What the Pandemic Reveals about Human Nature: Homo Homini Lupus

Public health authorities uniformly agree that if you put distance between yourself and people who don’t live in your household, cover your mouth and nose with a mask when around others, and wash your hands often – COVID-19 would stop spreading.

Thinking about this recalls the Jewish legend that if every Jew were to observe two consecutive Shabbats, the Messiah would come.

But human nature keeps getting in the way.

During ordinary times, the continuum of human nature finds most of us somewhere between self-interested and altruistic. However, during prolonged periods of crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic in which we find ourselves people gravitate toward extreme self-interest.

So what our pandemic reveals to me about human nature is, as Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote, paraphrasing Thomas Hobbes that Homo Homini Lupus “man is a wolf to other men.”

Garden variety liberals being optimistic about human nature, would take exception to this glum view. While utopians – be they communists and anarchists on the left or nazis on the right – claim that they know how to alter human nature. The genocide carried out by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and the Khmer Rouge was intended to perfect humanity.

But what does the Corona pandemic show us about human nature? Consider how political systems (Israel, China, or the US, for instance), organizations (such as hospitals, HMOs, and universities), and the private sector (like big technology) have deported themselves during the COVID-19 pandemic.

At best they have mostly failed in their missions.

It is easy to blame a nincompoop president, a distracted prime minister, or a sclerotic public health bureaucracy.

It is right to doubt the decency of clerics, who would wantonly endanger their flock to preserve control and insularity.

However, in the last analysis, isn’t the refusal by so many to take individual responsibility the crux of the problem?

The davka decision not to wear face masks, wear them as bracelets, or with noses protruding spotlights varying degrees of self-centeredness. Individuals or groups who demand to exercise their absolute right to crowd together for rowdy street demonstrations or pack into confined interior spaces to pray or party are being maliciously egocentric. Of course, that’s not how they see it.

In his legendary The Tortoise’s Little Green Book, Robert Ringer offers this maxim about human nature: “The most prudent way­  of dealing with people is to assume that their way of defining things is: Good is what I do; bad is what you do. Right is what I do; wrong is what you do. Ethical is what I do; unethical is what you do.”

The protesters shrieking at police near Israel’s Prime Minister’s Residence in Jerusalem see themselves not as vaporizing virus-laden aerosol but as warriors for justice. Everyone thinks the best of themselves, from youthful party animals and attendees at illicitly large Arab weddings, to Haredim jammed into mega-synagogues and politicians negotiating the contours of a lockdown with politics, not public health their paramount consideration.

Thinking about human nature and what makes people selfish or considerate delivers me to the intersection of philosophy-theology and psychology.

Philosophy

Thucydides tells us that left to their own devices, people will commonly exacerbate chaotic situations instead of pulling together. Aristotle understood that by nature, the Masses are Asses. Whatever else, he believed, Spinoza agreed that people were not inherently well-intentioned.

Likewise, James Madison believed foremost that men were not angels – human nature could go either way. That given the opportunity, individuals would choose to tyrannize their fellows. While no form of government could protect people from each other’s passions, in crafting the US Constitution, Madison, taking human nature into account, designed the US not a popular (majoritarian) democracy but as a republic. The people did not elect the president; they did not elect their senators. The original US Constitution also constrained the ruling elites (through checks and balances and a separation of powers) so that they did not act rashly in the heat of the moment. In Madison’s eyes

…Man is known to be selfish… We all know that conscience is not a sufficient safeguard and besides that conscience itself may be deluded may be misled… into acts which an enlightened conscience would forbid…

Theology

Jewish tradition instructs that individuals have free will. God expects us to choose wisely. By creating us in His image, humans were endowed with reason. For Maimonides, following Aristotle, reason should move a person to behave in a virtuous manner, which means pursuing the Golden Mean. I suppose in Corona terms, that requires acting neither solely self-interestedly nor self-sacrificingly altruistic.

A midrash suggests that God created man because angels were, well too angelic, and animals, perhaps, too bestial. Our assignment is to balance our good and bad inclinations.

Jewish civilization holds that reasonable self-interest is perfectly normal. The sages also figured that a person’s real character is revealed when their guard is down. Nothing takes your guard down more than a pandemic.

