Trump, Ben-Gvir, and my vanished abode

I don’t like Donald Trump.

I don’t like him as a human being. He’s mean, cruel, petty, vain, bullying, intimidating, uncaring, and non-empathetic. He replaces reasoned disagreement with insults and needs to study Exodus 23:7 carefully. To get an idea of his true nature, read his Instagram Easter message.

I don’t like him as president. He has a strong authoritarian streak, attempts to govern by executive order while treating the Constitution and law as mere suggestions, appoints incompetent cabinet members and fires watchdogs and heads of independent agencies, trolls about an unconstitutional third term (when people like President Trump say they want to be king, believe them), acts contemptuously toward federal judges, both in a legal and non-legal sense, forcing even his compliant chief justice to (overly gently) reprimand him, and denigrates the rule of law, thus violating his most basic constitutional power: to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

I don’t like him as the role model a president should be in his official capacity. He mistreats and deprecates democratic (small “d”) allies and their leaders while admiring and cozying up to dictators and oligarchs, has created a personality cult to which his acolytes kowtow, brags incessantly, never admits error, and makes sure the buck always stops at someone else’s desk, is a convicted felon and has been found liable by two juries for sexual abuse, is unable to accept defeat, and believes in vengeance as a matter of policy rather than due process as a matter of justice.

That’s not all, but I’ll sum it up more personally. My wife and I worked diligently to impart to our children the values our parents modeled for us, and to teach them to be good, decent, and kind people. Had they grown up to talk and act like, and be as unfeeling and callous as, Trump, I would have considered myself a complete failure at my most important life role. (Fortunately, they turned out to be magnificent adults.)

But I fear that on this issue I find myself in the minority of my Modern Orthodox community, the one I’ve lived in and cherished my entire life; the one I always thought stood for the values that decent people held dear, that were taught in my Torah classes, preached in my rabbis’ sermons, written about in the scholarly articles I read, and discussed at Shabbat meals I’ve enjoyed.

So I cannot understand how decent people can support Trump while knowing the importance Judaism places on the value of imitatio dei, the requirement to emulate God’s ways since all humanity was created be-tzelem elokim, in God’s image. We believe that since God is merciful, compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, kind, faithful, and forgiving (Exodus 34:6-7) and His seal is truth (Shabbat 55a), we need to seriously try, even if we too often fail, to incorporate those attributes into our very selves. And we understand that the obligation to love and protect the poor and the powerless, the strangers, widows, and orphans, is what the Hebrew prophets preached while speaking truth to power. How, then, can those with whom I daven, learn, and socialize abide the fact that Trump’s character and language, his placing the needs of the wealthy over the weak and the victimizers over the victims, are the antithesis of some of our most treasured values?

I’ve seen three, albeit highly unsatisfactory, responses to this anomaly. The first is exemplified by Bill Maher’s infamous 13-minute riff about his dinner with Trump. He argues that Trump’s not so bad; he was a fine host during that dinner, acting like good and gracious people do, and quite unlike the very different Trump we see in public. And, sensing pushback, he defiantly and defensively tells us more than once that he’s simply reporting the truth of those few hours, as if that “truth” actually was meaningful.

Larry David brilliantly tells a different truth in his dazzling, satirical opinion piece in the Times (“My Dinner with Adolph”), which highlights the complete irrelevance of Maher’s “truth-telling.” What difference does it make, no matter how true, if Trump can act nice and be normal for a two-hour dinner? That isn’t a chiddush (creative new idea). History is filled with cultured people, whose behaviors and actions on the surface meet the highest standards of proper society, yet who were truly evil, and acted accordingly, in all the ways that really matter. Has Maher learned nothing at all from the past 90 years?

There’s also the response that Trump’s good for Israel. Trump has, indeed, acted in some positive ways toward Israel and the Middle East, such as instituting the Abraham Accords. And while I think supporting Trump for that reason is unnecessary because the Democratic party and its leaders and candidates also are sincere, devoted supporters of Israel, I’ll leave a more complete discussion of that issue for another column. My essential point about why this response fails is that putting America’s role in the defense and security of Israel in the hands of a person as untrustworthy, unprincipled, transactional, and erratic as Trump is a fatal error, both practically and morally.

The third response is, ironically, one of seeming agreement, as many respond to Trump’s serious flaws by saying that they held their nose in the voting booth while pulling the lever for him. “I also don’t like him/the language he uses/his demeanor/his character but we’re not electing the pope or the Chofetz Chaim,” they say. The flaw here is that in a presidential election, an essential qualification of any candidate is, at the very least, basic decency and humanity.

I’ve heard something similar from an Israeli perspective. Recently, Itamar Ben-Gvir spoke on Shabbat at several MO shuls in the Five Towns, though one shul rescinded its invitation. Ben-Gvir, a Knesset member and minister in the Israeli government, also is a proponent of Kahanaism, sported a picture of Baruch Goldstein in his house until that became politically untenable, had been convicted of incitement to racism and supporting a terror organization, was barred from serving in the IDF, and exhibited behaviors that according to the Israeli attorney general and a Supreme Court justice harm “public trust in government institutions.” Those who take Torah seriously should not honor such a person with a platform in our sacred spaces on Shabbat, a day that is, as we sing, mei’ein olam habah, a day infused with a foretaste of a perfected world.

But here too, in heated social media discussions over the appropriateness of such invitations and calls to disinvite him, the same tactic was used; some of those who supported, and strongly opposed withdrawing, those invitations also claimed that they too don’t like or admire Ben-Gvir’s character and statements and/or didn’t vote for him. But, as with Trump, protestations of non-admiration are not a get-out-of-jail-free card absolving one of supporting the unsupportable.

(Parenthetically, the viral social media outrage over Ben-Gvir was initiated in a post by an Israeli tour guide friend of mine who grew up in one of the Five Town shuls that had issued an invitation. Great job, Robby! Thankfully, he was strongly supported by several wonderful Jewish educators, though, sadly, MO congregational rabbis were, as far as I could tell, notably silent throughout this brouhaha.)

As a child of the 1960s, I once believed, as Martin Luther King reminded us, that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. Now, however, that belief is being shaken if not shattered. In the national and international arenas, I feel frightened about the direction being taken by countries I love. And in a more personal sense, I feel lonely and alienated, living on the cold edge of the community I once felt was a warm home; “I dwell,” in Frost’s words, “with a strangely aching heart/In that vanished abode there far apart.”

Joseph C. Kaplan, a retired lawyer, longtime Teaneck resident, and regular columnist for the Jewish Standard and the New Jersey Jewish News, is the author of “A Passionate Writing Life: From ‘In my Opinion’ to ‘I’ve Been Thinking’” (available at Teaneck’s Judaica House). He and his wife, Sharon, have been blessed with four wonderful daughters and five delicious grandchildren.

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