All my life, I have been both a Jets loyalist and a proud, practicing Jew. I owe my religious commitment to Judaism to my parents and grandparents and their deep-rooted belief in the importance of Jewish education, prayer, and service to the community. But I place blame for my lifelong dedication to the Jets squarely in the laps of my father and grandfather. Apparently, in my family at least, dedication to a seemingly futile team is one of the riches of patrilineal descent.

As I’ve grown up, if anything my emotional investment has outgrown theirs. And yet, the misery has worsened. Indeed, I’ve come to see the Jewish psyche as a perfect fit for the Jets, from the fan base and the tradition of loss to the psychological syndromes and the community infighting. Like the Jews, the Jets have been through exile and endured life as second-class citizens. The team forced the fans to make a choice by scheduling a game against the hated New England Patriots on Rosh Hashanah and another starting an hour before Yom Kippur. And though in my life, they’ve been one game shy of returning to the Promised Land four different times, the Jets have—just like Moses—never managed to cross the frontier into the Promised Land.

On the eve of this year’s Super Bowl, the Jets’ misery is more pronounced as their two fiercest rivals prepare to play on the biggest stage for a combined 12th time since the Jets’ sole appearance. And I am forced to root for the archrival Giants.

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Like many American Jews, my parents grew up in Brooklyn as Dodgers fans. As the Dodgers found a way to lose each year, my father’s disdain for the New York Yankees—who kept finding ways to win seemingly every year—grew to the point where he couldn’t stand anything affiliated with them, including the football team that also played in Yankee Stadium: the New York Giants.

My father finally got his football team in 1960, with the creation of the New York Titans, a team that even carried a Jewish chip on its shoulder: Their name derived precisely from their ambition to be bigger than the Giants. In 1963, the Titans were bought by Jewish entertainment mogul David Abraham “Sonny” Werblin and renamed the Jets—thus ushering in what seemed to possibly be a genuine redemption.

Werblin took a gamble and signed the upstart quarterback Joe Namath to lead the team. In 1969, just three years before I was born, the Jets made it to the Super Bowl, where they faced the heavily favored Baltimore Colts. My father was in law school at the time, but he skipped out on studying for his final in order to watch the game. The Jets pulled an upset of Maccabean proportions, and my father passed his exam.

But the Jets have never been back to the Super Bowl—and I’ve been left to half-wonder if this isn’t because my father made some deal with the devil: Just let the Jets win this one time and just let me pass this test, and I won’t bother you about this ever again.

After a few exoduses from Polo Grounds and Shea Stadium, the Jets moved to the Meadowlands in 1984—where they would be second-class citizens at Giants Stadium, which they shared with that other New York football team. The Meadowlands was not far from my parents’ home in New Jersey and, every week that the Jets played at home, my father took me to the game. We’d sit with the same group of fans, our ritual minyan witnessing the Jets regularly sacrifice wins in creative ways.

The Jets spent years breaking our hearts. They picked awful coaches and drafted disappointing players. Same Old Jets was not only their motto, but the answer to our near-Talmudic inquiry: Why?

For my family, it might as well as been l’dor v’dor. And for many fans, including me, our biggest enemies often weren’t the division rivals or their players, but the Jets themselves and their coaching staff with their conservative, maddening, and predictable play-calling. Despite it all, we dutifully kept the faith, hoping our loyalty would be rewarded. On several occasions, I went to Shabbat services in the morning before walking nine miles from my parents’ house in Teaneck to the Meadowlands to see some critical late-December game (which of course the Jets usually lost).

I rarely missed a game—until I went to college at Cornell, where the Buffalo Bills overshadowed the Jets. Trying to see a Jets game at Cornell was like trying to be an observant Jew in an area with no synagogue; I was on my own. And each week, the futility of my Jets loyalty was laid bare, since my college years coincided with the Bills making the Super Bowl four years in a row. Even one would have been enough. Dayenu.

Like my father, I eventually went to law school. But instead of watching the Jets win the Super Bowl—or even get there—as he did in law school, I was rewarded with therapy. During my third year of law school, the New York Daily News held a contest for long-suffering Jets fans to attend a session of group therapy. The Jets were on their way to a 1-15 season. My friends encouraged me to apply, and no one was surprised when I was chosen. The next thing I knew I was in a circle with 10 jets fans describing their various degrees of torture, leaving me to realize that while I wasn’t alone anymore, I was in company that even misery wouldn’t keep.

Not even therapy cured me. Each year my commitment grew deeper. But I did find a community of those afflicted. During the 2002 playoffs, I joined 70 other observant Jets fans for a Shabbaton of sorts, participating in Friday night and Saturday morning services and catered Sabbath meals. While the Jets beat the Colts 41-0, they lost again the following week. Same old Jets.

In 2010 and then 2011, the Jets returned to the football equivalent of Mount Nebo, 60 minutes away from the Super Bowl. And two years in a row, they met the fate of Moses. But unfortunately this year, unlike many Jewish empires and communities before them, the Jets’ faithful watched as their team was undone by infighting reminiscent of a synagogue board meeting gone bad.

Now I have a son of my own, who is 2 and a half and already knows the J-E-T-S chant. For Hanukkah this past year, I bought him a Jets uniform and helmet. But, like the Jets, he stopped suiting up after December.

Come September, just as we Jews are congregating for the High Holy Days, we Jets fans—of all different persuasions—will congregate at Met Life Stadium, hoping for a sweet new year. This year, 2012, I enter my 40th year of wandering. I still have hope. I’m not even asking the Jets to win a Super Bowl; just to get there. Next year in New Orleans. Dayenu.

There is much to look forward to in a Spielberg swords-and-sandals epic: Moses’ moody childhood; great CGI on the parting of the Red Sea; a John Williams score that sounds like all the others. Still, I could’ve sworn that Spielberg—or at least his non-union Mexican equivalent—already made a similar film?

Steven Spielberg Eyes Bible Film [Page Six]

Something tells me, however, it might just as easily be a small pen instead. Still, one doesn’t hold a pen between one’s middle and index fingers, especially with the hand turned outward in so relaxed a manner. No, not a pen. Besides, why would a pen appear when the subject is standing up and when there clearly is no desk anywhere in the background? It must be a cigar.

On closer inspection, it seems that there is something quite studied in his relaxed posture: one hand akimbo, the other almost placing the cigarette on exhibit, not as an afterthought, not diffidently, but declaratively. The ashes themselves say quite a bit: They are not about to spill, as may have seemed at first; they are in fact honed to a point, as with a pencil sharpener, which is why I thought of a pen, a ballpoint, all the while knowing that ballpoints did not exist at the time this picture was taken. Stranger yet, there is no smoke emanating from the cigarillo, which suggests either that the smoke was touched up and blotted out in the photo lab, or that the cigarillo was never even lit.

Which means that the cigarillo in the photo has a totally intentional presence.

What is this gentleman—and there is no doubt, since the posture proves he is a gentleman—doing exhibiting his cigarillo that way? Could it be that this is just a cigarillo, or is it much more than a cigarillo, much more than a pen, even, the ur-symbol of all symbols, not just of defiance, of menace, of security, or of wrath, even, but simply of power? This man knows who he is; despite his age, he is strong, and he can prove it; witness his cigarillo—it doesn’t spill its ashes.

Another, younger picture of the same subject, taken around 1905, suggests more or less the same thing. The hair is neatly combed—there is much more of it—the beard, though grayish, is bushier. Behind the seated subject is a reproduction of Michelangelo’s statue of a dying slave, standing in naked and contorted agony. The man in this photograph stares at the camera with something like a very mild stoop, his shoulders less confident, uneasy, almost cramped. He looks tired, overworked, worn out; in his left hand he is holding a cigar that seems to have been smoked all the way down; he is holding its puny remains at one or two centimeters above the spot where his thighs meet, almost—and I stress the almost—echoing the flaunted nudity of the dying slave behind him.

I may have made too much of the symbolism here. I would, let me hasten to say, respectfully withdraw every word, were it not for the fact that the subject of these two pictures, ostensibly fraught with Freudian symbolism, is none other than Freud himself. How can anyone look at Freud’s cigarillo and not think Freudian thoughts?

However, there is another symbol at work here. Indeed, looking back at the pictures, it occurs to me that something had clearly happened between the older man standing up in 1922 and the somewhat younger man sitting down in 1905. What happened, of course, is success.

The man in the later picture is an established man. A man of property, of substance. His is the pose that all men adopted when being photographed: It conveyed composure, worldliness, confidence, plenitude, security, a touch arrogant perhaps, but without a doubt, this was a man of the world, a much-traveled, sought-after individual who had seen and lived much. In fact he was more than just established, he had made it, he had, as the French say, arrived. An arriviste is someone who strives to arrive; a parvenu, however, is someone who has arrived. You posed with a cigarette, or a cigar, or a cigarillo, not just because the cigar suggested security—as though those with, as opposed to without, cigars were worthier men—but also because the cigarillo was an instrument, an implement, a prosthesis for grounding oneself in the picture and, by extension, in the world. Smoking doesn’t suggest success, it screams success. It locks it in. A successful Jew who smokes is living proof that he has attained a degree of prominence.

Let me resort to another word, which is much used nowadays and which conveys a neo-Jewish nightmare: This man had assimilated. Assimilate is a strange verb, used without a direct or indirect object to mean being swallowed up, absorbed, and incorporated into mainstream Gentile society. But the verb has another meaning, closely linked to its etymology: To assimilate means to become similar to, to simulate.

The irony is that this was how one posed to simulate success. You were photographed with a smoking implement to appear you weren’t posing, to appear as though you had achieved enough stature not to have to pose at all. You posed with a cigar to suggest you weren’t posing with a cigar. You belonged and, therefore, no longer had to worry about belonging. The Italians may have called this posturing sprezzatura; add a pipe and the complications reach Magrittian proportions. A Jew poses with a cigar to symbolize two things: that he has achieved social and professional success, but also that he has successfully assimilated.

There were many other Jews with cigars.

Reading this week’s parasha, we come across an odd formulation. As the story begins, Moses is in a revelatory mood, telling the Israelites about to enter Canaan a scary story with a happy ending: God’s chosen people, he prophesies, will soon abandon their covenant with the creator, suffer punishment and exile, and, finally, return home to the Promised Land. It’s just the sort of speech you’d expect from a dimming leader; like Eisenhower’s grim prognostications about the military-industrial complex in his farewell address, Moses’ last hurrah warns of hubris and sinfulness and downfall. Nothing new there.

But then, Moses takes an odd step: “I have set before you life and goodness, and death and evil: in that I command you this day to love God, to walk in His ways and to keep His commandments,” he says. “Life and death I have set before you, blessing and curse. And you shall choose life.”

You needn’t be a particularly astute theologian to note the inconsistency between the two parts of Moses’ speech. If the fate of the Israelites is foretold, if it is indeed a tale of betrayal, repentance, and redemption, then all that stuff about choosing life is irrelevant; and if the bit about choosing life, namely the free will to chart one’s course through the choppy seas of morality, is true, then nothing can be predetermined and everything must be predicated on the choices we make. Put simply, one of Moses’ statements seems to contradict the other.

It’s a tough knot to untie, but, luckily, we video gamers are the right folks for the job. Just as earlier this week a group of gamers managed to decode an enzyme structure that had eluded scientists for a decade, so may we offer commentary on the nuanced and profound essence that Judaism shares with video games, namely the existence of choice in the absence of choice.

If this is confusing, just consider tic-tac-toe. This classic game has no narrative; all it has is a grid and a simple set of rules, from which 255,168 distinct possibilities of play arise. In other words, jotting down circles and exes on nine slots drawn on paper offers us a quarter of a million individual scenarios, a cornucopia of choice.

Video games, on the other hand, are far more limited. At their core, they are algorithms, a series of if/then propositions. Even recent, advanced games are bound by being pieces of software, lines of code designed with particular, unchangeable ends in mind. Take, for example, Nintendo’s celebrated The Legend of Zelda: To rescue Hyrule, the game’s fictitious kingdom, the player must solve a series of puzzles and defeat a series of enemies, all of which are specific activities that must be performed in a certain way. True, the premise played out in Zelda is much more complex than that of tic-tac-toe, and one that demands some thought and analysis. But anyone wishing to play the game successfully has no choice but to closely follow a script.

Which, at first glance, sounds like no fun at all: Video games wouldn’t be a multibillion dollar industry if all they offered players is the pleasure of pushing the right buttons in the right order. Of course, they offer much more. This is where intention comes in. The term was coined by videogame designer Doug Church and is defined as an abstract design tool used for “making an implementable plan of one’s own creation in response to the current situation in the game world and one’s understanding of the game play options.”

Serious gamers, like serious believers, know that they live in a world that they did not design, playing a game whose rules they did not make up and do not entirely understand. And yet they know that their success—their survival—depends on coming up with some sort of implementable plan and doing their best to overcome the challenges they face at every turn. This is the source of the immense joy we feel when we crack one of Zelda’s puzzles, say, or figure something out in a video game: We know well that the problem we just solved had only one solution, a solution written into the game by some unseen and omniscient designer, but that doesn’t make us any less proud of our achievement. As far as we’re concerned, the solution was entirely of our own creation. For a moment, we forget all about our cosmic helplessness; for a moment, we believe that we can impose order on an inherently chaotic world.

Even without having ever held a video game joystick in his hand, Moses understood this idea well. His prophecy, of course, is both valid and accurate. But it, the game’s script, takes little away from the tremendous burden placed on each and every Israelite to choose life and reject evil and go with God. To paraphrase Rabbi Akiva, all is foreseen, but permission is still given to play the game as we see fit. Mankind has wrestled with this elemental theological conundrum for millennia, but a generation reared on video games should have a much easier time resolving it.

Taking the stage frequently in a recent series of televised debates, the contenders clawed at each other and growled at President Barack Obama. An ambitious group, they also took the time to contest reality. Take, for example, Rick Perry. “The fact is,” the Texas governor said when asked about global warming, “to put America’s economic future in jeopardy, asking us to cut back in areas that would have monstrous economic impact on this country, is not good economics and I will suggest to you is not necessarily good science. Find out what the science truly is before you start putting the American economy in jeopardy.”

And what might the science truly be? Perry claims to have found out. In an August town hall meeting in New Hampshire, he sang his gospel. “There are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling in to their projects,” he said, “and I think we’re seeing weekly or even daily scientists who are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change.”

Just where these intrepid scientists air their grievances daily, Perry didn’t say. It certainly isn’t in any credible academic publication: According to a study published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, between 97 and 98 percent of the world’s 1,372 scientists “most actively publishing in the field” of climate research are quite certain of the idea of anthropogenic climate change, or climate change brought about by human actions.

But don’t expect the candidate who doesn’t lose sleep over the possibility of executing the innocent to lose heart when faced with the facts. And don’t expect his fan base to let science get in the way of a good story, either: As a survey released last week by the Yale Project on Climate Change shows, supporters of the Tea Party aren’t too troubled by global warming because a majority of them, 53 percent, believe it isn’t happening at all.

None of this, of course, is new. Radical ignorance has been in vogue with Republicans at least since a George W. Bush aide mocked his political foes for belonging to the benighted “reality-based community” while Bush and his followers answered to a higher power. “We are not this story’s author, who fills time and eternity with his purpose,” Bush said in his first inaugural address, referring to God. “This story goes on. And an angel still rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm.”

And herein, precisely, lies the problem. The Republican insistence on rejecting this reality for another, intangible one isn’t just bad science; it is, quite literally, bad faith.

Moses knew all about it. In this week’s parasha, he delivers yet another fiery speech to the Israelites, who are now standing on the doorstep of the Promised Land. But Moses isn’t interested in the immediate future; he’s more concerned with the recent past. “You have seen all that the Lord did before your very eyes in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh, to all his servants, and to all his land,” he says, “the great trials which your very eyes beheld and those great signs and wonders. Yet until this day, the Lord has not given you a heart to know, eyes to see and ears to hear.”

It’s an odd epistemological argument: Even though you’ve seen God’s miracles with your own eyes, Moses tells the people, it is only now that you’re capable of true knowledge. And forget about the yiddisher kop; true knowledge comes not from the head but from the heart.

At first glance, Moses’ speech reads a bit like Stephen Colbert’s introduction of his famous term, truthiness. “I don’t trust books,” Colbert said in one of his show’s more memorable segments. “They’re all fact, no heart.” But Moses is smarter than that, and he knows that facts and heart work best when they work together. It’s not hard to guess how the Israelite leader came by his views. We can only imagine what went through his head when he descended from the mountain only to witness the golden calf; here, after all, were people who, just a few weeks before, had witnessed with their own eyes the glories of God, but, impatient with their absent leader, waited barely a month before fashioning a more tangible deity out of precious metals. In Sinai, the Israelites knew God with their minds, but not with their hearts. They realized that the Almighty was real and present, but they did not yet believe in him.

We mustn’t blame them. God is a mighty difficult idea to grasp. Proof of his existence doesn’t make it any easier. Faith is required. Because faith, Moses knows, is more than believing in things we’ll never know for certain exist; faith is also the wisdom to believe in things we know for certain do.

Which brings us back to the Republicans. The adherence of so many in the party to counterfactual narratives is often explained away by faith. Just what kind of faith Rick Perry repeatedly makes clear. In a speech in Virginia earlier this week, he said that his “faith journey is not the story of someone who turned to God because I wanted to. It was because I had nowhere else to turn. I was lost spiritually and emotionally.”

Perry, then, assumes that if he trusts in God, God will tell him what to do. He believes, if we take him at his word, that he is capable of interpreting the precise and unerring will of the Creator. This is the opposite of Moses’ brand of faith. For Perry, faith comes first, and proof is unnecessary; for Moses, proof comes first, and faith must follow. Perry was lost until he found God; Moses found God first and then made his people wander in the desert for 40 years, until they were ready—intellectually as well as emotionally—to embrace what faith meant.

And what faith really means is responsibility. Because we are incapable of knowing God’s mind—and by “we” I mean decent people of all political persuasions who are humbled by their belief in God—we’re left grappling with life’s greatest mysteries by ourselves. We try, like children playing a game with rules they don’t entirely understand, to make sense of what might seem, to the unbelieving, like a cruel and random existence. All we can do is our best, and our only guide is our heart and its call for compassion.

The Israelites at Sinai didn’t understand this idea at first. They yearned for a god they could grasp, a shiny golden god, a god they believed could redeem them. It took them four decades in the wilderness to learn that only they could redeem themselves, and that faith isn’t, in itself, salvation, but merely its engine. The Republicans are now learning the same lesson. Let us hope that they, too, are headed to the wilderness, where they can wander and wonder about the true nature of faith and the dictates of personal responsibility. If they don’t, if they allow the Tea Partiers in their midst to prevail, we are all looking at decades of false idols and bad faith.

It was a happy place, until some evil financial wizards cast their spell. Neo Liberalus Economicus! they chanted, and suddenly Iceland’s banks were privatized, offering lenient conditions to foreign investors and attracting some serious capital. It seemed like the best of times on the icy little island: Construction boomed, the standard of living shot up, the future looked bright. But with foreign investment came foreign debt, and when the entire world experienced a financial meltdown—for reasons understood only by Odin and Asgard’s finest monetary minds—Iceland found itself hurting more than most. In 2007, for example, its national debt equaled 43 percent of its GDP; by 2009, that number shot up to 104 percent, while the banks’ debt equaled nine times the GDP and the currency, the kronor, lost something like 50 percent of its value.

Panicky, the island’s prime minister rushed to resolve the crisis, but he met with an imperial international community that sought to assume control of the debt and ensure that Iceland paid back all its foreign investors. This made the people of Iceland mad. They took to the streets. They brought down the government. But the new government wasn’t much better: It negotiated a massive settlement, which, as Deena Stryker put it in the Daily Kos, “required each Icelandic citizen to pay 100 Euros a month (or about $130) for fifteen years, at 5.5 percent interest, to pay off a debt incurred by private parties vis a vis other private parties. It was the straw that broke the reindeer’s back.”

The international community threatened severe sanctions, but the brave people of Iceland stood firm. Last year, they rejected the repayment of the debt. Also—and this part should really read like a fairy tale to us Americans—they began vigorous criminal investigations of those whose greed and carelessness led to such a colossal collapse. They also realized that the constitution they had, a little-changed version of the Danish Constitution (Denmark was Iceland’s sovereign until 1918), made the nation too dependent on foreign financial bodies and decided to rewrite it.

To that end, 25 qualified citizens were appointed to oversee the proceedings. A Facebook page was set up, and Icelanders were invited to contribute their suggestions to what would become the nation’s new foundational document. As Anna Andersen of The Reykjavik Grapevine, a prominent English-language magazine in Iceland, pointed out, this process was far from an Internet-enhanced version of ancient Athens, but it gave Icelanders a greater and giddier sense of participatory democracy than anything their peers in the West are likely to have ever felt.

This new constitution has yet to be approved. Contrary to some enthusiastic voices on the left who were quick to classify Iceland’s unusual response as a fairytale, the reality is far grayer and grimmer, as realities usually are. And while the exact scope of Iceland’s economic recovery, still very much a work in progress, remains to be seen, the island’s people have given the rest of us who rail against incompetent governments and wail under the burden of mounting debt an invaluable lesson: If you want to know what a responsible and engaged citizenry can do when financial trickery robs them of their future, just look at Iceland.

Although few of them are likely to cite Moses as inspiration, Iceland’s quiet, civil revolutionaries are operating very much in his spirit. In this week’s parasha, Moses introduces some of the philosophical principles of what would become the Israelites’ legal system. “You shall set up judges and law enforcement officials for yourself in all your cities that the Lord, your God, is giving you, for your tribes,” he commands, “and they shall judge the people with righteous judgment. You shall not pervert justice; you shall not show favoritism, and you shall not take a bribe, for bribery blinds the eyes of the wise and perverts just words.” And then, the famous words: “Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may live and possess the land the Lord, your God, is giving you.”

To modern ears, Moses’ exhortations may sound quaint. But they’re radical: Whereas law was previously authored by the king and subject to his whim, it was now emanating from God himself, which meant that the nation entire was bound by it, all equal, none more mighty than the other. It also meant that justice ceased to be a relative concept and became an absolute—an offense against the laws isn’t just a misdemeanor but a sin. Finally, it erected a class of judges, ordinary men and women who would wisely and impartially address the nation’s quarrels.

It doesn’t take much of an imagination to see how close Iceland is coming these days to the Mosaic ideal. Icelanders elected judges from among the people to rewrite a constitution according to mutual agreement, and they rejected the usurious demands of the International Monetary Fund and other global bodies on a principle not economic but moral:  More privatization, more power to the wealthy, more blind faith that only big business has the power to generate revenue is not only factually wrong but just plain evil.

Writing in the New York Times this week, Cornel West, lamenting the Disneyfication of Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy, sounded a similar note. He didn’t mention Iceland by name but argued that King would have endorsed a Reykjavikian revolution, “a revolution in our priorities, a re-evaluation of our values, a reinvigoration of our public life and a fundamental transformation of our way of thinking and living that promotes a transfer of power from oligarchs and plutocrats to everyday people and ordinary citizens.”

Amen to that. To paraphrase another big believer in fairytales come true, if we will it, it is no dream.

It’s a compelling story, but it’s also dead wrong. Obama hasn’t let us down; it’s we who have disappointed him.

Our betrayal of the president might have been more ontological than political. It has to do with the way we perceive ourselves. Modern liberals, for the most part, are the children of Emerson. We believe, as our spiritual father wrote, that “He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.”

We absolve us to ourselves on occasion, as my friends and I did in 2008 when we went canvassing for Obama among Pennsylvania’s undecided voters. The night Obama was elected, I was huddled with hundreds of strangers in a hotel ballroom outside Philadelphia, feeling elated. This, I thought, is how movements were forged, by scores of mindful men and women sticking together in the heat of a big idea. I hugged a lot of people that night. I never saw any of them again.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the political spectrum, movements are defined differently. For conservatives, politics are played not in four-year intervals but weekly, like football, in churches and school boards and living rooms, where a great number of people congregate to define for each other and for themselves the values worth living by and fighting for. A 2010 Gallup poll, for example, found that while 27 percent of self-described liberals frequently attended a house of worship, the number among conservatives was 55 percent. For these Americans, there’s a lot out there that’s far more sacred than the integrity of their own minds.

This may explain the occasional, and maddening, discrepancies in public opinion polls. A recent New York Times/CBS poll, for example, found that while 72 percent of respondents “disapproved of the way Republicans in Congress handled the negotiations” over the debt ceiling crisis, 44 percent echoed Republican calls for more spending cuts by saying that “the cuts in the debt-ceiling agreement did not go far enough.” You could explain such contradictions by arguing that many Americans may be misinformed, or, less charitably, by proclaiming them irredeemably illogical. Another explanation may be that movements are agnostic when it comes to facts, and that what really matters to tea partiers when they congregate isn’t trying to resolve their ideological tensions—like the discrepancy, say, between railing against big government on the one hand and supporting invasive legislation pertaining to abortions or abstinence on the other—but rather celebrating their successful congregation.

