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Outlook

People often ask me with respect to my columns in the Jerusalem Post: How can you stand having to deal with all those chareidi-bashers all the time? They must get you so angry.

“Not really” I respond. “I’m lucky. At least I can answer them and perhaps occasionally even grab their attention. I don’t have to keep all the frustration inside.” In short getting a chance to answer back is gratifying.  

American voters answered back last week. It would be a mistake to view the American midterm elections as nothing more than an expression of voter anger over ObamaCare or runaway budgets or high unemployment. I suspect that the most engaged voters last week thoroughly enjoyed themselves just as I enjoyed writing columns rejecting the jurisprudence of Court President Aharon Barak.

The brightest star to emerge on the Republican scene in this election Florida’s thirty-nine-year-old Senator-elect Marco Rubio was also the most upbeat. His parents were Cuban exiles. His father worked as a bartender and his mother as a hotel housekeeper in Las Vegas as he was growing up. An early Tea Party favorite he raced to a landslide victory over Florida’s popular governor on the basis of his ability to articulate a vision of America as a land of boundless opportunity. His message throughout an otherwise bitter campaign was one of relentless optimism.

Voters were affirming their belief in a particular vision of America based on the preservation of individual liberty. That vision is not just negative towards big government — at least as articulated by Rubio — it also supports a strong (and expensive) American military as a defender of freedom and robust spending on public education including higher education to ensure that America remains a society of opportunity.

Just as the Israeli chareidi community felt uplifted by the mass gathering in support of the Emanuel parents as an expression of devotion to our core values so did American voters rejoice in their opportunity to affirm their core values and vision of America.

***

Last week I mentioned that most people respect the admirable qualities of others as long as they are allowed to discover those qualities for themselves. I witness this every week at the Shabbos shiur given across the street from me. Before each shiur there is a tingle of excitement in the air in anticipation of the intellectual delights of the next hour and a half. But there is something else as well — something bordering on love for the relatively young talmid chacham who gives the shiur. That love binds us not only to him but to all the others attending the shiur.

His brilliance is not the source of that affection. Rather it is the combination of brilliance and his completely self-effacing pashtus (humility). This talmid chacham davened in the shul for nearly twenty years without so much as ever giving a drashah on leil Shabbos. Apparently others more in the know than I had some inkling of his gadlus. At some point someone asked him if he would give a shiur on Shabbos afternoon. That shiur began with fewer than a minyan of attendees sitting around a table. But news spread quickly just by word of mouth and within a few weeks the ranks of regular attendees has swelled to over a hundred.

This rav still sits in the same place towards the back of the shul has a smile for everyone deflects any expressions of gratitude for the shiur by responding that we are doing him a favor by coming and attends every simchah (although now he is invited to many more.) Well actually he doesn’t attend every simchah. Not so long ago one of the regulars at the shiur invited him to his granddaughter’s vort. The next day the rav called to apologize profusely that he had not been able to attend. It turned out that a talmid in the yeshivah in which he teaches got married the night before. The chasanah took place in the yeshivah and there were not enough hands available in the kitchen. So the rav stayed to help with the preparations.

As this talmid chacham reveals there is no middah as attractive as genuine anivus (humility). I don’t suffer from this challenge but I often wonder how genuinely superior people manage to avoid looking down at others. How do they retain their humility without which their excellence in so many areas would lose much of its luster?

I don’t mean those who are intellectually gifted. It’s relatively easy to appreciate that natural gifts are just that — gifts from Hashem. I mean those who are always on time for davening those who have become talmidei chachamim through their unrelenting yegiah b’Torah those who have a smile for every collector those who know exactly how much maaser they should be giving etc. In short those who are genuinely superior not just blessed.

Surely they must be aware of their superiority and our inferiority. In one of the minyanim in which I daven there is someone who always seems to glance up if I come in late. Perhaps it’s only my imagination that he notices me but the thought of his glance is jarring enough to cause me to wait for the next minyan. He may not be aware of his superiority in always being on time for every minyan but I’m acutely aware of my opposite tendency.

So far I’ve come up with two possibilities about how great people manage to retain their humility. The first is that it never occurs to them to compare themselves to anyone else and thus they have no occasion to ever look down on anyone. For them the only question is whether they are reaching the elevated standards they have set for themselves. The Vilna Gaon felt more pain over six minutes unaccounted for in a year than we do over the most serious failings.

The second answer is that they view all kochos hanefesh as gifts from Hashem not just the obvious ones. Those who grew up in proximity to the Chazon Ish attest that when he was learning a sugya every person in the neighborhood could have said the relevant gemaras be’al peh (from memory) so many times did they hear him reviewing the Gemara. His hasmadah was beyond our comprehension. Yet when asked how he reached that level of hasmadah the Chazon Ish would answer: Anyone born with my kochos hanefesh (innate traits) would have reached the same level. 

***

The left-wing Guardian in England reports some startling findings about the efficacy of the 1997 Kyoto Accords which were designed to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. While 187 nations ratified the Accords the United States the world’s largest producer of greenhouse gases was not among them. The signatories to the Kyoto Accords committed to reducing their emissions based on a 1991 baseline of emissions.

The Guardian found that carbon dioxide emissions in the European Union declined 17 percent between 1990 and 2010. But the emissions produced by all the goods and services consumed by the EU increased 40 percent over the same period. In other words all the EU had done was to transfer the emissions to countries with less rigorous reduction targets thereby exporting jobs in polluting industries abroad but failing to reduce worldwide emissions.

In light of those findings Walter Russell Mead the Henry Kissinger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations writes that the rejection of the Kyoto Accords by the US Senate — an act for which President Obama has repeatedly apologized — appears to be one of those rare instances in which 95 senators got things exactly right. Addressing the green movement he observes that it’s time for the environmental movement to grow up and begin to deal with the complex economics politics and diplomacy of its proposals and not just content itself with good intentions. And to its servile supporters in the media it’s time to get beyond the syllogism “the environment is good; X says that Y will be good for the environment; therefore Y is good.

Environmental politics is only one of many areas in which social planners filled with grandiose plans would be well-advised to focus on the unintended consequences of their schemes for human betterment.

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