Before Shabbat

In February 2010 paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division were assigned to check out reports that Afghan police had recovered the mangled remains of an insurgent suicide bomber. They were ordered to get iris scans and fingerprints for identification. 

Soldiers arrived at the police station in Afghanistan’s Zabol province in February 2010. They inspected the body parts.

God knows I can’t imagine what it’s like to be on such a mission, to deal with the gruesome aftermath of a heinous act.  I know someone has to do such things, I’m just glad it’s not me. It’s one of the many modern parts of warfare, logging iris scans of the dead.

After the paratroopers did their work, something happened.  Some deep vortex opened amongst this forensic team.  They decided it would be fun – how else can I put it? – to desecrate the suicide bomber’s corpse.  They posed for photos next to Afghan police, grinning, I might add while some held – and others squatted beside – the corpse’s severed legs.  They next took the upper torso and posed with it, too.

Twelve of the pictures from that day were sent to the LA Times, where 2 of them were published.  I saw the photos, and they are horrible on several different levels.  Morally and legally and professionally they are despicable. 

These two photos are actually the most graphic anti-war statements I’ve seen in a long time.  They depict what war and hatred do to people, who are not otherwise sociopathic or psychopathic.  The photos depict what happens when the ‘Other’, the enemy, is no longer determined as human at all, but rather as an object. 

War and hatred dehumanize us, make us susceptible to our basest instincts.  It can make people mad with power, can twist and distort their ethics.  The poison that ran through the souls of those paratroopers smiling beside a pair of severed legs is a derivative of the same poison that moved a suicide bomber to kill innocent people.

The great Jewish ethics battle is essentially acknowledging the battle between the yetzer tov and the yetzer ha-ra: the impulse for good and the impulse for evil.  As opposed to many forms of Christian ethics, Jewish ethics doesn’t posit evil to be some independent force that’s outside of us, seeking to break in. The yetzer tov and the yetzer ha-ra are both occupants deep inside of us.  We don’t seek to remove the yetzer ha-ra; we can’t remove it.  We seek to master it by appealing to the yetzer tov and subduing our evil impulse.  The struggle between the yetzer tov and the yetzer ha-ra is a daily one.  We cannot be perfect; we strive only to be strong enough to let the inner mensch win out.

It all begins in acknowledging the sacredness of life itself, the notion that every man, woman, and child is endowed with the divine spark.  It is all based on the remarkably trite and true Jewish teaching that we are all God’s children, that when we look at another human being we are not looking at an ‘Other’; we are looking at an extension of our selves.  How we treat the dead, particularly if they are our enemy, is a true moral test.  It is an indication as to the integrity of our yetzer tov.

Those 2 photos are a lasting reminder of how war and prolonged hatred can strengthen the yetzer ha-ra.  They are a sad testimony as to what violence does to the yetzer tov.  Because there is no ‘Other’.  It’s all us.  