Movements are selfish; they want to survive. If they stopped to question the viability of their arguments, they’d drown in a shallow pool of self-doubt. Instead, they make up slogans and pass resolutions and produce other simple and clear badges for their members to wear to distinguish themselves from non-members. As anyone who has ever attended any brand of religious school and was forced to come to terms with the inscrutable actions of God very well knows, sometimes the answer to the most difficult theological questions is “just because.” It’s not a sophisticated answer, nor is it satisfying for those of us inclined to explore each thought and idea for ourselves, but it’s not a categorically bad answer. When we march under a banner, when we identify the group’s interests with our own, when we belong to a movement, we do so, often, just because.

And by we, alas, I don’t mean liberals. They—we—demand explanations. We’re willing to get behind Obama, but only for short bursts at a time, and only provided that he act in a way we perceive of as befitting the image we have of him, that of our knight and savior. That’s no way to build a movement.

When he faces the Republicans, the president knows that his is a battle of one against many. “In similar circumstances,” Westen wrote in his Times essay, “Franklin D. Roosevelt offered Americans a promise to use the power of his office to make their lives better and to keep trying until he got it right.” True, but FDR had the support of the unions, then still a growth industry, as well as that of various well-organized political machines and ethnic minorities—Jews, blacks, Catholics—likely to belong to communal organizations in far higher numbers than they do today. When he talked tough, he knew he had in his corner millions of Americans who met each week and cherished their communal bonds and listened to their rabbis or priests or foremen. Obama has no such privilege. Without it, his power is greatly diminished. A president is still a politician, and a politician whose voters show up once every four years finds himself, in the remaining 1,459 days, forced to bend before his better-organized, more numerous foes.

A church-going man, Obama can, perhaps, find some solace in another leader of a stiffed-necked people, Moses. In this week’s parasha, the dying patriarch teaches the Israelites about the perils of political paralysis. He warns his followers not to perceive their triumph over their enemies and their entry into the Promised Land as a sign of entitlement. “Not because of your righteousness or because of the honesty of your heart do you come to possess their land,” Moses roars, “but because of the wickedness of these nations, the Lord your God drives them out from before you, and in order to establish the matter that the Lord swore to your forefathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”

The message is clear, and it is twofold: First, if the wicked inhabitants of Canaan had once incurred the wrath of God and were punished by extinction, then the land’s new custodians can expect the very same fate should they neglect their duties. And second, as the land was once inhabited by wicked nations and is now being delivered to the Israelites by way of wars and conquests, it is, by definition, an earthly place: Canaan is not Eden, and the only thing that makes the Promised Land promised is the willingness of its inhabitants to work hard at justice and compassion. Put simply, Moses is telling the Israelites about to enter Canaan the same thing that Obama should have told me and my friends at that Pennsylvania hotel, as well as all of his supporters, on the eve of his election—winning was the easy part, and the hard work is only now beginning.

Whether or not Obama secures a second term next winter is largely irrelevant. If we want real change—the kind we can believe in—we’re going to have to write our own story, and America’s, by committing ourselves to a movement on an ongoing basis. We can take heart from Wisconsin, where more than 100,000 members and supporters of unions—for many of us, still churchlike institutions—banded together to oppose Gov. Scott Walker’s attempt to slash collective bargaining rights for public sector unions. Walker got his way, but a well-organized progressive movement succeeded in bringing about numerous recall elections and taking two seats away from Republican elected officials. They didn’t win control of the state senate, as some had hoped, but they kept the spirit of organization inflamed with calls, meetings, rallies, and the other movement mainstays. That’s a stellar start.

There’s no other way to succeed save for this serious commitment to a deeply imperfect political vehicle. It’s not going to be easy—we’re likely to find many of our fellow travelers repellent, and we will likely be forced to make some decisions that would leave us less than pure. It’s not going to be much fun—there are more thrilling pastimes in life than canvassing, phone banking, lobbying, or serving on community boards. But when it comes to politics, it’s the only story worth telling.

For me, Moses’ heartbreak hits particularly close to home. Earlier this year, I released my newest film, a documentary titled The Queen Has No Crown. It tells the story of my family, started by Berlin Jews who fled to Israel and swore never to leave it, and of what happened to it when three out of my four brothers decided to seek out their fortune in the United States. Theirs were personal decisions, but they were informed by knowing that Moses, like so many generations of Jews throughout history, never got to set foot in the homeland, the homeland my brothers were now leaving.

But what is the meaning of this homeland when so many foreign cultures offer a more rewarding, more convenient life? And what is the relationship between nation and family? These are questions with which Moses spent his life struggling. They are the ones that occupy me, too. I hope my film—a clip from which is below—is a beginning of an answer.

Tomer Heymann is an award-winning Israeli filmmaker.

It’s a peculiar moment. The listeners huddled at Moses’ feet, after all, are of the generation born in the desert; it is highly unlikely that they have forgotten the events being recalled, most of which happened during their own lifetimes. We reading at home feel the same way. Haven’t we just read about these things just a few weeks ago? Why the repetition?

But the dying leader’s amble down memory lane is more than just sentimental. It is a lesson in history and in politics as well as a blueprint for nation-building offered to a people about to inherit the Promised Land.

I reflected on Moses’ words this week while closely following the news from the very same land, where massive demonstrations are currently drawing hundreds of thousands of Israelis to the streets in support of affordable housing, better terms for overworked and underpaid doctors, reduced public school class sizes, and a host of other measures designed to restore Israel to its storied past as a compassionate and equitable society that protects its citizens from the talons of the free market.

At first, news of the protests—they grow stronger every week and have now spread to every city in Israel—thrilled me to no end. Having spent much of my youth and early adulthood fighting for these very causes, it was touching to see my generation finally emerge from what had appeared to be a perpetual slumber and demand basic staples of dignity and justice. Perhaps, I thought, this awakening would even someday lead the same demonstrators to demand the long overdue end of the occupation. I was optimistic.

Then, however, I took a cue from Moses and indulged in remembrance of things past. I felt for him: Few things are as searing, as draining, and as humbling as looking back at one’s own past actions critically and honestly, with neither guilt nor pity.

My own recollection led me to some of the very same public squares now occupied by my fellow Israelis. Slightly more than a decade ago, on the eve of my 22nd birthday, I joined a surging movement of students bent on reform and, much as is happening today, took to the streets in protest. Our demands were simple: Israel, we argued, had no natural resource greater than the genius of its people and needed to invest more seriously in education. Since barely more than 40 percent of Israelis held a bachelor’s degree, and with only 1.8 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product spent on higher education (as opposed to 3.1 percent in the United States, say, and 2.4 percent in South Korea), the government, we felt, was far from committed to making a college education an affordable reality for the majority of Israelis. In consultation with education experts and economists, we proposed a simple plan: Each student in need of financial aid would volunteer a portion of his or her time tutoring underprivileged children and receive in return a government loan, interest-free for the first five years following graduation. We also asked for a few hundred additional dormitory beds in each major university—Tel Aviv University, for example, currently offers fewer than 1,000 beds for more than 25,000 students, forcing the rest to find and finance costly apartments close to campus, with monthly rents hovering around $900 for a room—as well as several other reasonable benefits we argued would help boost higher education. Each of our plans came with clear bottom lines; if the government truly thought education was a priority, we argued, it could start by channeling funds away from yeshivas—the students of which generally neither serve in the army nor pay taxes—and toward the rest of the population.

Armed with our modest proposal, we camped out in front of the prime minister’s residence. Its occupant, then as now, was Benjamin Netanyahu. Then as now, he refused any notion of a meeting. We went on a hunger strike: For 13 days, we lingered on the sidewalk, drumming up support, talking to the press, promoting our plan. It ended with a whimper. One by one, we collapsed. I was among the last ones standing; one evening, amid an impromptu demonstration, my body gave out. I was still in the hospital the next morning when Netanyahu finally gave in and invited us to his living room. His wife ordered a few trays of pizza, and he promised to form an investigatory committee to examine our proposal in depth.

Nothing ever came of it. The students marching in front of Netanyahu’s house these days are making the same demands we had once made. At first, I thought that maybe they would succeed where we’d failed; after all, they are part of a larger movement fighting for a larger reform, the sort of powerful political bloc that can’t be silenced by a few slices of pizza. And then I listened to what they had to say.

Speaking with a reporter for The Marker, a prominent Israeli business magazine, Daphne Leef, the movement’s organizer and de facto leader, was blunt. “I don’t understand anything about economics,” she said. “Whatever the people decide, that’s what will happen.”

Leef’s self-admitted poor grasp of all things numeric is, apparently, commonplace among her fellow activists. After weeks of refusing to release any concrete policy proposals, the movement’s representatives finally went beyond sloganeering this week and delivered their list of demands. It contained few surprises: Leef and her friends called on Netanyahu to implement progressive taxation, increase the minimum wage, reform the educational system, and strictly regulate the housing market. What was surprising, however, was the math. After running the plan by economists and other experts, The Marker reported that the activists’ calculations were off by tens of billions of shekels.

Which brings me back to Moses. Recounting his errand through the wilderness, he lingers on one point in particular. “So, I took the heads of your tribes,” he recalls, “men wise and well known, and I made them heads over you, leaders over thousands, leaders over hundreds, leaders over fifties, and leaders over tens, and officers, over your tribes.”

It’s telling that of all the wonders of the Israelites’ long, strange trip to Canaan, Moses chooses to hark back to the establishment of the wandering tribes’ political system. Speaking of the miracles—the parting sea! The manna from heaven!—might have made for a more inspiring and riveting tale, but not one the Israelites could use. In Canaan, Moses knows, there will be no miracles; once they inherit their homeland, the Israelites would have no choice but to redeem themselves, and no other means of doing it than through a committed class of civil servants. It’s a surprisingly down-to-earth legacy for a leader who’d spent much of his time atop a mountain, conversing with God.

If only Israel’s current activists heeded Moses’ call, they might have bothered to compose a coherent list of proposals prior to commandeering much of the media’s attention, or replaced their moving convocations with the mundane yet meaningful language of politics. But politics, to the young and the disgruntled marching in Tel Aviv and Haifa and Be’er Sheva, is a dirty word; theirs, they insist, is not a political movement.

It’s the same righteous bel canto that reverberated in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in the days leading up to Mubarak’s ouster, or in New York and Washington and Chicago in the weeks following Barack Obama’s election as president. It’s the song of the young and the pure, for whom nothing short of a transformative moment, a blazing miracle, would do. We’ve heard this tune before; usually, it ends with the Muslim Brotherhood taking over the square and demanding an Islamist state, or the Tea Party taking over Congress and ushering in an economic disaster. In both cases, the beautiful souls who believed in change are left to choose between outrage and apathy, forever asking how hope could’ve curdled so soon.

Moses has the answer. In this week’s parasha, the man who produced water out of a boulder is telling us to reject thaumaturgy and instead appoint capable people and pay close attention to their processes of governing. He knows it’s not exactly the sort of stuff that made Cecil B. DeMille giddy, but it’s just what his people need as they’re about the establish their own republic. If young activists—in Tel Aviv, in Cairo, or in D.C.—want to save theirs, they better listen to Moses.

The plot is as hot as the weather: We’ve only watched a few episodes, and already we’ve seen three or four major twists, dead people, dead animals, and a handful of New York apartments so ridiculously opulent that one imagines they can only be had by committing crimes far more heinous than those investigated by the series’ fictional lawyers. The cast, governed by the incomparable Glenn Close, was superb. The show was beautifully shot, reasonably well written, and smartly edited. And yet it left me with an uneasy feeling: It was just too evil.

In the Damages fictional universe, evil is treated with both reverence and glee, like an ice cream truck stumbling down a suburban street dense with children on a summer afternoon. If a practical goal can be achieved by being just a little bit evil, the show’s characters opt for being a lot, and if an absolute villainy is required, they orchestrate ingenious ballets of betrayals, lies, and abuses, all while looking great and grinning contently. It’s the Las Vegas theorem of morality: If you’re going to sin, you might as well go all the way.

This is a good prescription for drama—Damages started its fourth season on FX earlier this month and is enjoying a robust viewership. It’s also a dangerous one: Of all the things popular entertainment shouldn’t turn into trivialized pulp, evil is near the top of the list.

Evil—do we need reminding?—is both real and readily present; its demons—the murderous, the greedy, the hateful—flutter everywhere. But it never looks as good as Glenn Close, nor are its plots so perfectly coiled. Often, evil is no more than a dead-eyed and dull corporate executive, chewing on stale argot and robbing millions, or a man stirred by ignorance and fear to take the lives of others. In other words, evil is so terrifying precisely because it looks nothing like it does on Damages. It is not frequently banal, but it is always plausible, always present.

Which makes it all the more insulting when writers or filmmakers see the need to guild the lily—as if bad wasn’t bad enough!—and present us with a Grand Guignol. For a lesson in just how offensive this artistic overkill can be, compare Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest with Henning Mankell’s The White Lioness. Both are Swedish thrillers. Both revolve around a similar axis, featuring a murderous former KGB agent finding shelter in rural Sweden after communism’s collapse and perpetrating horrors. And both propel otherwise ordinary protagonists into a massive conspiracy with international implications.

The similarities end there. Larsson, a lumbering writer—“Jonasson saw lighting out over the sea. He knew that the helicopter was coming in the nick of time. All of a sudden a heavy downpour lashed at the window,” goes one characteristically inelegant phrase from the book—knows no better way to advance his sophomoric plot than by setting small charges of shock. That KGB guy? He’s also a sadist rapist who had fathered seven children in various countries throughout Europe, one of them a murderous hulk. His daughter? A bisexual hacker with a Gothic fetish who is raped, sodomized, and brutalized in many ways over many uncomfortable pages. The psychiatrist who orchestrates much of her torment? Why, he wouldn’t be complete without also being a pedophile.

Mankell, hallelujah, knows better. Perhaps the greatest thriller writer alive today, his former Soviet agent is a very evil man, the kind of chappy who, in the novel’s first pages, shoots a woman for no apparent reason and then goes on to shoot many more. But he’s also a human being, and one we can sympathize with: A professionally trained killer who had spent a lifetime serving an empire that no longer exists, he careens from kill to kill just trying to survive. How much scarier he is than Larsson’s cartoonish psychopath.

And yet, Larsson’s books are read by tens of millions, while Mankell’s, still popular, are not. One’s work is soon to be a major Hollywood motion picture starring Daniel Craig, the other’s a PBS miniseries featuring Kenneth Branagh. We need our killings supersized.

In this week’s intricate parasha, the Torah warns us against such tendencies. The story introduces the concept of the cities of refuge, six towns to which men who have killed unintentionally can flee the wrath of those relatives of the victim wishing to avenge the blood.

Emmanuel Levinas, the late French philosopher and Talmudic scholar, found this seemingly straightforward concept troubling. Isn’t God, he asked, omnipresent, and able to protect the innocent wherever they are? And aren’t we, as Jews, instructed to take refuge not in a city but in the Torah? These, he writes in Beyond the Verse, are all true assertions, but they ignore a key fact: We are, none of us, truly innocent.

“In Western society, “ he writes, “free and civilized but without social equality and a rigorous social justice—is it absurd to wonder whether the advantages available to the rich in relation to the poor … are not the cause, somewhere, of someone’s agony? Are there not, somewhere in the world, wars and carnage which result from these advantages?”

There are, of course, many such wars, much such carnage. And that, Levinas brilliantly argues, turns our own cities, the shining metropolises in which we live, expecting justice and protection, into cities of refuge. We are all, he writes, mostly innocent but nevertheless also somewhat guilty. We partake in oppression every day—of the poor, of the needy—but, mostly, we aren’t even aware of it. We are, he argues, asleep, human beings who are yet to wake up to the full potential of the bliss and responsibilities involved with being human. Like the inadvertent murderers in this week’s parasha, forced to leave their own towns and flee to the confines of the designated six cities, we moderns, too, live in constant exile in our own homes.

Or maybe this condition is not limited to moderns at all. Perhaps the Torah dedicates so many resources to protecting killers—even if they acted unintentionally—because it knows that without too much provocation, we can all turn murderous, and that without refuge, we’d never have a chance to restore that intricate balance between good and evil each of us strives to keep each day.

If only pop culture followed suit. If only our villains were presented at the twilight of morality rather than basking in the harsh sun of pure evil. There’d be fewer juicy roles for Glenn Close, but we’d all be better off.

Just ask Aaron Swartz. Now 24, the Internet entrepreneur and activist has already lived a life that would make even the most industrious among us slouch with shame. At 14, he helped develop the now-ubiquitous RSS format, which allows content publishers to streamline and syndicate their offerings. He toyed with higher education for a while, but Stanford was no match for the thrill of starting a company; Swartz called his Infogami,  a social news service that merged with a similar service, Reddit, and was eventually bought by Condé Nast.

Rather than devote his newfound fame and fortune to the pursuit of shiny objects, as many California whiz kids do once they’ve found a way to turn code into cash, Swartz headed to Harvard, where he was a fellow at the university’s prestigious Center for Ethics. Most of his work focused on freedom of information, which is not as peaceable as it may sound. After Swartz used a Chicago library computer terminal to download millions of federal court records—documents that were free to the public on the library’s terminal but elsewhere cost 8 cents a page—the federal government began keeping a close watch on him, claiming that he had illegally “exfiltrated” documents. Nothing ever came of the investigation; Swartz, it was clear, had done nothing wrong. He donated the documents to public.resources.org, an open-government initiative dedicated to making public records freely available to, well, the public.

This week, Swartz was arrested on similar charges, these involving JSTOR, the online archive of academic journals that charges universities premium subscription fees for allowing students access to a vast array of scholarly articles. Swartz, according to the indictment, used an MIT guest account and a piece of software that allowed him to download 4.8 million articles and other documents.

So, what did Aaron Swartz do wrong? If you ask the federal government, a lot, including wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, recklessly damaging a protected computer, aiding and abetting, and criminal forfeiture, a bouquet of allegations that could land Swartz in prison for 35 years and cost him up to $1 million in fines. Carmen Ortiz, the United States Attorney for Massachusetts, who is prosecuting Swartz and is an avid aficionado of alliteration, said in a statement that “stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars. It is equally harmful to the victim whether you sell what you have stolen or give it away.”

The victim, JSTOR, was far milder: In a statement the organization said that Swartz had stopped his downloading and returned all the documents he had downloaded, and that “once this was achieved, we had no interest in this becoming an ongoing legal matter.”

An ongoing legal matter, however, it very much is. And like other cases of the same nature, this one is likely to die with a whimper. As is often the case when the government tries to enforce its order on the ever-shifting terrain of our digital wilderness, the reality is far more complex than its federal version. In applying digital ninjitsu to download a mass of articles, Swartz violated JSTOR’s terms of service, as well as those imposed by MIT. But the articles themselves were accessed legally—any MIT guest user can simply log in and read as many as he wants; all Aaron Swartz did was grab a really large pile.

“This makes no sense,” Swartz’s friend David Segal—who runs Demand Progress, a nonprofit organization Swartz founded dedicated to government transparency and accountability—told Wired. “It’s like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library.”

The Swartz case isn’t the first time the federal government has tried to use a violation of terms of service as a rabbit hole through which to crawl into a much larger case. In 2009, after Missouri mom Lori Drew set up a fake MySpace account, pretended to be a local teenage boy, and harassed her daughter’s classmate—harassment that eventually led to the girl’s suicide—U.S. Attorney Thomas O’Brien filed charges on similar grounds to those argued by Ortiz. His theory was a marvelous bit of legalistic sophistry. It goes something like this: Since MySpace’s terms of service require users to provide “truthful and accurate” information when they register (a requirement that is widely ignored, it should be noted, by many of the service’s users); and since Drew registered for an account pretending to be a teenage boy; and since such an act violates the terms of service and constitutes “unauthorized access” to MySpace’s servers; and since unauthorized access violated the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Drew was guilty.

It didn’t take U.S. District Judge George H. Wu, who was hearing the case, long to dismiss the prosecution as baseless. “Is a misdemeanor committed by the conduct which is done every single day by millions and millions of people?” Wu asked from the bench. “If these people do read [the terms of service] and still say they’re 40 when they are 45, is that a misdemeanor?” The answer was no. It’s still no, as those eager legal eagles now prosecuting Swartz will probably soon learn.

But as the government doesn’t seem to learn from its own mistakes, perhaps Moses can be of service. In this week’s parasha, he is confronted by the tribes of Reuben and Gad with an unorthodox request: As the Israelites prepare to enter the Promised Land, these two tribes, cattle herders by trade, ask to remain on the eastern bank of the Jordan, where the pastureland is primo.

At first, Moses is livid. As he sees it, the Israelites have all signed a contract with the Lord, a contract with terms of service that clearly stipulate that all Hebrews must enter Canaan together, fight against its inhabitants, and inherit the land. But the men of Reuven and Gad want some freedom, and Moses is infuriated: “If you turn away,” he tells the dissidents, God “will leave you in the desert again, and you will destroy this entire people.” The dissidents, God bless them, aren’t cowered by Moses’ fiery words; rather than abandon their plan, they suggest a compromise—they’ll build their homes on the eastern end of the Jordan, then ride into Canaan with the other tribes, help fight against the Medianites who inhabit much of the land, and, once the war is over, cross the river once more and return to their homes.

Moses is appeased. As much as he’d like to have all his people contained within the confines of Canaan, he realizes that different tribes have different needs and that the way to govern them isn’t by enforcing draconian measures but by letting the spirit of the law, rather than its letter, reign supreme. As long as the men of Reuven and Gad are willing to fulfill their civic duties and join their brethren in war, they mustn’t be punished.

The same logic should prevail in the case of Aaron Swartz. He hadn’t done anything illicit with the documents he downloaded—it is quite possible that he intended them for personal research use, as he had done before when he downloaded and analyzed a great number of law articles to ascertain which legal scholars were receiving remuneration from corporations. And so the accusations against him read like a misguided and overzealous attempt to make a case of him in an effort to deter hackers everywhere. But Swartz isn’t a mere hacker; he’s a civic-minded young man who has devoted much of his energy to better serving the public’s interest by ensuring that information—too often locked behind paywalls for no good reason—be placed in the hands of those who have every right to it. Rather than attempt to lock him up, the government would do well to follow Moses’ advice and pay attention to Swartz’s arguments.

Usually, any sign of cognitive progress among elected officials is greeted with derision. Tracking the etymology of the term “flip-flopping,” the late William Safire found evidence of the phrase being in use as early as the 1880s. Sometimes referred to as “somersaulting,” any deviation from previously stated dogmas was seen—then as now—as the ultimate signifier of political perfidy.

Which is why, the Sunday after the vote, State Sen. Mark J. Grisanti felt the eyes of fellow congregants at Buffalo’s St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church silently stabbing him in the back. A Republican representing a largely Democratic district, Grisanti had previously vowed that he would remain unalterably opposed to same-sex marriage; when time came to pass the legislation, however, his opposition—along with that of three other Republican lawmakers—was altered. “I cannot legally come up with an argument against same-sex marriage,” he said before voting yes. “Who am I to say that someone does not have the same rights that I have with my wife?”

Ann Deckop, sitting across the aisle from Grisanti at church that Sunday, was not convinced. “I voted for him,” she told the New York Times, “and I’m writing a letter indicating that I will not be voting for him in the next election.”

As Grisanti may soon learn, Deckop is not alone among Republican voters. As a recent Gallup poll found, while support for same-sex marriage jumped 9 percent among all likely voters during the previous year—and 13 percent among self-described Democrats—Republicans remain unfazed, with 72 percent of them still in opposition, exactly the same number as last year. Republicans, God bless them, aren’t fond of changing their minds.

God, as it happens, is: In this week’s parasha, he happily reverses his position on gender-based land ownership, bringing about a major coup of social legislation. The story begins with the five daughters of the deceased (and unimprovably named) Zelophehad petitioning Moses. “Our father died in the desert,” they say, “and he had no sons. Why should our father’s name be eliminated from his family because he had no son? Give us a portion along with our father’s brothers.”

Moses is confused. According to the Lord’s commandments, a portion—meaning a plot of land—could be distributed only to a man’s sons in the event of his demise or, if he had no sons, to his brothers. Unsure of what to do with the unusual request before him, Moses takes it up with the Lord. Without thinking too much, God replies: “Zelophehad’s daughters speak justly. You shall certainly give them a portion of inheritance along with their father’s brothers, and you shall transfer their father’s inheritance to them. Speak to the children of Israel saying: If a man dies and has no son, you shall transfer his inheritance to his daughter.”

This is the very model of the ultimate lawmaker: Compassionate, attentive, ready to address private suffering by passing universal edicts, and unafraid to reconsider an earlier decision in light of shifting consequences. That’s politics as they ought to be.