Psychology

Sigmund Freud argued that civilization hangs on our ability to sublimate the desire for immediate gratification. The constraints placed on us by political society compete with base instincts. Only the discipline of living in society caps our instincts. “The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization,” Freud says in Civilization and its Discontents.

When individuals or groups lose their sense of shame – when shanda disappears – the foundations of civilization are undermined. Guilt is the price we pay to advance civilization, Freud argued. Now that we’ve stopped worrying about “what the goyim will say,” we’ve compromised ourselves.

Perhaps Israelis’ collective ennui has made us angrier. We appear incapable of expressing remorse for acting against the greater good. On the contrary, the dissonance between what we know is right and how we behave leads us to self-justification and finger-pointing.

While the Messiah tarries and COVID-19 spreads we pay pre-Yom Kippur lip-service to introspection and repentance.

Alas, the morbidity and mortality numbers two weeks hence are likely to reveal the truth about our natures.

 

What does it even mean to be a ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’?

 During a political argument, when someone calls you a liberal, they probably mean you are a hypocrite. To be tarred a progressive or leftist is to be declared at best naïve, at worst, a bloody communist.

If the slur is you’re a conservative, they mean you’re heartless. To be slugged right-wing means you’re on the reactionary-fascist continuum.

The premise of these political putdowns is that your interlocutor holds your thinking – maybe you too – to be not just disagreeable but bordering on devilish.

Since many of us are locked into this weltanschauung, the prospect that the camp we disagree with will be ascendant is downright terrifying.

Liberalism and conservatism are ideologies.   

Political scientist James Q. Wilson, who died in 2012, defined ideology as “a coherent and consistent set of beliefs about who ought to rule, what principles rulers ought to obey, and what policies rulers ought to pursue.”

Liberalism and conservatism have been defined and redefined over time and place. The Liberal Party of Australia is conservative by the American definition. In Israel, left and right only approximately mean what it does in the US.

In the contemporary American setting, liberalism meant championing liberty in personal matters, free-market capitalism in economics, and gradualist reform in the social sphere. A liberal would favor decriminalizing abortion and homosexuality, support low tariffs on international trade, and favor welfare and health coverage for the indigent.

Conservatism arose in the face of reforms gone too far (specifically, the 1789 French Revolution which overthrew King Louis XVI but led to the Jacobian Reign of Terror). A conservative would be someone who wanted to safeguard enduring values and the traditional way things were done. Change, more often than not, was to be resisted. Conservatives tend to be skeptical of the government’s ability to be efficient and effective.

Liberals were those who favored government intervention to make things better in the economy and the social sphere. They argued it was the government’s responsibility to ensure that all Americans had access to a socio-economic safety net. While conservatives were worried that if the government became too interventionist, it would become overbearing and interfere with personal liberties.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was a quintessential liberal who instituted Social Security for older Americans. Ronald Reagan was the archetypal conservative who famously said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”

In a healthy polity there are few pure liberals and conservatives. Most thinking folks calibrate their positions as they grapple with thorny real-life challenges. For example, a social conservative might in principle oppose abortion but not in the case of rape or incest.

Today, it seems to me, ideologues have moved from Wilson’s description of “coherent and consistent” to calcified and fanatical. We seem to have lost the ability to adjust – to determine the Golden Mean.

A realignment of America’s political spectrum is underway. Liberals and conservatives are embracing increasingly extreme positions. Liberals are becoming less tolerant and open-minded. Trumpian conservatives are interested in radically changing the liberal status quo.

Partisan trench warfare predominates. Ideological nonconformists who stick their heads up to utter something that sounds vaguely nondogmatic are liable to get their brains blown out. There is no place for anti-Trump conservatives in the Republican Party. There is less and less safe space for old school liberals in the Democratic Party.

New Conservatism

These days Trumpian conservatism stands broadly for championing protectionist capitalism, neo-isolationism, nationalism, opposition to gun control, partial re-criminalization of abortion, and robust individual rights against an overprotective and intrusive state.

Trumpian conservatism not only holds that the government can’t competently address climate change, but it also denies global warming is even a problem. According to the president, California’s forests are burning because the state has neglected to clean the leaves from the forests’ floors. Remnant conservatives who care about environmental conservation carefully package their concerns so as not to infuriate the Trumpians.

