An Introductory Note (Oct 29)
The essay “The Pope Has Left” was written weeks ago but was too late to be included in last month’s print edition of Kol Emunah. Perhaps it is just as well that it appears now because it gives me the opportunity to add just a few more words.
I write in between the Hebrew date (12 Kislev) and the English date (November 4) of the twentieth anniversary of the murder of Yitzhak Rabin, the great fallen leader of Israel. Rabin led Israel in war and then he painfully made the courageous choices to turn around and try to lead Israel to peace. His leadership was so frightening to large segments of his public that it was possible for a Jew, not an Arab, to murder him. None of us who were adults at that time have since known the kind of hope we felt then, before his murder. Israel has not known since then a leader who inspired so much hope in so many of them.
The essay is written in a quiet tone of voice. But our incapacity to support and follow real leaders has created immense damage to our community and the world. The traditional phrase one uses to refer to someone deceased is “zikhrono liv’rakhah – may his memory be a source of blessing.” I wish to say those words when I mention Yitzhak Rabin. But I wonder, for whom will his memory serve as a blessing?
The Pope Has Left
The Pope has left. Yogi is gone. Even John Boehner has resigned.
These times ask us to grapple with our relationship to leadership. Who do we look up to? Who do we look to for guidance?
The Pope is the official leader of a huge collectivity of humanity. Some billion-and-a-half Catholics accept him, at least in theory, as the “infallible” spiritual leader of their collective religious grouping. And he has captured the attention of many people who are not Catholics, as well. Among some Jews there has been a tinge of envy in watching the Pope visit the United States, following his speeches and gestures and the attention and reactions he has garnered.
Pope Francis is clearly a special person. He has touched people in a way that his predecessors have not. Perhaps his special gift, differentiating him from other popes of recent memory, is his desire and effort to present himself as a simple human being. Thus, he can stand surrounded by all the rich and powerful accoutrements of the Church, dressed in the finest vestments, and thus exuding an aura of royalty, while he speaks of himself with humility and simplicity.
Thus, he is a pope for our time, a time that has an uneasy feeling about authority and power. Instead of telling us what we must do, he asks us to pray for him, “a simple sinner.” We feel grateful and relieved that he speaks without flaunting his position so as to make us do what we might not want to do on our own. If we believe in helping the poor, we are delighted that he is a champion of the poor. If we are against abortions, we are reassured that he speaks in support of the human rights of fetuses. But we are a bit at a loss as to how we can embrace both sides of the positions he promotes, the side we agree with and the side we don’t.
If we hope for leaders with whom we can agree and fear leaders with whom we disagree, we have good reason for these feelings. We have left behind a century which saw the massive wreckage and unspeakable horror perpetrated by leaders who were granted absolute power. Meanwhile, elected officials have often failed to make the right choices out of limited vision or selfish interests. And the track record of economic and political elites in this country and elsewhere is a record of shame in too many essential areas bearing on human welfare. So, we treat authority with suspicion. We sanctify individual freedom as an absolute value because it affirms that each person is created in God’s Image and is of infinite value.
But such a recoil from trusting authority and from investing leaders with the power to lead is not a perfect solution to our problems. It seems to me that a particularly chilling result of such a worship of individual freedom is the situation we now witness in our inability to control the use of firearms. Tragedy after tragedy follow upon each other and yet we are not moved to take simple precautions to limit the availability of guns. Why? Because we do not trust “them.” We are afraid that our freedom will be stolen by people in power. So, to protect our notion of freedom, we are willing to let innocent people be murdered en masse, over and over.
But it is not only “the government” or “the leaders” who are flawed human beings. We all are. We all are subject to the temptations of selfishness and fear. Our selfishness is combined with our impatience. We want results immediately. So leaders are judged by short-term standards, and spend all their time fending off short-term problems. Our beloved Yogi was a pretty good ball player and a pretty good manager. Yet the Yankees fired him at the beginning of one season because he was not winning immediately. Speaker Boehner was a solid conservative politician, but he was not extreme enough in pushing for victory against the other party at the expense of closing down the government.
Religiously, we confront the same issue. As Jews we often congratulate ourselves that we do not have a central authority or a pope. Our freedom affords us the opportunity to create a rich panoply of Jewish living. But, if we wish to create communities that can sustain themselves, then we need to develop systems of leadership and authority that we can commit to. If we are not ready to be led by leaders who have a noble vision, how can we expect to move beyond ourselves for our own good and for the good of others?
In our series of discussions about the traditional prayers, we have come to the prayers that follow the recitation of the Sh’ma. The prayer is an extended blessing that recalls our redemption at the Red Sea. We remember the words of song we sang there, extolling God. The singing of that song was led by Moses and Miriam. They modeled the role of prayer leader: They called out the words and the people responded. The Torah tells us that, at that moment, “they had faith in God and in Moses, God’s servant.” For a short while we believed that we had leaders who were faithful servants to God, a Cause far greater than themselves. How do we create a culture, a society or a community that allows such leaders to appear and to lead? Do we actually want to achieve such a goal?
Image by Catholic Church England and Wales 
used with permission via Creative Commons: Attribution-ShareAlike License
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