Getting Militant

My stay on my Representative District's Democratic Committee needs to be reconsidered.  We represent a phantom elected official who declines invitations to present his efforts in the state capital to the committee that sponsors him, to say nothing of ignoring constituent contacts.  He needs to be defeated in a primary, and I said so.

Then a young socialist, the type who likely does not appreciate a day's work for a day's pay, asked the committee to endorse an anti-Israel resolution by one of the most despicable representatives in Congress, a lady elected to represent a failing district that was once adjacent to mine and later to my son's.  I avoided name-calling and personal demeaning comments either of the socialist or the person he wanted to support, but was upfront about moral clarity on the Gaza attacks of Simchat Torah and some basic moral clarity.  I support a just war, not his or that congressman's ceasefire which enables a Next Act.

To be fair, after the meeting I met with the committee chair and the recording secretary.  The socialist did have to get his piece approved by a legitimate editor to appear in print.  But that's not the purpose of our Committee. And even during the meeting even my best friend on that committee would think me too militant.

But I see the party of Roosevelt, JFK, Johnson of his Presidential years, and Clinton becoming relics, and me with them.  These men all saw an obligation to enable others to rise to their potential, as do I.  JFK saw all boats rising with the tide.  I see it through more Jewish lenses.  We have Mitzvot, things we are commanded by Torah in the name of the One God to either do or not do.  Fulfilling them is hard, and we often fall short, though not inevitably fall short in the manner of Christian Original Sin that dooms everyone to inferiority.  Instead, we have those Mitzvot as benchmarks.  We must rise to the mitzvot.  We cannot diminish what is expected of us to accommodate our own shortcomings.  There are rules of what we can eat.  While Kosher enough is what many of us, including me, actually do, we do not change commercial certification of the products that we purchase.  We must rise to the occasion by purchasing them.  Shabbos and Festivals are on specified days.  We do not change the days to adapt to our schedules, even when it risks not fulfilling our best observance.  We rise to the Mitzvot, the Mitzvot do not descend to us.

Where I see my Democrats shifting, and Jews shifting with it, is along those principles.  We not only cannot have the butchery that came our way last Simchat Torah, planned a year in advance, part of an express Hamas quest for Jewish elimination, but we cannot tolerate its rationalization. We all know what rape, child abduction, dismembering, massacring are.  And like pornography, perhaps, we know it when we see it.  That means doing what it takes for a humanity that raises its fists in the air now but benefits later.  That means calling out anyone, from that scripted socialist ignoramus to those like his admired congressman who divide the world into oppressed like them who need to squash the oppressor like me.  No, the better outcome is to enable their rise, which the Democrats of my own day, including the current President, seek to bring about.  But you cannot even pursue that when the moral clarity fails, which theirs has.