April 13, 2011

The politicization of everything

Leave a Comment / Opinion, Politics / Jewish Journal

How do you take one of the most shocking and revolting murder sprees in memory and make it even more disturbing? By pouncing on its supposed root causes for transparently partisan purposes.

Within hours of the Jan. 8 shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), U.S. District Judge John Roll, 9-year-old Christina Taylor-Green and more than a dozen other people in a Tucson parking lot, Twitter was choked with the obscene accusation — soon to be immortalized in a New York Daily News column by Michael Daly — that former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin had “blood on her hands.” As if the Tweets blaming the attack on political rhetoric were not bad enough, Democratic Party players such as Paul Begala were quickly telling news outlets that the massacre represented an important “opportunity” for President Barack Obama. Politico reported that “veteran Democratic consultant Dan Gerstein said the crisis ‘really plays to Obama’s strengths as consensus-builder’ and gives him the opportunity to build a deeper emotional connection with the people he governs. ‘He’ll be active, but also very careful not to appear like he’s blaming or politicizing,’ Gerstein predicted.”

Of course, the GOP and its supporters are more than ready to play a similar political game whenever blood is spilled. The Patriot Act and ‘global war on terror’ were launched within days of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Long-term GOP activist Jerry Falwell immediately announced on Pat Robertson’s TV channel that “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians” were partly responsible for the murder of nearly 3,000 people by radical Islamists. Years after Falwell apologized for his idiotic statement, conservative writer Dinesh D’Souza blew out the thesis into a full-length book, charmingly titled “The Enemy at Home.” D’Souza wasn’t talking about the people flying planes into buildings — he was more bent out of shape by dramatic readings of “The Vagina Monologues.” Just a few days after the Tucson massacre, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh inveighed that alleged shooter Jared Loughner “has the full support” of the Democratic Party, which “is attempting to find anybody but him to blame” for the violence.

The ability to muster a pre-political, simply human response to senseless tragedy seems to elude even those who aim to transcend the liberal-conservative divide. “It’s a real tragedy, but it’s also a real opportunity,” former Bush hand Mark McKinnon told The Washington Post right after the shooting. McKinnon is a co-founder of No Labels, a new political group whose slogan is “Not Left. Not Right. Forward.”

Putting political calculations first may be the modus operandi in Washington, but it’s also a key reason why more and more Americans are refusing to buy what Washington sells. It’s unnatural to act this way, and it reinforces the truism that politics is, as Henry Adams put it, “the systematic organization of hatreds” rather than a means of securing the common good.

There’s no reason to think that today’s political rhetoric is particularly overheated or inflammatory compared to even the recent past. There hasn’t been a U.S. election since the end of the Cold War that some minority of the population didn’t think was “stolen.” Nor has there been a recent president who wasn’t compared to Adolf Hitler. And even if current discourse were especially vitriolic, it’s hard to see how it is relevant in this case, where the apparent shooter’s motivations are the product of psychosis, not talk radio.

We do know now that accused gunman Jared Loughner didn’t listen to Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage, didn’t belong to a political party, and, according to a friend, didn’t watch TV or care about politics. But even if Sarah Palin’s notorious 2010 midterm election graphic, which “targeted” the districts of incumbents (including Giffords) who voted for health care reform, had somehow stuck in Loughner’s brain, she would be no more responsible for his violence than J.D. Salinger was for “inspiring” John Lennon assassin Mark David Chapman. Most of us immediately grasp this. A CBS News poll taken shortly after the shooting found that about 60 percent of Americans thought “politics” had nothing to do with the shooting. Just 33 percent thought it may have had “something” to do with the rampage.

Our problem isn’t with modern rhetoric. It’s with the politicization of every part of our lives, no matter how elevated or base, not for a higher purpose or broader fight but for the cheapest moment-by-moment partisan advantage. Both left and right embrace a totalist mentality that says the most important aspect of everything is whether it helps or hurts your party of choice.

This deeply Machiavellian calculation helps explain poll results that were released the week of the shooting. In its most recent survey of American political self-identification, the Gallup Poll found that Democrats were at their lowest point in two decades, 31 percent, while the GOP remains stuck below the one-third mark, even though far more people consider themselves conservative than liberal. The self-description with the highest percentage was Independent, at 38 percent, an increase of 7 points from 2003. This is a long-term trend: Harris Poll numbers that stretch back to the late 1960s tell the same broad story.

What Gallup and Harris are measuring is not just party registration; it’s about how Americans see themselves. It’s a cultural identity, like rooting for the Mets or the Yankees. Rejecting that identity is even more basic than declining to register for a major political party.

