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14 December 2004
"Rules of Engagement"
"Ask the Rabbi" editor,
R. Mermelstein
If you have not heard the
good news of late, Rabbi R. Mermelstein has agreed to answer a limited
amount of firearms related questions for readers of the Gun Owners
Alliance Web Pages. Feel free to browse:
http://www.gunownersalliance.com/AskTheRabbi.htm
and ask the rabbi your firearms related questions! Additionally, we
continue to recover previous "Ask The Rabbi" articles. We will add such
articles to our ever growing list, so please check back often for
updates from the past!
Sincerely,
Gun Owners Alliance
Chris W. Stark - Director
Rules of Engagement - Copyright © 2004
by Rabbi R. Mermelstein
Rabbi@GunOwnersAlliance.com
http://www.gunownersalliance.com/AskTheRabbi.htm
I must make an explicit admission: The events of 2004, more than
any year in recent memory, have depressed me in ways I am not yet even
aware of.
Not unlike other religious Jews, I keep both an English solar calendar
and a Jewish lunar calendar within easy view of either my desk at home
or at the office. The Jewish calendar begins with the first day of our
New Year, Rosh Hashanah, and ends the day prior to the next Rosh
Hashanah. On the solar Gregorian calendar, a revision of the Julian
calendar that was instituted in a papal bull by Pope Gregory XIII in
1582, those two days of Rosh Hashanah fall in either September or
October.
As a Jew working in a non-Jewish world these various New Year days each
carry their own significance for me, but in different ways.
Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, is both celebratory in a sober way,
and a day of proclaiming the Kingship of the Al-Mighty over His entire
creation. This acknowledgement of being subservient to a Creator who
has it within His power to extend (or not) our lives in all aspects for
the coming year is quite sobering indeed. This pervasive mood is also
designed to make people introspective and to scrutinize their lives
and, on a broader scope, the world around them.
The Gregorian calendar New Year also has this effect on people of the
Christian faith. Resolutions are made to improve personal shortcomings,
sincere best wishes are bestowed on total strangers; all in all, both
Jews and Christians soon climb down from the emotional heights and fall
back into familiar patterns of behavior. It is not the least bit
wasteful, then, to have a New Year event every twelve months—the human
soul needs an annual spiritual checkup with thought given to personal
betterment in our relationships with G-d and our fellow men.
And as a Jew living in a predominantly Christian nation, I unabashedly
take advantage of not one, but two annual opportunities to slow down,
sit down, and take stock of reality. Six such opportunities per annum would benefit me even more,
but I only have two calendars and I lack the saintliness to engage in
daily introspection without some sort of external impetus.
The aforesaid will serve as an introduction to my minor thesis.
Our world, and every civilization that ever existed on it, has always
been violent to the core. I’ve arrived at the conclusion that violence
is the general state of the human condition.
This statement needs to be qualified: There is violence that is born of
nothing more than unprovoked and unjustifiable malice. There is also
violence that is a natural and righteous reaction to check the
unprovoked, unjustifiable type. We can simply call these two categories
aggression and self defense. As lawful owners of firearms we practice
with the most efficient tools available to protect ourselves and our
loved ones from practitioners of the former sort of violence, but this
concept is very basic and already quite familiar to you if you are
reading these lines.
This brings me back to the cause for my melancholy. Just as cruelty and
brutality have been with us since Cain murdered Abel, if you believe
the biblical story of the world’s first inhabitants, the inescapable
byproduct of it is equally as hoary in its antiquity: the lack of value
placed on human life fashioned in the image of the Creator and the
degradation of all the grandeur that constitutes the soul.
This blurb was reported in the Buffalo News on December 6th:
"Americans have been fascinated by video games ever since someone
figured out a way to play a simple game of ping pong on a television
screen. Thirty years later, video games have reached a level of
sophistication that rivals the best military battlefield simulation. "
Too bad good taste hasn't kept pace.
