Campaigning on the Positive
Sermon Lech Lecha 5783
I have been telling people that if Jews were to believe in hell, which is unclear, we do know something important about how it would be. Hell would be a place where you are told that you are required to pack up all your belongings and move each and every week.
It seems appropriate this Shabbat in which we are completing our fourth move as a congregation of Wandering Jews in the desert that we are chanting the Torah portion of Lech Lecha. Lech Lecha begins with the call of Avram, our great ancestor, to leave one place, Harran, and journey to a promised land which will eventually become Israel. It is the beginning of the Jewish people’s journey, of which we at Beit Simcha are certainly a significant part. God knows we have experience wandering now.
We are so grateful to our hosts here at Church of the Apostles for sharing their beautiful facility with us and allowing us to celebrate Shabbat here. And we are eternally grateful to the incredible voluntarism of Beit Simcha, the many people who labored indefatigably to move us into our new offices, two storage units and here for services. It was an amazing effort led by Carol Schiffman-Durham but with fantastic levels of hard work and commitment from a host of great people. We are so fortunate and grateful, and it was, in spite of the challenge of moving, a tremendously positive experience that could restore your faith in humanity.
On the other hand, the mid-term Senatorial, Congressional, Gubenatorial, and local elections will complete in-person voting in a couple of days, and I, for one, will be greatly relieved not to have to watch any more political ads on television, Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Facebook or listen to them on the radio, or be inundated by unwanted texts and robocalls. It’s not as though most of the political ads have been positively driven, either. I would guess 7/8ths of them have been negative ads, harshly criticizing opposition candidates with statements and images that combine half-truths, insinuations and outright lies in an attempt to sway our votes.
I wonder if it was an election year in Harran when Abram lived there, and maybe he wasn’t leaving Sumeria for the Promised Land after all—he was just escaping all the horrible political campaign ads.
Look, it’s not as though negative political ads are a brand-new concept in American elections, or any elections anywhere, although it seems to grow worse in each subsequent election cycle. Still, we can’t pretend it’s something novel: in the presidential election of 1800 then-president John Adams was pilloried as a tryant and a tool of Great Britain. In 1828, President John Quincy Adams’ people accused Andrew Jackson’s wife Rachel of being a bigamist, which had grains of truth but broke her heart and, according to Jackson, killed her before he could take office. He never forgave his political opponents and took revenge on them for the next eight years. Abraham Lincoln was caricatured as “The Original Gorilla” for his gangly appearance and his racist political enemies insinuated he was secretly part Black. For many years after the Civil War, every Democratic Party candidate for office heard about the dead in that terrible conflict, and every Republican candidate at some point would “Wave the bloody shirt,” claiming all Democrats were Confederates and traitors.
In 1884 Grover Cleveland’s campaign for president was nearly upended by the revelation that he had fathered a child out of wedlock—he was himself a bachelor at the time—and Republicans chanted at him, “Ma, ma where’s my pa? He’s gone to the White House, ha ha ha,” perhaps the greatest negative presidential sloganeering ever. Much more recently, in 1964, Lyndon Johnson ran the famous “Daisy” ad, showing a 3-year-old girl counting off petals on a daisy followed by the countdown and explosion of a nuclear bomb going off. While it aired only once--once !—it devastated Barry Goldwater’s right-wing campaign. Goldwater himself was never mentioned in that ad, by the way, not even his famous dictum “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” You were just supposed to figure it out, and people did.
In recent years negative attack ads have become more specific and much more ubiquitous: everyone running is called a crook, is supposed to have evil political and business connections and is corrupt, and even anti-Semitic ads implying Jewish control of the world economy, or of a particular candidate—can anyone remember the ads against Hillary Clinton 6 years ago that showed photos of her linked to an “International banking conspiracy” and “global political establishment” then showed photos of George Soros, Janet Yellin and Lloyd Blankfein, all Jewish financial leaders—those attacks are now apparently legal and fair game. And while I would wager that originally more negative ads came from one side, there have been plenty of negative ads on the other side, too. I guess our current leaders believe you can’t win if you don’t get into the gutter—or maybe the sewer.
