Truth and Its Consequences
Kol Nidre 5763 Sermon by Rabbi Stanley Davids
The killers killed in the name of God. The victims of 9/11 not only were cruelly murdered, but their very status as human beings was desecrated. In rage we cried: EL N’KAMOT, EL N’KAMOT HOFEE-A. AD MATAI R’SHA-IM, ADONAI?? AD MATAI R’SHAIM YA-A-LOZU?? Oh God of Vengeance, Oh God of Vengeance and of Retribution, manifest Yourself. How long, O Eternal One, how long shall the wicked be permitted to rejoice??
Along with our rage, we sought responses that would be morally and theologically adequate. We found comfort in ancient Psalms. We proudly raised the American flag and sang patriotic hymns; we convened interfaith groups. We donated blood and raised funds; we tried to comfort our children, even as we spoke with them about the reality of good and evil. We declared war against terrorism. We wept in the presence of more than 2800 grieving families. We knew that we had been transformed as a nation, as some hastened to liken September 11th to Pearl Harbor, while others began to stockpile potassium iodide, atropine, cipro and hand-cranked radios. And we desperately looked about, everywhere and anywhere, for healing and for consolation.
Therefore it’s strange, isn’t it, that despite this nightmarish assault, there are many voices asserting that we as a nation have been staggered more from the events surrounding Enron and WorldCom than from the devastation visited upon the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
That can’t be! That’s counter-intuitive! Such an outrageous assertion flies in the face of all that has been written, all that has been proclaimed everywhere from the Rose Garden to small-town pulpits. Since 9/11: forget federal budget surpluses. There aren’t going to be prescription benefits for the elderly; we’re not going to bring all of those children within a network of affordable healthcare. Not now. And not in the near future. We have a war to fund. We have rebuilding to fund. We have death benefits to fund. Long lines, bomb-sniffing dogs and multi-million dollar machinery make air transportation barely tolerable. Almost weekly we are staggered by new terrorist alerts – our own synagogue is now spending tens of thousands of dollars on high-tech security systems and even on those stone benches designed to stop bomb-laden trucks from barreling through our brand-new front entry doors. The top layers of the Executive branch are being restructured, with the price tag reaching far into the tens of millions of dollars. Long-cherished civil liberties are under assault – all in the name of national survival!
So how can this be compared with those admittedly disgusting stories of greed and conspiracy, of malfeasance and misfeasance and financial cleverness that pushed past shady zones of uncertainty known as GAAP: Generally Accepted Accounting Practices – into the darker realms of criminality? But consider these Post-Enron facts: Millions of our individual pension plans have been devastated. Many of those planning for their retirement have had to put those plans on hold, and many of those already retired have been forced to re-enter the workforce. The stock market has taken a longer, deeper, more sustained beating post- Enron than it did post-September 11th, with a net loss to investors of over 6 ½ trillion dollars. Multi-million dollar bonuses to executives have made a mockery of the devastated lives of the ten's of thousands of employees who had naively trusted them.
It’s true that only one death has been linked to Enron. And there were no bearded terrorists in Houston shooting their guns in glee at our distress, no utterly hypnotic, utterly captivating images of a dense cloud of debris blackening the sun, and in place of desperately sad memorial services attended by the President we have only had a few perp-walks orchestrated by federal officers.
Why then such an impact? Surely because events over the course of the past year have lessened our tolerance for evildoers, and thus any attack on our well being is going to be absolutely unbearable. But even more importantly, in the wake of Enron, truth died. Trust died. Integrity died. Stability died. In the wake of WorldCom, dreams died. Confidence died. Fairness and justice died. We have bitterly discovered that selfishness still trumps sensitivity, that the insatiable needs of the few still crush responsibility for the collective. And who is the villain here; who is the bad guy? It isn’t bin Laden this time. Arthur Andersen? Citicorp? The SEC? Are all CEO’s or CFO’s – or their bankers, their brokers, their consultants – deserving of our scorn? What about those analysts promoting stocks their firms were selling, or those corporate officials skimming hundreds of millions of dollars off of the first day’s action in an IPO? Truth and honor have been cast into the dust. We are left now to wonder whether we really are no better than a South American banana republic. And even if a few token white-collar criminals end up serving some rather comfortable jail time, is this a just and sufficient response to the blatant theft of billions? What do we do with our outrage, with our sense of being ripped off, with the shattering loss of trust in our American way of life?
September 11th has shaken us with the discovery that some very powerful forces outside of our borders hate us, that we are vulnerable to their suicidal hatred, and that their hatred will probably continue to have murderous consequences for us and for our loved ones.
But post-Enron we are forced to acknowledge that human ethical behavior is too often a sham. Our own personal dirty little secret, that each one of us – not just political and business leaders – but that each one of us can be expected to lie has now become public knowledge. No matter what we say to our children, no matter how pious our public acts, no matter how generous our philanthropies, we are now forced to recognize that our so-called commitment to personal ethics is too often illusory. So not only have we been financially devastated by the greedy deceit of others, but those acts challenge us to ask if, under similar circumstances, we would act differently. We tremble at the possibility that our answers, if honest, may not be very comforting.
Fib Conceal. Mislead. Evade. Trick. Treachery. Falsehood. Duplicity. Fake. Fraud. Manipulate. An artifice. A pretense. A fiction. A sham. A hoax. How rich the English language is in the vocabulary of lying. Charade. Posturing. Two-faced. Hypocrite. Charlatan. Conniving. Calculating.
We lie by shredding documents. We lie by shading resumes. We lie to conceal our fears by denying our pain. We lie to protect what our family secrets are concealing. We lie by adding. We lie by subtracting. We lie through a contrived paper trail. We lie behind a barrage of artful phrases in PR releases. We lie through silence. We lie in generalities. We lie as we split hairs and try to figure out what “is” is. We lie every time we say, “Let me speak frankly.” We lie every time we protest: “But this hurts me more than it hurts you,” or “I am telling you this for your own good.”
