Torat HaLev - Leftorah

12 Nisan 5765. Some last-minute thoughts before I have to yield completely to preparations for Passover. According to a story Monday in The New York Times (www.nytimes.com/2005/04/18/politics/18reed.html), some of the major Washington players in the most trouble recently share a passion for "religion." Tom DeLay, a fervent evangelical Christian, Jack Abramoff, an orthodox Jew, and Ralph Reed, another evangelical Christian. One of the scandalous stories linking the three goes as follows: "In Washington, federal investigations of Mr. Abramoff, a close ally of Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, have revealed that Mr. Abramoff paid Mr. Reed's consulting firm more than $4 million to help organize Christian opposition to Indian casinos in Texas and Louisiana - money that came from other Indians with rival casinos." The article details other questionable actions of Reed, but I'll ignore that for now.

Significant, however, are the similarities between Reed and Abramoff. The latter, alongtime conservative "firebrand," founded two kosher delis in D.C. as well as Eshkol, a Maryland Jewish prep-school. He is now under investigation by no fewer than 5 governmental agencies, for some $82 million in lobbying fees that Abramoff and his partner, Michael Scanlon, reaped from wealthy tribes with casinos in questionable circumstances as consultants and that Abramoff earned from several foreign entities. According to a story in The Washington Post, "Abramoff also directed tribes to donate to several obscure foundations that appear to have no connection to Indian concerns, including a think tank in Rehoboth Beach, Del., set up by Scanlon" (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53609-2004Jul15.html). "Congressional investigators learned [last] March that Scanlon or organizations he was associated with paid Abramoff $10 million, an arrangement that was not known to the tribes or to" Abramoff's law firm. A recent piece from Slate details other Abramoff follies: "His work trying to secure a visa for the great Zairian kleptocrat Mobutu Sese Seko [...] Native American tribes, clients he described as "monkeys," "troglodytes," and "idiots"? Or his leadership of a 1980s think tank financed, unbeknownst to him apparently, by the intelligence arm of South Africa's apartheid regime?" (slate.msn.com/id/2116389). James Harding's article in Slate shows that Abramoff's ethically-challenged nature goes back a long way: "He became chairman of the College Republicans in 1981. Even then, Abramoff was a fragrant figure: While running the College Republicans, he also chaired the USA Foundation, a group that enjoyed tax-exempt status because it purported to be nonpartisan. In October 1984, the USA Foundation staged anniversary celebrations marking the first anniversary of Reagan's invasion of Grenada—jamborees that the group insisted had nothing to do with Reagan's re-election campaign. A spokesman explained Abramoff's dual role to Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post: 'When he has his College Republican hat on, he's partisan. When he has his U.S.A. hat on, he's nonpartisan.'" With the money Abramoff got from various Indian tribes, "For example, Abramoff helped get the chief of the Coushatta invited to a meeting with President George W. Bush in early 2001, set up by Grover Norquist, once Abramoff's executive director at the College Republicans and now Washington's pre-eminent conservative lobbyist. It was suggested that a donation to Norquist's think tank, Americans for Tax Reform, might be appreciated. Abramoff pressed the Coushattas. The $25,000 check was sent to ATR." (Norquist also happens to be the co-ordinator of the weekly Republican gatherings in Washington at which representatives of numerous media outlets and journalists literally set policy for spinning the news, but I'll leave that aside here as well.)

If you're not sick yet, there's more. Abramoff, the orthodox Jew, and DeLay, the fervent evangelical, "were introduced more than a decade ago by Rabbi Daniel Lapin, the South African-born radio talk-show host who established Toward Tradition, a nonprofit coalition of Jews and Christians that aims to advance the agenda of the devout," according to Harding. The website of Young America's Foundation offers a bio of Lapin (www.yaf.org/speakers/daniel_lapin.html) that makes his agenda explicit: "In 1991, Rabbi Lapin formed Toward Tradition to: 1. Supply religious and intellectual ammunition to the conservative movement by linking it to its Judeo-Christian origins. 2. Build new political alliances between the Jewish and Christian conservatives. 3. Offer a pro-business defense of capitalism based on the intrinsic morality of the free market." There you go; more PR, more packaging, more ona'at d'varim. The question is whether the moral schizophrenia of people like Abramoff (halakhic observance on the one hand, economic "freedom," on the other, i.e., utter self-interest) stands as merely an abuse or corruption of the system or characterizes the system itself? In other words, is there a distance separating Lapin and Abramoff?

Behavior such as Reed's or Abramoff's clearly doesn't bother everyone. One of Reed's defenders is "Kelly Shackelford, a prominent Christian conservative and president of the Free Market Foundation in Texas. [...] Mr. Reed led a new wave of Christian conservatives, Mr. Shackelford said, who 'understand that you have to be part of the system, and you can't sit outside and throw rocks at everybody.'"

Thank God not everybody has sold out. This morning I had the merit of sitting with Reb Arthur Waskow. He alerted me to an essay of Martin Buber's of which I had never before heard, "Recollection of a Death," a tribute to Jewish activist and socialist Gustav Landauer, murdered by right-wingers as Rosa Luxemburg had been. In his eulogy, Buber meditates on the question of ends and means, a meditation that could not be more timely. "I cannot conceive anything real corresponding to the saying that the end 'sanctifies' the means; but I mean something which is real in the highest sense of the term when I say that the means profane, actually make meaningless, the end, that is, its realization! What is realized is the farther from the goal that was set the more out of accord with it is the method by which it was realized." Regardless of which "side" we are on -- Moses or Pharaoh -- these thoughts should haunt us. Landauer, concludes Buber, "fought in the revolution against the revolution for the sake of the revolution."

May we never become complacent, ossifying into pyramids of self-importance, self-satisfaction and self-righteousness! May our souls remain always unleavened, thin and poor, nourishing enough only for helping others in need, needing always only to help, to help! Writes Emmanuel Levinas: "the relationship to the other is the very face of the future itself." May we taste the taste of the world-to-come in this world by baking it ourselves! Happy Pesach!