The game has gone too far in a computer simulation titled, "JFK
Reloaded," in which players re-create the 1963 assassination of a U.S.
president. Gamers "fire" three shots at President John F. Kennedy's car
from Lee Harvey Oswald's re-created sixth-floor perch in the Texas
School Book Depository. There's a possible prize for exact replication
of the real shots, and points are deducted for mistakes, such as
hitting the first lady. The game, if it can be termed as such, was
released on Nov. 22, the 41st anniversary of the shooting in Dallas.
Family members have described it as "despicable." This may not go far
enough in describing just how low the Glasgow-based firm Traffic,
designer of the game, sank in marketing what it inexcusably calls an
educational "docu-game" intended to refute the theory that a conspiracy
was behind the assassination.
This isn't about free speech, it's about decency. "JFK Reloaded"
trivializes an awful point in this nation's history. Even though speech
is protected under the Constitution, there are limits to such abuses as
threat-making, especially against a president. And even if this game
doesn't involve a "real" president, encouraging even the play-acting of
such violence isn't in the best interest of anyone, from the gamers
involved to the presidency as an institution....”
Many upright, thoughtful people may find tasteless games harmless. They
are not crimes and there are no victims, but is that in fact the case?
Our nation, our American way of life, is based on jurisprudence, or a
philosophy and science of laws. Laws dictate a minimal standard of
behavior that, supposedly, prevents society from collapsing in anarchy
and chaos. Minimal standard
is the operative, here. Laws are written to enforce good behavior, or
more correctly to curb bad behavior, via the threat of
consequences. In our secular American legal system, unlike in
biblical law, there are
no laws that require exemplary behavior.
The ultimate arbiters of right
and wrong in American jurisprudence are nine US Supreme Court justices,
who in different points in history gave us Scott v. Sanford (1857), the
Dred Scott decision that declared unconstitutional the provision in the
Missouri Compromise that permitted Congress to prohibit slavery in the
territories, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the infamous “separate but
equal” decision, Hirabayashi v. United States (1943), the Supreme Court
interpretation that the Fifth Amendment contains no equal protection
clause and it restrains only such discriminatory legislation by
Congress as amounts to a denial of due process thus upholding the
internment of Japanese-Americans in California’s Mojave Desert during
World War Two, and Roe v. Wade (1973). Roe has come to be known as the
case that legalized abortion nationwide. At the time the decision was
handed down,
nearly all states outlawed abortion except to save a woman's life
or for limited reasons such as preserving the woman's health, instances
of rape, incest, or fetal anomaly.
All the above Supreme Court decisions cited, for whatever their legal merits, cheapened the reverence that human life imbued with the image of the Creator is due.
Consider this last statement a personal editorial to which many will
take grave exception, but I could not care less. Neither am I alone in
this view.
This brings me to my major thesis.
The highest Court in the land shapes not only our legal system, but also, though not necessarily by intent, it shapes how individuals understand right and wrong at the most personal level.
No, I am not a scholar of constitutional law to argue with the
prevailing majority of Supreme Court justices behind these landmark
decisions. The dissenting minority of justices hearing these cases were,
however, scholars of constitutional law. The fact that their dissents
were overruled did not make them wrong, but law is based on factors
other than what I and others consider the common sense to come indoors
from out of the rain.
So, I have drafted an ironclad resolution for the coming year that,
with some fortitude, will keep me at peace with myself even if it puts
me at odds with the rest of society:
“As a thinking person with a brain housing a spark of my Creator, I
will persevere to be shocked and disgusted by any type of conduct,
speech or entertainment that my intellect, based on principles and
ethics dating to antiquity, tells me is wrong. Further, I will (1)
ignore those voices that vilify me for being judgmental when I speak
out against something that I know to be wrong and (2) work tirelessly
in my private and public life to show others by example and logic why
something is wrong. Whether I succeed or fail in the latter is
irrelevant, because one day, I believe, there will be a reckoning with
the supreme Law Giver. And He is above the US Supreme Court or any
statutes of Man."
This seems like a fitting way to ring in the New Year. I invite you to
join me in this resolution for 2005. We will review this material again
in twelve months. There will be a test one day.
Sincerely,
Rabbi R. Mermelstein
Rabbi@GunOwnersAlliance.com
http://www.gunownersalliance.com/AskTheRabbi.htm
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