On the porous margins of Trumpian conservatism are the conspiratorial-minded neo-fascist extremists who run the gamut from nazis and klaners to militiamen and white nationalists.

New Liberalism

Over in the liberal camp nowadays, the push has gone way beyond equal opportunity in race matters, beyond affirmative action quotas in hiring and education. Today’s liberals want the government to guarantee economic and social outcomes, use taxes to profoundly redistribute societal resources, robustly regulate the private sector, and take sweeping steps to repair the despoiled environment. The government’s role is to steer citizens toward healthier more just lives.

That the seam from reform-oriented liberalism to change-oriented progressivism has been crossed is nowhere better reflected then in vanguard media outlets like The New York Times. If liberals in the 1960s sought to protect criminal suspects from self-incrimination and to guarantee legal due process, in the 2020s progressives want suspects arrested for nonviolent felonies (subway turnstile jumping, belligerent panhandling, or vandalism) to be released without having to post bail.

The Trump era seems to have accelerated a shift that has delivered many liberals into the progressive bloc. As progressives they are reoriented to be mortified that whites continue to dominate the United States. Support for the amorphous Black Lives Matter movement, whatever its rolling open-ended demands, is axiomatic irrespective of reactionary, supremacist, or anti-Semitic positions voiced by some BLM figures. Jewish liberals once felt sufficiently secure to challenge the excesses of the Black Lives Matter narrative. Now, making BLM engageable is the order of the day.

Taking a page from Maoism, progressives aim to refurbish human nature with an emphasis on those of European white origin. Prejudice regardless if it is subconscious or dormant must be excised through a process of self-criticism and reeducation. Individuals who fall short should be prepared to be publicly humiliated. At the same time, white progressives must take care to avoid cultural appropriation by, for example, relocating into a historically black neighborhood.

Progressives are trained to acknowledge that whatever good fortune birth bestowed upon them is an illicit privilege. This has led some progressives to defend looting by people of color as legitimate. Male progressives have additional obligations to be “woke” or acutely attuned to political and social transgressions and patriarchal tendencies. Men need to abjure interrupting a woman while she is speaking or mansplaining, which is talking to a woman in a way that could be perceived as condescending. Progressive individuals need to unconditionally support LGBTQ+ culturally and politically, though the highest level of woke might also endorse the idea that the endgame should be the abolition of the family.

On the margins of the progressive camp is the hard-left amalgamation known as Antifa. Anarchist, Antifa follows a utopian philosophy aimed at repairing human nature and opposing all forms of hierarchy, including the state. In other words, they do not want a change in government. They want to collapse the state. Adherents, dressed in black, come together to fight the police and their right-wing adversaries.

To further muddle matters, some anarchists belong on the radical right because their goal beyond the downfall of the United States is the rise of whites-only enclaves.

Whatever the terms “liberal” and “conservative” once meant, their definition continues to evolve and not, it seems to me, in a politically healthy direction.

The Trumpian camp commands the GOP and the conservative brand. I assume his followers will continue to do so even if Donald Trump is no longer president.

While tensions between liberals and progressives are rife within the Democratic Party, these have mainly been put on hold to present a united front against Trump. Should the Biden/Harris liberal ticket be victorious, the Sanders/Warren/ Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez progressive wing can be expected to demand their due.

For those Americans who are not at home either among Trumpian conservatives or woke progressives there is – for now at least – only the political wilderness.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Follow me on Twitter

#JAGERFILE

Presidential Character and Scholarly Priorities

 If you mean to foster tolerance and want to protect the rights of people who hold minority viewpoints, mobilizing the masses, whether based on racial identity or ideology, is not the way to go.

The people left to their own devices.

THE ANNUAL conference of the American Political Science Association will take place in cyberspace on September 9 – 13.  This year’s theme is “Democracy, Difference, and Destabilization.”

In a chilling commentary, conference planners caution that longstanding certainty about the US Constitution as “solid and prescient enough to thwart — or at the least contain — the more authoritarian impulses of citizens and elected officials” has been called into question by the presidency of Donald Trump.