I’m not a journalist, though I may have been one in a previous life. Suffice to say that I am a news junkie. Following the news has always been a part of my consciousness. I grew up in a home where dinner time was coordinated with CBS Evening News. That is, we absolutely never ate while Walter came on – before or after Walter only. Walter Cronkite was like a member of the family, part jocular uncle, part international oracle. Whatever Walter said was the truth. He’d never try to trick us or sugarcoat anything. Walter was the shaft of light in the darkness, the guy who helped me through the assassination of JFK, the flight of Friendship Seven, the Six Day War, the debacle of Vietnam, the deaths of Bobby and Martin, and so much more. Walter will always be my journalist par excellence.
In pre-modern times people knew so little about the world in which they lived. Ignorance was the general state of humanity. The first newspaper appeared in 1665. Prior to that was lots of rumors, fears, and superstitions. Gaining insight into current events was like being given the gift of super powers! In fact, I feel that way in the 21st century. That I can talk about what’s happening in China, or Rwanda, or Israel, or Syria, and rely on the information I read or hear or see, is an enormous gift, an embarrassment of riches. This knowledge enables me to be a true citizen of the world. It reminds me of the gifts and responsibilities of my freedom. It also illuminates the truth that without a free press there is no true freedom.
To think of journalists not just as storytellers, but as agents of freedom, is not just an illusion. We know over the years the mighty few who believed themselves above the Law were taken down not by the Law at first, but rather by an inquisitive press. I know, there are lots of muckrakers who care about the byline and not the veracity of the story. The celebrity news industry, a 24/7 monster consumes more garbage than a pen of hungry goats. Then it pumps out foolish and brain numbing excrement about everyone from a prepubescent kid with an average voice who ends up a star for now, to weeping about a has-been singer known, let’s face it, more for her excesses than her talents, to the latest divorce of 2 narcissistic mega stars, and so on. All that isn’t journalism – it’s rather creepy entertainment. I’m talking about the real thing and the real practitioners. People like Anthony Shadid, who died yesterday.
Jill Abramson, the executive editor of the New York Times, wrote to the newspaper’s staff Thursday evening in an e-mail. “Anthony died as he lived – determined to bear witness to the transformation sweeping the Middle East and to testify to the suffering of people caught between government oppression and opposition forces,” she wrote. Amen, Jill. If journalists shed light in dark places, then Shadid used a spotlight. As I said last week, “A hero is a person who does something above and beyond the call of duty. A hero is a person who stands up and demands that justice be served, even in the face of daunting odds.” Shadid was truly a hero, risking his life all over the world to give us a clearer story, and a shot at the truth.
Of course, the side story for this sad loss is that my hero died on the Turkey – Syria border, not by bullets or mines or an IED. Shadid, an asthmatic, apparently died due to his asthma brought on by an allergy to horses that were being used to help him sneak in and out of Syria. Oy, it breaks my heart. The bravest men and women are as vulnerable as we are, sitting at home in our sweats and reading articles by giants like Anthony Shadid. We’re all fragile creatures, prone to various ailments and aches and pains. No one is immune from tsuris. Our condolences go to his wife and children and family.
I’m going to miss Shadid and his insights into the Middle East. I’ve lost a set of trustworthy eyes in a very complicated part of the world. Shadid was one of my most important go-to guys for the real truth of the Arab Spring. His writing was not only incisive, it was from the heart. One could always identify an Anthony Shadid piece. It always evidenced his singular combination of authority, acumen and style as well as reflecting the humanity of those whom he was covering. Always. His obituary gives a deeper sense of his talent and heart.
We need journalists – heroes – like Anthony Shadid. We need men and women who dare to follow the truth and then expose it, even when it is at great personal risk. May his soul rest in peace. May his work inspire all of us to reach out of our comfort zones to shed the light of truth and peace.
Shabbat Shalom
rebhayim

How do you define the word, hero? It’s used all the time; so much so that it feels almost commonplace. And yet, by my definition, a hero is anything BUT quotidian. A hero is a person who does something above and beyond the call of duty. A hero is a person who stands up and demands that justice be served, even in the face of daunting odds. That would include the Chinese man who stood before a column of tanks near Tiananmen Square in 1989 [who by the way, has never been identified; in the press he is forever known as Tank man.]. It would include Jeffrey Olsen, a firefighter who desperately tries to save lives on 9/11, only to perish later that day. It would include Rosa Parks, who dared to sit down at the front of the bus, and not in the back. It would include Hiram Bingham IV, the U.S. diplomat credited with saving more than 2,000 Jews and other refugees in France from the invading Nazis [the U.S. Postal Service has just honored his memory with a US postage stamp].
Of course I could go on and on. My point: these are not your average people. They are extraordinary. That is why they are heroes. I want to clarify the importance of setting true heroes apart so that we might learn from them and be inspired to perform courageous acts. Not to be heroes – anyone who wants to be a hero is immediately disqualified from wearing the title. It’s all about stepping up, or to paraphrase a famous quote from Maimonides, “In a place where there is no man, be a man.”
I just added a hero to my list. Until this week I never knew his story. Roger Boisjoly (pronounced like the wine Beaujolais) was a booster rocket engineer at NASA contractor Morton Thiokol in Utah who worked on the Challenger Space Shuttle team. Up until this week, I had always thought that Morton Thiokol engineers knew that there were problems with the O rings but remained silent for fear that the flight of the Challenger would be delayed and that they would be criticized by NASA for not working efficiently. The results, of course, were disastrous. The Challenger exploded mid-air, killing the entire crew: Michael J. Smith, Dick Scobee, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, teacher Christa McAuliffe,Gregory Jarvis, and Jewish astronaut Judith Resnik.
Boisjoly in fact noticed that the elastic seals – the O rings – at the joints of the multi-stage booster rockets tended to stiffen and unseal in cold weather. He was concerned about launching a shuttle in January: even in Florida, where it can get actually get cold – well, coldish. So he sent an internal memo, bluntly writing, “The result could be a catastrophe of the highest order, loss of human life.”
Managers at NASA and colleagues at Morton Thiokol immediately sought to shut him up. They belittled him, saying he was Chicken Little. Some at NASA management pushed him to “prove” that the Shuttle would explode if it went off on January, as planned. Boisjoly, remembering that conversation, said that he had never, as an engineer, been asked to prove that something would NOT happen, only what MIGHT happen. He couldn’t prove that it would blow up, even though there was enough evidence to show sure signs of danger.
Undeterred, Boisjoly kept hounding Morton Thiokol management and NASA, demanding accountability. On the night of Jan. 27, 1986, with a forecast of record cold for Florida the morning of the launch, Mr. Boisjoly and four other Thiokol engineers used a teleconference with NASA to press the case for delaying the next day’s launching. At one point, Mr. Boisjoly said, he slapped down photos showing the damage cold temperatures had caused to an earlier shuttle. It had lifted off on a cold day, but not this cold.
“How the hell can you ignore this?” he demanded. At first this seemed persuasive, according to commission testimony. Makers of critical components had the power to postpone flights.
Four Thiokol vice presidents, all engineers themselves, went offline to huddle. They later said that they had worried they lacked conclusive data to stop a launching that had already been postponed twice. They thought the naysayers might be operating on gut reaction, not science.
Jerry Mason, Thiokol’s general manager, told his fellow executives to take off their engineering hats and put on management hats. They told NASA it was a go.
The next morning Mr. Boisjoly watched the launching. If there was going to be a problem, he thought it would come at liftoff. As the shuttle cleared the tower, his prayers seemed answered.
“Thirteen seconds later,” Mr. Boisjoly said, “we saw it blow up.”
Roger Boisjoly did all he could to delay the flight, but he could not cut through the hubris of NASA and Thiokol management. The explosion and the responses of NASA and Morton Thiokol truly traumatized him. He eventually left after suffering debilitating headaches, panic attacks, and the snubbing by certain folks at Thiokol who resented him for “selling them out.”
Boisjoly spent the rest of his life speaking at conferences all over the world about forensic engineering and about the responsibility of scientists to the people involved in the projects and not the managers who ran them. He once said to his wife that his mission in life was teaching young people the ethical decision-making they would be called upon to use.
Roger Boisjoly risked his reputation, his job security, and contested the status quo, to save lives. He stood up and demanded accountability from the people for whom he worked. People like Boisjoly set the bar higher for us all. Maybe that’s the ultimate mark of a hero: someone who reminds us of what it means to believe in others and then to stand up for them. A hero reminds us of who we have the power to become, namely a better human being.
Shabbat Shalom
rebhayim