Unfortunately, we’re still far from the divine ideal. While New York’s recent legislation represents a major achievement, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgendered individuals are still fighting an uphill battle. Like the daughters of Zelophehad, they’re more likely to face peril when it comes to making a living: While the number of companies that prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation continues to rise—the number of Fortune 500 companies that earned top marks from the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s Corporate Equality Index, a leading benchmark of workplace equality, shot from 13 in 2002 to 305 last year—there’s still no federal legislation in place to safeguard this most basic of rights.

Not for lack of trying: Every Congress since 1994 has been presented with some version or another of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, a bill that would prohibit discrimination against employees on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity by companies of organizations with 15 employees or more, religious institutions excluded. It has failed each time, dying once in the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources, another time in the House Subcommittee on Employer-Employee Relations, a third in the House Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, and so on, mostly due to fierce opposition from Republican lawmakers. Another iteration of the bill is currently under consideration in various committees, with President Barack Obama’s explicit support.

It’s as necessary as ever. According to Degrees of Equality: A National Study Examining Workplace Climate for LGBT Employees, released in 2010 by the Human Rights Campaign, 51 percent of gay or transgendered workers still feel compelled to hide their sexual orientation at work, and 58 percent report being occasionally subjected to derogatory comments.

If Republican voters, who traditionally profess a stronger affinity to religious faith, want to do something truly godly, they should follow the spirit of this week’s parasha and learn to change their minds. We must fully—and federally—protect the rights of all Americans to be who they are, not only at the altar but also, and more important, in the office.

But even amid this bacchanal of otherworldly hotties, one breed of monsters fades into air: Forgive us, zombies, for we know not what we do.

To be sure, the undead aren’t altogether invisible in popular culture. AMC’s Walking Dead is a fine and thrilling depiction of the days following the zombie apocalypse, and a few recent movies, from Zombieland to Shaun of the Dead, have had clever fun with brain-eating ghouls. But while American girls have neatly lined up in Team Edward and Team Jacob and spent many slumber parties arguing the respective merits of the pale bat versus the big dog, none, I assume, has pined to find herself in the slightly decomposing arms of a lovelorn zombie.

The reason for that is simple: Zombies are on the wrong side of the deathly divide. Unlike vampires, who, if TV and movies are to be believed, have a penchant for attending proms and making out with women in bars well into their 11th decade, zombies die first and then live on. And no matter how hard they try to impress, they can never, it seems, shake the grave’s dirt off their pants: We look at them and see nothing but reanimated corpses. Zombies can’t get no respect.

This should not come as a surprise. After all, in a society as fearful of death as ours, any intimate acquaintance with the afterlife is enough to doom one to the undesirable status of shotgun fodder.

Georges Bataille understood this instinctively. Writing about slaughterhouses, the French philosopher observed that having once been closely connected with religious, ritualistic sacrifice, and therefore placed prominently in the centers of towns, abattoirs have become, in modern times, cursed destinations to be avoided at all costs. “In our time,” he wrote, “the slaughterhouse is cursed and quarantined like a plague-ridden ship. Now, the victims of this curse are neither butchers nor beasts, but those same good folk who countenance, by now, only their own unseemliness, an unseemliness commensurate with an unhealthy need of cleanliness, with irascible meanness, and boredom. The curse (terrifying only to those who utter it) leads them to vegetate as far as possible from the slaughterhouse, to exile themselves, out of propriety, to a flabby world in which nothing fearful remains.”

It would not, perhaps, be too much of a stretch to suggest that one of modernity’s key quests has been the eradication, by whatever means necessary, of death in both its physical and metaphysical forms. Science, law, literature: all bound together to diminish death’s terrible force, to rob it of the power to terrify and afflict. We spend a lifetime fighting death, and when it finally occurs in our vicinity, we rely on a handful of institutions—from hospitals to Hallmark cards—dedicated to helping us sublimate the jarring experience. Bataille was right: We’ll go out of our way to avoid death, even if rationally we know that it is merely life’s logical and inevitable conclusion.

The ancient Israelites, apparently, were no different. In this week’s parasha, we are presented with the strange law of the red heifer. This animal—“a perfectly red unblemished cow, upon which no yoke was laid”—is, God tells Moses, to be slaughtered and burned and its ashes used to purify those who have come into contact with the dead. And while the existence of such a process of purification may be comforting, Jewish thinkers parsing the parasha quickly stumbled on a small problem: Nature, alas, produces very few unblemished red cows. To many commentators, then, this particular law is an example of the Lord’s mysterious ways. Why propose a ritual that could, in all likelihood, never be fulfilled here on earth by us mere mortals? God only knows.

But zombie fans, a group with which I feel a semi-religious affinity, know better. We know that the fear of death, then as now, is a strong and savage force; nothing can spook the living more than coming into contact with the deceased. But what might we do, given that death is all around us? Find a red heifer. And if those are extremely rare? Keep looking.

This is God’s coup de grace. In commanding a ritual involving a species of animal of which he had created so precious few, the Almighty both comforts us by suggesting a magical process by which we might cleanse ourselves of death and forces us to confront our fears once we realize that said magical process is, like all bits of magic, little more than an illusion. This one-two existential punch is the only way to get us to stop worrying and learn to love the great beyond.

Even now, more than 3,000 years after Moses, it’s a lesson we’ve yet to fully learn. We flock to vampire fiction en masse, infatuated with the fanged bloodsuckers and their alabaster skin and eternal youth, or fawn over werewolves and their virility. But we never live forever, and we’ve no red cows to redeem us; much like zombies, all we’ve left to do is slowly become accustomed to the inherently frightening notion of life after death.

Her words never left me. She had attended a very good university for her undergraduate studies and an even better one for her M.F.A. in creative writing. If our mutual chosen profession had a class of knights Templar entrusted with safeguarding its traditions, she was solidly of it. And yet, she seemed to care little about the craft itself. What she craved was the fun, the fame, the fortune. And, more and more over the course of the following years, it was these three specters that haunted her dreams and shaped her career. She never wrote that great novel. She stopped reading great novels; they took too much time. She traded in Crime and Punishment for Law & Order, the searing pain of intellectual pursuits for the numbing comfort of dull amusements, the difficult beauty of truths for the blinding glare of truisms. She tweets now, and writes funny blog posts, and posts a lot on Facebook.

She is plagued by a terrible epidemic, the epidemic of frivolity: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by levity, laughing hysterical naked, dragging themselves through tweets and apps at dawn, looking for a funny fix. And she is hardly alone: The congressman who flirts with girls rather than committing himself to his work suffers from it. So, too, does the philosopher who happily exchanged real thought for rakish looks. The plague is all around.

Frequently, when discussed in newspapers, this grim outbreak is blamed on the throngs of aspiring celebrities, reality television stars, and other heat-seeking aspirants. Of course our culture is unserious, goes the argument; just look at how we’ve propelled someone like Snooki—the diminutive and ochre-tinted heroine of MTV’s Jersey Shore—to the pinnacle of popularity. But Snooki isn’t the problem; like so many of her fellow fame mongers, she applied her modest talents to convert what would have otherwise been a withered future into a lucrative career and a small fortune. That requires serious work, and Snooki, God bless her, put it in. Snooki is serious. So many of us, alas, are not.

As I have devoted most of my life to books, my examples, naturally, come from the world of writing. Consider a bit of autobiography that Christopher Hitchens cited in his obituary of the recently departed Patrick Leigh Fermor. The great and popular British travel writer spent his early years being kicked out of various schools before giving up on his educational ambitions and deciding to walk the length of Europe. When World War II broke out, Fermor, no professional soldier, offered his talents to His Majesty’s forces and ended up with a distinguished service that included planning and commanding the heroic kidnapping of the German military governor of Crete, Heinrich Kreipe.

Here’s how Fermor, in his memoir, recalled the aftermath of the operation. “We were all three lying smoking in silence,” he wrote of himself, Kreipe, and another English soldier, “when the general, half to himself, slowly said: Vides et ulta stet nive candidum Soracte. It was the opening of one of the few Horace odes I knew by heart. I went on reciting where he had broken off. … The general’s blue eyes swiveled away from the mountain top to mine and when I’d finished, after a long silence, he said: ‘Ach so, Herr Major!’ It was very strange. ‘Ja, Herr General.’ As though for a moment the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before, and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.”

Can you imagine any of our contemporary writers abandoning a life of pleasure—when the war started, Fermor was holed up in Moldavia with his Romanian mistress, occupied by love and art—to do something as serious and demanding as fight a war? And might you imagine that writer, even if one such specimen could be found who is prone to sacrifice, being able to recall, from memory, one dusky day on the battlefield, Horace’s odes? How many of the men and women whose names are currently on the New York Times best-seller list do you suppose have read Horace? You might think the question is irrelevant; why, after all, should we expect the author, say, of a memoir about one-night stands to be acquainted with Horace’s words to his fellow poet Tibullus about the futility of grieving for a lover who’d abandoned him for a younger man?

The answer, I think, has to do with seriousness. Any author—even an author of light comedic prose—is seeking a great privilege, the attention of his or her fellow citizens. And any author operates on the basis of a terrible presumption, namely that his or her words and ideas are important enough to entomb between two sheets of cloth and preserve for posterity. The least an author could do, then, is to take the task seriously, which might mean, among other things, taking the time to become acquainted with the titans on whose shoulders the entirety of Western culture rests. That, of course, takes time away from tweeting and requires an investment of energy that could otherwise be applied to appearing on basic cable. It is, in short, a losing proposition.

This plague of unseriousness has gotten much worse in recent years, but it is by no means a modern invention. Moses himself knew it well. In this week’s parasha, he is confronted by a gaggle of rebels. Led by the Levite Korach, these wannabes challenge Moses’ leadership and make a compelling case that the aging patriarch should be replaced by a more youthful, ebullient guard. Moses appeals to God. Smiting ensues. By the time the story ends, the rebels are left without cause and without a leg to stand on, the ground having been torn asunder by the Lord, swallowing Korach and his followers.

What sparked this spell of impudence? The parasha never truly says. The speech the dissenters offer Moses is as follows: “Is it not enough,” they ask, “that you have brought us out of a land flowing with milk and honey to kill us in the desert, that you should also exercise authority over us?” They miss Egypt’s earthly delights, they resent Moses his judgment and courage, and, most important, they’re vainly and erroneously convinced they can do a better job. They can’t, and for being so careless and conceited they are put to death.

Of course, in modern times, Korach and his crew would likely have ended up as leaders of some populist Tea Party type of movement, gone on TV, accused Moses of being a socialist, and, perhaps, won office. But let us, if we can, reject the Korachites of our time wherever we find them, especially if we find them inside ourselves. Let us pledge, as much as we can, to be serious. Let us take the time to learn, to listen, to think, to read, to lead. Let us reject easy gratifications and mindless pursuits, however soothing. And let us remember that the right thing is usually very hard to do. Our lives may depend on it. Seriously.

They’re unsettling beasts, these crocodiles, and not just for their eerie absence of pigmentation: After many long shots fawning over the stunning creations of humanity’s earliest artists, Herzog’s camera drowns us in the water with these spooky creatures, and our feelings of awe and elation quickly turn to dread and disgust.

Herein lies the genius of the filmmaker. Anyone else, most likely, would have seized on the opportunity to film at Chauvet and made a ponderous and prim movie, all close-ups of cave paintings and soliloquies about mankind’s innate ingenuity. Not Herzog; he allows us a glimpse of beauty, and then forces us to consider the price that mankind, another mutated species that eventually fell victim to its own progress, paid to obtain it.

The crocodile scene is a powerful moment of documentary filmmaking. It also happens to be completely fake: These crocodiles were Louisiana-born, imported to France for a tourist attraction. Their albinism is a natural condition, not a mutation, and while there is indeed a nuclear plant nearby, its cooling waters are not radioactive. Oh, and these animals on screen happen to be alligators.

Herzog himself happily confessed to this bit of film forgery. Appearing last week on The Colbert Report, he defended his style of documentary filmmaking, devoted not to facts but to unveiling what he calls the “ecstatic truth” of his subject matter.

“I want the audience with me in wild fantasy in something that illuminates them,” Herzog told an uncharacteristically deferential Colbert. “You see, if I were only fact based, the book of books in literature then would be the Manhattan phone directory—four million entries, everything correct. But it flies out of my ears, and I do not know: Do they dream at night? Does Mr. Jonathan Smith cry in his pillow at night? We do not know anything when we check the correct entries in the phone directory. I am not this kind of a filmmaker.”

To the schoolmarms, of which our news media employ great and many, this kind of talk is gobbledygook; things, flightless minds insist, are either true or false. And, in light of so many fake memoirs, fibbing politicians, and other accounts of the rich and famous dissembling freely, it’s tempting to subscribe to that narrow point of view. But Herzog is here to remind us that truth is a more complicated matter.

So’s Moses. In this week’s parasha, the Israelite leader presents his own version of ecstatic truth. Standing on the cusp of Canaan, he sends 12 spies to tour the strange new land; when they return, 10 of them have some bad news: “They spread an evil report about the land which they had scouted,” reads the parasha, “telling the children of Israel, ‘The land we passed through to explore is a land that consumes its inhabitants, and all the people we saw in it are men of stature.’ ” These men, continued the 10 spies, include the Hittites and the Jebusites, the Amorites and the Amalekites, strong and well-armed peoples who were unlikely to take kindly to a small and ragged band of desert-dwellers claiming this already densely populated sliver of earth as their very own divinely sanctioned Promised Land.

It’s a reasonable, factual report, and, reasonably, it sends the Israelites into hysterics. But the two remaining spies, Joshua and Caleb, stand firm. The land, they insist, is the Israelites’ for the taking. “We can surely go up and take possession of it,” Caleb thunders, but no one listens. No one, that is, but Moses: He has another one of his stern conversations with God, at the end of which the 10 fact-based spies are put to death by the plague, leaving Caleb and Joshua standing firm and the people somewhat more heartened.

Caleb and Joshua, then, are the Werner Herzogs of their time. Rather than describe Canaan as it is, they talk of it as it should be, an idyllic spot, a spiritual haven. And that, it turns out, is the right approach—the facts drive people to tears, but the ecstatic truth moves them to action.

Besides, the facts may not be so factual after all: In an 1873 essay titled “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” Friedrich Nietzsche took umbrage at our notion of truth. Truth, he said, was nothing more than “a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.”

This, of course, should not be interpreted as a passport to nihilism, as Nietzsche’s more boorish fans too often assume. Nor should it be read as a license to argue that religious truth should supplant ethical obligations and objective concerns, a view that is sometimes, and often too simplistically, attributed to the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Instead, the lesson we are to learn from Joshua and Caleb and those colorless crocodiles is that truth and light often hide in strange, shadowy places, places that the cold and critical eye can never penetrate. To see things clearly, sometimes we need to close our eyes and look for some wild fantasy to inspire us.

In this week’s parasha, one African rises to prove the venerable Kapuscinski wrong: As his leadership is called into question, Moses has the wherewithal to focus, as they say in Sinai, on the bigger, celestial picture.

The story begins when the leader, fed up with his stiff-necked people, kvetches to the Almighty. “Why have you treated your servant so badly?” Moses asks the Lord. “Why have I not found favor in your eyes that you place the burden of this entire people upon me? Did I conceive this entire people? Did I give birth to them, that you say to me, ‘Carry them in your bosom as the nurse carries the suckling,’ to the land you promised their forefathers? … Alone I cannot carry this entire people for it is too hard for me. If this is the way you treat me, please kill me if I have found favor in your eyes, so that I not see my misfortune.”

Feeling Moses’ pain, God instructs him to select 70 elders and bring them to the Tent of Meeting. There, the Creator promises, he’ll make a special appearance and charge the elders with helping Moses lead the people. The 70 are selected and carted off to the sacred spot, but just as they depart, two young dudes named Eldad and Medad have a divine moment and start prophesying.

To Joshua, Moses’ second-in-command, such a break with decorum is intolerable. A stickler for order, he runs to complain to his boss. “Moses, my master,” he cries out, “imprison them!” But Moses is unflappable. “Are you zealous for my sake?” he asks Joshua. “If only all the Lord’s people were prophets, that the Lord would bestow His spirit upon them!”

In the Five Books of Moses, there are, thankfully, many testaments to the man’s greatness, but none, arguably, is more profound than this brief episode. Here is Moses acknowledging his weakness, Moses asking for help, Moses realizing that sometimes what seems like a transgression or a challenge is truly a blessing.

Herein concludes the cheerful portion of this column. If, dear reader, you are not the sort that takes kindly to criticism, I would advise bidding our adieus and turning to less rankling pursuits. Because while Moses stands tall as a paragon of self-criticism, many of us, alas, do not.

I’ve nothing but anecdotal evidence to offer in support of such a cutting observation, but the anecdotes, I think, pile up and harden into a thick wall of obduracy. As someone who habitually writes about Israel, I frequently have the uproarious pleasure of reading this website’s comments section and discovering that I—scion of a great rabbi, ninth-generation Israeli, non-commissioned officer in the Israel Defense Forces, former low-ranking diplomat in Israel’s foreign service—am not only not a Jew, but someone who, if true to his hidden nature, would feel much more comfortable in the crisp, black shirt of a National Socialist stormtrooper. In conversations with Jewish communities across the nation, to which I am fortunate enough to be, from time to time, invited, I hear endless variations on the theme of criticism-is-racism: Bring up any observation that portrays the Jewish state—or those slivers of the Jewish community that support it unequivocally—in a critical light, and you’re guilty of being naïve or malicious or troubled or some impossible combination of all three. The Jewish state itself, alas, isn’t doing much better on the self-criticism front: Even in light of obvious and systematic failures, such as last year’s massive fires, Jerusalem’s captains are constantly engaged in a perpetual game of pass-the-buck.

In the late 20th century, the dominant cultural paradigm haunting Jewish communal life was that of the self-hating Jew; now, in the dawn of the 21st, the figure to watch out for is the self-infatuated Jew, incapable of introspection, resistant to censure, aggressively rejecting any bit of opprobrium as inherently and intolerably evil. It’s the self-infatuated Jew who drowns any attempt at dialogue with the din of accusations—but the Palestinians started it all! But we’re still more democratic than Syria! But the Iranians are denying the Holocaust!—and who is quick to draw the boundaries of communal belonging as passing somewhere between right and extreme right. And the rest of us, as smarter men have already observed, are left to either fight an uphill battle or walk away from the whole throbbing mess.

Amid the rancor, this week’s parasha comes as a much-needed reminder of our tradition and its attitudes toward leadership and dissent. Borrowing a favorite turn of mind from the self-infatuated hordes, I can say that self-infatuation and intolerance of criticism are fundamentally non-Jewish traits; real Jews, like Moses, admit their own shortcomings and embrace their passionate kinsmen even if the latter are defiant. Real Jews know how to tell prophesy from piffle. Real Jews reject thundering statements—in a website’s comments section or on the floor of Congress—in favor of difficult, often cantankerous, but always illuminating conversations. Like the one, dear reader, I hope we’re about to have soon.

But what are the rest of us to make of this bit of text, we whose eyes glazed over in math class and require a calculator to work out a 20 percent tip on a $100 check? The answer lies in the spirit rather than the letter of the text, and in spirit this week’s parasha delivers a simple but profound message: We all count. Even a small nation, or in particular a small nation, must keep track of each and every soul. Seen through this prism, numbers are not abstractions; each one corresponds with a living, breathing human being. Which, of course, is why we should be very careful to handle numbers with accuracy and care—fudge a number, and you’ve sinned against the very core of the tangible and the real.

Ours, alas, is the era of unreal numbers, from the falsified spreadsheets of Bernie Madoff to the felonious schemes of the equally criminal yet tragically unpunished swindlers behind the subprime mortgage bubble. Bluffing discreetly on balance sheets is bad enough; do it in the open, on the largest imaginable stage, and we’re headed down a dangerous road.

Unfortunately, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to a joint session of the Congress earlier this week was a master class of numeric (and other) inaccuracies. Because these things matter—they matter very much—let us, in the spirit of this week’s parasha, do the Jewish thing and set the record straight.

Netanyahu said: The vast majority of the 650,000 Israelis who live beyond the 1967 lines reside in neighborhoods and suburbs of Jerusalem and Greater Tel Aviv.

Actually, there are 304,569 Israelis living in the West Bank, according to the Israel Defense Forces. Add to that East Jerusalem—which, according to most credible sources, is home to about 200,000 Israelis—and you hit the 500,000 mark. Even if one chooses to be generous and give the prime minister these East Jerusalemites in his count, one has to wonder, as Jonathan Lis recently did in Haaretz, why Netanyahu, who later on in his speech roared that “Jerusalem must never again be divided,” would possibly choose to include the residents of the undividable capital in the overall tally of the contested populace.

Of the 300 million Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa, only Israel’s Arab citizens enjoy real democratic rights. I want you to stop for a second and think about that. Of those 300 million Arabs, less than one-half of 1 percent are truly free, and they’re all citizens of Israel.

This bit of bluster may come as somewhat of a slight to Israel’s northern neighbor, Lebanon, where the robust parliamentary elections of 2009 drew a record-high voter turnout. Also in line for surprise are the Iraqis, who, despite still struggling to find democracy’s balance, came out in droves to vote in the recent 2010 elections for the Council of Representatives: 62.4 percent of Iraqis cast a ballot that year, only a slightly less impressive showing than the 65.2 percent of Israelis who exercised their civic duty in the nation’s most recent elections in 2009. Oh, and Jordan? Its 120-member House of Representatives holds a substantial number of seats for women and religious and ethnic minorities. You know, as they’re wont to do in fiercely oppressive, thoroughly non-democratic countries.

As the cherry on top of Netanyahu’s rhetorical ruses comes the fact that two days before the prime minister thundered in Congress, the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee passed, in a preliminary vote, a new bill that would give preference to  applicants for government jobs who are veterans of the IDF, thereby openly discriminating against Israeli Arabs, who do not serve in the army. Add to that the so-called Nakba Law, which prohibits Israeli Arabs from teaching or commemorating their interpretation of the historical events that led to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, as well as other laws currently under consideration in the Knesset—like the one that would require all citizens of Israel to pledge allegiance to their nation as a uniquely Jewish state—and this whole “truly free” business begins to crumble.

In Judea and Samaria, the Jewish people are not foreign occupiers. We are not the British in India. We are not the Belgians in the Congo. This is the land of our forefathers, the Land of Israel, to which Abraham brought the idea of one God, where David set out to confront Goliath.

David, actually, swung his fateful sling in the valley of Elah, near modern-day Beit Shemesh, which is squarely within the boundaries of Israel proper. And if Netanyahu truly believes Israel is nothing like the Brits or the Belgians, he is welcome, of course, to do with the West Bank as had once been done with Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, and annex them. Until then, however, the prime minister has to choose: If he wishes to follow the Bible as his unsurpassable guide to realpolitik, let him declare so openly and allow his constituents to support or reject his theological aspirations. But if he wishes to guide the ship of state according to the acceptable, rational norms of Western democracies, all that blessed biblical stuff is, alas, rather irrelevant. Seen from that perspective, asserting martial law on a territory and its citizens, setting up an intricate bureaucracy of governance, oppressing any aspirations for self-governance, and insisting time and again that the natives are too corrupt and incompetent to govern themselves sounds like it’s one punch bowl away from feeling right at home at the Bengal Club.

The fun never ends. One could, for example, juxtapose Netanyahu’s encomiums for the riotous youth of the Arab spring with his efforts to drum up support for the despotic Hosni Mubarak as the Egyptian president was losing his grip on power earlier this year, or contrast Netanyahu’s claim that “the Palestinian economy is booming” with the World Bank’s report, released this April, which finds that the very same economy would soon be rendered “unsustainable” unless Israel relaxes the considerable restrictions it still places on the Palestinian private sector.

But instead of hurling oneself against the firm wall of slurs and untruths Netanyahu erected in his Washington speech, let us read the parasha instead, and recall the spirit, sacred and fierce and urgent, that urges us to keep our accounting strict and strictly honest.

Few are the biblical stories that present a greater challenge to our modern sense of justice than the one depicted in this week’s parasha. It begins on a cheerful note—animals are sacrificed, God is in a forgiving mood, the people sing praises. Then, however, something goes terribly wrong: “And Aaron’s sons, Nadab and Abihu,” the parasha continues, “each took his pan, put fire in them, and placed incense upon it, and they brought before the Lord foreign fire, which He had not commanded them. And fire went forth from before the Lord and consumed them, and they died before the Lord.”

What, we may be forgiven for asking, is a foreign fire, and why is it punishable by death? These are particularly vexing questions given that the two young men in question are the heirs apparent to the priesthood’s most exalted position. As we can expect, the rabbis have been pondering this problem for millennia, providing a myriad of explanations ranging from accusing Nadab and Abihu of drunkenness to stipulating that their death was punishment for their refusal to succumb to the will of their mighty uncle, Moses.

I would like to offer my own explanation, decidedly less scholarly but deeply relevant to our times. And I would like to call on a far less scriptural bit of writing in my defense, Harry Frankfurt’s 2005 treatise On Bullshit.