I could quibble with the rest of the statement’s woke tone and presuppositions but not with its bottom line conclusion: “America is as polarized now as it was on the cusp of the Civil War because of forces which polarize Americans into ideological, hyper-partisan camps.”

“Democracy, Difference, and Destabilization” has a catchy ring to it. However, in searching for a way forward, the program chairs ask a misguided question: “How inclusive and representative of our country’s diversity are democracy’s institutions and practices?” Pretty diverse, actually. The US Congress has more women than ever before (131); there are 53 African American House Members and three in the Senate; 51 Latinos in the House, 20 House Members who are of Asian or Indian origin, plus an unprecedented four American Indians in the House. The percentage of people of color on the Federal bench is for most jurisdictions in the double digits.

The question political scientists should be asking is: How can we reimagine representative democracy for the remainder of the 21t century – along the constitutional lines envisioned by James Madison.

The Madisonian model of democracy has no greater nemesis today than President Donald Trump. By dint of his character, Trump has manipulated the demos, exploited differences, and spurred destabilization. If you do not believe me dust off Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics, take a fresh look at Dye and Zeigler’s The Irony of Democracy, and re-read The Federalist Papers, particularly No. 10.

The point is if you mean to foster tolerance and want to protect the rights of people who hold minority viewpoints, mobilizing the masses, whether based on racial identity or ideology, is counterindicated. This lesson is something America’s responsible elites need to relearn – fast.

Trump’s presidency has played out as foretold. Americans knew about his character before Election Day 2016. Yet 62,980,160 voters put a pyromaniac in charge of an already combustible situation. When Americans contrasted Trump’s character with Hillary Rodham Clinton’s, maybe they saw difference without distinction. They were sorely mistaken. Clinton’s character may be out of kilter. Trump’s is putrefied. Or perhaps by voting for Trump, Americans were saying character does not much matter.

In our dopamine-drenched social media environment, Trump succeeds by mobilizing his doltish supporters even as he goads the hordes who oppose him into self-defeating militancy.

Alongside Trump drones are his more rational enablers who perfunctorily concede that the president’s character is problematic but argue that his policies are worth the discomfiture. I suppose they mean trying to pack the Supreme Court with justices inclined to re-criminalize abortion; or using regulatory authority to reverse irksome environmental laws, or just plain trying to keep America as white as possible for as long as possible.

To be fair, some of his policies on trade, illegal border crossings, and NATO are hardly outlandish at face value.

Like a broken clock, even Donald Trump can’t be wrong 24/7. 

It would be churlish of me as an Israeli not to admit what a relief it is to have a denizen in the White House who does not instinctively challenge every IDF military operation or decry every Jewish home constructed over the 1949 Armistice Line. It is fitting that the US Embassy is now in Jerusalem and that President Barak Obama’s 2013 Iran deal was reversed. Too bad that Trump’s administration seems no less helpless than its predecessors in preventing the mullahs from lurching toward an atomic bomb. And I shudder to think where Israelis would be if the PLO and Hamas had cleverly finessed their response to Trump’s deal of the century instead of rejecting it outright. 

I get that Trump’s America is understandably finished with endless wars in the Middle East. Still, as salesman-in-chief, Trump is delighted to flog F-35s and EA-18G Growlers to the UAE, Patriots to Kuwait, an old guided-missile frigate to Bahrain – and just about anything that goes boom to the Saudis. A welcome byproduct of this transactional approach to US foreign policy is that Israel’s zero-sum conflict with the Palestinian Arabs has been dissociated from its bridgeable differences with the broader Arab world.

Trump’s policies, for better or worse, tend to be divulged in a slapdash, circuitous manner that reflects his disordered personality. Staffers are left scrambling to justify his impetuous actions after the fact.   

His policies and character are intrinsically linked – as they have been for all previous presidents.

September 12 marks the 16^th anniversary of the death of the scholar who literally wrote the book on presidents and character, James David Barber. What better time than to revisit The Presidential Character – Predicting Performance in the White House, first published in 1972.

Barber, who was the chairman of the political science department at Duke University until 1995, was renowned for blending psychology and political science. He hopefully figured that people would factor a candidate’s character in deciding how to vote. “If there is such a thing as extraordinary sanity, it is needed nowhere so much as in the White House,” he wrote decades before Americans sent a self-described “very stable genius” there.

