Each morning we thank Hashem with the words v’hivdeelanu min hato’im for having given us the Torah to set us apart from those who bereft of such a guide to meaningful living wander aimlessly through life. We often don’t appreciate enough just how wide is the chasm that separates those who have Torah to illuminate their path in life from those who still rely on the nearly-extinguished glow of the Enlightenment.

A recent Wall Street Journal interview with Dr. Leon Kass a leading conservative intellectual who chaired President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics begins this way: 

“As pain is to the body so repugnance is to the soul” Dr. Kass says as we sit down for an interview in his book-lined office at the American Enterprise Institute.… “So too with anger and compassion. Repugnance is some kind of wake-up call that there is something untoward going on and attention must be paid. These passions are not simply irrational. They contain within them the germ of insight.” …. Degradation and its opposite human dignity are central elements of Dr. Kass’s philosophy and he fears that American society risks becoming disrespectful of dignity and indifferent to degradation.

Dr. Kass has touched here upon an important insight conveyed by Rav Dessler at some length in the second volume of Michtav Me’Eliyahu (p.219-221). The following is my free translation of one section:

Sometimes it appears to us that one or another feeling of ours is related to the physical aspect of our lives yet it’s not so. It may well be that its true source is in our spiritual selves except that when manifested in feelings its deeper source becomes obscured from us.

For example we are repulsed by disgusting things. Seemingly this sense comes from some external stimulus. But the holy Torah reveals to us the depth of the matter…. There is in our subconscious a nekudah a point of tum’ah that thrives on the repulsive and filthy and when we come in contact with such things it is stirred to transmit to us a spirit of tum’ah that distances us slightly from Hashem… The source of the feeling of disgust is the power of kedushah within us that seeks to repel the power of tumah to prevent the distancing from the Divine it causes. Therefore one of the practices of avodas Hashem involves being very careful in these matters and nurturing within ourselves our natural feelings of refinement.

Rav Dessler goes on to apply this idea to several other areas of human sensitivity. One is the use of coarse albeit permitted language which Chazal teach is indicative of some flaw in the soul. Another is the innate love of life and corresponding fear of its termination that we all share which are  not reflexive biochemical reactions but are rooted in a visceral sense we have that every second of life has a higher spiritual purpose to fulfill. And indeed the more spiritually devoid one is the more prone he is to devalue life and risk it for meaningless thrills.

Contemporary society however or at least the enlightened denizens of the academy who deign to speak for it has moved so far from these rarified understandings of the deep spiritual roots of our thoughts and feelings that even as basic — and as humanistic — a notion as the dignity of the individual is under attack. The interviewer observes:

In a 2008 essay highly critical of Dr. Kass’s work on the Bush bioethics council the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker questioned the value of dignity as a moral guide. “Dignity is a phenomenon of human perception” Mr. Pinker wrote. “Certain signals in the world trigger an attribution in the perceiver.”… That such an outlook is both blinkered and dangerous Dr. Kass thinks should be obvious to anyone who has ever [felt] love or … other great emotions. “There’s no doubt that the human experience of love ” he says is mirrored by “events that are measurable in the brain. But anybody who has ever [loved] knows that [it] is not just an elevated level of some peptide in the hypothalamus.” Nor are degradation and dignity.

Speaking of dignity Kass’s own early life experiences taught him that there was much of it along with goodness to be found far far from the campus. While completing his medical internship and a PhD in biochemistry at Harvard he and his wife spent part of the summer of 1965 inMississippidoing civil rights work. The couple lived with a black farmer inMount Olive Mississippi in a home that had no indoor plumbing. Kass recalls:

$$$$“I came back from this place with this conundrum: Why was there more honor goodness and decency in these unschooled black farmers than I found in my fellow graduate students at Harvard whose enlightened and liberal opinions I shared?” The answer he eventually concluded was that his black hosts displayed “the dignity of honest work and religion” — things he didn’t often find among his highly educated peers most of whom “were only looking out for Number One.” Around the same time Dr. Kass’s reading of Rousseau C.S. Lewis … and Aldous Huxley … led him to see that as science advances morals don’t necessarily improve; that the opposite might well be the case.$$$$

V’hivdeelanu min hato’im. The divide between those who have Torah to guide them and the to’im wandering Jews like Pinker is a stark one. At one pole the appreciation that even man’s seemingly purely physical impulses have deep roots in his status as a tzelem Elokim; at the other pole the utter denial that there is anything at all uniquely human beloved precious about us.

NOT THE FACTS PLEASE Former president George W. Bush was in the news last week with the opening in Dallas of his Presidential Library and the Washington Post reported that his public image is experiencing quite a rehabilitation rising from 23 percent approval in Washington Post-ABC polling in October 2008 to 47 percent today tying him with President Obama’s current rating. Mr. Bush’s biggest jumps in approval have been among seniors noncollege-educated whites and moderate/conservative Democrats.

And which group has least changed its opinion of Mr. Bush? African Americans who registered 90 percent disapproval in 2008 and 84 percent now. Here’s Christian Caryl writing in Foreign Policy this past February:

WhichUnited Statespresident will go down in history as the greatest humanitarian to have served in the office?… The name might surprise you: it”s George W. Bush.

I should say right up front that I do not belong to the former president’s political camp. I strongly disapproved of many of his policies.…

 [O]nly a few Americans have ever heard of PEPFAR the USPresidents Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief … [in which] President Bush called upon Congress to sponsor an ambitious program to supply antiretroviral drugs and other treatments to HIV sufferers in Africa. Since then the USgovernment has spent some $44 billion on the project.…

One medical expert calls PEPFAR the “largest financial commitment of any country to global health and to treatment of any specific disease worldwide.” It's impossible to tell exactly how many lives the program has saved though Secretary of State John Kerry recentlyclaimed that 5 million people are alive today because of it.…

Fast forward a decade later and … President Obama’s most recent budget proposals actually propose to cut spending on the program.… Bush still enjoys high popularity ratings inAfrica where he’s widely regarded as one of the continent’s great benefactors. (Meanwhile the Obama administration’s proposed PEPFAR cuts have triggered protests around Africa — even in Kenya where the president’s family ties have ensured him plenty of favorable coverage.)

The Washington Post’s liberal columnist Eugene Robinson concedes that Bush’s “commitment to PEPFAR was not really justifiable on grounds of national security.… The administration was motivated instead by altruism. It was the right thing to do.”

Meanwhile President Obama’s schedule last week included a speech for Planned Parenthood (PP) pledging his unwavering support just as the media was finally beginning to cover the trial of aPhiladelphiaabortion doctor accused of crimes much too horrific to detail here; PP was aware of his clinic but failed to report it. Many perhaps most of his victims were poor black women who the grand jury report said were treated by untrained staffers while white women were seen by the doctor.

The president hasn’t uttered a word about the case. His spokesman says Mr. Obama is “familiar” with it but can’t comment on an ongoing trial although that never seemed to matter in the Trayvon MartinAurora orFt.Hoodcases.

But enough confusing matters with the facts. Just repeat after me: for blacks Bush is bad Obama good.