Measuring Good: Sabermetrics and Spiritual Insight

If you have followed my blog or Facebook, and are not living under a rock, you know that I am a bit bleary-eyed today. The Cubs made history last night, ending the longest (by forty years) championship drought in modern sports. After 108 years, the Cubs are champs. This morning a friend (and LA Dodgers fan) asked me what I will do now that THIS season is over. I replied "Wait 'till next year!" The traditional Cubs-fan greeting has a different ring to it now. I can't wait!

I have one more piece of my own on the Neshama (soul) of Baseball. It will run tomorrow morning. First, I want to bring this terrific piece to your attention. This, appropriately, arrived from eJewishPhilanthropy this morning. Warning: it is based on some seriously nerdy Baseball thought. It is also, I think, brilliant. Stick with it. Rabbi Harris brings home in the end.

---

The Neshama of Baseball, Part IV

Measuring Good:
Sabermetrics and Spiritual Insight

By Rabbi Maurice Harris

If Sabermetrics was a religion, Bill James would be the Messiah who was sent to reveal the Truth, Billy Beane his first prophet, and Theo Epstein the current High Priest of the Temple of Baseball. And if you have no idea what the previous sentence means, then permit this humble rabbi to invite you to into the garden of baseball nerdery.

I’ll start with a story: in the 1970s, while working as a night shift security guard, Bill James developed an alternative set of stats for baseball called Sabermetrics – an unorthodox analytical model worthy of Nate Silver. For many years, James’ ideas were only known to a tiny group of extreme baseball junkies. The story of how Sabermetrics was finally embraced by a major league team’s general manager, Billy Beane, is wonderfully told in Michael Lewis’ 2003 bestseller, “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game” and the 2011 movie it inspired.

Beane’s dilemma was that the team he was responsible for building, the Oakland A’s, didn’t have the money to compete for the free agents who were the best players. Beane was a Bill James fan with a small budget and nothing to lose. He concluded that if James’ stats were actually better at predicting success than the traditionally used stats, then maybe he could build a winning team by acquiring overlooked players that traditional scouts would miss – players whose Sabermetric stats were cream of the crop. He did, and the A’s went on to become the winningest team in baseball for a good stretch of years.

Finally, there’s Theo Epstein, who’s in the sports headlines these days. He’s the Sabermetrics whiz kid who applied James’ model to the Boston Red Sox, finally ending their long championship drought. He’s spent the last five years doing the same with the World Series Champion Chicago Cubs.

So what’s spiritual about all this? I promise, we’ll get there, but stay with me a bit longer.

Sabermetrics works by applying probability math to a very large amount of baseball data. It claims to deliver a higher probability of winning games over a long stretch of time. The regular baseball season is 162 games long, and typically the best teams at the season’s end win no more than 60% of their games, and the worst teams no fewer than 40%.

Applied over many seasons, the model has produced impressive results. For the first 10 years the A’s used Sabermetrics, their winning percentage was 52.1%. That may not sound that amazing, but it actually is. Historically, out of 30 major league teams and over 100 years of stats, there are only 3 teams with a higher all-time winning percentage – the Yankees (56.9%), the Giants (53.8%), and the Dodgers (52.5%). The team with the worst overall record throughout its history, the Tampa Bay Rays, still has won over 46% of its games.

Now, finally, we come to the spiritual insight in all this baseball meshugas.

Judaism is an optimistic yet realistic tradition. Every High Holy Days, we’re reminded of the sages’ teaching that we should all think of ourselves as people who probably do roughly the same amount of good deeds and bad, and that by taking a moral inventory and doing teshuvah, we have the power to tip the evenly balanced scales towards the good. We’re also taught that the world is profoundly broken, but that we collectively have the power to improve it. And, at least in liberal Judaism, we tend to believe that the world includes accidents, random events, and uncertainty.

Judaism’s attitude towards the power we have as human beings to improve the world is very sabermetrical. This is true of individuals and it is true of our organizations and congregations. If a group of us works hard to do good in a proven effective way, does that mean good outcomes will happen next week? Who knows? Too small a sample set. But if we stick with it over the long haul, our faith is that the cumulative effect will bend the moral arc towards righteousness.

This isn’t to claim that all the world’s problems can, or should, be addressed with comfortable incrementalism. That would be a misunderstanding of the Judeo-Sabermetric Tradition! Global warming needs dramatic action, for example, in part because we’re reaping the awful harvest of many decades of harm.

