Sunday, Sept. 20, 2009 | 2 a.m.
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It is that time of year again.
For 5,770 years Jews around the world have been celebrating Rosh Hashana, which, as best I can tell, puts us at least a thousand years ahead of most enlightened religions. And given our biblical admonition to teach the world, a point of discussion at times like this, the question could well and properly be asked: What have you done?
Or, at least, what have you done lately?
To answer that question, I had to search no further than the lady who taught us most of what we have needed in my family to grow and prosper in decent and honorable ways — my mother.
She is struggling a bit in her own life but not nearly so much that she has forgotten or abandoned the life lessons she taught us from infancy — mainly how to be civil and how to laugh.
I mention this today because not only does Rosh Hashana — which began Friday night — begin the Jewish New Year, but it also marks the beginning of the High Holy Days, which culminate with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
On Yom Kippur, which is the holiest and most solemn day on the Jewish calendar, Jews everywhere seek forgiveness and ask that they be “inscribed in the Book of Life” for another year. Implicit in those prayers is the acknowledgment of wrongdoing.
It is not hard to follow these rituals through the other great religions that came afterward that bind most, if not all, of us together in common cause.
The word civility has been used a lot lately in public discourse.
First, after the recent death of Sen. Edward Kennedy, civility was used to describe the deep and respectful friendship that marked the relationship between the late senator and the senior senator from Utah, Orrin Hatch.
Whatever their differences — political and philosophical — they hashed them out in the most colorful language and intonations on the floor of the United States Senate and, when done rhetorically ravaging each other’s ideas, went to dinner or to each other’s home to further pursue their friendship.
The second emphatic use of the word civility has been to describe the absence of it or all pretense to it in the recent outburst by South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson who, in the middle of President Barack Obama’s address to the joint session of Congress, called the president a liar. He apologized to Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel not long thereafter and was told the president accepted.
That’s as far as Wilson went and, as a consequence, the House of Representatives, most of whose members were embarrassed by the outburst, rebuked Wilson in a most public way.
That, however, is not the news and not the lesson. Wilson’s outburst — wrong time, wrong place — was but a symptom of a country that has lost its way when it comes to civil behavior.
Had my mother been paying attention, she would have been appalled. Had any of her children or grandchildren been the culprits, we would have felt her wrath, for nothing is more important to our mother than our manners and the way we act toward others.
I believe that many Americans, and for that matter, many others around the globe, have missed that most simple lesson in how to act. Whether it is a biblical admonition or a parental imperative, the understanding that to be civilized is to be civil has been lost on so many people today.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t be passionate. We learned to stand up for ourselves, to argue when we needed to, fight when we had to and always stand our ground with passion and commitment. Civil society and great democracies demand that of their citizens.
What that does mean, though, is that we have respect for the other person’s opinion, and that means we don’t shout him down, we don’t talk over him to the point of distraction (a common tactic on cable “news”), we don’t call people with whom we disagree Nazis (unless they really are), and we don’t attack folks with epithets just because our own words and reason fail us.
Because of the way I grew up, I have always paid great attention to people’s table manners. How they hold their knife and fork, whether they use a napkin, whether the word please is ever used in conjunction with a request — you know, the sort of thing to which the queen of England would pay attention!
I do that because it gives me a glimpse into their upbringing (if they were fortunate to have been taught by their parents) or their own pursuit of good manners as they grew toward maturity in their pursuit of a good life.
When I don’t see good manners and civility, I wonder. And today I wonder if those people on whom the lessons of manners and civility didn’t take are the same ones who think it is OK to shout down a guest in their own home — that is, the president in Congress — or think it is OK to call elected officials and others who are trying to serve the public (whether we agree with them or not) the kind of names we are supposed to reserve for our worst enemies.
I wonder about that because if it is just a matter of lessons not learned or never taught, we can fix it. If, however, it is something much deeper, much more sinister and much more rooted in some perversion of biblical and other ancient teachings, then I am afraid we are in for much more difficult times in this experiment in democracy.
There are no guarantees that our democracy will endure — there are plenty of examples of those that haven’t. The only chance we have to continue what the first 200-plus years have brought us is to learn, once again, to be civil toward one another. Remember Aretha Franklin? R-E-S-P-E-C-T?
When we ask forgiveness — whenever and however we do it — perhaps we should start with the understanding that civility is the price we should pay for that peace of mind.
That’s what my mother has always taught us and that is one of the things I believe we are supposed to teach the world.
Happy New Year to all people of good will.
Brian Greenspun is editor of the Las Vegas Sun.