The assertion at the heart of this surprising literary hit—the best-seller list is hardly a natural place for a Princeton emeritus professor of philosophy to find his work—is that there is a significant difference between bullshit and lies. A liar, Frankfurt writes, must first know the truth and then choose to misrepresent it; a bullshitter, on the other hand, has no regard for the truth and speaks for no other reason than to promote personal interests.

As we watch so many of the institutions we had once considered sacred felled by mendacity, as we squint at the parade of pilloried politicians and shamed journalists and disgraced academics, we may feel compelled to blame our sorry state on the increasingly loosened boundaries of the truth. But our crisis is deeper than that: What we have on our hands is not an epidemic of lying but a general migration away from any notion of truth altogether. We simply don’t care what’s true and what isn’t; we speak without being bothered by the veracity of our words and act without concern for the consequences of our actions. We are, in short, knee-deep in bullshit.

And so were Nadab and Abihu. The first of the Israelites to enter the confines of the holy Sanctuary, they understandably did what many other men would have done under the same circumstances—they played around, experimented, tried to get comfortable with a job that required strict adherence to protocol and long periods spent in seclusion. They might have knocked back a few flagons of wine or poured some incense into the fire, but they did so not because they were deliberately resisting the Lord’s orders but because, like us all, they were human.

At the very end of his short book, Frankfurt delivers an illuminating thought. “There is nothing in theory,” he writes, “and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial—notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.”

The young priests would probably relate. They tried to be sincere—nowhere in the text is it suggested that they are malicious, rebellious, or disdainful of their post—but sincerity is an absolute of which men are never truly capable. To be sincere, we must first know what we’re being sincere about; in other words, we must know ourselves, thoroughly and absolutely and without doubt. As anyone who had ever paid a princely sum for 50 minutes on a therapist’s couch could surely attest, such pure and perfect self-awareness is far removed from the reach of human beings.

What we are left with, then, is bullshit. Which, as Frankfurt playfully points out, is not to say that bullshit is careless or insubstantial. There’s a reason we call masters of the form “bullshit artists” and adore them in real life and in art. Our mock protestations aside, we put up with so much bullshit because we realize that bullshit is perilously close to the human condition itself: Unable to know anything for certain, and anxious about preserving our interests, we make it up as we go along. It was the rotten luck of Nadab and Abihu to end up on the wrathful side of a divine boss who wouldn’t tolerate any of that human folly.

Where, then, does that leave us? In his book, Frankfurt recounts a story about Ludwig Wittgenstein and his friend. The friend was convalescing in the hospital after a small operation, and the philosopher paid a visit. Asked how she felt, the friend replied that she felt much like a dog who’d been run over. Wittgenstein fumed. “You don’t know what a dog that has been run over feels like,” he said. The grand man of the philosophy of language was appalled to see his friend utter a sentence that so blatantly ignored the truth—the actual sensation experienced by an unlucky, wounded animal—and conjured the image of the injured dog solely for the sake of arousing sympathy. As we learn from this week’s parasha, this, more or less, is God’s position in striking down the two hapless youths. What the Almighty may tell us in these seemingly senseless slayings, perhaps, is that if we believe in him, we believe in an absolute, and that even if we fail to follow his rules, we still haven’t the right to make up rules of our own. We can sin and transgress and lie, because in so doing we understand what it is that we sin against or lie about; but we can never, ever bullshit.

Reading the Torah this week, we get little but the rules of ritual. God commands Moses to install Aaron and his sons as priests, and he then embarks on a long and exacting speech concerning the various sorts of offerings, the veins of fat and the feeding times, all the other strictures of sacrifice. We, a millennium removed from ritualistic slaughter, are left to wonder what might be relevant about this cornucopia of commandments and prohibitions; the closest most of us come to animal sacrifice, after all, is playing Angry Birds.

The idea of ritual, however, has never disappeared. Instead of governing the sanctified destruction of beasts, it now subtly, sometimes invisibly, regulates various other aspects of our modern lives. Nowhere is this prevalence of prescribed motions more evident than in video games: Although we seldom associate video games with the sacred, I suspect Aaron and his sons would have known just what to do had God graced them with a Playstation 3 to pass away those long days spent secluded in the Sanctuary.

This bond between video games and ritual first occurred to me while completing my doctoral studies in communications. As a video games scholar, I had spent many tedious evenings defending my beloved medium against accusations of devilry and rejecting the popular misconception that picking up a joystick makes one that much more likely to someday pick up a semi-automatic, put on a trench coat, and shoot up a school. These allegations seemed absurd to me, not only because I’ve read enough scientific papers refuting any correlation between video games and violence, but also because I realized what the pundits gasping about the lurid storylines often depicted in games—all those dead prostitutes and massacred civilians!—did not, namely that video games are played not so much with the mind as with the thumbs. In other words, they are a ritual.

To prove my point, I set up a little experiment. With the help of several research assistants, I spent long stretches of time playing a favorite game. The assistants were instructed to interrupt me at various intervals, sometimes when gameplay was at a peak—in the middle of a critical battle, say, or halfway through a complex and demanding puzzle—and others at moments when my avatar was doing little but wandering around the game’s world aimlessly. Then, applying a simple set of metrics, the assistants would evaluate how long it took me to immerse myself anew in the game. The results were overwhelming: Time after time, the only factor that had any influence on my ability to effortlessly resume playing had nothing to do with the game’s narrative and everything to do with how long I’d been playing before having been interrupted. If, say, I was disturbed 20 minutes into my gaming session, at the peak of an adrenaline-flushed battle against some pixilated baddie, I was able to resume my concentration and immersion in the game almost immediately. But if I was interrupted after three hours of gaming and in the midst of nothing important at all, regaining my focus was infinitely harder. I repeated the same experiment with other players and received the same results. While far from conclusive, the experiment suggested that the key factor determining a player’s connection to the game wasn’t the engagement with a particular storyline but the immersion that comes only with a lengthy duration of play.

Which, of course, is the very nature of ritual. This is why God, at the closing of this week’s parasha, orders Aaron and his sons to “stay day and night for seven days at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting.” However pure the priests’ hearts, the sensation of sacredness cannot come unless practiced, mindlessly, repeatedly, for long periods of time. Whirl like a dervish, chant like the Hindus, self-flagellate like a Shia on Ashura, do any one thing for long enough and with intense concentration and the critical faculties will eventually give way to a higher order of knowing, that of wild faith. That’s the idea behind this week’s parasha, and that’s the idea behind video games.

It is not an easy idea for us to process. We are raised to see the Enlightenment as our worthy inheritance. We are taught that facts are the keys that open the doors of knowledge. And we value our media for allowing us access to new and vast valleys of information. The logic of ritual abhors all that. For the priest alone in his sanctuary or the gamer alone on her couch, for anyone whose life consists largely of mechanized movements repeated ad infinitum, subjectivity eventually dissolves. Instead of looking at the world from the outside in, instead of being analytical and detached, the person in the throes of ritual quite literally loses him- or herself and becomes one with the practice. This is how secrets are unlocked, and how seemingly ungraspable actions, like communing with God, are delivered to earth and into the hands of human beings.

And this is why video games are, arguably, the defining medium of our generation. Elsewhere in the domain of digital media, we find new technologies making new demands that defy the boundaries of our consciousness. Facebook, for example, demands that we befriend scores of strangers when most of us can barely keep track of the four or five loved ones we hold dearest. Twitter seeks to reduce human speech, that mighty flow of thoughts and words, to 140-character bursts. The web allows us to neglect our memory and rely instead on its endless silos of data and bunk. But video games ask us to continue and do what men and women have done since the dawn of history, namely let our hands take over and succumb to ritual. Think of that the next time you want to spend the afternoon with your Nintendo.

Unless dogs are involved.

When I witnessed Michael Vick return to professional football last year after a 19-month prison sentence for running a dog-fighting organization and personally ending the lives of several animals, I experienced the sort of rage I rarely feel, a thick, deep, and bubbling anger. The man, I said, should never be allowed back on the gridiron. He shouldn’t even be allowed his freedom.

A number of my friends took me to task. How, they asked, could I be so quick to forgive my worst enemies but reluctant to pardon a man whose crime, as heinous as it was, hurt no human beings? Did I value the lives of dogs more than the lives of people? One acquaintance, a serious and faithful student of Christian theology, said that my inability to accept Vick’s statements of repentance was not so much my own personal fault as it was a glitch in Jewish ethics as a whole; lacking a Christ figure who commands and offers forgiveness, my acquaintance said, Jews were left to judge on a case-by-case basis, a far more difficult proposition, and one that often allowed for personal and irrelevant criteria to enter into the equation.

I took this criticism to heart. As I watched Vick go on to have a stellar season, I struggled mightily with myself, trying my best to find some merit in the voices of those calling on us fans to give the man a second chance. But no matter how hard I tried, I always failed.

This week’s parasha helped me understand why. There is, to be sure, little in it about being kind to our four-legged friends. On the contrary: The entire text deals with the ritualistic sacrifice of beasts as part of the complicated process designed to relieve human beings of the burden of their sins. But reading the parasha, I was once again awe-struck by Judaism’s meticulous approach to animals.

According to most historical accounts, we first encounter serious concern for animals’ rights in the work of Pythagoras, who believed that both humans and animals shared the same sort of indestructible soul and that the transmigration of these shared souls could often cause a human being to be reincarnated as an animal and vice versa. Around the same time the Greek philosopher was busy with these thoughts, a prince, Siddhārtha Gautama, was born in Lumbini, which today is located in Nepal; when he was 29, he left his palace to meet his subjects, saw the world’s sorrows firsthand, became the Buddha, and inspired a host of teachings, the most prominent of which, perhaps, commands refraining from taking another living creature’s life.

But the laws of the Hebrew Bible precede these events by nearly 700 years, and they do not share the same logic as Buddha and Pythagoras. For the most part, Judaism doesn’t necessarily believe that animals possess the same spiritual endowment as do humans. Maimonides, for example, wrote that “my view is that Divine Providence in this world applies to human beings” and not to animals or plants, as both most Buddhists and some ancient Greek thinkers believed. All the Bible’s many laws demanding kindness to animals—from the command to allow one’s beasts to rest on the Sabbath to the prohibition on muzzling an animal while it plowed the field—stem not from a sense of interspecies egalitarianism but rather from a strong sense of duty: Man is elevated above the beasts, and therefore has an obligation to show them the same quality of mercy he’d expect the Lord himself to show mankind.

Therefore, even as we read about animal sacrifice, we are constantly aware that the greatest care has been taken to guarantee the elimination of needless bloodshed and suffering. The occasions for sacrifice are exhaustively detailed, lest anyone get a bit too knife-happy.

Which brings me back to Michael Vick. Reading about the great care with which God describes the minutia of animal sacrifice, I realized that my disdain for Vick is a result not only of his horrific actions but also of the imperious cruelty required in anyone running an underground organization dedicated solely to the infliction of pain on other living creatures. This, I think, is a specifically Jewish kind of rage: Not believing, like the Buddhists, that all creatures are equally sacred, and not believing, like the Christians, that forgiveness is always de rigeur, Jews considering the case of Michael Vick are angry with the athlete for having betrayed that most sacred of edicts, the one compelling us to show animals the care and consideration the Lord himself had instructed us to bestow.

This, alas, leaves us in a very tight spot. “For Jews, forgiveness is a much more difficult achievement, especially since most of the beings that would need to forgive Michael Vick, being dogs, may not communicate in the same level as human beings or may not be alive,” Rabbi Joshua Hammerman of Temple Beth El in Stamford, Conn., told me. That being the case, all we have to go on isn’t intent—who, after all, knows if Vick’s numerous declarations of remorse are truly sincere?—but action. Vick, said Hammerman, is “getting a lot of accolades and money and positive attention; let’s see if he falls again.” Until then, all we can do is wait, obliged to overcome our fury and disgust and give Vick not the firm handshake of absolution but the tentative nod of allowing him another shot at redeeming himself.

It’s a message that this week’s parasha communicates as well, however softly. The concern for the animals being offered on the altar is there in every tortured sentence, in every tiny detail that God takes care to communicate to Moses. And while the theme of God’s speech is sin and forgiveness—that, after all, is the purpose of all those offerings—not a word is said about the stirrings of the heart. God doesn’t care how we feel, or whether or not we’re truly sorry. When it comes to forgiveness, he is all about actions, about having things done the proper way, about tangible proof. We should adhere to the same standard when it comes to Michael Vick.

As the story begins, the Tabernacle is completed, and Moses delivers a thorough account of the artisans who toiled on its construction, the fabrics and metals used, the monies paid. At first read, this exhaustive list of men and materials can come off as yet another paean to the great leader’s glory: Having asked the people to sacrifice some of their wealth and most of their precious goods to build the Lord’s dwelling, Moses—responsible and fair and civic-minded—takes the time to inform his charges just what he had done with their resources. In so doing, Moses sets a precedent of transparency, accountability, and other staples of governance on which we moderns living in democratic societies frequently insist.

The story, however, is more complex than that. To understand its intricacies, we must abandon Moses for a moment and look instead at other great yet largely unheralded leaders, our very own teachers.

In recent weeks, the plight of educators made national news from Wisconsin to New York. In the swirl of discussion, one term seemed to hover above controversy: accountability. To best educate our children, goes the logic, we need great teachers, and the only way to identify and incentivize these great teachers is by holding them—and the institutions in which they teach—accountable, rewarding those whose students do well on standardized tests and punishing those whose students falter. This has been a key feature of President Barack Obama’s educational policy, which aggressively promotes the remuneration of successful teachers—one key program, Race to the Top, awards $4.35 billion to schools with demonstrably effective educators—and which heavily depends on hard data, mainly test results, to quantify success.

This may sound very sensible. After all, most of us who work for a living are required, regularly and repeatedly, to undergo professional evaluations. We are rewarded for terrific performance and penalized if we fall short of expectations. But apply the same cool logic to teachers, and disaster is likely to ensue.

Writing last year in the Los Angeles Times, Diane Ravitch, perhaps our sharpest scholar of education history and policy, made this point eloquently. “The Obama education reform plan,” she wrote, “is an aggressive version of the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind, under which many schools have narrowed their curriculum to the tested subjects of reading and math. This poor substitute for a well-rounded education, which includes subjects such as the arts, history, geography, civics, science and foreign language, hits low-income children the hardest, since they are the most likely to attend the kind of ‘failing school’ that drills kids relentlessly on the basics. Emphasis on test scores already compels teachers to focus on test preparation. Holding teachers personally and exclusively accountable for test scores—a key feature of Race to the Top—will make this situation even worse. Test scores will determine salary, tenure, bonuses and sanctions, as teachers and schools compete with each other, survival-of-the-fittest style.”

As an assistant professor at New York University, I spend a lot of my time in classrooms, and although education policy is not my field of expertise, Ravitch’s point is one that I deeply feel to be true. If my livelihood depended on metrics, I would most likely concentrate intensely on making sure my students meet the required criteria, which would mean narrowing my scope of interest and theirs to a given set of precise, measurable particulars. Even if that were the case—and I’m extremely fortunate to report that it is not—and even if I were especially adept at my job, I could still fail: As anyone who has ever spent more than a minute or two with a student knows, the tiles that make up each individual’s mind are laid not only by teachers but, primarily, by parents, friends, the media, the environment, and a host of other factors entirely beyond our control. To place the blame for failure—or the laurels of success—on one person isn’t accountability; it’s cruelty.

Unfortunately, even the most progressive-minded among us too often engage in this sort of Manichean thinking. Last February, to name but one prominent example, a school board in Rhode Island voted to fire all the teachers of one struggling high school. Obama hailed the decision. “If a school continues to fail year after year after year and doesn’t show signs of improvement,” he said, “then there has got to be a sense of accountability.”

But as this week’s parasha proves, accountability means accounting, the breaking down of a process to facts and figures. It’s easy to do when one’s business is selling corn, say, or buying land, when all that’s required are bottom lines. But when one’s business is the broadening and bettering of young minds, we need much more. Just what more? For answers, we may turn to those too many nations that surpass ours in comparative international rankings and realize that what Japan, Finland, Holland, and other nations boasting excellent educational systems have in common is not a system revolving around punishments and rewards but rather one devoted to setting clear standards and goals and promoting a well-rounded education focused on the liberal arts and sciences. When fourth-graders in Houston, therefore, stress out about improving their math and reading test scores, their peers in Hong Kong study Picasso’s work and visit a local artist’s studio. One needn’t be an expert on educational policy to guess which method makes for a better education.

And yet we adhere to the ghost dance of accountability, insisting that the world can be broken down to numbers. But it cannot, at least not those slivers of the world that are holy and that still matter. The Good Lord, I suspect, knows it, too. As Moses finishes reading his account, the spirit of God materializes above the Tabernacle. The Creator, of course, could have chosen whatever form he wished, but all that transparency and accountability, all those clear and concrete figures, apparently have given the Almighty the creeps. When he appears above the dwelling the Israelites had built for him, he appears as a cloud.

As the Israelites begin building the Lord’s Tabernacle, we are informed that God imbued those among them who labored in the construction of that most sacred edifice with “wisdom of the heart”: Every “wise-hearted man,” reads the parasha, “into whom God had imbued wisdom and insight to know how to do, shall do all the work of the service of the Holy.”

A wise-hearted man, of course, is a paradox worthy of Chesterton. The heart feels, the mind thinks; the heart, according to most of our acceptable metaphysical edicts, is no more capable of being wise than the mind is of being swept by currents of emotion. And yet artists, the parasha suggests, differ from the rest of us in that they somehow succeed in reconciling the twin titans of human motivations, feeding feelings and thoughts both into the furnace of artistic creation.

It’s a difficult concept to comprehend without a concrete example to observe. Luckily, we’ve just the man: one of America’s greatest forgotten artists, the sculptor best known for blasting the faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt into the rock of Mount Rushmore, the monomaniacal Gutzon Borglum.

Next week marks the 70th anniversary of Borglum’s death. He was born in Idaho, trained in Paris, and lived for long spells in New York. His fame was great: He was the first living American sculptor to witness his work displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and among the first to appear in newspaper ads endorsing consumer goods. By 1923, the year Doane Robinson, a South Dakota historian, came up with the idea to erect some sort of mountainside monument to America’s presidents, Borglum was the obvious choice.

What made Borglum great? An easy answer is available merely by looking at his work: Stand in front of Roosevelt’s stony mug, glance at the ever-so-nuanced lines carved to suggest that the Rough Rider wears eyeglasses, and the sculptor’s genius is in full evidence. But Borglum’s stature exceeded his skill—he was wise at heart, a quality illuminated by his complicated and little-known relationship with his Jewish friends.

Those he had aplenty—among his closest companions were Dr. Isidor Singer, editor of the Jewish Encyclopedia; Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter; and the financiers Bernard Baruch and Jacob Schiff. When they needed his help, he rapidly and enthusiastically rose to their defense, organizing, for example, a fund-raising campaign to assist the impoverished Singer. These remarkable friendships were made more remarkable by the inconvenient fact that Gutzon Borglum was a raging anti-Semite.

In a paper from the 1920s titled “The Jewish Question”—cited in Six Wars at a Time, Borglum’s biography—the sculptor tried to express his misgivings about the Hebrew race. “Jews,” he wrote, “refuse to enter the mainstream of civilization, to become producing members of the world community. They do not share or create, but choose instead to clannishly hold onto their old ways and with mere money buy and sell the efforts of others.”

There is nothing surprising about this text; scores like it were written during the same period by thinkers and artists and public figures great and small. What’s surprising is what Borglum chose to do with his hateful screed: He shipped it over to Dr. Singer, asking his friend for his thoughts.

“Dear friend Gutzon,” the Jewish scholar replied with good humor, “reading what you write someone would think you were an anti-Semite, when in reality you are a philo-Semite.” Borglum’s response was immediate. “Dr. Singer,” he wrote, “if you were not a bigger man than you are a Jew, I would throw bricks at you.”

This mercurial temper got Borglum in trouble throughout his life. When Jacob Schiff died, in 1920, a committee of New York’s most prominent Jews approached the sculptor to erect a monument to his late friend. Again, Borglum’s response was quick to arrive: “I have never met a man who exemplified all the characteristics of George Washington as Jacob Schiff,” he wrote, but he refused to accept the commission, arguing that as a Christian he could not honor a Jew. The same mad temerity was frequently on display when the Mount Rushmore project made Borglum an international celebrity. When President Calvin Coolidge, responding to Borglum’s request, sent a brief history of the United States to be included in the statue’s design, the sculptor liberally altered the president’s words, sending his edit to the press without informing the White House of the changes. Furious, Coolidge abandoned his support for the project. But nothing could stop Gutzon Borglum from accomplishing his life’s dream: Once he’d set foot on the mountain, he was consumed by the challenge and single-mindedly committed to the project.

Which brings us back to this week’s parasha. Those entrusted with erecting our most sacred and celebratory monuments, we are told, are not only masterful artisans but also men and women who approach the task with wise hearts. And Borglum, for all of his vile ideas, was a wise-hearted man. When Hitler seized power in Germany, tossing around some of the same language and ideas that Borglum himself was known to express, the sculptor was horrified. It was one thing, he realized, to write inflammatory screeds and send them to Jewish friends in the hope of extracting a drop of outrage; it was another altogether to set up concentration camps. In the last years of his life, Borglum became a fierce critic of Hitler, often releasing outspoken anti-Nazi statements designed to goad the Führer into a war of words. Hitler said nothing, but his deeds spoke loudly: When his armies swept Poland, he ordered his henchmen to remove the sole statue in that country created by Gutzon Borglum, a statue of Woodrow Wilson the sculptor had erected in Poznan in 1931. Where the statue had once stood, Hitler had put up a sign: “The American sculptor,” it read, “made the legs too short, the body too long and the head too large. Such an artistic eyesore cannot continue to stand in the city.”

But Borglum hardly noticed this petty slight. He was, at the time, suspended with his men in midair, attacking the granite of Mount Rushmore with chisels and jackhammers and sticks of dynamite, removing 450,000 tons of rock to create one of our most majestic monuments. He was moved by far more than the force of the technical challenge: The monument, he believed, would serve as an everlasting tribute to America’s greatness, proof set in stone of its divine election. To that end, he planned to blast an 80-by-100 foot vault next to the four presidents; this, the Hall of Records, would, he hoped, one day house the original Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and any other document pertaining to America’s glorious founding.

On March 6, 1941, Gutzon Borglum died of coronary sclerosis in a hospital in Chicago. Shortly before his death, he wrote to a friend, Montana Sen. Burt Wheeler, to advocate once again for a decisive American strike against Germany. “There is one single human obligation now before all decent fathers, mothers, governments—Stop Hitler and his cutthroats,” he wrote. He never lived to see Berlin taken by Allied troops, or to witness his son, Lincoln, complete his work on Mount Rushmore.

The nearly 15 million people who visit the site each year can judge more than Borglum’s artistry; they can judge the quality of his heart. Like Bezalel, Oholiab, and the other men tapped by Moses to build the Tabernacle, he was moved by a higher power. On his deathbed, he penned a letter to a friend, citing Victor Hugo. “Where the soul awakes,” he wrote, “there and there only your spirit is born.”

This week’s parasha provides a good example of the man’s strange nature. Moses climbs up to the mountain to receive the word of God, tarries in returning, climbs down, and sees the Golden Calf. Reading the story as a child, I was incensed on his behalf: Having just witnessed the true spirit of God, I asked myself, the Israelites couldn’t even give Moses the benefit of the doubt for running a bit behind schedule? Are a few weeks truly that much of a setback that a nation that had just been awarded the Torah would resolve to break the divine rules and erect a shining statue? And, most troubling of all, what to make of Moses’ own baffling response? Rather than fume at the ungrateful idolaters, Moses wrestles with God on their behalf. The supreme being is in a genocidal state of mind; bravely, Moses takes a stand and demands that God spare the Israelites. “If you do not forgive them,” he tells the Lord, “blot me out from the book that you have written.” Why go through all that trouble, risking anonymity in perpetuity, to protect a sinful horde?

Just ask Bernie Madoff.

The disgraced financier is not a man usually associated with biblical wisdom, but a series of recent disclosures, including interviews with Madoff himself, suggest that he and Moses might have shared a fundamental understanding of the human condition. Speaking to a reporter from the New York Times, Madoff argued that the various banks and financial institutions he’d defrauded were guilty of “willful blindness,” and that there was no way these large and savvy investors—as opposed to private individuals—did not know his unnaturally profitable operation was a sham.

Some newly released documents support Madoff’s claim. Earlier this month, for example, internal communications of JPMorgan Chase employees were made public in a lawsuit, indicating that some at the bank were suspicious of Madoff long before he was arrested. On June of 2007, a senior executive at the bank, the Times reported, sent an email to colleagues and said that another executive at Chase “just told me that there is a well-known cloud over the head of Madoff and that his returns are speculated to be part of a Ponzi scheme.”

