About two hundred years ago, a monetary dispute between two people came before a Jewish court. The head of the court was a great sage and scholar. When the case was debated between the judges, this great sage found himself in a conundrum. On the one hand, he understood one position to be right, but for some reason he was hesitating to state it. He couldn't figure it out, so he adjourned the session for the next day.

When he left the courtroom and put on his coat, he felt an envelope in his pocket. He took it out and found money that was not his. He realized that the guilty party must have put the money in his pocket and that it affected his judgement even though he didn't know about it.

This sage would later repeat this story many times. He was fascinated how vulnerable our minds are to bribery. Even when he didn't know about it, his senses picked it up.

The Talmud brings several stories of sages who didn't preside over court cases of people with whom they had even minimal business contact. Acknowledging how vulnerable our minds are, is not a weakness. On the contrary, it's a strength. Being aware of our vulnerabilities help us achieve moral clarity.

The Founding Fathers understood that mixing state and religion would not strengthen religion, it will corrupt it. When religion operates independently of power it can be the inspiring and transformative force that it is supposed to be.

The Satmar Rabbi, Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum of blessed memory, one of Orthodox Judaism's “founding fathers” in America, understood the same thing. He believed that previous efforts to instate a sage to be Chief Rabbi of New York was not the right course to take. The Satmar Rabbi himself didn't seek a big Synagogue to hire him or to lead an established community.

Instead, he opened a small synagogue in Williamsburg, in Brooklyn NY, with very few people. His banner was “we are going to be fervent Chasidim like we were always, whoever wants to join can join and whoever not, that's fine and we will not come to your community and impose any of our customs”. Many other Orthodox groups in the U.S. did the same and this strategy worked amazingly well. Many people joined them by choosing it and not by it being imposed on them.

This strategy strengthens the community without having to compromise to accommodate people who don't want to be part of it. By not having the power to impose, they have the power of influence and of community bond.

This brings me to politics and power. Today, many of the important moral questions are in the area of politics and society. Many ideologies are not born out of thinking them through and believing in its values but are a result of using these ideologies to reach power. Even the idea of separating state from religion became sometimes too extreme. Above, I referred to its original meaning.

I'm totally fine with the idea that a party wants to be in power and would pursue policies that are good to the people who can place them in power. That's fine and healthy. We just shouldn't be sold on the ideas as if they are truths in its own merit, and that all other ideas are immoral. We have to be aware when our motivation is ideological and when it is wanting our party to be in power; when the ideology drives the politics or when the politics drive the ideology.

A good way to start is by imagining that the sides of the aisle would be flipped, and the other party would be in power. What things would I still believe in and what things would I believe differently?

Comments? Email me: moshe@jaketv.tv