\n<\/p>\n
(RNS) \u2014 I found out the way I find out about everything now. My phone buzzed, and I looked at it before I was even fully awake.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Senator Lindsey Graham had died of a sudden illness, at the age of 71.<\/p>\n
I gulped; he was my age.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Let me say this plainly, and this is hardly the place for a full examination and evaluation of his political career, which is necessary and which will doubtless emerge.<\/p>\n
I believed that Graham, a Republican representing South Carolina, was a mixed bag. I will simply say that I disagreed with most of his domestic politics. But he served this country well.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He was also one of the most steadfast friends Israel had in the United States Senate, through administrations of both parties and through the worst years in Israel\u2019s history.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That\u2019s not a small thing to me. There\u2019s a Jewish value that names this \u2014 \u201chakarat ha-tov,\u201d<\/em> the recognition of the good that someone has done.<\/p>\n \u201cHakarat ha-tov\u201d doesn\u2019t require that you like the person. It only asks that you be honest about the good, specifically, on its own terms, without letting the rest of your feelings erase it.<\/p>\n That is how I can hold \u201cI disliked Lindsey Graham\u2019s politics\u201d and \u201cI am grateful for what he did for Israel\u201d in the same mind and soul. That\u2019s not confusion. That\u2019s just what it means to look at a person as a whole human being, with all their complexities, confusions and contradictions.<\/p>\n That was how I responded, inwardly, to the death of Graham.<\/p>\n And then I opened Facebook. I found gloating. A laughing emoji under the news. \u201cKarma.\u201d \u201cGood riddance.\u201d One post that actually used the word \u201cfinally\u201d (\u201cfinally\u201d \u2014 at the age of 71!).<\/p>\n One person referred to him as \u201cMs. Lindsey\u201d \u2014 an act of wretched homophobia that would have been otherwise unthinkable and worthy of cancellation.\u00a0<\/p>\n I have seen the same kind of \u201cschadenfreude\u201d regarding the illness of Senator Mitch McConnell.\u00a0<\/p>\n But as we know, the normal rules of etiquette and social discourse don\u2019t apply to one\u2019s political enemies.\u00a0<\/p>\n Those messages were coming from my regular, everyday Facebook friends and others.\u00a0<\/p>\n Here is what is inexplicable to me.\u00a0Some of those messages came from my clergy colleagues.\u00a0<\/p>\n Those messages were coming from people whose profession requires them to stand at a pulpit and tell other people (often, repeatedly, piously and, at every available opportunity, almost as a mantra) that every human being is made \u201cb\u2019tzelem elohim,\u201d in the image of God.<\/p>\n I expected more.\u00a0<\/p>\n There\u2019s a story in the Talmud that I have taught more times than I can count (Megillah 10b). The Sea of Reeds (the Red Sea) has just closed over the Egyptian army, and the angels want to sing. God stops them. \u201cThe work of My hands is drowning in the sea, and you want to sing songs before Me?!?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n I am hardly the only rabbi who has told that story, repeatedly.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s every colleague I know.\u00a0<\/p>\n We reenact a version of that same restraint every Passover. As we recite the 10 plagues that fell upon Egypt, we dip our fingers into our cups of wine and spill 10 drops of wine. We deliberately diminish our joy because of the suffering of the Egyptians.\u00a0<\/p>\n And in the book of Proverbs, we read: \u201cIf your enemies fall, do not exult; if they trip, let your heart not rejoice; lest God see it and be displeased, and avert God\u2019s wrath from them\u201d (Proverbs 24: 17-18).<\/p>\n \u201cReally, Jeff?\u201d you will say. \u201cWhat about the joy that we have on Purim, as we celebrate the hanging of Haman and his sons?\u201d<\/p>\n That is true, I will say.\u00a0<\/p>\n Except, let us admit that Graham was not Haman.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cJeff, didn\u2019t you rejoice when Sinwar (the head of Hamas) and Khamenei (the Iranian leader) were killed?\u201d<\/p>\n No, I didn\u2019t rejoice. They were dead. That was enough for me.<\/p>\n So I think of the death of Sen. Graham and how people are reacting, and I ask myself (and hardly for the first time): What happened to our common humanity and compassion? When did we become so vulgar and so coarse?<\/p>\n If you say that Trump caused the decline of our national conversational style, I would ask you to remember what Trump said<\/a> about the murder of Carl Reiner and his wife, Michele.<\/p>\n We rightly despised that heartless, cynical response. We can blame Trump for polluting our discourse, but we would then need to ask ourselves: Are we powerless to fight it?\u00a0<\/p>\n And if you respond that Graham\u2019s politics forfeited his claim on your compassion, I would ask you to sit with this sobering reflection on your own fragility and mortality. It is simply this: When you die at a good, old age, someone who hated your politics will have the exact same logic available to them. They might say equally sour things about you.\u00a0<\/p>\n We are better than this.<\/p>\n I have to believe that, or I don\u2019t know what any of it \u2014 the angels, the wine, the Proverbs \u2014 was ever for.<\/p>\n \n <\/div>\n