Above: A great moment in TBE recent history. We came together on Zoom at the height of the pandemic in 2020 to light our menorahs as a community.
WHO WILL BE OUR SHAMASH?
Henry Kissinger, who died last week accomplished something highly unusual for an American. He won the Nobel Peace Prize. It happened in 1973, honoring his participation in the Vietnam peace negotiations in Paris. Whether or not he deserved it – and, depending on your point of view, similar arguments can be made against other American winners, including Presidents Obama and Carter and Vice President Gore, there is one thing that nearly all of the 24 American winners have in common, save for two: they were known for being political movers and shakers rather than moral beacons. Only two people even remotely fit that description, Martin Luther King (1964) and Elie Wiesel (1986), and only one of them was an actual religious leader. It's not as if spiritual leaders have been lacking among non-American Peace Prize recipients. The overall list includes such luminaries as Mother Theresa, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Albert Schweitzer, Andrei Sakharov and this year’s winner, Narges Mohammadi for her work fighting the oppression of women in Iran. Although Nobel Peace Prize is hardly a perfect determinant of virtue (Yasser Arafat won it, and so did the United Nations), it’s an indicator of where a nation’s priorities lie. Americans have won 40 percent of all Nobel Prizes – over 400 – including 80 in chemistry alone. But when it comes to the Peace Prize, we find just one American-born religious leader, Dr. King. On Hanukkah, we light the menorah using an added helper candle, known as the Shamash. The word Shamash comes from Shemesh, which means sun in Hebrew and is a term actually derived from a Mesopotamian sun god who exercised the power of light over darkness and evil. From the perspective of Jewish law, which predated electric lighting by a millennium or two, this added candle does all the grunt work of bringing light to the room for practical uses, like cooking, reading, and household chores, so that the other candles might use their glow to exclusively proclaim the miracle. The Shamash does the hard work of bringing everyone together, like Mother Theresa in the alleyways of Calcutta, while the other candles bask in the glory of just standing there and melting. But all their illumination could never happen without the the sacrifices of their humble servant, the Shamash. What we’ve discovered recently is that there are no more Shamashes to be found. A half century ago. America was blessed with a galaxy of saintly religious leaders. Martin Luther King was the best of them, to be sure. But there were others, including Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. And the Roman Catholic cardinal who was particularly revered in my house – Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston. Where are such leaders today? Have we been too burned to trust our religious leaders, what with all the clergy sex scandals, partisan politics and corruption – and the utter lack of courage to stand up to a would-be dictator who occupied the White House? Or more to the point: Assuming there are no great religious leaders around anymore, does that bother us in the least? Do we really care? Several years ago, Rabbi Steven Listfield wrote, “What has changed drastically over the past few decades is that people no longer seem to expect - nor is it clear that they get or respond to - anything of overarching moral challenge or communal purpose from the organized religions of America.” In other words, the problem isn't just in the leadership, but the flock. The sheep would prefer to go it alone, sans shepherd, rather than risk being fleeced again. So how are we doing, without great prophets to cry in the dark, and apparently without the desire on our part to hear them? The world is a far more dangerous place now than it was then, even though back in King’s day the Soviet Union was still flexing its nuclear muscles. Racism is as virulent now as it was then, though at times more subtle than the 1960’s strain. But when racial, ethnic and religious attacks occur, such has happened increasingly recently. where is that clear voice, the one voice, respected on all sides, with the ability to drown out all the others? Where is that commanding call to eradicate the evil? There has been none. Matthew Arnold, the 19th century English poet, wrote, “The true meaning of religion is not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.” I think people do care. We are still looking for the next Abraham Heschel and Martin Luther King, just as the political dreamers among us are still in perpetual search of another Lincoln or JFK. If some appear complacent, it's only because we've gotten used to mediocrity - clergy who attend to basic pastoral needs and do little else, and churches, synagogues and mosques that educate but neglect to inspire, and because there are so many conflicting voices now, so much noise, that they tend to cancel each other out.
Norman Lear, who died this week, produced programs that brought Americans together through a weekly collective exercise in the mockery of bigotry. He was a prophet of sorts. But were it to be produced these days, "All in the Family" would be instantly cancelled by both extremes of our political universe. We've come close, perhaps, but television has not produced a producer like Norman Lear since Norman Lear. Americans continue to pile up Nobels in every branch of the sciences, But an entire generation has come of age, and our educational system has failed to turn out a single great moral voice. And now there is a real fear that all voices speaking truth will be silenced or overwhelmed by the false voices of artificial intelligence and the propaganda silos of our increasingly suspect media. What we need is a Sputnik of the spirit, something to jar American educators and religious leaders to rearranging their priorities. We won the race to the moon, but we're losing the race to repair the Earth. We need to have a voice of incorruptible and uncorrupted moral power, one that Trump is afraid of, one that can pierce the echo chambers of academia that rationalize the genocidal brutality on October 7, one that can proclaim, "Love is love is love is love is love," but get us far beyond that simple proclamation. We need a voice of true moral courage, touched by outrage, but motivated only by love. We need someone to light a fire under us. We need a shamash. | 
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