Stalwart partisans no doubt will blame apathy and self-involvement for their declining market and mind shares. But Americans have always sought refuge from, not expansion of, politics. Faced with major parties and their backers bending every news story, consumer trend, heat wave, snow storm, box office hit or bomb — you name it — to a political narrative, is it any wonder that fewer people want to be affiliated with Democrats or Republicans? We want to get on with life, and certainly with more important things than party politics.

Nick Gillespie is the editor of Reason Magazine, where this originally appeared. Reprinted with permission.

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Waiting for Nowhere

Leave a Comment / Opinion / Jewish Journal

Two films have captured the country’s attention over the past year — “Waiting for Superman,” depicting the imploding landscape of American public school education, and “Race to Nowhere,” a highly flawed examination of the treadmill on which American students have found themselves.

“Superman” is a film we should be paying close attention to, as it depicts systemic and philosophical problems in the public school system that are a threat to our democracy and, ultimately, to our commitment to human freedom.

“Race” contends with a serious subject in an unsophisticated and simplistic way, both minimizing the problem and its possible ramifications. One teacher in “Race” calls the current test-crazed American educational system “a mile wide and an inch deep.” Unfortunately, the film addresses the issue in exactly the same manner.

What is particularly challenging in “Race” is that the filmmaker turns herself into a central figure, struggling with a middle daughter who is emotionally rebelling against her mother’s type-A dreams for her child, to the point of physical illness and a refusal to participate in her own education. The daughter is, to me, the hero of the film because she is using nonviolent Gandhi-esque behaviors, not in responding to school (school would be just fine for her if her parents knew who their daughter was and were willing to provide her with the proper support) but in responding to her mother, who has a deeply flawed approach to parenting. The filmmaker/mother, to her credit, recognizes this to a certain extent, but her solutions are equally alarming. The film itself looks primarily outward at schools as the source of the problem.

Unfortunately parents and schools are both to blame for this mess, and only when there is a real values-based and philosophical shift in thinking about this problem will the deeper issues resolve.

Designing children vs. raising children

Fundamental to the way in which we view children, in a country where fear and monetary success have become our societal mantras, is that they are all special, precious and in need of a perverse form of protection. As opposed to theories that suggest the nuclear family is disintegrating, what I see is families as islands, with significantly larger communities (previously characterized by deep obligation to religious communities such as churches or synagogues) left out of the picture. Parents find themselves hovering over their children, without trust in other adults to watch them, except for the hired help or the two-hour play date.

In more sophisticated communities, large networks of people raise children by necessity. For various reasons, parents now find themselves isolated from larger networks of their immediate and extended families, grasping onto their children as if they are eggs ready to break.

Coupled with the explosion of the pharma-psychiatric industrial complex in the early 1980s, parents are less raising their children than designing them. Children are seen as both so special and unique that, like glass, they might shatter and break if the wrong pressure is applied.

Schools, both public and private, have played into this wildly dangerous instinct by promising that every little bit of a child’s life will be monitored and examined, measured and quantified. Parents expect excellence from schools inside a completely cocooned experience, and schools are suggesting that they can provide it. Any breakdown of this social contract leads to a crisis, not for the parents or the schools, but for the child. Children are not so special. Neither are they at all so fragile.

The extreme crisis, as “Race” depicts, might be the suicide of a young middle-schooler as her world seems to collapse. The film chooses the pressures of school as the culprit. The film, though, misses the point. It is the perfectly framed picture of the perfect child on the clean and unblemished piano top that leads to crisis. The tragic story is a about a child being molded, designed and programmed, not brought up in the messy, creative, expressive and idiosyncratic ways of successful families, communities and schools.

Purpose vs. jobs

The president of Bennington College, Elizabeth Coleman, recently commented that “we have gone from being a country which educates for democracy, to professions, to jobs.” Our filmmaker in “Race” even states that her own type-A upbringing was geared toward training, toward preparation to participate as a productive member of an economic system, not as a participant of a democratic and civil society.

When Alexis de Tocqueville toured America in the mid-1800s, he marveled that every town he visited had two institutions — a church and a school. Both institutions were seen by the early settlers as fundamental components of a free society. Families and schools are doing a poor job of communicating to our children the true purpose of an excellent education and the reason for all of their hard work: to free their minds from the possible tyranny of others. In our Jewish schools, it goes one step beyond: to free our minds and souls from the tyranny of others and that which would oppress us. Instead, are we training our students and children? Are they merely being educated to produce? There is a fundamental dignity to giving any human being the skills and knowledge to make a decent living, to support a family and enjoy life. But this is only necessary, not sufficient. Children need to know why they are learning, what their larger purpose is. The film portrays these children as depressed slaves but does not provide the answer to this problem because it does not understand the real end game: to live free, obligated only to that which is right, true, fair and just. The filmmaker is only able to recognize that her own child feels imprisoned but is unable to articulate that the ultimate purpose of her daughter’s education is to free her mind, heart and soul.

