Open minds should listen to Condoleezza Rice at Beth El

Hopefully, the Beth El community has not become so polarized that the only speakers to whom we will willingly listen are those who share our views

By TOM SANDERS

In the Sept. 18 edition of the American Jewish World, a fellow Beth El congregant explained why he is “appalled and saddened” that Condoleezza Rice will be speaking at our synagogue on Nov. 8.

I am appalled and saddened at the polarization and demonization that has infected our public discourse. I am a liberal, but I will listen to Rice with interest, if for no other reason than because, as a Jew and as an American, I believe in listening across the divide.

The previous article passionately argues, and some no doubt agree, that Condoleezza Rice is “a warmonger and abuser of numerous legal values and core Jewish principles.” She committed “deeply immoral actions” and “shares direct culpability for many thousands of American and Iraqi deaths, for the grief and ruin the war has brought….”

Yet there are many in our community who are interested in hearing Rice, and others who have respect or even admiration for her, and they too have good reasons for their views. She was, after all, central to U.S. foreign policy-making for the entire eight years of the Bush Administration and an accomplished foreign policy scholar and policy maker before that.

Considered one of the more moderate members of the administration, she was an opponent of former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and is entitled to some credit for Cheney’s declining influence and Bush’s belated second-term efforts at a more multilateral foreign policy. She is at least as vilified by the far right as she is by the left.

Rice deserves credit for the AIDS initiative in Africa, a very substantial humanitarian effort to combat what is one of the great human tragedies of our time. And it’s a fact that Bush was reelected even after much of what outrages many Americans was common knowledge. If there’s culpability here, we, the American people, have our share of it.

The point is that it’s a much more complicated picture than the prior article suggests; and, more importantly, that there is a diversity of views among our community members and legitimate arguments to support many of those views. It’s much less about Condoleezza Rice than it is about being open to hearing differing viewpoints.

She’s not the speaker some of us would have chosen; but she is a person of intellect, import, experience and insight. Many of us were thrilled when Bill Clinton came to speak, even though many others have a well-justified moral objection to him. We cannot complain if, this year, the speaker is someone with whom we have issues.

More generally, I am deeply saddened at the descent of our public discourse into mutually exclusive exercises in vitriolic name-calling. Each side gets its “facts” from its own sources, hearing nothing but the echo of its own anger, and shouts epithets where reasoned dialogue is so badly needed: socialist, fascist, Nazi, warmonger. Hopefully, the Beth El community has not become so polarized that the only speakers to whom we will willingly listen are those who share our views.

Our body politic would be far healthier if we were to remember the dispute between the School of Shammai and the School of Hillel, which was resolved when a divine voice decreed that the law is according to the School of Hillel. Why? “Because they were kindly and humble; they taught their own rulings as well as those of the School of Shammai. And even more, they taught the rulings of the School of Shammai before their own” (Talmud Eruvin 13b).

In hosting Bill Clinton, Condoleezza Rice and others, the Beth El Speakers Series stands with the School of Hillel in opposition to polarization and demonization.

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Tom Sanders, of Golden Valley, is an officer of Beth El Synagogue.