No, the faith of the rabbinic Sabermetrician is a faith that accepts the existential fact that even if we do the most good that we could conceivably do to address a great problem, the probability is that we only improve the odds of success by a few percentage points. For those of us worried about climate change, we have to reckon with the possibility that even if the entire world suddenly cooperates with massive clean energy reforms, we may be too late to avert lasting terrible consequences. That said, our best chance at making the world a better place, whether regarding global warming or, say, Jewish engagement, is for us to develop the most effective strategy to improve the situation and then implement it with discipline and consistency.

Adopting a Sabermetrics approach forces us to ask: are we asking the right questions? Perhaps it is not total membership households that defines a congregation’s success, but some other measurable? Or should we even be talking about members anymore – maybe we should instead be categorizing peoples’ involvement and participation in Jewish communal life differently, and measuring it in some novel way that tells us more about how effective our work is?

Another thought: we live in a world of probabilities, and our tikkun olam work, if done well and over time, will shift those probabilities. Trusting that that is true – that the universe is wired that way – goes hand-in-hand with accepting that we can’t control the outcomes. Even if we make it more probable than not that justice will prevail, it’s still possible that injustice will win out in any given situation. Similarly, Sabermetrics is quite reliable at getting baseball teams to finish with a good enough record to get into the playoffs, but it loses its predictive powers in the face of a short series of games.

Sabermetrics and Judaism guide us towards comparable approaches to the work of improving baseball teams and human society, respectively. They say to us: 1) do the research to find out what specific work needs to be done to succeed – understanding that the best strategies may be novel ones; 2) do the best you can do as a team (or as a community) to implement that plan, and 3) accept the uncertainty of the outcome in any given situation but keep on keeping on.

To put it more succinctly: Study. Take action. Accept what happens next. Repeat. Have faith in this process. Play ball and/or Amen.

Rabbi Maurice Harris is associate director of affiliate support for the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College/ Jewish Reconstructionist Communities.

In the BIG Inning

The Neshama of Baseball, Part 3

Ari and Rachel

Rachel Margolis is an educator in Chicago and my partner in crime as co-chairs of the Communications Team for the Association of Reform Jewish Educators (ARJE). She and her husband Ari, a rabbi serving Congregation Or Shalom in Vernon Hills, Illinois. Ari and I have never actually met. When Rachel and I get together with our colleagues, he is usually home parenting their three spectacular daughters. But he has weighed in while Rachel and I have texted while watching the Cubs this post-season. He wrote this drash for Parshat Bereshit this past week. Rachel posted it on Facebook and The CCAR Blog picked it up as well. He gave me permission to post it here.

---

An ode to the intersection of this week's Torah portion, Bereshit, and my beloved Cubs:

In the beginning. . .

There was a team that experienced an abundance of success. They went to the World Series three times in a row. But they fell from grace after two straight championships. Expelled from the Garden of Greatness, they lost their way, squandering opportunity after opportunity. They experienced a deluge of misfortune, a famine of talent and success as they turned away from the land of the World Series, winding up in the bondage of ineptitude. They wandered, searching to find the promised land for 71 years, escaping the oppression of poor management and indifferent ownership, never losing hope.

Suddenly, a new team arose who knew not the Cubs of the past. Together with new ownership, sabermetric analysis, young talent, and innovative management, the long suffering crew has found its way to back to the World Series, standing on the precipice of the promised land.

By next week, we will all know the outcome of this part of our story, yet to be written. But what we do know is that sure enough, a new baseball season will come next Spring with new opportunities for redemption, renewal, and understanding, just as we have opportunities to find the same in our own hearts during this next year of reading our Torah.

Here's hoping that the team that taught me to understand the narratives of our people, always striving to return home to the promised land, will have found their Jerusalem. And whether they do or not, as we say at the end of Passover ... Next year in the World Series!

The Theology of the Cubs

The Neshama of Baseball, Part II

Irwin

I have known Irwin Keller since 4th or 5th grade. He was a year ahead of me in religious school at Congregation B'nai Jehoshua Beth Elohim (BJBE) in Glenview, IL. He was always the smartest kid I knew, but I never told him that until now. He was not a know-it-all. He was a great guy who took knowledge - especially Jewish knowledge seriously. While we were all trying to learn how to decipher the modern Hebrew dialogues in B'yad Halashon, Irwin was mastering the language. He led the service for his Bar Mitzvah completely in Hebrew - or at least that is how we all remembered it. He has become a lawyer, founded a drag a cappella quartet, the Kinsey Sicks, and for many years has been the spiritual leader Congregation Ner Shalom in Cotati, CA. He is studying with the Aleph Alliance and will be formally ordained a rabbi relatively soon. He also blogs at Itzik's Well. You should read it. I learn something every time he speaks or writes, and I am proud to call him a friend.