Results vs. learning

Lastly, the most damning moment in the film is when our filmmaker/rehabilitated parent provides us with the ultimate solution to her child’s oppression. “I stopped asking her about her grades and test scores when she comes home from school.”

This is both an inadequate solution and a reflection of a deeper problem seen in our current educational culture. The answer to making sure our students understand the real value of their education is not to refrain from the conversation. Instead, it is to change the nature of the conversation. Battering kids with questions and interrogations about test scores and achievements serves no value in and of itself, but coupled with deep meaningful conversations about the substance of their learning proves essential.

This is where schools, their communities and parents receive the failing grade. Are the adults in children’s lives actually interested in what students are learning? Children are smart and wise. They will see right through the hypocrisy of adults who are results-oriented but claim to care about actual learning.

This does not mean that evaluative measures should be brushed aside. Grades and report cards are an essential way we measure growth and achievement. And, in my 20 years of educating children, teachers in our schools mostly get it right. They know who is working hard and who is not; who is capable of achieving and who is not; and who needs help and support.

In the end, however, the treadmill about which everyone is so worried, the relentless need to achieve, is motored by a careless sense of the real value of a child’s education, one left unarticulated and expressed in less than passionate and engaging terms. Children who are most happy in school are not the ones who are or are not working hard, it is the ones who feel surrounded by meaning and purpose and value. These students, with their caring parents and great schools, are racing toward something much greater than a good job or a great college acceptance. They are graduating into an adulthood filled with wonder, virtue and a lifetime of fulfilling learning.

Jason Ablin is head of school at Milken Community High School in Los Angeles.

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Dancing with the Rabbis?

Leave a Comment / Dennis Prager, Opinion / Dennis Prager

On April 3, under the auspices of the American Jewish University, in its Gindi Auditorium, five Los Angeles rabbis competed with one another in an evening titled “Dancing With the Rabbis.” As reported in this newspaper, the sellout crowd loved the evening.

May I respectfully suggest — and I do mean respectfully, as I know that good intentions prompted the evening — that this be the “once in a lifetime” event that some who attended called it. It should not be repeated.

I say this in order to preserve the dignity of the rabbinate. When I was a child, the rabbi was an esteemed figure, by far the most esteemed figure in our Jewish community. Even though it was part and parcel of Jewish religious life to criticize the rabbi for what he said or didn’t say in his Shabbat sermon, we would stand up on those occasions when the rabbi walked by our row in shul. And not only did we not address our rabbi by his first name when we spoke to him, we never referred to him by his first name when we talked about him.

I have preserved this custom to this day. I address all rabbis by their title. In public, I do not even make exceptions for close friends who are rabbis, and in private I only make exceptions when the person is a close friend. I also call my physicians “doctor.” One of the characteristics of conservatism is conserving, and this is one of the many past values conservatives such as myself seek to preserve.

Beginning in the 1960s, this attitude, like so many other values in American, Jewish and Western life, was overthrown. Many non-Orthodox rabbis adopted the liberal egalitarian spirit and sought to end hierarchy wherever possible. They, their congregants and their students were to be on the same level. “Don’t call me ‘Rabbi,’ ” Jews were admonished. “Call me ‘Joe.’ ” And, so, the rabbi went from above us to one of us.

I guess one can say that with “Dancing With the Rabbis,” the movement toward “the rabbi is just one of us” reached its apotheosis. Our rabbis — or at least the rabbis who participated — are just one of the guys or girls. They, too, are hip. No more ivory tower rabbi. Our rabbi is so with it, he will dance with a 22-year-old swimsuit model: In the words of The Jewish Journal, the rabbi “twirls across the dance floor. His beautiful young partner reaches out her hand, and together they do a quick step and spin into each other’s arms.”

Had the rabbis danced with Jews with special needs, I could understand the message sent. But what was this message?

Though I was not present at the event, my opposition is to the concept, not the execution. I don’t think I am alone in the Los Angeles Jewish community in thinking that this was well-intended but not wise. Not only did no Orthodox rabbi participate — and not only for halachic reasons, I suspect — but some non-Orthodox rabbis also refused, and not because they were afraid to dance publicly. When I asked one of the country’s leading Reform rabbis, Rabbi David Woznica of Stephen S. Wise Temple, whether he would have participated had he been asked, he responded that he was asked, and refused.

