Parshat Vayiggash
SERMON Parashat Vayiggash January 3, 2025
Rabbi David Edleson Temple Sinai South Burlington, Vermont
In the fall of 1976, I was a sophomore with Tim at Chattooga High School in Summerville, Georgia. As many of you know, I was a band geek, and already Drum Major, but I also was the only good piccolo player in the band. So every Friday night at the big football game, the flag and rifle corps would huddle up in the front, and I would disappear into them. The band would start Stars and Stripes Forever, the flags would begin to lift, and then on cue, the flags would sweep down to the ground to reveal me, standing on the crossed rifles of the rifle corp, being lifted up like Venus in the clam, to play that screeching piccolo solo – (imitates solo).
It was a heady time! It was the bicentennial, and a governor of Georgia was running for President. My family was all in for Jimmy Carter that year. He went to Georgia Tech, where my father had gone, and he brought a very new style to presidential politics after Nixon.
My senior year in High School, Carter held his famous Camp David meetings with Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Menachem Begin of Israel. Sadat’s bravery, that would cost him his life in a short time, and Begin’s courage in agreeing to peace with an country that had repeatedly led the wars against Israel made this unexpected breakthrough possible. The Camp David Accords were signed a few days after my 18th birthday that year, and I remember driving with my family, now living in Virginia, the hour it took to get to the nearest synagogue. It seemed like every Jews in Virginia came to synagogue that night. People were crying. Shots were flying. Every bad joke the rabbi told landed to roars of laughter. For us, it was like a prophecy come true: Israel won the war in 1948, recaptured Jerusalem in 1967, survived 1973 against all odds, and now there was peace between these two powerful enemies. It seemed for a brief shining moment that peace in the Middle East might actual come and that Jews would have a safe and peaceful nation finally after millenia of exile.
It's good to remember times like that, times of hope, times when the absolutely unexpected happens. The celebrated Jewish scholar Gershom Scholem wrote that every once in while, there are times in history that are best described as “plastic,” when great changes and shifts are possible, but that the groups that are most ready and able to seize the moment will shape the moment to their will. That felt like such a moment. Sadly, the advocates for peace did not succeed in seizing that moment.
Two years later, the Iranian revolution would depose a corrupt Shah in Iran, seize American hostages, and together with Saudi Arabia, begin an oil embargo that created tremendous hardship and distrust between the west and the Middle East. I remember waiting in long lines for gas, as I guess many of you do. Carter couldn’t get the hostages released and his popularity plummeted. Carter became a popular joke about a kind but bumbling weak president.
My sophomore year in college, Reagan won election and within days of his inauguration, Iran released the hostages. We shall see if history repeats itself this January.
I went home for Spring break that year, and my family had moved back to Georgia where my father had a new job. He invited over his new boss and other executive staff for supper al fresco. He grilled burgers and my mom made deviled eggs and potato salad. Everything was great until the new boss, hamburger in hand, blurted out, “Jimmy Carter was the worst president ever. I don’t know anyone who would admit voting for that idiot.”
From the doorway, came my mother’s voice: “What did you say?” She was holding a large bowl platter of corn on the cob. I knew instantly we were in for a treat. “What did you say?” she repeated as she slammed the corn down and half of it rolled to the floor. The boss repeated what he had said, and my mother reached over, grabbed the hamburger out of his hands and said through clenched teeth, “Well I voted for him, and I’m proud I did and you can kindly get the bleep out my bleep house, you bleep.” I loved my mother in these moments. My father not so much. That ended the dinner party, and soon after, his job.
When I graduated from college, I moved back to Atlanta to be with Tim, and I got a job at the Israeli Consulate there. The Carter Center had just opened not far from where we were living, and a young Benjamin Netanyahu who was a rising star, former chair of Likud, and Deputy Chief of Mission at the Israeli embassy in DC, and soon to be Israel’s charismatic, smart and very handsome Ambassador to the UN. It was my job to escort him around Atlanta to his meetings in my unmarked car. Whatever my feelings about his politics, I will never forget walking into his hotel room to get him, and he walked out wearing only tighty whities. He was 35. I was 23. All things were possible. I met President Carter during that time, and met him repeatedly during my time at the Consulate. He was always kind, calm, respectful, and listened intently.
Fast forward to 2006 and the release of Carters book: Palestine: Peace not Apartheid. By then, I was up here, a dean at Middlebury College, and while there was much discussion and consternation, there was just as much eye rolling that a sweet old president could be this gullible. Later, when Hamas told him they only wanted peace, Carter, always the optimist, always full of Christian charity, took their word for it.
Carter remained deeply critical of Israel and Netanyahu and viscerally supportive of the Palestinian desire for a state. I have no idea what he thought about the events of October 7, or if they changed his view of the situation. I doubt it.
So while I profoundly disagree with Carter’s views of many of the conflicts in the world, I still deeply admire. Having finished his one-term presidency, he went on to build the Carter Center, and be a powerful voice and player in all sorts of conflicts and elections. He was pivotal in organizations like Habitat for Humanity and other groups that help the poor. More than any former president I can think of, Carter continued to work for his values, and not only talked, but acted over and over again. While I might not agree with him, I very much admire him and his commitment to peace and justice as he saw it, and even though I, like many Southerners, really liked Roslyn best and knew she was the real brains and power behind the president, I think we all owe Carter our respect and admiration.
The peace treaty with Egypt has lasted over 40 years, and became the model for the treaties that have followed. He did not retire, but remained incredibly active for his very long life, from building houses to teaching Sunday School, to monitoring elections around the world.
It also seems to me like a good opportunity to remember that we don’t have to agree with everything someone thought or did to admire them and respect them. Too often today, everything is a litmus test of whether a person was good or evil, not simply right or wrong. By this standard, ss a gay man, there is almost no one in the history of the world that I could respect because they are almost universally homophobic. Every statue at every cathedral I’ve ever visited would have hated me or at least publicly denounced me. As a Jew, it is about the same. Still, can’t we admire people for some things and really despise them for others? I love Wagner’s music; and he was a profound hater of Jews.
One key lesson of our sacred texts is that people are both good and bad. King David was an amazing leader, poet and musician. He was also a murderer and a philanderer. In this week’s Torah portion, Joseph is both cruel and kind. He saved our people but kicked starving Egyptians off their land and took their homes as payment for food. Moses himself is no picnic. None of us are.
I think Carter’s death is an opportunity to sit with the complexity of human beings, and the way we are all flawed and yet are also quite capable of extraordinary things. To be a humanist, to love human being is to hold our contradictions and complexity, whether they are sitting next to us here in this community, or if they were President. May his memory be for a blessing.
Shabbat shalom,
David