Much of Madoff’s recent statements, of course, are self-serving, an attempt, perhaps, to lessen the effect of his grievous actions. But there’s much more we can learn from his comments that the banks were somehow complicit in his crime: What Madoff understood, the fundamental truth lying at the heart of his deceptions, was not that people are greedy, but that people would go to tremendous lengths to try and overcome the basic unknowability, the profound impermanence that is at the core of human existence. People invested with Madoff because he suggested that he could turn the market—tempestuous, unpredictable, sometimes vengeful, frequently wild—into a tamed beast that behaved just as you liked it to behave, a reliable animal that gave and gave and asked for nothing in return. And the banks collaborated not only because great wealth was being generated, but also because Madoff’s fantasy was too strong to resist.

It’s the same story, essentially, as this week’s parasha. As the story begins, the Israelites are introduced to God, a mysterious and invisible being that presents them with rules but is never entirely familiar to them. They are awed, but their awe soon turns to anxiety. Like the Wilpons and the Picowers and Madoff’s other victims, they needed something permanent, something they could grasp, something controlled and controllable, something so unlike God. They ask for a calf, and Aaron, the great priest, doesn’t hesitate for a moment: He collects their jewelry and fashions them an idol. Like the gentlemen at JPMorgan Chase, he understands that what’s truly at stake is not material but spiritual, and that what the people are asking for is assurance in a world that has none.

Moses, the wisest of leaders, knows all of this, and he refuses to succumb to the Lord’s wrath. Even God’s divine book, he knows, is written for humans, and no story is more human than striving to eliminate uncertainty. If the punishment for such human actions is genocide, he tells God, write me out of the book.

And God is soothed. He understands—neither for the first time in the Good Book nor for the last—that his people are stiff-necked, and that no matter how many signs they’re given, they’re still likely to abandon his ways for any fleeting chance at tangible, earthly representations of divinity. He realizes that the laws he advocates depend on faith, not evidence and are, therefore, an abstraction. And he knows that the people congregated in the desert, sweating and scared, vie for the concrete. Therefore, he forgives—he orders the Israelites to destroy their remaining jewelry, but he spares them their lives. There’s no other way to reconcile God and Man.

If he’s studying the Torah in his North Carolina jail cell, Bernie Madoff may take some comfort in this bit of divine good will. And let us, too, show Bernie some mercy: His crimes are terrible, but they transcend simple greed or sheer arrogance. As we learn from this week’s parasha, we’ve had Madoffs since the dawn of time, and we will continue to have them, most likely, for as long as we strive to impose order on a world that is unruly, for as long as we think we can fashion our own gods, for as long, that is, as we’re human.

“Speak to the children of Israel,” God instructs Moses, “and have them take for Me an offering; from every person whose heart inspires him to generosity, you shall take My offering. And this is the offering that you shall take from them: gold, silver, and copper; blue, purple, and crimson wool; linen and goat hair; ram skins dyed red, tachash skins, and acacia wood; oil for lighting, spices for the anointing oil and for the incense; shoham stones and filling stones for the ephod and for the choshen. And they shall make Me a sanctuary and I will dwell in their midst.”

If you vaguely remember the Israelite story, you may recall the bit about their 40-year sojourn in the Sinai desert, a patch of earth not celebrated for its abundance of gold, spices, and purple wool. Why not settle for something a bit more Arid Chic? Why not build something a bit easier to transport? Why all the opulence?

Because God knows that a people—especially a people stumbling through the wilderness—is in need not only of spiritual solace but also of a physical space where worship can become concrete and where God’s ephemeral greatness can be seen on earthly terms. He may not be fond of icons or graven images, but when it comes to dwellings, the Lord bequeaths his people a simple principle of design: More is more.

How strange, then, that so many of his people—at least those who, millennia later, pursued careers as architects—rejected his command and instead championed the spare and the unadorned. Some, trained in Berlin’s Bauhaus school in the 1920s, became pioneers of the International Style; when the Nazis rose to power, a number of these architects moved to Tel Aviv and worked to reshape a town of old houses tinted with arabesques and tanned by the Mediterranean sun into a modern metropolis of clean, straight lines and functional forms.

Eventually, when the time came to erect Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, it was the spirit of Germany, not of Jerusalem, that triumphed: Joseph Klarwein, trained in Munich’s Polytechnic, designed the low, approachable, modern edifice. The Knesset, some critics complained at the time of the building’s inauguration in 1966, was a thoroughly un-Israeli structure; its striking resemblance to the American embassy in Athens, designed five years earlier by Bauhaus oracle Walter Gropius, didn’t help much to alleviate the charges of foreign influence. The critics, however, were missing the point. If there was such a thing as Jewish architecture, it was, by the 1960s, far more likely to follow Gropius’ commands than God’s.

The biblical tradition of architecture, the one that holds that buildings that matter must be stately and lavish, hasn’t fared much better since then. It is nowhere in evidence in Frank Gehry’s functionless extravaganzas, nor in, say, Daniel Liebeskind’s angular abstractions. Indeed, looking at the past six decades, its safe to say that Jews design buildings either as wild ideas or as austere objects of utility, but rarely in the grand, rich tradition evident everywhere from the holy sanctuary to the palace at Versailles.

Historically, of course, one can find many reasons to explain this trend. No ethnic group removed for centuries from the centers of power and influence could be expected to develop a taste for grandeur. But herein lies the startling power of this week’s parasha: Even at their most powerless, without a state and without a clue, roaming the Egyptian dunes with the bitter taste of slavery still in their mouths, the Israelites, at God’s insistence, had a refuge of great luxury and elegance. Power and influence, the parasha teaches us, splendor and grandeur, all begin at home.

And while manifestations of this architectural logic are still uncommon in Jewish circles, at least one notable example may delight our eyes and hearts; it’s a sanctuary of an altogether different sort, the new Ralph Lauren store on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

A new building in the highly decorative Beaux Arts style, this four-story, 22,000-square-foot mansion houses the designer’s collections for women and the home. It is a complement to the Ralph Lauren men’s store across the street on 72nd Street and Madison Avenue, the historic Rhinelander Mansion that the designer purchased in 1986. The new building’s exterior is finished with lovely limestone with hand-carved flourishes, the entrance is a regal archway, the interior a bacchanalia of ornamentation, with wrought-iron railings and Persian rugs and intricate chandeliers everywhere.

Born in the Bronx as Ralph Liftshitz, Mr. Lauren attended a number of Jewish day schools before finding his way into the fashion business. Whether or not he paid particular attention to God’s musings on design is unknown; what is evident is that when it comes to buildings, Lauren is refreshingly unafraid of opulence. Not for him the austere, negative spaces, the glass and the steel, the angles and the emptiness and the big, bold ideas. Those belong to the theorists, to the intellectuals, not to the landed gentry, a class traditionally inclined toward unconflicted declarations of elegance and wealth, a class traditionally bereft of Jews.

Keeping in line with the designer’s general aesthetic of moneyed ease, Lauren’s new store is an important monument to an idea that Jews would do well to reclaim, the idea expressed in this week’s parasha: When you build, build gloriously.

Interior of Ralph Lauren Madison Avenue Mansion, New York.
Ralph Lauren

Few biblical quotes, arguably, have been more maligned. Confronted with this wrathful standard in the film version of Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye winces. “Very good,” he says. “That way the whole world will be blind and toothless.” Similarly worded rejections are attributed to Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi.

It’s not hard to see why: All that eye poking and tooth pulling feels a tad primeval for us enlightened folk. We prefer to talk about cooperation and collaboration and compassion. And, for the most part, we’re the better for it. When we read biblical bits like this week’s abundance of laws, it’s tempting to ignore the lot of them; after all, how many of us have to worry about our bull goring a neighbor, a loved one becoming a sorceress, or other ancient concerns that have little to do with our modern lives?

But the ancient laws are more relevant to us than we imagine. If we observe their spirit rather than their letter, we stand to uncover an array of astonishingly progressive legislation: protecting the rights of animals and servants, defending the well being of women, and taking other measures to ensure a just and robust society. There’s grace here, and love and kindness, but all these come at a cost: Break the rules, we’re told, take advantage, and you’d better watch out for those eyes and teeth.

There’s much evidence to suggest that we could use such a shot of harshness. Everywhere, from American classrooms to American Idol, we see the culture of entitlement: Whether they can actually sing or dance or do math, Americans are certain that they can, ignoring signs to the contrary. In boardrooms and newsrooms and just about anywhere else, delusional souls seek fortune and fame, break the rules, and, all too often, get away with it. In both Wikileaks and the Tea Party, we see the hissing sort of disdain for authority that, at its most extreme, can result in fatalities. An eye for an eye is the antidote to all that; an eye for an eye reminds us, in the bluntest terms imaginable, that we are masters of our own fates, that our actions have consequences, and that rather than hiding in the thicket of excuses and justifications that is so much of our public discourse today we should take responsibility for our decisions and prepare to be judged for our deeds.

All this talk, I realize, sounds ominous. It is also terribly abstract. I have, then, a concrete proposal. American Jews today, I believe, should raise their voice for responsibility and accountability, a sorely needed moral move. And the best way to do this is to bear arms.

I am well aware that the previous sentence may sound—comment vous dites?—crazy. Allow me a few qualifications: I don’t think that Jews should own guns because they face clear, present, and particular dangers as citizens of the United States. Nor do I believe that Jews should turn to guns instead of putting their trust, as everybody else does, in the criminal justice system, nor that the solution to our tortured body politic, God forbid, lies in some sort of proactive paramilitary action. What I do mean is that American Jews—a group whose cosmology of saints includes those famous for opposing power (Abraham Joshua Heschel, Elie Wiesel), those who mock power (Lenny Bruce, Jon Stewart), and those who’ve turned power into a harmless farce (Norman Mailer)—could use some locks, stocks, and barrels if they are to offer American society a vision as relevant to our times as those of Heschel and the other Jewish luminaries of the civil rights movement were to the 1950s and 1960s.

A personal anecdote might illustrate the point. I remember being 6 or 7 years old in Israel, playing with a toy gun, pointing it at my father and pretending to shoot. He looked at me, unsmiling. “Never,” he told me, his voice cold, “point a gun at something you don’t intend to kill.” My mind was reeling. I was just a boy, and it was just a game, but my innocuous play had been pierced by a sudden sense of reality, and I wasn’t sure what had happened.

A year later, when I shot my first real rifle, I understood. The kickback didn’t bother me much; what captivated me was the steely realization that the tool I now held in my hands gave me the power to take someone’s life, and that with such power—to quote my favorite political philosopher, Spider-Man’s uncle—came great responsibility. If I had the agency to kill, I thought, then I also had the agency to soothe and help and comfort. With my finger on the ultimate generator of consequences, I realized that I had the power to shape things, for better or for worse.

A few weeks ago, in Tuscon, another young man experienced a similar sentiment. Like me, he was a gun enthusiast, and if news reports about Jared Lee Loughner are to be believed, he, too, had given much thought to the strange tickling of omnipotence that comes with gun ownership. But unlike me, Loughner allegedly chose murder. Precisely why we may never know, but one possible reflection has to do with his creeping sense of powerlessness, an impotence that drove him to misunderstand Nietzsche and retreat into dreams and squeeze the trigger outside that Safeway on a Saturday morning. He’d spoken about his feelings of powerlessness in the YouTube videos and MySpace updates he left behind. Like so many Americans—supporters of Sarah Palin, fans of Julian Assange, contestants on televised talent shows—he was flummoxed by what he felt was the undue influence of menacing and shady elites. And rather than learn how to feel empowered, he grabbed a Glock and shot.

To many, the lesson to implement involves limiting access to firearms. This, I suspect, includes most of the American Jewish community, whose leading institutions all feature prominently on the National Rifle Association’s list of national organizations with anti-gun policies. But there is a different, far better answer: Rather than take away our guns—as an enthusiastic member of the NRA, I have a lot to say about the various perils of such a proposition—teach us how to handle them with care.

Imagine, then, instructors at summer camps or Hebrew schools or day schools ending their talks about Maimonides or tikkun olam by taking out a .22, passing it around the room, and asking each student to take a moment and reflect on the Talmudic edict that he who destroys a soul destroys the entire world while he who saves a life saves a world entire. With a .22 in hand, the saying becomes much more than a platitude; it becomes a way of life, a way of life devoted to contemplating the freedom we each have to act and the tragedy of choosing destruction over redemption.

This, I believe, is what empowerment is all about. It’s also what eye for an eye means: not wanton violence and blind vengeance, but a deep sense of responsibility that understands just how transient life is and just how careful we must be to preserve it.

Taking away, restricting, or limiting access to guns enforces the same logic of powerlessness at the heart of so many of our contemporary woes. I hope the Jewish community, so attuned to moral crises, might help change the acrimonious discussion about guns by making them a touchstone of personal responsibility rather than a banner of destruction.

More than a decade ago, when you took the stage at some crowded Tel Aviv banquet hall and gave your first speech as Israel’s prime minister-elect, I was standing in the back of the room, pressed against many of my friends, all of us dirty and exhausted. We had spent the previous weeks darting from street to street, putting up fliers, canvassing, doing whatever we could to convince whomever listened that you were a far better alternative to Benjamin Netanyahu. And when you won, by a landslide, we were all thrilled; after the bumbling Shimon Peres and the sinister Bibi, you were, we thought, just the man we needed. When you spoke of your election as the dawn of a new day, we believed you.

Earlier this week, as I sipped my morning coffee and watched you announce your decision to leave the Labor party, found an independent faction, and remain in Netanyahu’s Cabinet, the first thought that came to my mind was that quick, sweaty handshake you gave me as you were inching your way out of the room on the night of your victory in 1999. That evening, you had won the confidence of 670,484 Israelis, or 20 percent of voters, representing 26 seats in the Knesset. Exactly 10 years later, in your most recent electoral challenge, the numbers were very different: 334,900 votes, less than 10 percent of the voting public, 13 Knesset seats. In the course of 10 years of leadership, dear Ehud, you’ve cut your party’s electoral strength by exactly half, a disgrace very few other Western politicians can claim.

Momentous as your political failure is, it is not much of a factor in the profound and bubbling contempt I feel for you, a visceral enmity that few of your colleagues have inspired in my otherwise tranquil political imagination. Nor am I too hung up on your record as the squanderer-in-chief of precious opportunities, from peace with Syria—which you bumbled after flying to Washington, getting cold feet, refusing to disembark from your plane, and sending the Clinton Administration into a rage—to talks with the Palestinians, which you largely doomed with your impulsive, poorly thought-out decision to try to resolve a century-long conflict in two make-or-break weeks. What I resent more than anything, Ehud, is your catastrophic misunderstanding of the burdens of leadership.

You are, I know, a reader; you like to boast about having polished off James Joyce’s Ulysses in a matter of hours, a bit of bravado that seemed appealing when I was young and seems pathetic now. But take a look, then, at this week’s parasha—there’s a lesson there about leadership you cannot afford to ignore. As the story begins, Moses, groaning under the burden of being the sole leader of nearly a half-million people, is visited by his father-in-law, Jethro. The latter is quick with advice: “The thing you are doing is not good,” he tells Moses. “You will surely wear yourself out, both you and these people who are with you, for the matter is too heavy for you; you cannot do it alone.” The solution Jethro suggests is simple, and it involves deputizing competent leaders and judges and setting up a structured hierarchy.

You were preoccupied this week with emptily comparing yourself to past leaders, from David Ben Gurion to Ariel Sharon; you might want to reach further back into Jewish history and take a page from Moses. Seeing the merit in Jethro’s suggestion, Moses immediately cedes much of his own power. He understands that good governments, and good governors, are those capable of shaking the unshakable feeling that they alone know what’s best. You, Ehud, have allowed that false feeling of omnipotence to shake you.

In 2005, when you announced your return to politics, you told participants in an online Q&A that you and only you were capable of resuscitating the Labor Party, and that you anticipated winning as many as 35 Knesset seats. That never happened, and your reappointment, in 2007, as minister of defense brought with it a spirit of repression and arrogance that many close to you have decried, remembering, for example, how you had once told a well-respected and knowledgeable general who disagreed with your analysis to sit down and shut up. You treated your political colleagues with the same imperious impatience; when they disagreed with you, you accused them of being post-modern—as if Labor was manned by Jean Baudrillard and Jürgen Habermas rather than Benjamin Ben-Eliezer and Isaac Herzog—and left, leaving the party to lick the wounds you yourself had inflicted.

In light of all this, you might find Moses’ behavior puzzling. In giving up his power willingly, he, after all, is the ultimate freyer, or sucker, a character trait you’ve repeatedly mocked. Maybe, then, you should skip ahead in the parasha and get to its truly astonishing part: Designating the Israelites as his chosen people, God has his own thoughts about the nature of governance. “And now,” says the Lord, “if you obey Me and keep My covenant, you shall be to Me a treasure out of all peoples, for Mine is the entire earth. And you shall be to Me a kingdom of princes and a holy nation.”

Imagine that, Ehud—a whole kingdom of priests, a holy nation moved by the spirit, with little need for guidance and less for small men with large egos. These days, we’re seeing sparks of this utopian vision in the Middle East far away from Israel, in embattled Tunisia. As the citizens of that country fight to unburden themselves of the onus of a corrupt, despotic, and incompetent leadership, the world, for the most part, is deeply supportive. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for example, urged the Tunisian government to reflect “the wishes and aspirations of Tunisian people,” and the Arab League called on “all political forces, representatives of Tunisian society and officials to stand together and unite to maintain the achievements of the Tunisian people.” The word out of Jerusalem was distinctly different. Netanyahu expressed his concern about the popular uprising jeopardizing the “stability” in the region, while his deputy, the Tunisian-born Silvan Shalom, focused on the fate of the country’s approximately 2,000 Jews, as if the rest of those taking a risk and lifting their voices were negligible.

A Tunisian-style popular reform movement terrifies Netanyahu and Shalom, men whose careers are firmly rooted in the arid ground of the status quo. And I imagine it terrifies you, too: There’s little room in a kingdom of priests for bonapartes and solipsists. But the people are in the streets in Tunis, and they might soon be in the streets in Tel Aviv, too, tired of the corruption and opportunism and perfidiousness of their rotting political class. When that happens, don’t bother turning to this week’s parasha for inspiration. It would be too late.

Sincerely,

L. Leibovitz

Copy That

It’s a familiar story, of course—most of us spend one or two nights a year munching on matzoh, reclining, and retelling this tale to our families and friends—and it’s familiar by design. “Remember this day,” Moses tells his flock, “when you went out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage, for with a mighty hand, the Lord took you out of here.” It’s more than a passing suggestion: We are all commanded to speak of the Exodus each year, to introduce it to the next generation, to keep the collective memory vividly alive.

Taken literally, this is a strange demand. Shouldn’t memory, like the moon affecting the tide, take its natural toll on the heart and the mind alike? Shouldn’t we be allowed to remember what we want to remember and forget what we want to forget? This, surely, is true of individuals; but once a collection of selves congregates and contemplates peoplehood, the rules change. A people needs a story, upon which nations are founded and according to which history is understood. In his renowned book Imagined Communities, Cornell professor Benedict Anderson argued that America invented the notion of nationalism, creating a shared narrative powerful enough to bind together men and women who hailed from different parts of the world, lived in different parts of the country, and believed in different religious and political ideals.

In this week’s parasha, we see the same principle at work. As they prepare to flee Egypt, the Israelites are still a loose collection of clans, sharing little but common ancestry and the brunt of Egypt’s burden. But in the story of the exodus, and in the commandment to retell it in perpetuity, they have found the platform for peoplehood. Sharing a story is often much more meaningful than sharing DNA.

This idea, incidentally, is also the basis for our copyright laws. And it is everywhere under attack. While our current copyright laws, for example, allow copyright-holders to seek redress from individuals guilty of specific copyright infringement, a new bill that is likely to pass into law soon would give the government the right to shut down an entire website if the website was “dedicated to infringing activities.” The law, called the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeit Act of 2010, does not specify precisely what such dedication might mean, giving corporations a powerful tool to use not only against legitimate offenders but also against competing corporate entities. The recent case of Viacom v. YouTube, for example, would most likely have ended very differently had the media conglomerate had legal grounds to argue that the web video giant, despite all efforts to remove unlicensed content, still harbored many infringing materials and should therefore be shut down.

This is a perilous state of affairs, one that stands in direct contradiction to the original intent behind copyright law. Passed in 1710, the world’s first piece of copyright legislation, known as the Statute of Anne after the queen to which it was presented, makes this point explicitly. The law’s full title was “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned.” It’s a mouthful, but it gets the point across: Rather than grant authors or publishers perpetual ownership of their creations, as had been the case for decades, the law required that all works be made available to the public after a certain period of time, for the benefit of the common good. It is no coincidence that the statute came only a few short decades after John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government; if, as Locke famously argued, the only legitimate governments are those who govern by consent of the people, then the people must be educated. For that to happen, they need access to shared resources, an interest that trumps even that of private property. So was born the public domain.

Unfortunately, in the hands of lobbyists and legislators, this noble idea dies a little each year. When Charles Pinckney of South Carolina and James Madison of Virginia drafted the nation’s first copyright law in 1790, they were content with giving authors the rights to their work for 28 years; by 1998, the term limit has climbed as high as life of the author plus an additional 70 years. This grants creators and publishers excessive protection, leaving the rest of us with a staid and struggling public domain.

As we read this week’s parasha, then, let us be reminded once more of the importance of shared stories, and let us zealously guard those shared spaces that corporations, politicians, and other interested parties are forever trying to make private and profitable. Without such common resources, without a public domain, what we have is not a culture but a marketplace. Emma Goldman, whose work entered the public domain this week, said it best. “Heaven,” she quipped, “must be an awfully dull place if the poor in spirit live there.” Let us struggle to make sure that is never the case.

But for this, the last column of the year, I couldn’t face another dose of fury. Contemplating my new year’s resolutions, I promised to try and sidle up to grace. I promised myself calm and lovingkindness. It was in that pacified state of mind that I sat down to write this column. And then I learned that this week’s parasha was all about the first round of plagues inflicted by Moses on the hard-hearted Pharaoh. I had wanted a cheerful and soft send-off to 2010; instead, what I got was pestilence, blood, frogs, and boils.

Refusing to succumb to all that awesome celestial vengeance, I put on Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, one of very few albums I know that possess the quality of redemption. No matter what afflictions you, the listener, might bring into the experience, no matter how much woe or heartache or ennui or sweet melancholy, Morrison’s howls—and the swirling musical notes that accompany them—will purge you of your sadness. One emerges from listening to the record like a man exiting a darkened theater into a bright spring afternoon: a few blinks of the eye, a few breaths of air, and nothing but beauty all around.

And while great works of art hardly have need for biographical notations, the story of Astral Weeks is one worth retelling. In 1968, then 23 years old and a mildly successful pop star, Morrison found himself in the house of legal bondage: The year before, he had signed a contract with Bang Records and was dismayed when Bert Berns, the label’s owner and chief producer, seized control over every facet of the creative process. Berns selected the studio musicians, arranged the songs, and gave Morrison’s debut solo album the unfortunate title Blowin’ Your Mind! One song, “Brown-Eyed Girl,” became a huge hit, and Berns pushed Morrison to follow up with more in the same spirit and write nothing but sweet, weightless pop anthems. But Morrison had other ideas, impressionistic slivers of song that ebbed and flowed in his mind and lacked anything nearing a conventional structure. Incensed at Morrison’s reticence, Bert Berns had a heart attack and passed away.

His widow, Ilene, was livid. Whether or not she blamed Morrison for her husband’s untimely death—conflicting accounts exist on this matter—she refused to set the singer free. Her heart, too, was hardened.

Moses, facing a similar predicament in this week’s parasha, had Aaron to lean on; Van Morrison had Lewis Merenstein. The priest of Israel turned his staff into a snake and watched with delight as it devoured the wands of the Pharaoh’s sorcerers. The New York record producer arranged a complicated legal compromise that released Morrison from his commitments to Bang Records. The first time he’d heard the young Irish singer play his stuff, Merenstein later recalled, “I started crying. It just vibrated in my soul.”

Whisked off to a studio, Morrison had no time to prepare for his exodus. He was assigned a band of musicians, most of whom he’d never before met, and told to start singing. To allow him to commune with the spirit of the song, he was placed in an isolated recording booth with his guitar, unable to see or hear the others, a sound-proof plexiglass Mount Sinai of sorts. There, he let loose.

The musicians were perplexed. Usually, even the wildest jam session begins with a lead sheet, a skeletal arrangement of sorts that gives the players some idea of where a tune is headed and leaves them to fill in the details and add their own flourishes. Van Morrison provided nothing of the kind. Guitarist Jay Berliner, hired by Merenstein, later recalled the peculiar difficulties of the Astral Weeks sessions. “Van just played us the songs on his guitar,” he said, “and then told us to go ahead and play exactly what he felt.”

What Van Morrison felt was urgency. “There was no choice,” he told NPR’s Josh Gleason in 2009. “I was totally broke. So, I didn’t have time to sit around pondering or thinking all this through. It was just done on a basic pure survival level. I did what I had to do.”