If nothing else, what we have here is a learning moment. Good people can differ on the wisdom of the evening. But, as I believe that clarity is more important than agreement, it seems clear that we have a liberal-conservative divide here.

The liberal mindset is, first and foremost, one of egalitarianism. The notion of hierarchy is largely rejected. Thus, the rabbi is just like us, and we’ll prove it by having him or her dance with sexy professionals. The conservative mindset is that the rabbi is not, or at least should not be, like everyone else. This is no way means that a rabbi should lead an ascetic life. I would defend any rabbi’s decision to go with his spouse to Las Vegas, gamble and even see a Vegas show there. As regards a rabbi’s private life, I have nothing to say. That is between him and God. But what he does as a rabbi publicly should matter to any Jew who cares about Judaism and about the rabbinate.

Some will see this as an attack on the participating rabbis. It is not. It is a disagreement with their decision to participate and with the American Jewish University’s decision to sponsor the event — an event that ended with a performance by the professional dancers that The Journal described as “so racy that it may have had more than a few members of the audience wondering whether they should clap or head home for a cold shower.”

Moreover, my disagreement emanates solely from a desire to see these and all rabbis guard and preserve the prestige and dignity of their title. When Jews elevate rabbis, the whole Jewish people benefits.

I feel the same about teachers. We need to honor teachers and preserve their prestige. When they come into class wearing shorts or ask students to call them by their first names, they may be hip, but their profession loses prestige.

I am sure the evening was fun. But it was not the kind of fun a Jewish seminary should have sponsored, nor the kind of fun that its rabbis should have engaged in.

I understand the desire of some rabbis to be seen as real and human. But acting on a higher plane in public comes with the job description. You cannot have the reward of great communal respect without acting accordingly. And there are innumerable ways to humanize oneself — had the rabbis, for example, decided to put on a Shakespearean play or even a humorous skit, people would have had at least as much fun, and the rabbis would have just as successfully shown another side to their personalities. That, in at least one Jew’s opinion, would have been the wiser choice.

Dennis Prager’s nationally syndicated radio talk show is heard in Los Angeles on KRLA (AM 870) 9 a.m. to noon. His latest project is the Internet-based Prager University (prageru.com).

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Bibi needs a plan, fast

Leave a Comment / David Suissa, Israel, Opinion / David Suissa

I had a lively debate with the founder of J Street, Jeremy Ben-Ami, April 11 at Temple Israel of Hollywood, and as much as we disagreed sharply on many issues relative to Israel, there was one item on which we were in complete agreement: The Palestinians’ steady march toward unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state at the United Nations in September is a disaster-in-waiting for Israel.

We disagreed on what Israel should do: Ben-Ami thinks Israel should try to entice the Palestinians back to the peace table with another temporary settlement freeze, while I think the United States should pressure the Palestinians to come to the peace table without preconditions.

If that approach fails, however, Israel must do something, and do it fast.

Before Israel can figure out what that “something” is, it must admit to itself that it has lost the battle of the narrative. Right now, Israel is seen, almost universally, as the main obstacle to peace. You can cry foul all you want about this, but it won’t change the reality. From the moment two years ago that President Obama elevated the settlements as the main impediment to peace, the die was cast.

Israel has been scrambling ever since, but it’s been an impossible battle. No amount of clever diplomacy or lobbying could undo the lethal vise that Israel is in — not even last year’s partial settlement freeze.

Simply put, the Palestinians have hidden behind the United States’ initial demand for a settlement freeze to stay away from peace talks, while developing their enormous international support to do an end run around Israel and further isolate the Jewish state.

By repeating their U.S.-sponsored mantra — “We will not negotiate until Israel freezes all settlement activity” — the Palestinians have managed to camouflage the real obstacles to peace. To name just one, there is the obvious obstacle that the Palestinian Authority (PA), which governs the West Bank and could still engage in peace talks, has absolutely no control over the terrorist Hamas regime in Gaza.

In fact, one of the absurd aspects of this peace process is that Israel is acting like the buyer when it should be acting like the seller. If peace is the “product,” then Israel owns it and should be selling it. Because it can control its army, it can deliver peace. Who can say with a straight face that the PA will be able to control its “army” (including Hamas) and hence be able to deliver peace?