Our teachers of old well understood that truth is a fundamental building block of human civilization. They asked us to imagine the three letters in the Hebrew word for truth, EMET. ALEPH. MEM. TOF. ALEPH is the first letter of the Alphabet; TOF the last letter; and MEM is in the very middle. Truth is the structure that holds the human community together from end to end, and lies inevitably shred the social fabric. Without honesty, we can’t live together in a society. Using the strongest possible imagery, the rabbis declared that EMET, truth, is in fact one of God’s names. God is truth. Truth is God. A rejection of truth is equivalent to an embrace of idolatry. We are discovering that far too many of us are idolaters.
Bill Clinton once said: “Nearly everyone will lie to you, given the circumstances.” He ought to know. Nixon piously intoned: “I am not a crook.” I bet he crossed his fingers when he said that. Mark Twain insisted that there are 869 ways to lie. Now that was a lie, but at least we can understand what he meant. Diogenes searched futilely for an honest person. Abraham lied to Isaac, and then he lied to Pharaoh as well; Joseph lied to his brothers; Bathsheba lied to David. Princeton lied about why some officials broke into the Yale student application database.
So even after the courts and various legislative bodies have completed their thankless task of trying to build firewalls between human greed and our form of capitalistic individualism, our all-too-human weaknesses will not have been banished from the scene. They will still be there, crouching at our doors, threatening to overwhelm us. They are hardwired into us. They are part of us. And that discovery is devastating to contemplate.
Even so, I believe that we are not powerless. If the heritage of Torah has any validity, if the lack of truth in both words and deeds is no less a sin than idolatry, then it is long overdue for TRUTH AND ITS CONSEQUENCES to be moved by each of us from the periphery to the very center of our attention. Post-Enron, to avoid an even greater moral collapse, we need to affirm the power of moral individuals to reform an immoral society. That is our challenge. Tonight of all nights, we can begin to turn away from the deceit that abides in our very own hearts.
1. BE SELF-CRITICAL. Learn to feel shame at our failings, shame when we bungle a business deal, shame when we operate with motives far from praiseworthy, shame when we allow unworthy motives to become excuses for selling our own souls, shame when our words beguile, confuse and deceive. Shame when we lie, no matter whether our lie is self-serving or not. Shame is an assumption of personal responsibility. Shame is an acknowledgement that we know the difference between right and wrong. Shame can be a powerful force in changing the way in which we make moral judgments. Feel shame!
2. Acknowledge that human society is a moral community. What we do and what we say affects others; what others do and say affects us. A moral community understands what is meant by, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” No mere slogan, that phrase from Leviticus ought to be a ringing moral imperative for each of us. Was Thomas Hobbes right when he said that each of us is a wolf toward everyone else? Ask whether the inscription over the gates of Buchenwald, “Every man for himself,” is an honest reflection of how we ourselves act. I believe that the affirmation that we live in a moral community is why Jonah finally faced up to the truth, even when that act of Teshuvah led to his being thrown overboard. I believe that this is what motivated the whistle- blowers to expose the callous greed of big tobacco and the corruption within Enron itself. And I believe that the embrace of a moral community is what motivated Martin Luther King, Jr., and Elie Wiesel to speak truth to power.
3. Acknowledge that we are more than the work we do, more than the money we earn, more than the trappings of success we acquire. We are more than just animals; we may even be but littler lower than the angels. Martin Buber warned us not to treat others as objects to be used and then discarded. In the world of I-It, it doesn’t matter what we say or what we do – just what product emerges. The Midrash tells us that when the Tower of Babel was being built no one paused from labor when a workman tumbled off of the scaffolding – but if a building block tumbled to the ground, everyone wailed. Affirm that the value of human beings exceeds our economic value.
4. We are Jews. Whatever we do and whatever we say have, since the beginnings of time, implicated the God we claim to serve. We know that it is wrong to use God’s name in an oath we do not intend to fulfill. It is worse when Jews act or speak corruptly, thus declaring to the world that our adherence to an ancient covenant is a meaningless sham. When our speech is corrupt, when our acts are corrupt, we desecrate the name of God in public.
5. And finally, affirm that everything we do survives us. Whether or not we believe in life after death or in a final judgment, we will be remembered for what we say and we will be remembered for what we do. Will Michael Milken, at the close of his life, be remembered as a commanding force seeking to discover a cure for prostate cancer, or just as one who skated too close to the line separating smart business practices and corrupt behavior? Will Martha Stewart be remembered for the matching window treatments she designed, or how well they will look in her jail cell? Time will tell. For Judaism, there is no moral superiority in poverty or in wealth, but only in how we live our lives from day to day.
My friends, we can do little to extend our life’s length, but we can do a great deal to deepen our life’s value. The fall of Enron and of all the others have shown us far too clearly what must be done before honesty and integrity can be enshrined in our personal lives. The curtain has been stripped away. We have learned more about ourselves than we had ever wanted to know. But it need not end there. We are still works in progress. God still has not finished with us. The scandals of today can become a piercing Shofar blast for each of us as individuals, calling us to Teshuvah, transforming us and thereby transforming our national society, demanding that we establish our personal lives upon truthful foundations. So much has been lost these last months. So much has happened that has left us powerless, frightened and confused. There is a better path. A path that can move us from greed toward goodness, from scandal and shame toward an embrace of the sacred. In this New Year 5763, shall we try to walk that road together?
AMEN
(With gratitude to the 2003 Sermon Seminar sponsored by the UAHC and the CCAR).