This past week a teacher from a local grade school pleaded not guilty in a West Roxbury District Court to charges of indecent assault and battery on a child under 14 and posing a child in a state of nudity. He also pleaded not guilty to related charges of possession of child pornography in Brighton District Court.  Anyone who reads the news is used to reading/hearing such stories.  The recent Penn State Jerry Sandusky scandal splashed around all kinds of salacious, shocking stories for days.

We may be used to shocking news stories involving inappropriate physical contact between adults and children, but we are hardly inured to them.  The sexual exploitation of children is so heinous that mention of it causes us to recoil in pure revulsion. The betrayal of trust, the psychological and physical injury, the cynical use of power and fear to intimidate the child victim – all these reasons and so many more make us feel sick and angry.

This story has some added dimensions for me.  Since I first heard mention of it on the radio, I’ve been reeling. Because the teacher in question taught one of my daughters at Underwood School for second grade.  Because the teacher in question is a bright, friendly young man.  Because the teacher in question was always the quintessential nice Jewish boy.  Because we had the teacher in question at our home for various Jewish holidays.

I feel utterly torn apart by this turn of events.  As a father, a rabbi – a human being for God’s sake! – I am unequivocally enraged by Mr. E’s conduct, and if he is guilty, I want him to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. [By the way, I’m calling him Mr. E, the name by which he’s been known for years; I won’t use his full name because, quite frankly, it hurts me too much.]

But in addition to my rage and disgust, I have a deep sadness.  I always felt so happy to see Mr. E around town.  My daughter and her classmates had so much affection for him, and their feelings led me and almost all of the parents of his students to also feel positively disposed towards him.  He seemed to be such a good guy…

And there’s the utter paradox.  Mr. E was a good guy.  And at the same time, he engaged in behavior that was both immoral and illegal.  What does this mean?  Well, for one thing it means that we can never really know another person.  The human mind is capable of twisting itself into the darkest of places.  The private obsessions, the dreams and nightmares we live with can destroy us.  The enormous pull of addiction, the emptiness we can feel and what we may use to try to fill it… all of this can plague us endlessly.

My heart aches for Mr. E’s parents.  I can’t even imagine what it must feel like to see your grown child brought down so low.  They believe he’s innocent – I hope he is.  But reading the charges leads me to suspect that Mr. E is guilty.  And if so, that means Mr. E’s parents have to acknowledge how little they know their own flesh and blood.  And of course my heart aches for the victims, the scared, scarred children used and abused by Mr. E and others.

And so on this Shabbat I pray for justice and for mercy.  I pray for openheartedness and forgiveness.  I pray for strength as I continue to walk through this wild maze called Life.