Another obstacle is the fact that the PA has never prepared its people for a compromise on the sacred “right of return.” Sure, it may have made private statements to Ehud Olmert a couple of years ago suggesting flexibility on borders and Jerusalem, but the analyses that I have seen of the “Palestine Papers” suggest that they are far from compromise on the issue of the right of return. And that is a deal killer.

But it is the bright glare of the settlement issue that has created the perception that Israel is the major obstacle to peace. It may not be fair, but it is what it is.

What should Israel do now?

The first thing is not to expect the Palestinians to return anytime soon to the negotiating table. They won’t. They’ve got their eyes fixed on the U.N. and the world community, where they are treated like kings and never have to compromise. They want a lot more than what Israel could offer, and they think the U.N. will give it to them.

The second thing is to stop arguing. We’ve lost the argument. We can make cogent arguments until we’re blue in the face, but it won’t help.

The only way for Israel to regain the initiative is with real, dramatic action.

If I were Bibi, I would dust off a peace plan, call a press conference, and tell Abbas simply and clearly: “Sign here and the conflict is over.”

Which peace plan? The plan that’s got one of the world’s most credible names on it: The Clinton Parameters. Bibi might make a few security-related adjustments to reflect new realities, but the thrust of the plan should be unchanged.

Will Abbas sign it? Let me put it this way: The Jewish Journal will become the voice of right-wing fanatics before Abbas signs this peace plan. Why? Because he can’t. The Clinton plan is his nightmare. It forces him to compromise on too many things, including the right of return. It gives him a lot less than he has already rejected.

Compared to the Rolls-Royce he is about to be handed by the U.N., the Clinton plan is a Yugo that needs repairs. It’s dead on arrival.

Israel should present the plan not because it believes the PA will sign it, but because Israel desperately needs to present a credible alternative to the unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state at the U.N., a diplomatic disaster that Ehud Barak said would bring a “tsunami” of further pressure and isolation on the Jewish state.

If Palestinians say no to the Clinton plan, they then automatically become the “major obstacle” to peace.

At the very least, this might shock them back to the negotiating table.

David Suissa is a branding consultant and the founder of OLAM magazine. For speaking engagements and other inquiries, he can be reached at {encode=”suissa@olam.org” title=”suissa@olam.org”} or davidsuissa.com.

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The Arab Seder

Leave a Comment / Holidays, Opinion, Rob Eshman / Rob Eshman

This has been a good year for freedom.

The Arab spring that began in Tunisia spread through Algeria, Egypt, Syria, Libya, Jordan, Yemen, Bahrain. The pharoahs who haven’t fallen are plenty nervous.

For decades they enjoyed a stable social contract with their people: You put up with our corruption, economic stagnation and lack of civil liberties, and we won’t kill you, maybe.

Now, suddenly, the contract is irrevocably broken. The outcomes will be various and remain uncertain. Egypt may turn more Islamist. Libya might be a long, bloody disaster. But the sphinx is out of the bag. Arabs, like all people, prefer to be free.

It’s impossible not to see the parallels to the ancient Passover story in the events unfolding today. The pharoahs, the plagues, the oppressed — it’s all being played out across the Middle East and North Africa, often in authentic dress.

For that reason, this year, I would love to hold a seder in Egypt. In Libya. In Bahrain. In Syria. In Iran.

Why not? Passover is a holiday that enshrines the value of freedom as a God-given human right. The seder meal is an ingenious invention (more accurately, an ingenious merging of Greek custom with Jewish narrative). It is a way to physically reaffirm the immorality of oppression and the imperative of liberation: You eat freedom. It is difficult for any people to take the holiday seriously and not fight for their own freedom and that of others. Freedom is a great Jewish value, but not only a Jewish value. Arab families could use a good seder now.

The fact that this is such a far-fetched notion points to another symptom of Arab oppression. It may not be a coincidence that the Dark Ages of modern Islamic political, cultural and intellectual development coincide with the demonization of Jewish self-determination and the rejection of all things Jewish. When the Arabs and Persians in the region can truly study and learn and engage in cultural interchange with their Jewish peers, in Israel and abroad, their own cultures and lives will be richer for it. If the liberation movements in the Middle East truly lead to more open societies — and I recognize that is still a big if — one healthy side effect will be the reintroduction of Jewish culture, history and values into the region where Judaism was born, developed and among whose people it flourished.

I grew up in a generation that rewrote and redesigned the traditional haggadah to mirror the cause du jour: I’ve seen black/Jewish seders; seders designed for farm workers, feminists, gays, addicts, Darfurians. I once was invited to an animal-rights seder where the haggadah read more like “Animal Farm.” Needless to say, there was no brisket course.