Other albums—Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Pet Sounds—may be more monumental than Astral Weeks. Others yet—The Velvet Underground & Nico—may be more influential. But no other album, I believe, surpasses the audacity, the wonder, the desperation, and the joy of Astral Weeks. It is of all musical genres and of none at all, and its lyrics—with lines like “If I ventured in the slipstream/ Between the viaducts of your dream”—are as close as pop would ever get to closing its eyes and dreaming. For spiritual seekers, people willing to wander for a few decades in the desert because they know for certain that the promised land awaits, there can be no better companion than this record.

Lester Bangs, perhaps the finest rock writer who ever lived, was one of those seekers. “Van Morrison was twenty-two or twenty-three years old when he made this record,” Bangs wrote. “There are lifetimes behind it. What Astral Weeks deals in are not facts but truths. Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend.”

This pretty much describes us all, especially as we stare at another new year charging our way. We may be stunned by life, we may be completely overwhelmed, but we are not alone.

The snitch, the snout, the squeal, the stool pigeon—is there a more complicated and compelling character? There he is, in the center of one true-crime drama after another, traitorous and infuriating, on the right side of the law but the wrong side of the story. We upstanding citizens idolize Jesse James but revile his cowardly assassin Robert Ford; we adore Dillinger but despise Anna Sage, the Romanian immigrant who ratted out the legendary gangster in the false hope that she’d be granted a green card in return for her service. Why this animosity toward men and women whose sole transgression was turning to the authorities?

The answer has a lot to do with the conventions of storytelling in general and the crime genre in particular, a genre that has birthed a succession of memorable anti-heroes, from Edward G. Robinson’s Little Caesar to James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano. But it may have as much to do with the machinations of human morality: As an ongoing study of snitching suggests, tattling is a far more complex matter than previously believed.

Dr. Rick Frei began The Snitching Study at the Community College of Philadelphia in 2007, when he surveyed residents of the City of Brotherly Love about their attitudes toward telling on each other. The study was largely a response to Stop Snitchin’, a national ersatz campaign that sprang into life in 2004 and featured prominent figures—from rapper Lil’ Wayne to NBA star Carmelo Anthony—cautioning their fans not to cooperate with the police. As is often the case with our quicksilver culture, the campaign was soon cast as yet another controversial battlefield in the never-ending culture wars, with politicians like Boston Mayor Thomas Menino taking such strict measures as ordering all T-shirts emblazoned with the Stop Snitchin’ logo removed from city stores. The majority of media reports portrayed the campaign’s supporters as nihilistic, petulant, and irresponsible. Determined to understand why some people saw snitching as an unpardonable offense while others saw it as a civic duty, Dr. Frei and his students started asking questions.

Their findings are surprising. Above all, they discovered a direct correlation between snitching and initiative: To truly be a snitch, one had to act in one’s own self-interest, knowingly and proactively. While 82.6 percent of respondents said that ratting someone out in order to avoid the consequences of one’s own criminal actions constituted snitching, only 15.8 percent thought that someone submitting to police questioning after witnessing a crime was a snitch.

Such distinctions are far from minor. Taken as a whole, they constitute a serious moral platform, one that values communal cohesion above personal gain. Take, for example, the case of the rapper Cam’ron. A victim of violent crime—he was carjacked and shot at close range—he had refused to identify his shooter to the police. In 2007, he was interviewed by 60 Minutes and asked if he would consider calling the cops if he learned a serial killer had just settled in next door. Cam’ron’s reply—he said he would consider moving but would never dial 911—infuriated pundits and politicians, but it is, in fact, wholly aligned with what many consider to be the foundation for Western morality, Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative.

Kant’s idea, simply put, is a philosophical principle constructed of three maxims: a person acts morally if his or her behavior would be unconditionally right for anyone else in a similar situation; a person acts morally if he or she treats others not as means to an end but as ends in themselves; and a person acts morally if his or her actions can establish a universal law governing all other similar cases. In other words, we must follow what Kant called “pure practical reason” and pursue actions regardless of incentives but merely because these actions are right in and of themselves. In his interview, Cam’ron was saying more or less the same thing: Snitching was wrong, and even if he himself had much to gain in having his homicidal neighbor arrested, he would rather continue and adhere to the universal code.

Moses would most likely agree. In this week’s parasha, the future leader of the Israelites, rescued from death and raised by the Pharaoh’s daughter, is ambling around Egypt. Seeing an Egyptian man striking a fellow Israelite, Moses loses his cool and kills the assailant. The very next day, the parasha tells us, this happens: “He went out on the second day, and behold, two Hebrew men were quarreling, and he said to the wicked one, ‘Why are you going to strike your friend?’ And he retorted, ‘Who made you a man, a prince, and a judge over us? Do you plan to slay me as you have slain the Egyptian?’ Moses became frightened and said, ‘Indeed, the matter has become known!’ ”

This story, Rashi suggests, can be read on two different levels. Taken literally, it couldn’t be simpler: Breaking up the fight between the two Hebrews, Moses is warned not to intervene lest they inform the authorities of his slaying of the Egyptian man the day before. Fearful, Moses mutters that “the matter has become known,” the matter being his crime. But Rashi digs deeper: In saying “the matter has become known,” he argues, Moses really means that now he understands why the Israelites were condemned to slavery—the wicked Hebrew man beating his brother and threatening to snitch on Moses if he intervened is the embodiment of the moral failures that have propelled God to inflict such a severe punishment on His people.

Like Cam’ron, Moses understands that when people do what’s right for them rather than what is simply right, society slowly crumbles. It’s a principle all of us would do well to recall.

In conversation with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry, Hazony warns against dismissing these ancient pronouncements as simple or obvious. Rather, he says, they are worthy of study, and of being followed—even the one about not coveting our neighbor’s ox. [Running time: 20:26.]

Even in the 1940s, my mother said, Helen was still a griner, a newcomer. She came green, stayed green, and died green, when green was still uncool. My mother’s favorite Green Helen story is about movie-going: At the RKO Keith’s, in Flushing, the two roommates would buy tickets and a box of nonpareils, watch a newsreel or two about the war, then take in a double feature. Later, over dinner, Helen would retell the newsreels in Yiddish for Sadye and Morris, who had stood all afternoon selling white blouses and black slips. But when it came to the features, her retellings were all her own. It was all one story, the break between films merely another intermission. An afternoon split between Yankee Doodle Dandy and Mrs. Miniver would be told as a sweeping epic of a tummler who grows up to be summoned to the White House, where he meets with Roosevelt while bombs are falling over the Minivers huddled in their shelter, who emerge to daven in their ruined church and potchke with their roses. Jimmy Cagney dissolved into Greer Garson; wisecracking hoofers wore stiff upper lips. To Helen, the movies were chaotic and unpredictable, no more or less, say, than getting on a train at Sochoczew and off a steamer at Castle Garden, or moving from Abie’s to Reizl’s to Sadye’s. Life was like that.

Perhaps for Jews life has always been like that, fractured and disrupted. We tell ourselves that Jewish life comes in cycles: from sunset to noon to nightfall; from harvest to frost to spring lambs; from birth to brit to bar mitzvah to marriage to (your middle-aged milestone here) to death. But most of the time life doesn’t feel cyclical. It’s rent by gap years, layoffs, and divorces. The pale, freckled faces that depart bear no resemblance to the bald, pink-mouthed strangers who arrive.

Take Simchat Torah morning, when Jews everywhere run circles around the Torah, rejoicing that ends turn into beginnings. We’re here for the double bill, and it’s all one story, this triumphant story of ours. V’zot habracha, we chant, this is the blessing of God’s man, Moses, bidding farewell; bereishit, we continue, in the beginning. Our technicolor Torah is an epic of blessings, a feature fit for God to watch in his heavenly balcony, over and over again.

I think about Helen, and I think, life isn’t like that. Torah’s not like that. It’s more like this:

God’s news for Moses has not gone down well: You will die on the mountain, and you will not enter. It must be a pretext, thinks Moses, it’s outrageous. He implores the earth and the heavens, the sun and the moon, the stars and the planets, to take up his cause, but for naught. The earth turns over; stars twinkle and blink. Surely the sea will plead for me, O Sea!, Moses thinks, but his roar is lost in the crashing waves. When Israel supplicates for Moses’ life, the angels Zakun and Lahash, in latex gloves, snatch up their words.

It’s not life he’s jealous of; it’s the land. Moses tells God he’ll go as a nobody. “No way,” says God. “You’re royalty.” I’ll dig a cave under the Jordan, Moses says; “No way,” says God. “A crossing’s a crossing.” At least let my bones go up, like Joseph’s, Moses says. “At least Joseph called himself a Hebrew,” says God. “But you? When the daughters of Jethro called you Egyptian, not a peep. No way. I’m putting my money on Joshua.”

God’s made up his mind; the countdown begins. “Six hours to live!” says God. I’ll live as a beast, says Moses; I’ll prey and scrounge. “Forget it,” says God; “that’s five.” Then as a bird, picking at rags and sipping at puddles, says Moses; silence, except for the angel Michael, weeping. I’ll defer to Joshua, I’ll be taught by him, says Moses. “Make me believe it,” says God. “That’s three.” Not even a hand or a foot? asks Moses, incredulous. “Don’t be ridiculous; that’s two,” says God.

He’ll try what always worked before; quote God back to himself. You have said, says Moses, I singled you out by name, and you have, indeed, gained My favor–but God cuts him off. “Been there, done that,” says God. “One more.” In the hour of his death, Moses’ soul wails brokenly, as only souls can. His thirsty soul, which marched through the desert when other souls soaked in the hot tubs of Gan Eden, his faithful soul that never grumbled and never looked back. “No,” cries his soul, “I won’t go, I can’t,” but Moses can’t stand the crying. As soon as he says, “There there, go rest, dear soul,” she’s in a kimono, flitting to heaven.

Then God knows: Never again would there arise in Israel a prophet like Moses. Never again, face to face. Never again, the bargaining and bullying, the wrath and forgiveness, the turning away and turning back. Never again, to be held in the cleft of pleasure, in Moses’ eye, showing far more than God had intended, than God thought he should.

Then it comes to God: He will sit on a rock and grieve for seven days.

And while he grieves it returns to him, the radiant face, in darkness and wind, in a welter of soot, in whelming waves. “Let there be light,” he says, and there is light. He tastes it now, the bitter water Moses turned sweet, and he gathers the waters into a sea. In each eye of the shepherd, a burning bush, “a great light for day and a lesser for night.” A tiny ark adrift in the Nile, “let the waters swarm.” Moses, a father of sons, and he brings out trees and fruit and seed.

In his ear, the plague of buzzing and bleating—gnats and goats, frogs and cows, oxen and sheep—so he makes them all, those who crawl and those who creep.

Through his mind flows a river of blood; he makes hydras and krakens.

From a leprous hand, drawn out of a cloak, from scabs and boils, he fashions flesh, smooth and firm, a shoulder, a calf, a buttock, a breast, and makes them one and one.

Six days, and the heaven and earth were completed, and all their array. He sits for one more day, and holds the new world close and still, as if Moses, too, had made it.

This is what I once told a congregation, at a festive Simchat Torah dinner, that the creation of the world was God’s shiva for Moses. It was not what they came for, and out of step with the klezmer and the schnapps and the candy apples. But they’d gone on to decaf, and they sipped and considered. Afterward, one polite man said I was “idiosyncratic.” Well, my middle name is Helen. Let’s say I’m Helen, my grandmother, in the middle, which is just where the endings are, though Helen never seemed to notice.

Esther Schor is a poet and professor of English at Princeton University. She is the author of Emma Lazarus, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters Series.

Until two years ago, I was no more familiar with the Torah than I was with Beverly Hills, 90210.

I admit that I knew both texts intimately: Growing up in Israel, I spent each Friday afternoon with one and each Saturday morning with the other. I followed closely the stories each told. I memorized the kind of negligible details only a youthful admirer might notice, like Noah’s age when he died (950) or the license plate on Steve Sanders’ Corvette (I8A4RE. Say it quickly). But I was not a thoughtful consumer of either sacred text. I read and watched, but I didn’t care much.

When I was asked to begin writing a weekly column for Tablet’s predecessor, Nextbook, commenting on the week’s parsha, or Torah portion, I approached the task with wry amusement. My mandate was to unearth any relevance the Torah may have to contemporary life, and to ascertain what, if anything, we young, secular, and not exceedingly educated Jews might learn from the Good Book. I looked forward to writing biting critiques that gently mocked the ancient book’s strange and antiquated stories. I expected to feel everything but enlightenment.

Two years into my journey—after a year of writing about the parsha, I moved on to commenting on the haftorah, the weekly reading from the Book of Prophets that supplements the Torah portion—I have changed in profound ways. I have no plans to observe the Sabbath, and I still consider my burger bereft unless veiled by a thick layer of Gruyère, but reading the Bible closely each week, and asked to grapple with its meanings, I feel more resilient than I’d ever been in my faith.

Some readers, I know, may be unwilling to free faith from the tethers of ritual and will consider my own brand of belief invalid or flawed. Without delving into details—the intricacies of the matter are too great to paint on such a modest canvass—I will say that at the core of my faith is a fervent belief in God, coupled with a strong skepticism that any one human, or any one book, could ever grasp the entirety, the enormity of his mysterious and ultimately unknowable will.

And while I don’t believe the Bible to be literally divine, I have come to see in it an astonishingly astute guide to human thought and behavior, a beacon in whose light us moderns—having ravaged with conviction every last bit of certainty, weary with knowledge and wary of truth—might do well to walk.

Of all the lessons the Torah had taught me, one stands above all: There is a God, but the rest is up to us.

Consider Sinai. If we look at the Bible as a tale, the moment at the foothill of the mount is its absolute peak. Everything we’ve read so far has been leading up to this. God chooses Noah, then Abraham, then makes Abraham into a nation, then banishes that nation into exile in Egypt. Finally, they are redeemed. Finally, God is willing to speak to the whole people. He’ll give them his living word, his law. He’ll tell them what it’s all about. But here’s what God has to say: “Ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation.” That’s it.

Listening intently, the Israelites may be forgiven for feeling somewhat swindled. God, after all, had just told them that they were his Chosen People, but he hadn’t told them why, and, more bafflingly, he hadn’t told them what, now that he had conferred on them this most singular status, he expected them to do with it. A kingdom of priests? A holy nation? That’s hardly a blueprint for peoplehood.

At the heart of Divine Election—a chosenness that extends in time and applies not just to the particular people huddling in the desert millennia ago but to all Jews in perpetuity—is doubt. We understand, of course, that observing God’s laws is an irrevocable component of redemption, but it is not the only one. Sinai suggests something else, something spiritual. It invites us to wonder what it means, to question how we should act to prove worthy of being the Lord’s favorite sons and daughters. It puts the onus on us.

This, I believe, is one of the Bible’s most awesome tenets. Judaism shies away from heavenly arithmetic; it is not a world where the good and the bad are both calculated, measured against some divine standard, and used to determine life and fate. It’s not a religion that poses a straight and narrow path to salvation and punishes anyone who transgresses. Instead, in weekly portion after weekly portion, we get deliberate ambiguity and exhortations to take action.

Take Isaiah, for example. “This people I formed for Myself,” says the prophet, channeling the voice of God. “They shall recite My praise. But you did not call Me, O Jacob, for you wearied of Me, O Israel. You did not bring Me the lambs of your burnt offerings, nor did you honor Me with your sacrifices; neither did I overwork you with meal-offerings nor did I weary you with frankincense. Neither did you purchase cane for Me with money, nor have you sated Me with the fat of your sacrifices. But you have burdened Me with your sins; you have wearied Me with your iniquities. I, yea I, erase your transgressions for My sake, and your sins I will not remember.”

Writing about this passage a few weeks ago, I commented on its astounding lack of causality: The people sin grievously, yet God gracefully forgives. In Judaism, unlike its sister monotheistic religions, salvation doesn’t necessarily depend on prior action. Salvation comes first; what you choose to do with it is the whole point.

That is the message of Isaiah, the message of Sinai, the message of Moses and numerous others of our spiritual founding fathers. It’s a message of responsibility and of purposefulness. It’s also a message of freedom: Rather than a painting-by-numbers approach to morality and mortality—follow the rules and go straight to heaven—Judaism revolves around that chief faculty that distinguishes us from God’s other creations, namely free will. The rules are all set, but we’re free to rebel.

Which, needless to remind, we do. Forty days after receiving the Word of God, the Israelites make themselves a golden calf. For 40 years in the desert, they gripe and moan. They’re such incurable complainers that God himself calls them a stiff-necked people. And yet he seldom punishes them and never abandons them. He knows they’re human and that the only way they can be redeemed is not by accepting him unconditionally, or subjecting themselves to his every word, but by slowly overcoming their own weaknesses and learning to be a little bit more divine each day.

At its center, then, Judaism places Man. Blessed in his confusion, holy in his errors, searching. The search is the thing; the goal is less important. Not for us all this eschatology: Time and again, the rabbis remind us that there is no difference between this world and the days of the Messiah except for removing the yoke of foreign bondage. Our Messiah is not only ordinary, he’s a paradox: As Michael Walzer astutely noted, the Jewish Messiah can only come when the entire people are worthy of him, by which point the Messiah is no longer needed. If it’s salvation we want, Judaism teaches us, we’re going to have to do it ourselves.

These are some of the lessons I’ve learned from reading the Bible. I’d like to think that they’ve made me more observant, not in practice but in thought. Like those trembling Hebrews at Sinai, I’m overwhelmed by the peerless heights; I look up and can’t see the sky. And like them, too, I suspect that there’s a good 40-year-trek lying ahead, most likely with no Promised Land on the other side. Never mind; I’ve got one hell of a guidebook.

Here are lyrics to four songs.

“Some Hebrews”

MOSES
[Spoken.] You just don’t get it, do you, Aaron? Anyone who stays in Egypt is dead! If I die, it won’t be from slaving. It’ll be from fighting, to get up and get out!

Some Hebrews can get a thrill
Hauling stones up a sandy hill
That’s OK for some Hebrews
Who don’t know they’re alive

Some Hebrews can thrive and bloom
Digging pits for some Pharaoh’s tomb
That’s perfect for some Hebrews
For four centuries or five

But I at least gotta try
When I think of all the sights that I gotta see
And all the prayers that I gotta pray
All the tables I gotta eat at
Come on, Aaron, whatta you say?

Some Hebrews can get their kicks
Cutting straw and then making bricks
That’s peachy for some Hebrews
For some weak, dumb Hebrews to be
But some Hebrews ain’t me!

I had a dream
A wonderful dream, Aaron
All about God in a bush that was burning
That’s all that it took for the wheels to start turning

I had a dream
Just as real as can be, Aaron
There I was in Mr. Almighty’s office
And he was saying to me, “Mose,
Turn your old staff into a serpent
Plagues of frogs and blood in the river
Send a cloud of locusts to Egypt
Boils and hail and death to the firstborn
Go to Pharaoh, if he’s in pain then
You’ll be on your way back to Canaan!”

Oh, what a dream!
A wonderful dream, Aaron
And all that I need is 88 bucks, Aaron
That’s what he said, Aaron
Only 88 bucks

AARON
[Spoken.] You ain’t getting 88 cents from me, Moses

MOSES
[Spoken.] Well, I’ll get it some place else! But I’ll get it! And I’ll get my people out!

Goodbye to the Desert Sinai!
Good riddance to all the rocks that I had to carry
All the bricks that I had to cart
All the mummies I had to bury
Hey, Red Sea, get ready to part!

Some Hebrews sit on their butts
Hope for freedom, but got no nuts
That’s living for some Hebrews
For some dumb bum Hebrews I suppose
Well they can stay and rot!
But not Mose!

“Little Pascal Lamb”

YOUNG FIRSTBORN EGYPTIAN CHILD
Little blood, river blood
You left us with nasty mud
Little frog, little frog
Your croaking freaked out my dog
Little louse, little louse
Infected our whole damn house
Little cow, little cow
You’re no longer with us now
Little boil! Little boil!
You’re giving us all the blues
We look in the mirror and recoil
The dermatologists all are Jews
Little hail, burning hail
The firewall did not prevail
Little night, endless night
Will we ever again see light?
Will we ever again see—
[The Young Egyptian Firstborn Child falls down dead.]

“Everything’s Coming Up Moses”

MOSES
[Spoken.] It’s time we show them what Moses is really made of, what I really got inside me. Finished? Ha! This is only the beginning!

I had a dream, a dream about you, Aaron
It’s gonna come true, Aaron
You think that we’re through, but Aaron—

Lift the staff! Part the sea!
We got nothin’ to do but be free
Manna falls from the sky
Honey, everything’s coming up Moses

No more fights, no more fuss!
It’s the number we call Exodus!
Gotta rush, gotta fly
Honey, everything’s coming up Moses!

On to freedom, build your own pyramids
Jews don’t need ’em, they got a prophet to lead ’em!

Don’t need light! Don’t need bread!
Got a pillar of clouds overhead
We’ll be fine, we’ll be great
We’ll kvell, just you wait
That burning bush will never fade from view!
Honey, everything’s coming up Moses for me and for you!

We can do it, get to the old Promised Land
We can do it, Moses is gonna see to it!
Don’t need light! Don’t need bread!
Got a pillar of clouds overhead!
Lift the staff, part the sea
I can tell, we’ll be free
And no one’s gonna stop the freaking Jews!
Honey, everything’s coming up Moses and Miriam
Everything’s coming up farfel and matza brei
Everything’s coming up brisket and seder plates
Everything’s coming up Moses for me and for you!

“You Gotta Make a Living”

WISE SON
You can sing Aleinu
Til they say Dayenu
Bench at the bench til you’re bent
But you gotta make a living
If you wanna make your rent
You can sacrifice a heifer
Ostracize a leper
Spend Yom Kippur on your feet
But you gotta make a living
If you want your kids to eat

You can oy, you can oy
You can oy oy oy
It ain’t such a draw
Me I oy, and I oy
And I oy oy oy
In my practice of the law
My arguments are thrilling
And I ain’t even billing
I was first in my class at the bar
Make yourself a living
Israelites, and you’ll go far

WICKED SON
You can oy, you can oy
You can oy oy oy
It won’t make you well
Me I oy’d, and I oy’d
And oy’d, oy’d, oy’d
But I did it at Cornell
Tell me it’s farkakte
I’m still a fancy doctor
And clearing half a million a year
Make yourself a living
You can say goodbye to fear

SIMPLE SON
They can oy, they can oy
They can oy oy oy
That ain’t the golden goose
Me I oy, and I oy
And I oy oy oy
Yep, you guessed it—I produce!
Once I was a failure
Now I’m L.B. Mayer
For everything from films to Broadway
Make yourself a living
If you wanna win the day

ALL
Be a professional
Any old profession’ll
Earn you a house and a car
It’s easy to be giving
When you make a living
Can’t you see how happy we are
Make yourself a living
And you, Jew, can be a star!

Tweet the Exodus’s second entry reads, “In every generation, one is obliged to see oneself as if one personally came forth from Egypt.” In this age of online living, I can think of no more appropriate way to fulfill that demand.

Tweet The Exodus
Passover Meets Twitter [WSJ]

Equally wide-ranging and diverse are the Americans for whom Moses was a household name and a moral touchstone. In their darkest days, the Pilgrims sought comfort by reading about Moses’ tribulations, Feiler tells us, as did the founding fathers for whom the “reluctant leader of Israelite slaves end[s] up as the favorite son.” An affection for Moses also ran in families: Henry Ward Beecher and his sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe were quite smitten with him. But then, so, too, were Cecil B. DeMille and Martin Luther King Jr. Feiler’s inventory of Moses’ fans and champions is so encompassing and expansive, you have to wonder whether there was anyone at all in America who did not cotton to the man.

Drawing on dozens of vignettes, the author goes further still, insisting that there’s hardly an American institution that has not been touched by Moses’ staff. Feiler is so taken with his subject, in fact, that he is moved to write in one of the book’s most eye-opening sentences that “Moses is our true founding father. His face belongs on Mount Rushmore.”

In his exuberant telling of Moses’ popularity and far-reaching impact on virtually every nook and cranny of American life, Feiler can’t help sounding a little like the author of The Da Vinci Code. He moves at breakneck speed and peppers his prose with lots of “aha”s. Cycling quickly through broad swaths of time and complex historical phenomena as if they were stops along the Tour de France, Feiler dispatches George Washington’s putative relationship with Moses, say, in a brisk couple of pages before moving on to something else entirely. His account accumulates encounters, quotes, and choice details, overwhelming the reader with a mountain of information.

And yet, there’s nary a footnote in sight. Instead, the book’s authority rests largely on Feiler himself. He puts his quest for Moses the American at the center of the narrative, seeking out thinkers like Peter Gomes, Jonathan Sarna, and Michael Walzer for tête-à-têtes about the biblical character’s impact on America; visiting museum curators; donning the costume that Charlton Heston wore when he played Moses in DeMille’s The Ten Commandments; and even meeting with George W. Bush in the White House for a chat about Moses’ impact on the presidency.