In 2016, voters seemingly ignored Barber’s advice to look for patterns of behavior before casting their ballots. They didn’t have to know that Donald Trump grew up in a home with a mother who was cold and withdrawn, and a father who withheld his love as punishment for perceived failure. A family where cheating and bullying were endorsed, and introspection, soul-searching, and apologizing were inexcusable signs of weakness to intuit that Trump’s personality was psychologically stunted.

Naturally, a person’s character is not determinative; it is not destiny. Humans have the capacity for growth. Or, as Barber put it, “starts, do not define finishes.” Still, he hypothesized that a president’s early life would be an essential element among a confluence of factors affecting presidential style, specifically: rhetoric, interpersonal relations, and homework. “Character is the way the president orients himself toward life not for the moment, but enduringly,” wrote Barber.

Psychologist Daniel Goleman added in Emotional Intelligence that “The bedrock of character is self-discipline; the virtuous life, as philosophers since Aristotle have observed, is based on self-control” to be able to set aside self-centeredness, to do real listening and to allow yourself to be empathetic. For Barber, character is what emerges when who we are comes up against what we must deal with in daily life. Personality and temperament matter because citizens look to the president for reassurance in times of crisis. The president ought to be able to personify the better angels of our nature.

Barber categorized presidents roughly speaking from Theodore Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter (in a revised edition). His classifications were anchored in two criteria: whether these individuals were active performers and whether they took pleasure from their job.

As presidential types went, Barber judged Thomas Jefferson as active-positive, John Adams as active-negative, James Madison as passive positive, and George Washington passive-negative.

Trump, who denigrates opponents as “low energy,” spends chunks of his days in frenzied TV watching and tweet storming clearly derives little pleasure from the presidency. Given his apparent low self-esteem and grandiose schemes, most observers identify him as active-negative.

Barber had found that active-negative presidents do not try to sway those who disagree with them. Their rigidity impels them to double-down on failing policies. They sometimes work themselves to exhaustion, become isolated and paranoid. Anger is a constant. “As the process of rigidification moves along, the President finds among his enemies an individual who, to him, personifies the threat. That person becomes the focus for the President’s aggression,” according to Barber. 

Active-negatives do little or no presidential homework. They have no use for anyone who offers an adverse opinion; total loyalty is demanded. The glass always looks half-empty. So as not to hurt them emotionally – since they are fragile and desperate for adoration – bullied advisers tell them only what they want to hear. Tormented, they cannot relish victory. They find it hard to show compassion. These individuals assume complex problems can be solved by backslapping, flattery, and personal appeals.

Barber published before Donald Trump entered politics, but he analyzed him uncannily: “His natural medium was the world of the deal, the world where a man at the right place and time could patch together a bundle of power, doing some good for himself and some for others at the same time.”

What active-negatives have in common is “strong deprivations of self-esteem” in childhood as a result of “parents who denigrated or abandoned them.” Elect an active-negative character, and you run the risk turning one person’s tragedy into a massive national and social catastrophe, warned Barber.

He might also have added that you could be unleashing a pedagogical catastrophe. Besides the immense power Donald Trump has as president, he also sets an example for children. Remember Vladimir Lenin’s mantra: “Give me four years to teach the children, and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” 

Think about what Trump could do with four more years.

 

'Graving'

When does religion crossover into superstition? And when does pilgrimage verge on idolatry?

I have been thinking about these questions because of the controversy surrounding the annual Haredi-dominated pilgrimage to Uman.

Each year before Rosh Hashana during the Hebrew month of Elul, thousands of (mostly but not exclusively) Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox pilgrims board flights at Ben-Gurion Airport to pay homage at the grave of Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav in Uman, Ukraine. A few men spend the entire High Holy Days near the shrine, leaving their wives and little ones behind.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has struck Israel hard and its ultra-Orthodox community, incredibly hard, Ronni Gamzu, the government’s chief Corona coordinator, has been lobbying vehemently to thwart the 2020 pilgrimage. 

