Thursday was a beautiful day in Jerusalem. The sky was bright blue the weather mild. No sound of helicopters bringing wounded to Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital or of fighter jets overhead broke the serenity of the day. One who did not have any sons at the front or relatives who had received their reserve call-up notices could have strolled around all day without any reminder that Israel is once again under fire and perhaps on the verge of a full-scale invasion of the Gaza Strip  

And that’s the problem.

We check out the Jerusalem Post news site and learn that a Hamas missile hit an apartment building in Kiryat Malachi. Three Jews were killed. This is real. But then we look out the window or head off to Minchah and we forget again.

The fate of approximately one million Jews within range of Hamas missiles and that of thousands of Jewish soldiers awaiting orders to invade the heavily populated Gaza Strip are not totally removed from our consciousness. But neither have they crowded everything else out. They don’t intrude so far as to preclude small talk after davening with a neighbor or a trip to the gym.

On Friday morning the war in the South moved a little closer to home. Looking at the front page of the Jerusalem Post my wife realized that she knows the family of one of the Kiryat Malachi victims Mirah Scharf. Rebbetzin Scharf and her husband replaced Rabbi Gabi and Rivka Holtzberg as Chabad shlichim in Mumbai. She had returned toIsrael to give birth and came early for a memorial service for her friend Rivka Holtzberg.

Leil Shabbos as I’m walking down the stairs on the way to Kabalas Shabbos the shriek of an air raid siren pierces my reverie. Soon the stairwell fills with womenfolk and a few male stragglers. We all ask each other what it means what we are supposed to do. No one seems to know.Jerusalem hasn’t been under rocket or mortar fire since 1973. In shul I find out later no one knew what to do when the siren went off during Minchah — so they just went on davening.  

At the Shabbos table my son comments that he is glad for the siren and its message that we are in this too. I was thinking the same thing. I feel like Hashem is testing me for the second time in two weeks. And I am failing the test.

The first test was Hurricane Sandy. Sure I looked at the pictures of the destruction and made clucking noises. But how much time did I spend trying to imagine what it’s like being without power or heat for days or to have one’s home rendered uninhabitable. And how much time have I spent thinking about what it’s like to raise children in Sderot or any of the southern cities where Hamas rocket fire is a constant fact of life? They sometimes hear a dozen sirens a day. And they don’t have to ask the meaning of the sirens; evidence of the potentially lethal impact of incoming rockets is everywhere in Sderot.

THE MAHARAL in Gevuros Hashem identifies the Korban Pesach which must be either a sheep or a goat with the Jewish people. Strike a sheep or a goat on any part of its body and the pain will reverberate throughout its entire body because of its relatively small size. Similarly with the Jewish people if a Jew or group of Jews is struck anyplace in the world we all feel the pain.

But do we? Technology has made the world much smaller. We have instant access to high-level visuals from any place on the globe. But technology cannot overcome deficiencies of the heart. If we don’t place ourselves in the picture it still remains “there” no matter how fast the image reaches us and how high the resolution.

During the Yom Kippur War Rabbi Chaim Shmulewitz strongly urged bochurim in the Mirrer Yeshiva to remain inJerusalem. The tefillos and learning from afar he said — adding many proofs from Torah — could never have the same intensity as the tefillos and learning of those living in a country at war.

To feel that we are part of the picture requires something more than just reciting a kapitel or two of Tehillim after davening — as important as that may be. Rabbi Noach Weinberg used to bemoan the fact that when he would ask “What are we doing for the Jews of Sderot?” some would answer that they recite Tehillim but those same people did not content themselves with Tehillim when something really important like a Jerusalem mayoral election was at stake and instead closed the Bais Yaakov schools so that students could go out canvassing.

At the very least — assuming that Jerusalem sirens do not become constant over the next week — those of us living here can invite families from the South to join us next Shabbos or for longer so that they can have a respite and so we can begin to learn what it means to live while running for shelter multiple times a day and sleeping every night in the basement.

The Goodists – Part II

Last week we discussed the dangers of “goodists” who adopt political positions as a means of affirming their essential goodness. We focused on the how viewing politics as a morality tale — a continuous struggle between the good people who care for the poor and downtrodden and the bad people who care only for themselves — often results in policies that poorly serve the so-called downtrodden on whose behalf they are allegedly instituted.

But that is only one example of the adverse impact of the “goodists.” The Jews of Israel are among the primary victims of those who adopt political positions primarily as a means of affirming their moral sensitivity. Once the Palestinians are identified as “have-nots” in the minds of goodists the case is closed as far as they are concerned.

The Jewish people’s historical connection to the Land the condition of the Land prior to large-scale Jewish aliyah the consistent Arab refusal to accept Jewish sovereignty in any part of the Land — are all besides the point. History is irrelevant for those who support the Palestinian cause in order to establish their own virtue at no cost or risk to themselves.  

Moralism and the search for pragmatic solutions do not go together. The entire strategy of the Obama campaign was to polarize the electorate around “values” issues — reproductive rights same-gender marriage — of little relevance in order to distract them from the two immensely consequential issues of the election: the skyrocketing national deficit and economic doldrums.

Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan has been at the forefront of the search for practical solutions for what every serious analyst and President Obama’s own Budget Commission agree are unsustainable entitlements — Social Security Medicare and Medicaid. I have no doubt that experts in these areas could find many arguments against the practicality of his proposals. But those kind of pragmatic fact-based arguments are of little attraction to those who view politics as a morality play. Instead Ryan was portrayed as an evil man eager to push granny over the cliff in her wheelchair.  

Those who view themselves as representing the forces of light against the forces of darkness are less inclined to observe procedural rules of fairness or checks and balances. Totalitarians of all stripes who view politics primarily in terms of a Manichaean struggle between good and evil slaughtered many tens of millions in the last century.

But we need not reach for the most egregious examples. The lack of squeamishness about means characterizes those who view politics as a battle between good and evil. Yoel Inbar and Joris Lanners of Tilburg University in theNetherlandsconcluded on the basis of interviews with 800 social and personality psychologists that those holding conservative political views were well-advised to hide their opinions from colleagues. The more liberal the interviewees were the greater their willingness to discriminate against those who did not share their views — both in terms of hiring and publication decisions.

That may explain the monochromatic political cast of the modern university and the widespread confusion between teaching and indoctrination. The ratio of political contributions byPrincetonUniversityfaculty and staff was 155 to two in favor of Obama. (A visiting engineering professor and a janitor contributed to Romney.) One more good reason to worry about any children exposed to so-called higher education inAmerica.

Finally treating being liberal as synonymous with being good stunts character involvement. President Obama succeeded in convincing a majority of voters that his big-government liberalism proves he cares more about the average Joe than his opponent. I’m not so sure. Even in the most admiring biographies of the President — he’s brilliant he’s cool he’s handsome he’s unflappable — I have yet to read of one instance in which he extended himself for another human being.

Such stories about Romney are legion — not just giving away $4 million in annual charitable contributions but physically helping neighbors do home repairs and the like. He shut down evil Bain Capital for a week so that the whole staff could search for colleague’s missing daughter. (She was found just in time through their efforts.) And the largest slice of his time since the election has been spent working databases to help find jobs for 400 campaign workers.

As George Will once observed values are cheap: Anyone can proclaim hundreds of values. Virtues are much harder to attain. The acquisition of virtues requires hard work and self-denial. It cannot be achieved by pulling a voting lever or putting a Free Palestine bumper sticker on one’s car.