In parshat Ki Tisa, this week’s Torah portion, starts with God giving Moshe a few last commandments about how to lead the Israelites. Then it continues;
When the people saw that Moshe was late in coming down from the mountain, the people gathered against Aaron, and they said to him: “Come on! Make us gods that will go before us, because this man Moshe, who brought us up from the land of Egypt we don’t know what has become of him. (Exodus 32:1)
Waiting to get the complexity of the Torah was too challenging for them. Masses of people never have the patience for nuance.
This is reminiscent of a talk given by former Supreme Court Justice David Souter. In a 2012 appearance in New Hampshire he made some striking and prescient remarks about the dangers of “civic ignorance”. This video has been circulating and worth seeing:
I was was most struck when he said:
I don’t worry about our losing republican government in the United States because I’m afraid of a foreign invasion. I don’t worry about it because I think there is going to be a coup by the military as has happened in some of other places. What I worry about is that when problems are not addressed, people will not know who is responsible. And when the problems get bad enough, as they might do, for example, with another serious terrorist attack, as they might do with another financial meltdown, some one person will come forward and say, ‘Give me total power and I will solve this problem.’… That is how the Roman republic fell. Augustus became emperor, not because he arrested the Roman Senate. He became emperor because he promised that he would solve problems that were not being solved.
Civics is important. We need to know who is responsible and then we can demand performance from them. Like the Israelites in the Golden Calf Incident, as was the case with Rome for Augustus, I am worried about our republic. The people who voted for Trump invested in a demagogue who claimed he alone could solve their problems. There is a never a quick fix to a truly complex problem. And yes everyone knew that health care was this complex. What will we need to do to clean up from this mess? Trump has been up on the Hill for over 40 days. If he wants to clean up this mess he has to do it quickly. He alone can determine if he is going to be Moshe, Augustus, or a Golden Calf. Like the Golden Calf- Trump is a product of an ignorant and impatient group yearning to be heard. It only it was as easy as breaking a couple of Tablets to get them to shut up and listen for a moment.
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