Shas and United Torah Judaism, the ultra-Orthodox parties upon which Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s political survival hinges, charge that Gamzu exceeded his mandate when he directly contacted Ukrainian authorities urging them to prevent Israeli pilgrims from visiting the shrine. Haredi lawmakers demanded Gamzu be sacked.

Ultra-Orthodox pundits argued that God, not Prof. Gamzu, was best positioned to heal the sick. And anyway, they said, why should the secular have all the fun? They get to work out in gyms and protest Netanyahu policies and alleged corruption in nightly rallies with no social distancing while Haredi life has been comparatively restricted. 

The Haredim feel they are being asked to take Covid-19 more seriously than other Israelis, and it is just not fair. Israelis famously loathe being made suckers – individually or tribally.

Netanyahu, who has shown a capacity for duplicity, messaged that he was siding with the ultra-Orthodox against Gamzu. Offstage, he pleaded with Ukraine to forbid the entry of Israeli pilgrims. This officials in Kyiv did on August 26, as Israel’s Covid-19 death toll was nearing 1,000.

Some pilgrims took no chances, left early, and are already ensconced in Uman. Others carrying non-Israeli passports will try to sneak in via indirect connections.

Is it not folly to adamantly insist on making an international pilgrimage during a pandemic that has claimed over 800,000 lives worldwide? As it is many ultra-Orthodox sages in Israel, the US, and the UK have died of Corona. So why would any father, son, brother, or husband consider putting their families at risk? Why do Haredi politicians notably Agudat’s Yaakov Litzman (Ashkenazi Hassidic) and Shas’s Aryeh Deri (Sephardic) push for pilgrimages even after the community’s bitter experience at the beginning of the plague?

Part of the answer is that Litzman and Deri cannot ignore the wishes for “normalcy now” coming from clerical powerbrokers and rank and file constituents. The grand rabbis and their coteries are no more ignorant about Covid-19 than the US president, but like him, they find the pandemic a drag.

And like for everyone else, the public health danger must be balanced with other needs, including for Haredim, the imperative of maintaining tribal discipline and cohesion. The Haredi lifestyle depends not only on insularity from society-at-large but on maintaining internal solidarity, which requires devotees to gather in numbers in synagogues, wedding halls, yeshivot, and on pilgrimages. 

If, as Aristotle said, man is a social animal Haredi Man is utterly dependent on his communal personages, structures, and institutions to sustain, legitimate, and perpetuate a way of life.

Naturally, matters of a pecuniary nature play a role. The ultra-Orthodox world’s sub-economy is not immune to the financial blows wrought by Covid-19. There is legitimate as well as illicit money to be made for Haredim and locals in organizing pilgrimages (and pleasures) in Uman.

In Judaism, “graving” is not in and of itself idolatry. Paying homage at graves has long been a fixture of diasporic Judaism, often involving arduous journeys to the Holy Land. That said, fixating on a faraway crypt during a global pandemic seems reckless. 

I am not disparaging cemetery visits. Visiting the graves of loved ones provides succor. Personally, I am less keen on pilgrimages to the graves of saintly rabbis or purported shrines of biblical figures. Yet for many, such journeys deliver a connection to forebearers, solidify our shared heritage, and offer emotional-spiritual comfort.

Perhaps the most revered burial shrine in Judaism is Hebron’s Machpelah, where tradition says Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are buried along with the Matriarchs Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah. The Machpelah anyway has profound significance in Jewish civilization because it is situated in Hebron ancient Israel’s first capital.

When Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav went on his Holy Land pilgrimage, it might have been to Hebron and to the Mount of Olives overlooking the Temple Mount. He may have also visited the tomb of Shimon ha-Tzadik, a Second Temple-era high priest mentioned in Pirkei Avot (1:2) as “among the last of the Great Assembly.” Shimon is believed to be buried in what is nowadays the Arab neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah on the way to Mount Scopus.

The 2nd-century’s Simeon bar Yohai cited many times in the Mishnah, and regarded in traditionalist circles as the author of the mystical Zohar attracts masses of pilgrims to his grave in Meron, especially on Lab B’Omer. This year too, notwithstanding Corona (and with an amber light from the Haredi-deferential Netanyahu government), thousands of the faithful trekked to his Galilee resting place.

