This past week I read in the Washington Post that Rick Perry has attacked George W. Bush as a closet liberal:
Perry, who closely allied himself with Bush earlier in his career, was a supporter of Bush’s tax cuts and praised his leadership on national security issues. But he has been critical of Bush’s fiscal stewardship and his attempts to court the political middle by taking on issues such as education, immigration and Medicare. He has said that “this big-government binge [in Obama’s tenure] began under the administration of George W. Bush.”
Bush rankled conservatives with remarks such as this 2003 comment: “We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move.”
Perry has dismissed that idea.
“The branding of compassionate conservatism meant that the GOP was sending the wrong signal, that conservatism alone wasn’t sufficient or worse yet, was somehow flawed and had to be re-branded,” Perry wrote in his 2010 book “Fed Up.”
This past week I wrote the
D'var Torah for the groups Street Prophets and Elders of Zion. I focused on the opening words of this past week's Torah reading requiring the Jewish people to appoint impartial judges who do not take bribes. I examined the Talmud's standards for impartiality and questioned whether today's right wing zealots on the bench meet these standards. But, while sitting in synagogue this Saturday morning and studying the rest of the Torah reading, it occurred to me that Rick Perry and his fellow teahaddists fall short of the concept of the Torah, as construed in the Talmud, as to what is the responsibility of the government.
In Deuteronomy 19: 8-10, the Jewish people are commanded to establish cities of refuge where the person who accidentally, but not deliberately, kills someone, may flee in safety. The passage ends with:
That innocent blood be not shed in thy land, which the LORD thy God giveth thee for an inheritance, and so blood be upon thee.
Deuteronomy 19:10 (King James Version)
The Talmud comments on this verse:
They, the Public Commissioners, go forth to clear the roads of thorns, to mend the broadways and [main] highways and to measure the public baths; and if any baths be found short of . . . of water they train a continuous flow into it [to ensure enough water in the bath.] And how do we know that if they did not go forth and attend to all these [public needs], then if any blood be shed there through this neglect, Scripture lays the blame on them (the government officials), as if they themselves had shed it? From the verse of the the Torah which states: And so blood be upon thee.
Matan Katan 5a.
At the end of this past week's Torah reading, in Deuteronomy, chapter 21, we read:
If . . . someone slain is found lying in the open, the identity of the slayer not being known, your elders and magistrates shall go out and measure the distances from the corpse to the nearby towns. The elders of the town nearest to the corpse shall then [slaughter a heifer and] wash their hands over the heifer whose neck was broken in the wadi. And they shall make this declaration:
"Our hands did not shed this blood, nor did our eyes see it done. Absolve, O Lord, Your people Israel whom You redeemed, and do not let guilt for the blood of the innocent remain among Your people Israel." And they will be absolved of guilt.
The Talmud, Sotah 38b, quotes Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi:
The necessity for the heifer whose neck is to be broken only arises on account of the lack of spirit, as it is said, 'Our hands have not shed this blood.' But can it enter our minds that the elders of a Court of Justice are shedders of blood? The meaning is, [the man found dead] did not come to us for help and we dismissed him, we did not see him and let him go - he did not come to us for help and we dismissed him without supplying him with food, we did not see him and let him go without escort.
It seems to me, that the Perry-Teahadist attitude that the unemployed and the downtrodden and the unfortunate can starve, that those without health insurance can die, and that public facilities need not be kept up and improved - just don't raise my taxes and I demand you lower them, is at odds with the rabbinical construction of these Biblical verses. I would assert that, despite wearing their piety on their sleeves, these folks are rather un-Jewish and, I would hazard to suggest, un-Christian and un-Islamic too. But I'll let the folks of those faiths supply the text.