After making my way through America’s Prophet, I don’t doubt that America—then, as now—found the Israelite leader to be a most congenial fellow, bending him to its own political, rhetorical, and symbolic uses. But the Moses who inhabits these pages ends up being so protean and malleable a figure that it’s hard to figure out where he begins and America ends. Feiler’s unabashed celebration of his subject, whom he likens at one point to a “kind of American Hamlet,” leaves little room for nuance, equivocation, and the sifting of sources. The hundreds of references to and perspectives on the man that animate the book end up sounding the same note: three cheers for Moses. The net effect is to flatten rather than clarify his appeal.

In the end, Feiler is so busy trumpeting America’s affinity for the biblical figure that you are left to wonder what the affinity actually proves. What does it say about this great big republic of ours that so many of its leaders made use of Moses and the Exodus story for their own ends—as a call to arms, a rallying point, a cautionary tale? Why did the United States clasp Moses to its bosom when so many other God-fearing nations did not? Where are we to draw the line between religion and politics or, for that matter, between religion and the public square? By the time we put down America’s Prophet, we’re none the wiser. But we sure can cite chapter and verse.

Jenna Weissman Joselit is a professor of Judaic studies and history at George Washington University. She is currently at work on a book about America’s relationship to the Ten Commandments.

He did, however, manage to kill one of his assailants, and with his flesh shredded by the fusillade turned to one of his lieutenants. “Don’t let it end like this,” Villa is believed to have said. “Tell them I said something.”

Possessing the wherewithal to realize famous last words were in order but not the wit to craft the appropriate parting statement, Villa is a perfect guide into a territory too often scorched by its dangerous proximity to death. It’s the territory of legacy.

Legacy, as the hapless Pancho learned all too well, is as much an urge as it is a rational contemplation. Staring at the masked gunmen, Villa could think of nothing else but his appointment with posterity. He ached for Trumpeldor’s thundering “Never mind, it is good to die for one’s country,” or even Vespasian’s maniacal “Me thinks I’m turning into a god.” Anything but dying wordless.

His last words, if indeed he ever spoke them, may not inspire generations of men to take up arms and the cause, but they do shed light on an essential human truth: faced with death, we strive for a neat summary, one more act of asserting our agency before we cease to be what we’ve always been, our selves.

To hear Heidegger tell it, such last-ditch efforts are missing the point. Man, he would say, is unique among all other beings because he is the only creature acutely aware of the inevitability of his own demise. In other words, what sets us apart from the beasts is that we know we’re going to die, a realization that, in turn, informs each hour of our lives. The moment of death, to further simplify Heidegger somewhat cavalierly, is our moment of ripening, the fruition of our human quest. But as death knocks gently, we’re never there; death is the one thing we can never experience simply because we no longer are.

How to solve this conundrum? What to do when we face the darkness? How to die gracefully? Just ask Moses.

This week’s parasha is a melancholy one for the aged leader. It takes place on the last day of his life. Knowing that he is a few hours away from the yawning forever, Moses refuses to pull a Pancho and scramble for some final sermon by which to be remembered. Instead, he sings a song.

It’s solemn and gorgeous and, with locutions like “My lesson will drip like rain,” reverberates with an elegant and confident flow that would make even Kanye blush. But the point is not so much what’s being said—Moses again warns the Israelites to observe the Torah lest God abandon them—as what’s missing. What’s missing is Moses.

After the bit with the Pharaoh, the spell of plagues, the parting sea, the golden calf, the ten commandments and the four decades in the desert—after all that one would think that the fading father would feel a slight urge to say something personal, something, perhaps, along the lines of “you won’t have Moses to kick around anymore.” But Moses, to borrow a phrase from contemporary political parlance, stays on message; he warns the people once more, and then gets ready for his final curtain.

It wouldn’t have been such a heartbreaking moment—the death of a 120-year-old man seldom is—if we didn’t know it had no happy ending. But as soon as Moses concludes his song, God commands him to climb atop Mount Nebo and peer at Jericho shining in the distance. For his sins, God reminds his beleaguered servant, Moses will die without entering the Promised Land he had sought for so long.

But even allowing for this punitive explanation, a deeper meaning suggests itself: Moses is forbidden from entering Canaan not only for his infractions, but also because permitting him this final act of grace might portray life as life seldom is, as a coherent narrative slouching toward a unified clear goal. But life thrashes and collapses, jerks and jibes. It suddenly begins and just as suddenly ends. We grasp on to notions like legacy or to elegant epitaphs, thinking those may give us a leg up on death’s crushing abruptness, but they never do. Instead, we’re just yanked out of the story one fine morning or one balmy afternoon, and our Jerichos are always shining in the distance, never entered.

No despair, Moses tells us in his subtle way. Such is life. To prepare for death, he suggests, forget about yourself, the self that soon will be no more. Speak instead to those who’ll stay behind. Tell the people once more of fate and faith. Make them listen, then say goodbye. That, the departing leader knows, is as close as a human being can come to a legacy, to agency, to immortality.

As this weekly column comes to a close—we’ve now worked our way through the entire Torah—I wish I had a clever last line, something witty and piercing you, dear readers, would remember for a long time. I don’t. But don’t let it end like this: if anybody asks, tell them I said something.

The political climate is even hotter. Every town seems to hold town hall meetings, and in every town hall a gaggle of goons, screaming and making obscene charges, turns up the heat some more.

I would hate, dear readers, to add to the exhaustion and exasperation this summer has wrought. I would feel terrible knowing I’ve contributed yet another voice to the cacophonous choir screaming from every channel on air. And so, let us abandon the ides of summer for something completely different.

Like Moses.

If President Obama thinks the gun-toting maniacs lurking outside his public appearances are a tough lot to govern, he should take a peek at Deuteronomy; both physically and politically, the Israelites’ desert makes Washington’s swamps seem cool and calm in comparison.

Increasingly weary, nearing the end of his term and the end of his life, Moses speaks to the people. And as he orates, his tone grows angrier, more impatient. He has no time for platitudes. What he doesn’t get across, he realizes, might be forgotten as soon as he passes away. He speaks in growingly strong sentences.

Here’s one, from this week’s parasha, a short quip that had since come to adorn many a synagogue wall. “Justice,” Moses booms, “justice shall you pursue.”

To hear the aging leader tell it, it’s a fairly simple pursuit. As long as we are truthful and diligent, as long as we take great care before we wildly throw around accusations, as long as we respect and obey the hierarchy we set in place to govern us and adjudicate in our quarrels, we’ll be just fine.

Reading Moses’s dictates, however, it’s hard not to find oneself back in the present moment, in the thicket that is the debate over health-care reform. The pursuit of justice, the curbing of baseless accusations, the basic respect for our institutions, these are the fronts on which we fail miserably.

Consider the business of death panels. Distorting language in the proposed health care bill that seeks to require Medicare to cover counseling sessions on sensitive end-of-life issues if a person wishes to receive such consultation, Republicans—most notably former vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin and Sen. Chuck Grassley—have been assiduously and insidiously promoting the patently false idea that the government was secretly interested in erecting committees that would determine who among the old and fragile is simply too expensive to be kept alive.

Or the equally hideous canard that health care reform is really just one big front for a devilish plan to divert federal funding into abortions. Having pulled the plug on grandma, goes this libelous logic, the government is now looking for ways to end little babies’ lives before they even begin. That the proposed bill says nothing about overriding the 1976 Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the use of federal money for abortions, seems to matter not at all to the kooks who carry signs like “No Tax $$$ for Killing Babies.”

As many of the loudest liars purport to be religious folk, and as the Hebrew Bible is a staple both Jews and Christians share, here’s an idea: instead of repeating the scandalous allegations and giving them undue credibility, the media should consider running instead this week’s Torah portion. If it’s too long, or the language too archaic, here’s a fair summary: enough with the malicious falsehoods. Enough with the rabid disrespect for members of the House. Enough with the violent overtones, like the ones William Kostric, an armed New Hampshire citizen, menacingly expressed outside an Obama speech recently when he said, ominously, that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of tyrants and patriots.”

In even simpler terms, enough.

But this week’s parasha carries not only a condemnation of those who are malicious but also delivers a warning to those who witness evil and do nothing to stop it. Detailing the ceremony of Egla Arufa, or decapitated calf, Moses speaks of a particular form of sacrifice a community could perform to atone for bloodletting it was not able to stop. Even if the community’s members are innocent of the murder itself, by failing to prevent it they are nonetheless tainted with endless guilt.

Before an evil wingnut raises his arms and takes a shot at a congressman, before a town hall debate turns bloody, before more harm is inflicted, we must realize that it is we, no less than the maniacs, who are responsible for this intolerably hot summer. If we don’t intervene, if we don’t—regardless of our political worldviews—silence the lies and curb the violence, we may find ourselves with a chronicle of a death very much foretold.

But, dear readers, it’s summer – did I mention it? – and a thundering speech is far too stifling for such temperatures. Let us end, then, on a lighter note, with an example of just how we all should act and sound when encountered with our unhinged brethren. Barney Frank, the stage is all yours:

For the past few weeks, I’ve been commenting here on Moses’s farewell speech to the Israelites, marveling at how the nation’s fading father managed to vividly retell the story of the nation’s tortured past as well as admonish the people to remain faithful in the future.

As his speech nears its end in this week parasha, Moses delivers this same message again, with fiery clarity.

“Beware that you do not forget the Lord, your God, by not keeping His commandments, His ordinances, and His statutes, which I command you this day,” Moses says. “Lest you eat and be sated, and build good houses and dwell therein, and your herds and your flocks multiply, and your silver and gold increase, and all that you have increases and your heart grows haughty, and you forget the Lord, your God, Who has brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage, and you will say to yourself, ‘My strength and the might of my hand that has accumulated this wealth for me.’”

It’s a fascinating passage. For most peoples, history is a string of triumphs, a succession of victories that shape the shared consciousness and create a sense of community. But Moses has something very different in mind. Moses is advocating a humble history. He’s telling the people to remember not their glory days but their basic, fundamental, and incontrovertible meekness, because they’re all at the Lord’s mercy—and that, really, is Jewish history’s one and only theme.

And so, this week, let us experiment. As there’s nothing more humble a writer can do than give up his perch, I hereby turn this space over to you. Write me at blessedweekever@tabletmag.com, and share with me your own stories of humility, of realizing your own might would only go so far, of seeking help from heaven or on earth. Your contributions can be as short or as long as you’d like, signed or anonymous: as long as they’re appropriate, we’ll publish them all.

Humbly yours,

Liel

Watching Bale cough out his inane lines, the teenagers slouched a few rows in front of me cheered noisily. It made me shudder: not that I minded the distraction, quite the opposite, but I wondered why these adolescents were so quick to side not with Ashdown and his crew—an impressive and multiethnic cabal, looking a bit like what might have happened if those kids in the iconic Benetton ads had grown up, formed a militia, and devoted their lives to kicking robot butt—but with a lone lunatic possessing of a limited vocabulary and messianic aspirations.

I know, I know: it’s only a movie, and the audience, naturally, is primed to empathize with the hero. And yet, in a film that made so little sense, I thought, a normal person’s sympathies should have fallen with the seasoned and sensible general.

The same thought echoed through my mind a few days later, as I read this week’s parasha. It features no menacing cyborgs, no nuclear wastelands, and—Hallelujah!—no Christian Bale. But at its core, it presents the same moral dilemma those dudes sitting in front of me were so quick to resolve, namely, what is the nature of leadership and what gives one the moral authority to issue orders to one’s fellow men and women?

As the story begins, Moses, like a biblical Rodney Dangerfield, still can’t get respect. This time, however, it’s not just the cantankerous Israelites who call his authority into contest; it’s Korah, the grandson of Levi and a member of the elevated priestly class. And Moses, says this silver-tongued challenger, is keeping the people down.

“You take too much upon yourselves,” Korah and his cohorts reprimand Moses and his brother Aaron. “For the entire congregation are all holy, and the Lord is in their midst. So why do raise yourselves above the Lord’s assembly?”

Moses hears this, and falls flat on his face. Korah, he had to have realized, makes a valid point. After all, wasn’t it God himself who said the whole of Israel were a holy nation and a kingdom of priests? And why would such a blessed people succumb to the autocratic rule of one bearded guy?

Of course, Moses has little to worry about: God soon resolves this challenge, as God so often does, with some smiting. Moses’ leadership remains intact; but Korah’s argument rings on. After all, when we root for Moses aren’t we, like those boys in the movie theater, rooting for the wrong team? Isn’t Korah the General Ashdown of this story, logical and levelheaded, and Moses an ancient John Connor, a tortured soul who believes the fate of his followers rests entirely in his hands?

That may very well be the case. But this argument also ignores one crucial aspect: both General Ashdown and Korah were wrong.

In Terminator Salvation (caution: spoiler ahead!), Ashdown’s belief that he had found the machines’ Achilles heel proves to be a grave strategic error, nearly costing mankind its very existence. And Korah’s associates, Dathan and Abiram, believe that Moses messed things up by taking Israel out of Egypt, the real land of milk and honey, and leading them through an endless errand in the wilderness. In both cases, then, the wellbeing of the people is protected by a zealous vanguard that pursues its convictions with no regard for common sense, perceived notions, or popular sentiments.

That’s a hard thought to bear for us enlightened children of modernity, especially as we cheer for our fellow democrats in Iran who are trying to topple precisely such a zealous vanguard. Here we are, having hailed Moses and John Connor both, deriding another messianic man following his own crazy heart, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Why do we believe the rebelling prophet of the war against the machines when he claims that he must delay a major attack in order to save the man who would one day travel back in time and become his own father, but not the lunatic who claims that the recent elections solidify his status as the leader of the Islamic Republic? Why do we profess now one principle, now another?

Because we’re complex creatures, and unlike the biblical Israelites, the men and women of post-apocalyptic southern California, or those teenagers howling at the screen, we understand that leadership is a delicate and volatile thing, requiring at times subservience and at others obduracy.

This, perhaps, is what makes democracy, in the words of one famous leader, the worst system of government except for all of the others that have been tried. If only that man was around to lead the uprising against those pesky robots.

Young, reform-minded Iranians can ask for no better leader. They should adopt as their battle cry Allen’s famous quip, that 90 percent of life is just showing up.

I know, I know, it doesn’t quite roll off the tongue like “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” or “Hasta la victoria siempre,” but when it comes to the green-clad youth flooding the town squares of Persia, no slogan could be more poignant. Although it is too early to tell just what is going on in Iran, one thing is clear: wonderful things can happen if only one opened one’s door and stepped out to the street in protest.

I doubt that many Iranians, still governed by the crushing will of the mullahs, will be paying much attention to the weekly Torah portion. Pity. This week, the parasha is all about another rebellious people, the Israelites, who learn a priceless lesson in politics.

As the story begins, one is inclined to feel sorry for our exhausted ancestors. There they are, in the endless desert, with aching feet and doubting minds, when God instructs Moses to dispatch twelve of his finest fellows to see firsthand that greatly promised land. The spies hop over to Canaan, and return 40 days later. The look on their faces alone is enough to alert the people that there’s trouble in their promised paradise.

“The land we passed through to explore is a land that consumes its inhabitants, and all the people we saw in it are men of stature,” shrieks one of the returned spies. “There we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, descended from the giants. In our eyes, we seemed like grasshoppers, and so we were in their eyes.”

The Israelites, never ones to miss an opportunity for some operatic moaning, take their cue. Immediately after hearing these reports, the people begin to wail: “If only we had died in the land of Egypt, or if only we had died in this desert. Why does the Lord bring us to this land to fall by the sword; our wives and children will be as spoils. Is it not better for us to return to Egypt?”

Hold on, say two of Moses’s emissaries, Joshua and Caleb. Don’t turn around quite yet: the land is “an exceedingly good land,” with milk and honey and all that. And those giants are nothing compared to the glory of God, who would surely deliver them to us, you know, what with being His chosen people and all.

But Jews, historically, never really knew what to do with good news, and the congregation turns to the two cockeyed optimists and threatens to pelt them with stones.

Watching these shenanigans unfurl, God is not amused. Why not kill all of them, he suggests to Moses, and build a new, improved, and kvetch-free Jewish people? Moses, thankfully, turns down this kind offer, and God settles on a milder punishment: as the entire congregation failed to trust the Lord that the land is good, it shall never see it. The Israelites are doomed to wander in the desert for 40 years—one year for every day the spies spent in Canaan—until they all pass away and a new generation, free of sin, is ready to inherit and inhabit its home.

At first reading, the Israelites’ qualms with God may appear wholly justified. He had, after all, just appointed them as his elected few, and could have just as easily made them all disappear from Sinai in a cloud of purple smoke and reappear seconds later in downtown Jerusalem. That, the Israelites might have been forgiven for thinking, is how a god should roll.

Not our God. He is a Do-It-Yourself kind of deity. And when the Israelites balk, saying that there are too many other nations already occupying Canaan and that some consist of freakishly large men and that the whole thing is just too damn hard, He explodes.

More often than not, this story is taken as a lesson in the importance of faith. Joshua and Caleb, goes the perceived wisdom, believed that the Lord’s promises would come true, and that drove them to see Canaan not as it really was—a tiny and troubled country with too many folks fighting for too little space—but as God promised it would be, overflowing with earthly delights.

But faith may be beside the point. As in the anecdote of the pauper praying at the wall one more time, buying the ticket may be what it’s all about.

No one, perhaps, said it better than Michael Walzer. In his masterful Exodus and Revolution, he explained the story simply. “The land would never be all that it could be until its new inhabitants were all that they should be,” he wrote. In other words, it isn’t about believing, but about doing. The land itself is ordinary; it would be made special, promised, divine solely by the merit of its new inhabitants. If the Israelites took charge and obeyed God’s laws and set up a just and progressive society—the society that emerges from the intricate set of rules God had given his people at Sinai—the nation they would create would emerge as a beacon to all others, a true city on a hill. But if they sat and groaned and waited for readymade glory, all they would find is a desolate and divided strip of land, no better than Egypt and perhaps much worse.

It’s a stunning vision, and one we all too frequently forget. I wish there was a way to condense it to 140 characters and tweet it to Tehran. It would go something like this: 90 percent of life may be showing up, but it’s the other 10 percent, doing the right thing, that’s the hardest.

I also remember my twenty-second birthday: I spent it locked up in the back of a police van. I was placed there after being apprehended while blocking one of Tel Aviv’s major traffic arteries, protesting with dozens of my friends the government’s refusal to institute student loan programs, subsidize tuition for needy students, or do anything else to halt the rapidly plummeting rate of college graduation. Five years older and just a touch smoother, I still screamed many of the same slogans. I was drenched with sweat and flushed with hope. I didn’t really care what happened in the end; all that mattered was that I had tried to make a difference.

It’s been nearly a decade, and with one brief exception involving tequila and a faulty stall in a downtown bar’s men’s room, I haven’t been locked anywhere since. I am relieved by that fact, of course—my instinct and my intellect have both matured, and I have since learned that the subtle and the sublime needn’t necessarily be mutually exclusive. But a part of me, throbbing and restless, can’t help but feel cheated. In rage, there was purpose; in disobedience, life.

That particular feeling bubbled within this week, as I read the accounts of New York’s Internet Week, a bacchanal of twitterers and text-messengers, the people of the Facebook and the Friendfeed. They were blogging about each other, these radiant youths, posting photos of parties and exchanging witticisms in 140 characters or less. They were speaking their own cryptic tongue, the language of the hash tag and the squee. And for a brief moment there, I felt the urge to break out and do something non-violent that might get me locked up again. I wanted to scream at the crowds of techolytes huddled in the bars of the Lower East Side, clad in ironic t-shirts and vintage dresses and a fake, facile manner crafted in so many chatrooms. I wanted to take away their microbrewery beers and hacked iPhones and tell them that they were wonderful, thoughtful, intelligent people currently wasting genocidal amounts of creative energy live-blogging the season premiere of Top Chef Masters instead of trying to somehow change the world. I wanted to shout at them like I did at my timid principal nearly two decades ago, and speak to them of all the beautifully hopeless and thoroughly inspiring ideals in the world. Instead, I did nothing. I flipped my laptop shut, read a book, and felt like an aged man who time had mugged and left for dead.

The paragraph above, naturally, is rich with stereotype. Nascent technologies, of course, have given an army of impassioned activists the tools to influence the agnostic and organize the likeminded. Not all webutantes, as they are sometimes called, are vapid creatures who see the Web as a Cosmos-sized mirror reflecting their own vanity. And there is, to be sure, a healthy measure of audacity in writing harshly about the Internet on a web-based magazine that was gloriously born this week and received an ecstatic group hug from many kind and generous souls online. For all of those reasons, I will speak of the Internet no more, but of this week’s parasha.

It begins with hordes of hungry Hebrews. “Who,” they petulantly demand of Moses, “will feed us meat?” Then, sounding like some of the cooking contestant on Top Chef, the Israelites sing of culinary treats past: “We remember the fish that we ate in Egypt free of charge,” they said, neglecting to mention that small bit about being enslaved, “the cucumbers, the watermelons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic.”

All this talk of food makes Moses angry. More into the spirit than the stomach, he wonders aloud why he had been punished with leading such a nasty nation. “Why have You treated Your servant so badly?” he demands of God. “Why have I not found favor in Your eyes that You place the burden of this entire people upon me? Did I conceive this entire people? Did I give birth to them, that You say to me, ‘Carry them in your bosom as the nurse carries the suckling,’ to the Land You promised their forefathers?” If the burdens of the bitching Jews continue, Moses concludes, he’d be better off dead: “If this is the way You treat me, please kill me if I have found favor in Your eyes, so that I not see my misfortune.”

God acquiesces. He orders Moses to take seventy elders to the Tent of Meeting, where they would receive the word of God and share Moses’s terrible burden of being the only living man to regularly chat with the Creator of all things. The elders are gathered and transported to the holy of the holies. Then, however, trouble erupts. Eldad and Meidad, two young lads, feel the spirit of God descending upon them. And they begin to prophesy, in defiance of the religious hierarchy and the rules of the priests.

As some readers may remember from the unpleasant incident with the Golden Calf, Moses, for all of his many virtues, was not one for tolerating dissent. When his leadership was questioned or his beliefs challenged, he called on the Levites—like ancient, bearded ninjas—to draw swords and settle scores. Joshua, Moses’s young apprentice, knows that; as soon as he spots the prophesying, he runs to his master, reports Eldad and Meidad’s transgressions, and expects swift and violent orders, deploring Moses to imprison the two offenders.

But the old man is jubilant. “Are you zealous for my sake?” he scolds his young aide. “If only all the Lord’s people were prophets, that the Lord would bestow His spirit upon them!”

If only all the Lord’s people were prophets. Needless to say, they’re not. Just as Eldad and Meidad conclude their transcendental trip, God decides to relieve Moses’s dolor by raining quail from the heavens, asking only, like a divine Surgeon General, that folks eat in moderation. The Israelites, however, remain true to their bad reputation, and horde the birds, each man carrying his own weight in game. This vision of insolence and greed makes the lord angry, and he strikes the hapless Hebrews, the meat still stuck in their teeth, with “a very mighty blow.”

“He named that place Kivroth Hata’avah [Graves of Craving],” the Bible tells us, “for there they buried the people who craved.”

The people who craved were smitten. The people who prophesied were celebrated. Those who scattered about, infatuated with ephemera, left behind them no mark. Those who risked all for the sake of the spirit remain two of Judaism most revered rebels. God himself made it clear that sometimes we would do well to drop the petty concerns of our mundane lives and speak, like teenagers, with much passion and little sense, about the stirrings of the soul.

These are all great lines. I hope I remember them next time I get locked up.

He’s been through a few Landmark forums, where, huddled in an auditorium with a few hundred other people, he was taught how to unleash his precious individual potential. He’s walked on smoldering coals with motivational speaker Tony Robbins, hoping that his scorched feet would give his mind the clarity it so badly needed. He even tried following Sting around for a little while, thinking that the aging singer and tantric sex aficionado may unlock a few of life’s mysteries while playing the lute.

Alas, nothing helped.

Still looking for a solid vessel on which to sail life’s stormy seas, my friend settled for a far more conventional, and much more popular, belief system–so popular, in fact, that it has no name. For our purposes, let’s call it the cult of emotional entitlement, defined as a strong faith in the following assertions:

1. Everything must be pleasant.
2. Everyone must be special.
3. Criticism, confrontation and cold, hard truths may be emotionally injurious, making people feel less special and therefore making everything less pleasant. They are therefore to be strongly discouraged.

We see this cult’s adherents everywhere. They’re there on college campuses, for example, moaning, as some of my former students did, that the B they received was unfair, accurately assessing their lack of intellectual ability but neglecting to reflect the all-important fact that they had tried really, really, really hard. These are the very same people we see in our reality television shows, doing their best to be stars, incensed when their singing voices or dancing moves or cooking skills are called into question, and inevitably resorting to snide comments about how there’s no need to be mean because, after all, they were just doing their best.