Rachel’s Tomb near Bethlehem draws a steady flow of pilgrims. Bratslav devotees have been known to spend the night at Joseph’s Tomb in PLO-controlled Nablus.

Outside Israel, significant gravesites dot the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and North America. But no shrine consistently draws more devotees than Rebbe Nachman in Uman, Ukraine, a city drenched in Jewish blood. Terrible pogroms took place there in the 1600 and 1700s. During the Holocaust, some 17,000 Jews were murdered in and around Uman.

Nachman (of Bratslav in Poland) lived in Uman for about a year before his death of tuberculosis at age 38 during Sukkot 1810. A great-grandson of the founder of Hassidism, the Ba’al Shem-Tov, Nachman pulls more visitors than his revered great-grandfather buried in Medzhybizh about 250 km. to the west.

Nachman encouraged his followers toward asceticism and fasting as attested by his fundamentalist followers in today’s Mea Shearim quarter in Jerusalem. A probable manic depressive, he also encouraged clapping, singing, dance, and ecstasy during prayer.

One of his contributions to Hassidism was to accentuate the Rebbe’s role as a conduit between his disciples and God. And he advocated hitbodedut or meditative self-isolation to draw closer to God. He taught: “It is very good to pour out your heart to God as you would to a true, good friend.” 

Such innovations led to disputes with competing clerics who charged him with messianic pretensions. It was these differences that forced him to relocate to Uman.

The branding of Nachman was accelerated by his leading disciple Nathan (Reb Noson) ben Naphtali Herz of Nemirow. He built the synagogue in Uman to perpetuate his teacher’s memory and instituted the annual pilgrimage around Rosh Hashanah. According to Noson, Rebbe Nachman promised to intercede in heaven on behalf of every person who prayed at his grave.

Nachman’s less-ascetic followers latched on to the happy-clappy side of his message. Some can be seen driving around randomly in dilapidated vans with souped-up loudspeakers. Between traffic lights, they pour out and dance to thump-thump-thump Bratslav trance music. 

Today, there is no one Bratslav Rebbe which has allowed some shady characters to emerge. Perhaps the most esteemed Bratslav court is headed by Jerusalem Grand Rabbi Yaakov Meir Shechter (a fierce anti-Zionist). 

The catchphrase “Na Nach Nachma Nachman Meuman” popularized by one of the Rebbe’s followers – and later by ubiquitous graffiti – is considered to have wonderous Kabbalistic powers when recited.

In pondering the demands of Nachman’s followers and fellow travelers to do their Uman pilgrimage pandemic notwithstanding, I ask myself what distinguishes their Judaism from mine, their “superstition” from my “tradition.”

To the extent that I have an answer it is that Jews are tribal people, and Judaism is a Big Tent civilization that encompasses contending mores and worldviews. The spectrum allows for rationality and fantasy. For me to call them superstitious and for them to call me God knows what.

Jewish law does not obligate graving, not even to visit the burial site of a loved one. However, the notion that the spirits of deceased relatives can intervene on our behalf is discussed in the Talmud (Taanit 16a) which was redacted around 350 CE. Rabbinic Judaism sought to balance the requirement that prayer be directed exclusively to God with our emotional need to hold on to the memories of loved ones. Rational traditionalism tends to discourage obsessive visits to gravesites, according to Maurice Lamm’s seminal The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning.

In contrast, fundamentalists tend to play up graving. The Lubavitcher Rebbe would spend several afternoons a week in meditation at the tomb of his father-in-law.

Personally, I find occasional visits to the graveyard cathartic. I keep deceased loved ones in my thoughts and prayers year-round. But I endeavor not to be obsessive about it.

So, maybe superstition is what happens when you catapult graving beyond what the sages of old intended. And idolatry is what happens when you make a fetish out of what should be symbolic. 

Faith ought to provide a spiritual, ethical, and social framework for living. This is not enough for fanatics who feel compelled to ostentatiously signal their piety. Religion becomes an excuse for obsessive-compulsive behavior.

Non-fundamentalist Judaism allows reverence for God to be expressed in nuanced modest ways. It strives for the golden mean. 

Faith is what you struggle with when you do not have the crutch of easy graving.