My dad was a great guy who lived a great and remarkable life. As I said when he died in March, there’s nothing about his life to mourn except that it’s over. We miss him a lot.
Fortunately, he left us one more gift. In his typical manner — diligently, without fanfare — he was working on and just barely completed one final book. It’s called, ” Faith’s Answers to America’s Political Crisis: How Religion Can Help Us Out of the Mess We’re In.” It’s a long title for a short book, and it’s a short book with a big message: we can do a lot better, and we already know how.
It’s no accident that the hallmarks of my dad’s career included such traits as bipartisanship, the courage to lead, civility and a willingness to compromise. All these sprang naturally from his source code as a person, which was his faith. As a religiously observant Jew, my dad believed in God, believed we were all created in God’s image, and therefore, that we were all at the most fundamental level, brothers and sisters — all equal, all deserving of respect, all of infinite value.
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My dad’s faith drove the causes he championed. He marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. in Washington in 1963; he risked his life in Mississippi laying the groundwork for the Freedom Riders who arrived the following summer; he fought polluters who were defiling God’s physical creation as well as sickening God’s human creations; he supported America’s efforts to thwart the expansionist aims of tyrants and liberate those previously oppressed; he insisted we do something to counter the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Bosnia; he stood strong with Israel; he exerted great effort and took great pride in his office’s work to make better the lives of his constituents in the most important everyday ways.
His faith, however, drove not just the substance of his work but also the manner in which he went about things. In the book, he focuses his message on how his belief in God was the touchstone for his efforts at practicing politics with courage, civility and an openness to compromise. He drew on the lessons of scripture for inspiration.
I’ll cite just one of his examples. The account is well known: Abraham argues with God not to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. First, what courage this took — to challenge the Almighty! For Abraham, it was a matter of principle, and he let his courage lead him. Second, an exchange between a human and God that we can easily imagine becoming heated or worse is instead played out with calmness and mutual respect. Last, Abraham is asking God to compromise! And repeatedly, God is willing to compromise if certain conditions are met which, alas, they are not. Courage, civility, compromise.
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More than 90% of Americans believe in a higher power, and 80% say that higher power is the God of the three Abrahamic faiths. In the book, my dad cites example after example from the three Abrahamic faiths as well as from Hinduism. The basic point is that the part of our lives that gives our lives meaning and direction is shared by the great majority of us. We accept our faith as important if not binding in its influence over our actions as individuals.
However, our respective faith traditions also give us countless examples of how we should act in relation to our broader community — our cities, our states, our countries, and our world. It’s all right there in our holy texts, as my dad shows. Yet the principles, the codes of conduct that we say we accept, we somehow fail to apply in our more publicly oriented words and deeds.
There’s no reason that the Golden Rule should stop at the threshold of politics; in fact, our faiths teach us precisely the opposite. Yet one can easily look at Washington today as two opposing armies, a red one and a blue one, are at a complete standstill, hurling insults at each other and accomplishing almost nothing.
Can we do anything about it? We can, and we already know what that is. As the Bible relates, “what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach. … [It] is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart” Deuteronomy 30:11, 14. Also, “The word is near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart ” Romans 10:8.
Since my dad’s death, people have kept coming up to say how much they miss him, how sorely his voice is needed at this most fractious moment. We deeply appreciate the esteem with which people held him, but really there was no great secret to what was special about my dad. In a nasty business, he managed to live by the Golden Rule. If he did it, we all can. It’s in our mouths and in our hearts — right now.