Here’s the delightful truth: our best often isn’t enough. Why? Because we aren’t special. Most of us are just plain ol’ folks, ordinary people with no outstanding skills to speak of and nothing, really, to set us apart from the rest of humanity. We are, in short, Aarons.

Talk about an ordinary guy. Aaron’s brother, Moses, talked to God, parted the sea, and led the people out of the house of bondage. And Aaron? He was left in charge for one minute and already there was a giant golden calf being erected. And when Moses finally returned and the Tent of Meeting was finally erected and Aaron was finally appointed as high priest, things weren’t going that much more smoothly. In this week’s parasha, Aaron’s two sons, Nadav and Avihu, offer a “strange fire before God, which He commanded them not,” and are killed on the spot by the wrathful deity. Aaron, then, can’t seem to catch a break.

Now, if he lived in modern times, Aaron might have well emulated the demeanor of defeated reality show contestants or petulant college students, and tearfully whine that he was not being treated fairly because he tried his best to be a good shepherd to the people and it’s not his fault that they’re sinful and that his sons are overzealous and that his brother’s some kind of holy dude. It’s not fair, he probably would have said, it’s not fair and it’s mean.

But Aaron had the good fortune of being born biblically, and serving beside a tough-minded leader who had little patience for emotional entitlement. A moment after Aaron’s boys were smitten, Moses sets things straight: “This is what the Lord spoke,” he tells his bereaved brother. “And Aaron,” the paragraph goes on to say, “was silent.”

By modern standards, of course, such treatment is unthinkably harsh. We would expect”and with good reason!”anyone whose brother just lost his children to show a bit of sympathy, a touch of compassion, a hint of remorse. But Moses has no time for any of the above; he summons Aaron’s relatives to replace the dead sons and goes on with the business of worshipping the Lord.

And while we would be right to reject Moses’ behavior as bordering on fanaticism, let us nonetheless take from it a lesson we so sorely need to learn”when crisis strikes, when injury befalls, when wrong is done, there’s only one thing we can do: get over it.

No matter if we were dumped by a girlfriend or touched by an uncle or had the misfortune of belonging to a particularly disadvantaged minority, let us do the only thing that is truly useful, which is to get over it and get on with our lives. Like Moses, let us summon the strength to witness the most terrible tragedies and think not of our own emotional precariousness but of the common good. Let us remember that we deserve nothing, that the world is neither pleasant nor fair, and that the only way to redeem ourselves and others is through action”single-minded, focused and unemotional. Let us ignore that which is insignificant”our hurt feelings, our self-pity, our insecurities”while simultaneously working to mend the source of our suffering, affecting real change with real deeds.

I phoned up my friend and told him all of this. He sighed. It sounded mean, he said, and anyway he had no time to talk it through. He had just joined the Church of Scientology.

If you happened to be in Austin, and paid close attention to the throngs of 20-year-olds who covered the town like locusts clad in ironic T-shirts, you may have gotten the impression that the earth had just begun spinning in reverse, that the economic meltdown of the last few months vaporized into the mists of time, and that it was once again feasible for youngsters who hadn’t yet had their first shave to raise their first round of funding for their new social networking site.

Such is life at South by Southwest, the annual festival for music, film, and interactive media. Mushrooming in size from a few hundred participants when it was established in 1987 to tens of thousands in recent years, SXSW, as the cognoscenti call the gathering, has become the closest thing we’ve got to a barometer of cool.

How, then, does the barometer read this year? To believe the news reports, time is out and space is in.

More accurately put, film and music, entertainment forms that occur largely in time—the time, for example, it takes to watch a movie or listen to a band perform—fail to attract nearly as many people as they had just a few years back. At the same time, participation at SXSW’s interactive media event is up twenty percent. Which means score one for space.

If you’re someone who can’t tell their Flickr apart from their Tumblr, the previous sentence requires a bit of decoding: for several years in a row now, the biggest attention-grabbers at the festival’s interactive event were media applications designed, at least in part, to enable users to place themselves and their friends on a geographical grid. In 2007, Twitter, the microblogging service that is now used by everyone from John McCain to Britney Spears, chose SXSW as its launching pad, rapidly gaining a cult following by allowing the inebriated conference goers to instantly inform each other where in Austin’s downtown area were the best spontaneous parties. And although Twitter has grown up much in the past two years, and has inspired many unintended creative uses, a key function of the service remains the ability to inform a large group of friends of one’s whereabouts for the evening, inviting anyone who may be in the neighborhood to pop in and clink glasses.

This year, SXSW’s belle du jour was Foursquare, a location-based service that allows users to inform their friends of their whereabouts, plan outings to new restaurants and bars, and turn their town into a huge virtual treasure map of leisure spots using advanced GPS technology.

A pattern, then, emerges: the cool kids are telling us they want technology that saves them space, not time. Even though they were reared on the virtual, they’re flocking to any innovation that can help them make sense of their actual geographical location, place themselves and their buddies on a map, and make the big and menacing world a friendlier and more knowable place. And as for things that take time—you know, like movies or live music or conversation—well, they have no time for those.

Neither did their ancestors: this week’s parasha proves beyond doubt that even millennia ago, the cool kids still preferred space over time.

As the story begins, Moses, fresh from killing 3,000 of his own people over that little business with the golden calf, is in a forgiving mood. He gathers the Israelites, and once again reiterates the importance of the Sabbath. It’s the only one of the Ten Commandments he finds important enough to repeat; the stealing and the adultery and the coveting of neighbors’ wives don’t make the cut.

As soon as he’s done speaking of the Sabbath and its holiness, however, Moses gets down to the real business at hand.

“Take from yourselves an offering for the Lord,” he tells the people. “Every generous hearted person shall bring it.” It is time, he adds, to build the mishkan, the tabernacle, a momentous task that requires all the ram skins and crimson wool and goat hair available. And even though Moses began his speech on a somber note”by promising to put to death anyone who violated the Sabbath”the people are nonetheless excited to begin construction, donating so many goods that Moses has to order them to stop. That’s the way it’s always been with us Jews: at the first site of great real estate, the hearts sing with joy.

For all its miniscule details of the Tabernacle’s every nook, the story, however, leaves us with an enormous philosophical question: it begins, after all, with talk of time”the Sabbath”but soon reverts completely to talk of space, the mishkan. And there’s no question where popular passions lie: the people listen politely when Moses pontificates on the purity of the Lord’s Day, but positively leap at the first mention of erecting a concrete edifice and decorating it lavishly.

This is particularly fascinating as Judaism sanctifies time alone: Shabbat, we are told, is holy. The Bible fails to make similar statements about buildings or cities or swaths of land, shying away from the tangible and celebrating the ephemeral.

But people are fickle: they can understand a specific house being sacred, but have a much harder time when the sacred object is not a building but a day. They are human, and they want to worship something they can see and feel. Constantly wandering in the desert, they don’t have the time to sanctify time. The Tabernacle, then, is a great substitute, and it’s the one thing that gets all the folks excited.

If only our poor ancestors could Twitter, they would have had a much easier time putting together their majestic mishkan. If only they could go on Foursquare, collecting goat hair would’ve been a breeze. If only they could join the hip crowd at Austin, they would have learned that nothing has really changed: then as now, with technology or without it, all we want is some space to fill with special meaning, be it a tabernacle or a tiny neighborhood bar. All we want is to know that everyone, even God, has a specific place in the world. And we care less for things we can’t control, be it the Sabbath or a screening of the new Spike Lee movie. It’s just the way we are, and no amount of time is ever going to change that.

For those readers who are fortunate enough to have enjoyed a well-balanced childhood, spending their leisure time hanging out with friends and playing sports and effortlessly chatting up members of the opposite sex, The Phantom Menace is the title of the fourth installment in the Star Wars series (or the first, if we go by the story’s chronology). And, having spent a considerable portion of my youth trying to summon my inner Jedi, the release of a new episode threw me into a state of nearly religious ecstasy. Up to that moment, I’ve been, at best, an intermediate geek—dabbling in comic books and video games and science fiction—but at the thought of a new Star Wars movie, I was thrown into the dark depths of dorkdom, waited in line for hours to buy tickets to the new movie, and insisted on watching it four times on opening day alone and several more thereafter.

Of course, it was terrible. Terrible the first time I saw it, even more awful the third, unbearable by the ninth. No inner truth revealed itself, no strange satisfaction appeared. It was just a bad movie, and my disappointment was as cold and heavy as my passion had once burned bright.

It’s only natural, then, that, reading a film version of the celebrated graphic novel The Watchmen was in the works, I reacted with cool detachment. The book is one of my favorites, and, I knew, its grim atmosphere and metaphysical quandaries would be very hard to capture on screen, especially for a director like Zack Snyder, whose previous film, 300, had much more by way of bare midriffs than bold thoughts.

Still, I stood in line, anxious to see the movie the very day it came out. And just as I’d expected, it was abysmal. But it compelled me to revisit the original source, and admire anew its powerful premise: a group of masked heroes, most lacking any supernatural abilities or exceptional talents, find themselves hunted, driven underground by an enraged public that has come to see them not as holy saviors but as hooded sadists. Still, the Watchmen persevere, and, in a variety of terrifying, unexpected and contemplative ways, save humanity from itself.

The first time I read the novel, I wondered why they even bothered. Why they sought to unravel a mysterious pending attack on New York City, when New York City was awash with rioters screaming scurrilous slogans. Why they cared so much about a world that cared so little about them.

Moses answered all my questions. Were he around the fictional, apocalyptic New York City circa 1985 the book so deftly portrays, one could easily imagine him putting on a mask and cape and joining the cloaked crusaders in their escapades, although, I suspect Moses might not be too chummy with another of the Watchmen, Ozymandias, who based his superhero persona on the ancient Egyptian pharaohs.

Like the Watchmen, Moses, too, had felt the sharp sting of ingratitude: here he is, in this week’s parasha, marching down the mount, tablets in hand. He hadn’t been gone for long, and yet the Israelites had already lost faith: craving instant, visible, godly gratification, they pressed Aaron to make them a golden calf, worshipping it instead of the one true god they had sworn to obey for all eternity just a few weeks prior.

One of the Watchmen in particular would have commiserated with Moses: Dr. Manhattan, a nuclear physicist whom a freak accident turned into an omnipotent blue being. Despite providing a host of extraordinary services, like singlehandedly winning the Vietnam War, Dr. Manhattan is haunted by the media, dogged by false accusations and vicious rumors, and generally despised by most Americans. Exasperated, he retreats to Mars, where he contemplates parting ways with the stiff-necked human race and starting a new civilization all by himself.

Moses faces the same dilemma. Witnessing the Israelites and their glittery idol, God, livid, declares his intention to annihilate them all and start afresh, making Moses himself into a great nation as he had once done with Abraham. And Moses, too, has his Mars Moment, considering the temptation inherent in letting go of the people who had let him down.

And yet, he soldiers on. “Why, O Lord,” he pleads with God, “should Your anger be kindled against Your people whom You have brought up from the land of Egypt with great power and with a strong hand?” God is appeased, but Moses is no man of mere mercy: he descends from the mountain, smashes the tablets, burns the calf and slaughters 3,000 of his own people in retribution for their sins.

Although he had had his share of tribulations—the whole bit with the sea, for example, or the business with the burning bush—it is only at that moment that Moses truly becomes a leader, a man capable at once of sweet pity and searing wrath, protecting his charges even as they do everything in their power to betray him. The first lesson of being a superhero, Moses learns, is never expecting those you save to do anything but resent you for your might and your grace.

It’s a lesson God himself delivers: as Moses climbs back up the mountain, God reveals to him the 13 attributes of mercy, a stunning sermon on that most exalted of all qualities, the capacity to forgive when one’s compassion is repaid with thanklessness. And it’s a lesson we should all be mindful of: barring a chance nuclear mishap that turns our skin blue and our powers unlimited, all we need to become divine is the ability to sacrifice everything and expect nothing in return.

Fifteen years ago, I reminisced—as a sanguine Benicio Del Toro mumbled another bit of lovingkindness to a beatific looking peasant before rushing off to blow up some Batistudas in the green hills of Cuba—15 years ago, a movie like Che would have made me shiver with excitement.

Back then, I belonged to that most beautifully sad of species, the high school revolutionary, all Marxist aphorisms and impotent rage, reading Che and Trotsky and Marcuse and humming “The Internationale” as most of my peers were rocking to Ace of Base. Had some daring director brought the story of Havana’s finest guerilla to life back in 1993, I might have been tempted to comb back my platinum-blond Mohawk (forgive us, O Lord, the sins of our youth), lace up my Doc Martens, and march on the teachers’ lounge, demanding a moratorium on homework and other manners of capitalist oppression. In 2009—with normal hair, sensible shoes, and, I hope, a somewhat more complex political outlook—all I could muster was nostalgia.

A few days later, however, my inner barnstormer was once again reawakened as I immersed myself in another story of a political trailblazer, a freedom fighter who had faced down a mighty oppressor, a revolutionary so intense he makes both Mr. Guevara and Mr. Del Toro seem impish in comparison: Moses.

Here he is, in this week’s parasha, delivering the final three plagues on Egypt and its smarting tyrant, all hot rage and holy spirit. I read the portion with joy: given my aforementioned political past, I have always relished the Exodus story, which I interpreted as one of history’s greatest examples of glorious revolution. Having just watched Che, I was looking forward to “Let my people go.”

And yet, as I reread the parasha, something strange happened: I noticed a passage I had never noticed before. “And the children of Israel did according to Moses’ order, and they borrowed from the Egyptians silver objects, golden objects, and garments. The Lord gave the people favor in the eyes of the Egyptians, and they lent them, and they emptied out Egypt.”

My head felt light, my throat dry, my forehead swelled. What was this business about robbing Egypt? In my memory, the Israelites were just and beleaguered and in such a rush to get out of town that we’re all still condemned to an annual week of consuming the abominable abdominal punishments of unleavened bread. And yet, with all the hastening and the light travel”the Israelites, we are told, fled with only “their leftovers bound in their garments on their shoulders””they somehow managed to schlep silver, gold, and garments? Taken, mind you, not from the Pharaoh’s bottomless vault, but from ordinary, hardworking Egyptians, who might have invested in the garments and the gold as a retirement fund? Moses as Madoff? It was more than I could take.

For days, the question haunted me: why the thievery? Why not just leave with what was rightfully theirs and be thankful for their redemption? The more I thought about it, the more I meditated on Moses and Che and my 15-year-old self, the more obvious the answer became. Moses had to bankrupt Egypt for the same reason Che refused to rest on his laurels after dethroning Batista and I refused to attend my prom, plotting instead a failed hostile takeover of the school’s public address system in an attempt to shout out sassy slogans and shock the gathered crowd of dolled-up teens: a real revolutionary never rests. A real revolutionary is equally engaged in construction and destruction. A real revolutionary must not only deliver his people from evil but also despoil his opponent for good. Simply put, in taking Egypt’s gold, Moses played it out like a desert Tony Montana, saying to Pharoah that if he’d like to play rough, he’d have to say hello to Moses’s little friend.

This, I realized, was a message that even decidedly non-revolutionary souls could find deeply useful. Take President Obama, for example: as he pushes forth his economic stimulus package, he may do well to summon his inner Moses and wage total and destructive war against some real and vicious enemies. Like Merrill Lynch’s John Thain, say, or the nitwits of Citibank, the same greedy Goliaths who devastated our economy and are now purchasing nifty new corporate jets or spending a cool million on redecorating their offices. Confronted with these marauders, Obama, usually the coolest of cats, might do well to rebel, not only by passing sound policy but also by doing to the malicious moneymen the same thing the Israelites did to Egypt: robbing them of all their silver, garments, and gold, and making sure the evil empire never again rises to enslave and oppress.

Then again, it’s far more likely that we’ll all keep our cool, keep away from revolutions, and keep ourselves amused: after all, Steven Soderbergh’s next project is another biopic, this time of Liberace.

Mr. President,

First of all, mazel tov! Up here, we’re all pretty psyched for you. Quite a few of us are registered Democrats—though not Esau, who’s a libertarian (go figure)—and we are immensely proud of your achievement. The Marx Brothers (Chico, Harpo, Groucho, Gummo, Zeppo, and Karl) threw one hell of a bash to celebrate your inauguration; Biggie and Tupac both performed, as did the Carpenters. Up here, they’ve got a lot of street cred.

But I’m digressing. The reason I decided to write to you, dear Barack, is to share with you a few pointers about leadership. I’m sure Lincoln would have loved to do so himself, but he and Liberace booked a cruise long before the election and didn’t want to lose their deposit.

It may seem a bit strange to you, taking advice from someone who’s been dead for a few millennia. After all, you may ask, what do I really know about modern issues like war or welfare or women’s rights? But what I have to say is priceless, the sort of wisdom that only gets truer with time. Don’t worry, I won’t be long. Here goes:

1. People suck: In a few months, something inevitable is going to happen. You’ll turn on the television one afternoon and discover that those throngs of people who support you now, all the millions who braved the cold to see you sworn in as president, no longer care. Even worse, you may find out that despite your passing sound legislation, working tirelessly to protect the nation’s well-being, and making all the right calls as commander-in-chief, the people inexplicably turn against you, distracted by some silly gaffe or filthy slander. You’ll sit there watching and, if you’re human (which Elvis, by the way, doubts), you’ll seethe with anger. In that moment, I want you to imagine how I felt when I ran happily down that mountain, carrying not the Constitution but the freakin’ word of God, and saw that it took my constituents less than a month to abandon everything sacred and make themselves a damn golden calf. And these were folks who had listened to the Good Lord with their very ears; I shudder to think what may happen to people who only listen to Fox News. Understand this, and take it to heart: people can be awful. Don’t get upset, and don’t try to be foolish and change human nature. Just work with what you’ve got.

2. Spare some change: Sure, you speak eloquently about the call of duty and the need for transformation, but don’t expect people to show up ready to work hard and be selfless just because you asked them to. I rescued my guys from a murderous tyrant, and made sure they were well-fed in the desert, and brought them into a covenant with their creator, and they still weren’t happy to follow me into the wilderness. Why? Because I gave them manna, and they wanted meat. Because I promised them holiness, and they wanted a homeland first. This is an important lesson, Barack: if you want people to march, make sure first that their stomachs are full, and that they have a place to lay their heads. Without concrete stuff, all talk is meaningless.

3. You need all the help you can get: At first, I was certain I could lead the Israelites all by myself. When relatives suggested I may be better off appointing deputies, I lost my cool. After all, so much of my campaign was about me—the hail, the frogs, the blood—that I found it hard to relinquish control. But when you’re dealing with stiff-necked people, you need good men and women by your side to help you govern. I see you’ve already begun to heed this advice; congratulations on choosing Dr. Sanjay Gupta as your surgeon general.

4. Get a Josh: I read an article about you and the civil rights movement that crowned you the leader of the so-called Joshua Generation, the youngsters who can safely conquer the promised land that those quote-unquote Moses-figures like Martin Luther King, Jr. could never reach. A sensitive topic with me, as you can imagine. But an important point nonetheless: make sure you, too, have your own Joshua, because none of us, no matter how fortunate, ever really get to enter Canaan. More often, we die on some mountain, alone, our Promised Land within sight but not within reach. And just before we do, we realize that it was really the journey that mattered. Still, make sure that when you step down in four years or eight, you have someone to pursue your vision, someone young and capable and passionate. There are quite a few of them in your party, so don’t worry about petty politics and start mentoring them from the very beginning. Otherwise, you’ll end up like LBJ; even here, he’s surly and lonely, and if it weren’t for the occasional tiff with Nixon, he’d have nothing to do.

5. Time is on your side: You, Mr. President, have four years to change the reality of your nation. I had 40. And I needed every day. As you may recall—and if you don’t, Rick Warren can surely remind you—I didn’t knock about in the desert for four decades because I couldn’t find Canaan. I did it because my people were not yet ready for the Promised Land, because they needed time to purify their hearts and steel their minds and strengthen their resolve. I had to wait for a lot of old people and old prejudices to pass away, had to wait for a lot of bad ideas to die out and for new, good ones to emerge naturally and organically in their stead. Sure, it’s easy for me to talk; there were no opinion polls in the desert, no bloggers to report on my every move. So do what you need to do to maintain your support, but remember that truly great accomplishments take time, and that time takes patience.

I’ll stop now, before I sound too much like Buddha, which happens to a lot of us up here after a while. I hope you find my thoughts helpful, and wish you again the best of luck. Oh, and if you see Bono, please tell him I’m a huge fan.

Yours across time,
Moses

He was not, despite his deepest wishes, the first man to make it to the South Pole; that would be the mustachioed mariner Roald Amundsen. He was not, in spite of his best efforts, the most famous explorer of his time; his former boss, the regally named Robert Falcon Scott, had that honor. He never even succeeded in translating his modest celebrity into a handsome income: when he died, at 47, on a small island in the southern Atlantic Ocean, he owed a small fortune that, in modern terms, would come to nearly a million-and-a-half pounds. Add to that his thick eyebrows, hangdog face, and penchant for spending most of his time by himself reciting poetry, and you begin to wonder if this is the same Shackleton who inspired generations of adventurers, not to mention a made-for-television film starring Kenneth Branagh.

And yet, despite his failures, Shackleton’s spirit was steadfast. “A live donkey,” he wrote to his wife, “is better than a dead lion.” And so it was with the donkey’s requisite stubbornness that he tried once more for Antarctica, aiming for the one record that hadn’t yet been broken: the crossing of the frozen continent. For nearly a year, Shackleton and his men fought with the treacherous ice and the creeping cold. Then the hull of their ship, exhausted by the extreme weather, cracked, forcing the crew to evacuate to the nearest secure landmass, the ominously named Elephant Island. The crew, Shackleton knew, would perish unless rapidly rescued. Along with five of his men, he boarded a small lifeboat and headed out for help, risking an ocean dense with icebergs and starved killer whales. He refused to pack supplies for more than four weeks, the amount of time he estimated the remainder of his men would survive without relief. So as not to burden the small vessel with unnecessary weight, nothing unnecessary, not even a Bible, was permitted on board. Instead, the captain instructed each of his men to tear their favorite passage out of the good book and place it in their shirt pockets, close to their hearts.

Were I fortunate enough to be there, among Shackleton’s men, I would have picked out this week’s parasha. One passage in particular, to be precise: the one about Moses dealing some street justice to an Egyptian officer. Here it is: “Now it came to pass in those days that Moses grew up and went out to his brothers and looked at their burdens, and he saw an Egyptian man striking a Hebrew man of his brothers. He turned this way and that way, and he saw that there was no man; so he struck the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.”

Growing up, I was puzzled by this story. Here, I thought, was Moses, future leader of the Israelites, purveyor of the Torah, and God’s BFF, acting all sly. Instead of standing up to the oppressor and making a statement, Moses looks around to make sure that no one’s watching and then makes his furtive move. It’s as if he subscribed to the Bart Simpson forensic school of thought: I didn’t do it, nobody saw me do it, you can’t prove anything. Would Rambo ever turn this way and that way before dispensing his holy wrath? Would Dirty Harry? Would Charles Bronson? Why couldn’t Moses, our hero of heroes, simply mutter a cool catchphrase, like “yippie-kay-yay, sun worshipper” or “hasta la vista, Pharaoh” and then kill the Egyptian with a neat karate chop? Why so timid, even when kicking ass?

It took me years to learn that Moses’s hesitation had nothing to do with the fear of getting caught. He was not, I’ve come to realize (aided by some of our finest commentators), looking left and right to make sure no one was watching. He was looking left and right for a far less prosaic reason: as many of us often do when we witness an injustice, he was hoping that someone else would step in and do the right thing. He was hoping that someone else, someone more confident and strong and fearless, would show up and give the Egyptian his comeuppance. Anyone, he was hoping, anyone but him.

Although he preceded the Talmud, Moses was nonetheless operating on that precious and wise Talmudic dictum: “In a place where there is no person, strive to be one.” There he was, and there was the Egyptian beating the helpless Hebrew slave, and there was no other person present to put an end to the violence. There was no other person, and so Moses strove to be one. And he did.

And here’s the beautiful thing, the key lesson that makes even grand figures like Moses and Ernest Shackleton perfect role models for the rest of us dull, unwashed masses: they both failed. Moses may have succeeded in saving his Hebrew brother from a thrashing, but the very next day he was ratted out by his fellow tribesmen and was forced to flee to faraway Midian. And Shackleton may have succeeded in saving his men, but he failed in fulfilling his expedition and died broke and heartbroken. But the lesson of both lives had nothing to do with missions accomplished. It had to do with striving to be a person where there is no other person to be found. It has to do with knowing how to be that person even, or especially, in dangerous, unrewarding, but ultimately unavoidable circumstances. It has to do with stepping up to the occasion, whatever the occasion may be.