Back in March Stanford anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann wrote an interesting op-ed in the New York Times focusing on the politics of evangelicals but relevant to Orthodox Jews too:

It’s election season and once again Democrats are flummoxed by evangelical voters.… That’s because evangelicals and secular liberals … think about life — and therefore politics — in such utterly different ways.

If you want to understand how evangelicals conceive of their political life you need to understand how they think about G-d.… What someone believes is important to these Christians but what really matters is becoming a better person. As I listened in church and participated in prayer groups I saw that when people prayed they imagined themselves in conversation with G-d.… They … try to become the person they would be if they were always aware of being in G-d’s presence even when the kids fuss and the train runs late.…

This completely changes the way someone thinks about politics.

When secular liberals vote they think about the outcome of a political choice. They think about consequences. Secular liberals want to create the social conditions that allow everyday people behaving the way ordinary people behave to have fewer bad outcomes.

When evangelicals vote they think more immediately about what kind of person they are trying to become — what humans could and should be rather than who they are. From this perspective the problem with government is that it steps in when people fall short. Rick Santorum won praise by saying …“Go into the neighborhoods inAmericawhere there is a lack of virtue and … you will find government everywhere: police social service agencies. Why? Because without faith family and virtue government takes over.” This perspective emphasizes developing individual virtue from within — not changing social conditions from without.

So far so good. Luhrmann has hit upon a basic truth about how liberalism and religion approach the building of a virtuous society so very differently. But when he begins dispensing advice based on this insight things get strange. He notes that “evangelicals are smarter and more varied than many liberals realize. I met doctors scientists and professors at the churches where I studied. They cared about social justice. They cared about the poor.…”

But then he proceeds to urge liberals to try to woo these religious voters with what seems to be a cynical and transparent effort to blur the very real differences between the liberal and religious worldviews that he’s just finished describing so accurately:

If Democrats want to reach more evangelical voters they should use a political language that evangelicals can hear. They should talk about the kind of people we are aiming to be and about the transformational journey that any choice will take us on. They should talk about how we can grow in compassion and care. They could talk about the way their policy interventions will allow those who receive them to become better people and how those of us who support them will better ourselves as we reach out in love. They could describe health care reform as a response to suffering not as a solution to an economic problem.

If evangelicals or for that matter Orthodox Jews are as smart as he grants won’t they see right through such talk? Won’t they respond that in fact receipt of government “interventions” generally doesn’t make for better people and that health care reform certainly isn’t a “solution to an economic problem ” but neither with its bureaucratic rationing and stifling of research is it a “response to suffering”?

I’M NOT WORTH IT This past week saw the 39^th yahrtzeit of HaGaon Rav Yosef Eliyahu Henkin ztz”l. Growing up in the America of the 1960s and ’70s we all knew of Rav Henkin as the longtime menahel of the illustrious tzedakah called Ezras Torah and as a towering pillar of psak halachah in this country.

In 1980 Ezras Torah published Rav Henkin’s writings on halachah. In the introduction his successor Rav Moshe Margolin shared the following amazing excerpt from a speech Rav Henkin gave at a dinner where a large crowd had assembled to pay tribute to his many decades of total devotion to Ezras Torah. He began by posing a seeming contradiction: The Gemara in Chullin 94b indicates that we are not obligated to correct another’s inflated opinion of us so long as it’s an estimation he arrived at on his own not one we helped create in his mind. Yet the Yerushalmi in Makkos states that where others believe one knows two masechtos and in reality he knows only one he must immediately apprise them of their misconception.

The resolution explained Rav Henkin is that where one stands to gain monetarily from others’ overestimation of him he must correct their mistake to avoid being paid more than his teaching and scholarship is truly worth. Where however others’ delusions about a person’s abilities and achievements won’t result in ill-gotten profit for him they may be left to believe what they wish about him.

And with that Rav Henkin continued: “In my youth a great future in Torah had been prophesied for me if I were to continue learning without letup. Yet upon coming to these shores I threw all my efforts into the holy mossad Ezras Torah and I didn’t grow in Torah in the way I would have had I devoted those same kochos to learning. Thus I gave away my entire future for this organization and it in turn owes me so much that no matter how much it pays me I’m effectively working for free for Ezras Torah.

“That being so whatever praise Ezras Torah wishes to heap upon me has no financial import; there’s no chance I’ll be overpaid as a result. And so if you want to delude yourselves into thinking that I’m a gaon and a tzaddik although I’m not then so be it…”

He said Ezras Torah owed him more than it could ever pay him … yet he “fended off” a raise in salary forced upon him by Ezras Torah’s board of trustees by simply failing to cash some of his paychecks; the income from the dinei Torah and gittin over which he presided went into Ezras Torah’s coffers; and when at age 75 a group of rabbanim purchased a ticket for him to make a first-ever visit to Eretz Yisrael he declined the gift saying that Ezras Torah’s difficult straits made it impossible to take along sums greater than the usual tzedakah distributions in which case he saw no justification to go.…

He said he gave up additional Torah greatness for the cause of tzedakah and chesed … yet Rav Isser Zalman Meltzer wrote in Rav Henkin’s ksav smichah at age 20 that the Slutzk yeshivah could be proud of having produced a gadol like him and despite 48 years of total immersion in the cause of Ezras Torah he went on to become a final address in halachah for rabbanim across America.

WHO’S SNARLED? The JTA’s headline about the great maamad of last Wednesday evening read something like “Siyum HaShas draws 90000 to Meadowlands stadium snarls traffic” which reminded me of the similar headline after President Obama’s 2009 inauguration “First black president’s swearing-in festivities uplift nation snarl traffic.” Just kidding.

The JTA line was among the media’s more benign coverage and the truth is the only snarl of consequence here is the one on the faces and in the hearts of these journalists. That they’d deem even an occasion as full of goodness and positivity as this one to be an opportunity to spew their venom simply tells us that what they need is not a journalistic response but long-term therapy before they consume themselves with their toxic fears envies and animosities.

So let’s ignore them and refuse to be drawn into their whirlpool of unhealthy emotions. Let’s instead perform the mitzvah of speaking well of Jews. We can begin by quoting what one traffic reporter said on the radio late Wednesday evening: He’s been covering theNew Yorktraffic beat for about 25 years yet has never seen the roads as clogged as they were that night by the post-Siyum volume. But he added no one’s honking the drivers are just waving to each other.…

Then there are the security personnel at Metlife who were deeply struck by the contrast between the impeccably decorous crowd that evening and the high levels of rowdiness and drunkenness that are par for the course at that venue. And finally a small personal anecdote: my mother-in-law left the event without taking along her bag containing an umbrella and towel. But 12 hours later they were back in her hands. The lady in the next seat took the bag with her called AgudathIsrael’s offices the next morning to ascertain her neighbor’s identity and delivered the bag to my mother-in-law’s home.

Torah ennobles.