It also seems to get worse every single electoral cycle now: robophone calls every hour, robotexts from changing phone numbers multiple times a day, pop-ups on search engines, emails and ads on social media and old-line media, road signs everywhere, and a mailbox full of political ads, almost all negative. It’s genuinely horrible.
At times like these, I’d like to strongly, if quixotically, suggest a return to the Jewish standards associated with ethical speech, the laws of Lashon HaRa, in our public life. These rules come originally from the Torah, in which the clear statement is lo taleich rachil b’amecha, do not become a slanderer among your people, and are echoed and then vastly amplified in the Talmud, and particularly in the works of Mussar, the teachings of Jewish morality and self-correction. According the greatest authority on the ethics of speech, the Chofets Chayim, there are 31 different rules limiting harsh and defamatory speech. These go so far as to stipulate that even telling the truth in a hurtful way is prohibited, while lying to damage others is a particularly evil sin that no Jew should ever practice. Gossip is damaging, and according to the Talmud it kills three people: the one who tells the gossip, the one who listens to the gossip, and the one about whom the gossip is said.
In a way, this is embodied in the Rotary Club’s standard of speech, the 4-Way Test, which has always impressed me as derived from the same thoughtful, moral approach as Judaism’s understanding of the ethics of speech in its doctrines on Lashon HaRa and Motzi Sheim Ra.
Here’s the Rotary Club 4-Way test for how to speak, which would certainly also apply to political ads:
1. Is it the truth?
2. Is it fair to all concerned?
3. Will it build goodwill and better friendships?
4. Will it be beneficial to all concerned?
I don’t think the vast majority of the ads we’ve been subjected to this election season could qualify under those standards, and certainly not under Jewish standards. I’m not sure 10% of the ones I have seen lately would qualify.
Now, perhaps this is just a fantasy, but let’s take a moment to imagine a world in which the rules of Lashon HaRa applied to all political advertising. That would mean all negative political advertising, by candidates or super-PACs or national committees, would simply be banned. In that imaginary America campaign world, you could say as many positive things about your own candidate as you’d like, and about your party if you wish, over any medium you chose. But you couldn’t spend your funds, creativity and effort to create a negative image of the opposing candidate. You couldn’t attack them personally, you couldn’t commit Lashon HaRah by making ugly innuendos about their family, you couldn’t insinuate that they were involved with international Jewish cartels to control the country, you couldn’t claim they want to allow murderers and rapists to swarm over your homes or that they are cowards and liars. You certainly couldn't engage in motzi shem Ra, and simply lie about them over social media or the airwaves or in texts and emails and on websites and news programs.
Imagine if American political campaigns were required to focus on the strengths of their own candidate, her or his accomplishments and good qualities. Imagine if they had to actually put out ads about the policies the candidate advocated, or the ideas that motivated the candidate to run in the first place, or his or her goals if he or she won the election, instead of merely saying awful things about the opponent. Imagine a politics of the positive, instead of the mess we are in now. What was that old song? Accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. Wouldn’t that be a mechayeh for everyone?
The concepts of Lashon HaRa developed over many centuries, and that gives them a deep and thoughtful validity that could be applied today. We can practice them in our own lives, if we choose to do so, and so improve our own ability to function as a successful congregation and community. And we can choose to advocate for them in our society, too, because the way that political advertising and campaigns have gone in America over the past few election cycles cannot be the right way for a civilized society to go.
You know, that was one of the central reasons we created Beit Simcha four years ago: to create a congregation built on joy and affirmation, in which we did not engage in the kind of negative attacks and petty recriminations that are so common—common in every sense of that word.
It’s too late to save the verbal standards of this 2022 election year. But it’s not too late to begin to move towards civility, honesty and positivity in our society, and so in our own lives. By choosing to embrace the standards of Lashon HaRa in our own conduct, and by refusing to pay attention to ugly ads that flood our lives in this election cycle, we can follow a course that leads to wholeness, honesty and positivity. And then, perhaps the next election cycle, we will see real change in the way that words and images are used. May this be God’s will—but mostly, ours.