Give me a few hours and some good page layout software, and I could compose a modern-day haggadah for the new Arab world:

The Children of Israel are of course the Muslims and Christians living under a succession of Middle Eastern pharoahs, from Tunisia to Iran.

The Ten Plagues are the disasters this collection of strongmen, criminals, crooks and bureaucrats brought upon their nations: Poverty, Illiteracy, Torture, Oppression of Women, Unemployment, Corruption, Hunger, War, Ignorance and the Killing of the First Born — yes, just think of the generations of young Arabs and Persians denied their true potential, or sent to their deaths in foolish wars, sacrificed for nothing.

The Four Questions are these: How can Islam serve as a true moral compass and not as an instrument of oppression? How can we develop our human capital, and not just our oil? How can all men be free when so many women aren’t? How can we join with free peoples throughout the Middle East, including Israel, against political extremism and religious fanaticism?

As for the Passover foods, the symbols on the seder plate, that’s easy:

Matzah: The unleavened bread that didn’t have a chance to rise can symbolize the speed of these revolutions. They caught every single “expert” off guard and forced our president to make fast choices between an increasingly elusive “stability” and the perhaps equally elusive promise of democracy.

Maror: The bitter herbs can represent the enduring sorrows these populations both have suffered and inflicted on others as a result of their oppressive leadership.

Charoset: This mix of chopped fruit and spices stands for the mortar of the pyramids we were forced to build; here it can symbolize the cohesiveness of societies that came together to overthrow their leaders: think of Tahrir Square, where religious and secular Muslims and Christians, Kurds and Coptics at least temporarily overcame their differences to fight together as one.

Beitzah: The egg can represent Facebook, Twitter and social media. Don’t ask me why, but something has to. Technology didn’t start the fire, but it sure helped spread the flames.

Zeroa: The roasted shank bone can represent the sacrifice people made for their own freedom. Hundreds dead and wounded in Egypt. Thousands dead in Libya. Innumerable murdered, tortured and imprisoned in Iran. “I’m not afraid to die,” a 28-year-old Libyan blogger and civilian journalist named Mohammed Nabbous told an NPR reporter, “I’m afraid to lose the battle.” A day later, Libyan soldiers shot and killed Nabbous.

Elijah the Prophet: Jews open the doors of our homes to welcome Elijah, with his promise of peace, to our seder table, where we pour an extra cup of wine (or grape juice) for him. How fitting — to Muslims, he is the Prophet Ilyas, defender of monotheism. To Christians, he is often compared to Jesus and John the Baptist. He would be a welcome guest in the homes of all three faiths.

If only they can keep their doors open.

Happy Passover.

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A Pesach plea for prison reform

Leave a Comment / Holidays, Opinion / Jewish Journal

Last week, here in Los Angeles, we read with horror of an inmate in a local county jail who was strangled to death in his cell. This inmate had been complaining to a judge that he was being “hassled” by other inmates. Overcrowding and unsanitary conditions have plagued L.A. County’s jails for more than 30 years, along with a culture of violence and fear that includes prisoner-on-prisoner assaults and the use of excessive force by deputies.

Too often in recent years, state prisons have been used to house lower-level offenders and parole violators, which wastes money due to the costs of state prisons, aggravates already overcrowded conditions and hinders rehabilitation, because facilities can’t adequately serve so many inmates. Furthermore, while parole boards need some autonomy and flexibility in their decisions, those decisions also can’t be arbitrary. The Chowchilla kidnappers case, for example, is a case in California that may continue to be an arbitrary denial of parole. No children were hurt when these three men kidnapped a bus in 1976, yet they continue to be denied parole 35 years later.

This Chowchilla case is just one of the vast array of problems in the broken California penal system putting a strain on the state’s budget and welfare. It was recently found, for example, that the California Rehabilitation Center, a medium Level II correctional facility in Norco, Calif., was built to hold 1,800 inmates, but now holds more than 4,700 and is almost always under lockdown to prevent fights due to overcrowding. Parts of the buildings, built in the 1920s, are so outdated that electricity is shut off during rainstorms to ensure that prisoners aren’t electrocuted. It has been reported that the facility is understaffed by 75 guards, and its rehabilitation program for drug use has a three-month waiting list.

Over the past few decades, California has engaged in minimal reform for its prisons and yet has enacted tougher laws that put more people behind bars for longer times. More and more policies, notably the “three strikes” law mandating prison for life after three or more felony convictions, are created to follow an ethos that the goal of incarceration is punishment alone.

Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget cuts may bring promise for the expansion of community-based alternatives to incarceration, which have been shown to reduce crime and long-term recidivism (such as in Missouri, for example).

For now, conditions in our prisons remain extremely dangerous for the incarcerated. Many prisoners keep knives in body cavities, one ex-convict told me last week, to ensure they can protect themselves from brutal prison violence and rape. This horrific description haunts me.

Supermax prisons engaging in solitary confinement in the United States, in particular, are some of the most miserable places on earth. Impenetrable cement cells, where prisoners are fed through a hole, and the bare minimum of exercise are the norm for those residing in these 6-by-8-foot cells. Such conditions are not only inhumane, they bring on and worsen mental disabilities and raise the recidivism rate.

Federal, state and local governments must seek alternatives to incarceration to ensure more humane options, to reduce overcrowding and to cut budget costs. Incarcerating just one inmate costs about $30,000 per year, according to the Pew Center, and often perpetuates further criminal activity. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the United States has the highest incarceration rate and largest prison population of any country in the world.

Prisons have only gotten worse in modern times. Michel Foucault, the 20th century French philosopher, argued that the penal system had shifted from regulating one’s body, by means such as torture and corporal punishment, and replaced it with “technologies of punishment” regulating thoughts and behavior, by means such as strict surveillance and psychological abuse. This “disciplinary punishment” provides a potential abuse of power on the part of the parole officer, jailer, psychologist and program facilitator over the prisoner.

The inhumanity of today’s incarceration has no place in the Jewish tradition — aside from temporary pretrial detention (mishmar), the Torah has no model for prison and only provides a number of alternatives. The only exception is a brief period when the rabbis, under Roman influence, instituted a kipa, or temporary jail.

One biblical alternative proposed is that of the eved k’na’ani laborer, whom the Talmud requires be treated like his master. This is to ensure his dignity not be lessened in the process of repairing the wrong committed as he gives back to society. Another model, the “City of Refuge” (Ir Hamiklat), provides for the unintentional murderer a protective community operating much like a normal city.

The Jewish commitment to human dignity, even for those who have erred, can inspire us to affirm more of the alternatives to incarceration that exist in America today, such as: work crews, electronic monitoring, probation, educational sentencing programs, drug rehabilitation and house arrest. These less-expensive options work to address systemic problems in more sustainable and moral ways.

As we approach Passover, we can recall Rabbi Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin’s (Netziv) teaching on Exodus 2:25 about the spiritual dangers of overcrowding in narrow spaces: “It is known that a wide-open living space widens one’s mind, and thus the opposite, a crowded living space and lots of people together, degrades one’s mind. Pharaoh strove to degrade the minds of the Israelites, and so he would press them in one place.” Scholars today argue that overcrowding narrow spaces is a great causal factor of prison rape. A cage can transform a man into a beast.

Slavery in Egypt was like an overcrowded jail that destroyed the minds of its inhabitants. The Netziv taught that conditions became so bad that it was clear that God needed to liberate these people. Today, we can emulate the Divine — we must hear the cries of those in very narrow spaces and advocate for more alternatives to the failing model that exists in today’s prisons.

When we are called upon this Passover to remember the foreigners living in our midst, we can think of the approximately 31,000 noncitizens, including children, held in immigration detention in America on any given day. Most especially, we can remember the few hundred immigrants, mostly children, who have died in incarceration, many of whose deaths can be attributed to medical neglect.

Rav Soloveitchik taught, “The halachah is not hermetically enclosed within the confines of cult sanctuaries, but penetrates into every nook and cranny of life. The marketplace, the street, the factory, the house, the meeting place, the banquet hall, all constitute the backdrop for the religious life.” It is time that those committed to Jewish law and values work to transform prisons in America, one of the greatest human rights problems in California and the United States.

We must be sure to maintain adequate and effective punishments for crimes, yes, but we must also remember and retain our feel for nuance in societal realities and cling to our tradition’s value of compassion for the dignity of all human beings, even of criminals.

This Passover, may we remind ourselves of those trapped in the darkest and narrowest straits.

Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz is the Senior Jewish Educator at the UCLA Hillel, Founder and President of Uri L’Tzedek, and a fifth-year doctoral candidate in moral psychology and epistemology at Columbia University. utzedek.org

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At Beit T’Shuvah, they sing a song of ‘Freedom’

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“How long must I roam, to find my way home …”

Natalie sings the lines tentatively, tugging at her black T-shirt, her voice soft and sweet.

But soft and sweet won’t cut it for a drug addict trying to work her way back into her family on seder night.

“This is your story. Stand up for it. What are you afraid of?” director Laura Bagish urges her.

Natalie, who asked that only her first name be used for this article, plays the lead role of Shira in “Freedom Song,” a Passover-themed musical produced by Beit T’Shuvah, a Jewish residential rehab facility in Culver City. The actors are all alumni and residents of Beit T’Shuvah, and at a late-night rehearsal in the facility’s lunchroom, which also serves as both auditorium and synagogue, they are feeling the pressure of the three shows they will be performing before Passover.

Playing a lost daughter feels particularly familiar to Natalie: She is 18 and was addicted to heroin when, three months ago, she left Beverly Hills High School to check herself into Beit T’Shuvah.

As the cast cheers her on, she sings with more depth, but she’ll have to get stronger before her first performance, just days away.

“Freedom Song” was written nearly seven years ago, based on the real-life stories of Beit T’Shuvah residents. Conceived as a one-time production, the 45-minute, edgy musical has played continually since then to thousands of people at synagogues, schools and other organizations across the country.

The show serves as a form of therapy for the actors, but it is also a catalyst for the audience. After each performance, the cast holds a dialogue with the audience, and nearly always someone from the audience comes forward with an addiction story of their own.

“It’s amazing that the play is such a vehicle for people opening up, for cutting through the denial and allowing people to speak in a way that seeing a didactic seminar about addiction just wouldn’t do,” said Beit T’Shuvah’s Cantor Rebekah Mirsky, a former country singer who co-authored the script.

The actors use the Passover story as a lens through which to view their own journeys, and in turn reflect back to the audience a new way of internalizing the Passover story: What are you a slave to? Do you retell your foundational story and pull meaning from it, or do you hide your truth from yourself and from others? Do you truly understand what it means to live free of deception?

The staging juxtaposes a 12-step meeting with a family seder. The music, a mash-up of original theater tunes, Jewish liturgy and forceful pop, with interludes of rap, plays as a constant underscore for dialogue that weaves itself into the music.

As the story unfolds, the audience learns that the seemingly happy family members on one side of the stage are enslaved to their idea of normal, while hiding truths about themselves. The addicts on the other side of the stage share their tales of deception and self-sabotage — tales that each new round of actors writes into the script to reflect their true journey. The addicts, the audience learns, have grown to understand that owning their narrative is the only road to authentic living.

The show highlights the haggadah’s imperative for storytelling. Even if the story is shameful — 200 years of slavery, 20 years of addiction — telling it can be a powerful tool not only for an ongoing process of national rediscovery, but for deep and difficult self-improvement.

“For people who have had to be secretive, who have been ashamed of themselves and been hiding in many ways from themselves, this is really powerful,” said Beit T’Shuvah director Harriet Rossetto, who founded the program in 1987. “The message to addicts often is, ‘If anyone really knows who I am, they won’t love me.’ And I think that is what our people get — that sense that I can be me, and tell my story, and people will still love me.’ ”

Ira S., a 53-year-old who worked in the entertainment industry, is recovering from decades-long drug and alcohol abuse (he asked that only his last initial be used). He moved into Beit T’Shuvah in 2008 and now works there as a counselor. He plays Grandpa in “Freedom Song.”

“I’m not the kind of person that people see a lot. When I first came here, it was all about trying to get by without being on the radar. I was trying to hide more than being present, and that was a part of me that needed to change,” he said in an interview.

He said he was reluctant to join the cast and froze his first time on stage. But, now, he credits “Freedom Song” as being a major part of his recovery.

“I feel like I belong to something. I never felt like I belonged before,” he said.

Beit T’Shuvah is the only rehab residence in the country to integrate Judaism and the 12-step program. Its 120 beds, plus 30 outpatient slots, are always full. Two off-site residences house clients who are well into recovery, and Beit T’Shuvah recently purchased another building, next door, which it will use for its popular Shabbat services and an expansion of outpatient offerings, possibly including a drop-in center. Its prevention curriculum has reached thousands of teenage and middle school students.

While Beit T’Shuvah self-reports an impressive success rate of 65 percent, 85 percent of “Freedom Song” participants stay clean, according to Beit T’Shuvah’s Rabbi Mark Borovitz, who is married to Rossetto. The show allows for deep artistic expression and gives the participants responsibility and the sense that people are counting on them, Borovitz said.

“They know they’ve touched someone, which I’ve heard them say again and again was a bigger high than ever getting loaded was,” Rossetto agreed. “And when you give up your external high, there is a void, and if you don’t fill that with some other highs, it’s very hard to stay sober.”

Watch the trailer below.

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