Like me, he is also a Chicago Cubs fan. We watched Game 4 of the series together Saturday night. I was in the bleachers and he was in a bar in West Hollywood (don't know why he was in LA, I didn't ask.) But with Facebook in front of us, we were watching together. He wrote the piece below last week and gave me permission to re-post it. Enjoy this second installment of the Neshama of Baseball. The original article is here.

---

A souvenir ball from Irwin's childhood

The Theology of the Cubs

by Irwin Keller

I grew up with a rabbi who regularly used baseball references in his sermons. I adored him (still do), and his outfield metaphors were usually just right. That said, he was a native South Sider, and a White Sox fan. Even as a kid I knew to look at his baseball enthusiasm with some skepticism. Sox fans were not like Cubs fans. My family – generations of North Side Jews – were the latter. Being a Cubs fan was as essential to who we were as being Ashkenazim, Chicagoans, Earthlings. We shared something special and formative with other Cubs fans. It was different from just being a baseball fan. Cubs fans had their own kind of faith, their own special theology.

I was raised into this religion from birth. My grandfather and his brothers-in-law were all formidable Cubs fans. Every summer Sunday of my childhood, like clockwork, like Shabbos, Grandpa Joe and Grandma Sade would pull up in their Oldsmobile and we would watch the ball game together. We'd turn on WGN at 1PM, in time to settle in with the announcers' pre-game chatter. My mother would pour her father a scotch on the rocks. I'd sprawl on the floor in front of the TV. And the game would start. My grandfather, like so many Chicago grandfathers, would yell at the umpires, would yell at Jack Brickhouse, would yell at Leo Durocher. Sometimes there were double-headers and all 6 of us would have to eat dinner in front of the TV so as not to miss any plays.

We were faithful fans, my family, although not fanatics. But fanatics did exist in my bloodline. My great grandmother's brother, Morris Levin, was a beloved figure at Wrigley Field. He earned a mention in the 1930 edition of Ripley's Believe It or Not for attending every game of the season and knowing every statistic in the National League, this while being completely blind. The players would say, "Hello, Mr. Levin" to him on their way onto the field, and he could tell from the sound of bat meeting ball exactly where a hit was headed.

Cubs games were daytime diversions in the days of my childhood; Wrigley Field had no lights. Too many extra innings and a game could be called on account of darkness. And who needed night games anyway? For Cubs fans, part of the joy was skipping school or work to go sit in the bleachers. And to a Cubs fan's eye, there was something vulgar about night games. Under electric flood lights, the White Sox looked like a Vegas stage show. Real baseball took place under the blue sky and bright sun.

I guess I'm saying these things to shore up my baseball cred, to try to convince you that I'm not just jumping on a Cubs bandwagon, although clearly here I am bouncing along on it. Baseball was, I think, something I sacrificed growing up and coming out. In perfecting my new, rebellious, gay identity, I embraced an outspoken and derisive ignorance of sports. And it was mostly true – I know nothing about basketball, football, hockey. I only care about soccer teams when they make beefcake calendars.

But baseball? Baseball I'm not ignorant about. I know the rules. I once knew the players. I know the pace and the feel and the culture. When I moved to California, that spirit chilled in me. I attended a few Giants games and a couple As games. And the company of my buddy Emily was wonderful. But I walked into Candlestick Park and it wasn't Wrigley Field. It was the wrong team in the wrong place. And rooting for a team that could actually win felt oddly meaningless.

Because being a Cubs fan has something to do with faith. Not faith in a specific outcome, but faith for its own sake. Faith as practice.

The Cubs last won a World Series when my Grandpa Joe was 5 years old. By the time I was watching ball with him 60 years later, the organizing principle of fandom could not have been any realistic expectation of winning. Instead faith was a posture, a relationship with the world, or at least the world of baseball. Rooting for a team that had a good chance was easy and it was beneath us. That kind of fandom was for people from other cities, where strength of character was not strictly required.

Whereas the theology of the Cubs fan had (and has) something to do with an embrace of the "is" rather than the "might be." It is belief without proof. Endurance without promise of reward. Patience just because.
If only we could live our lives this way! With such constancy. With exquisite endurance, faith that doesn't flag, joy even in the waiting. Holding the world – and each other – with love and loyalty, despite imperfection, despite unfinishedness. We don't need a perfected world; we don't need a perfect partner; perfect children, perfect self.  If we could just hang on to life, with all its ups and downs, with the fierce love with which Cubs fans hang on to baseball. What a world this would be!

And if every century or so there's a World Series title, no one would complain.

I sat last Saturday and watched the last National League playoff game, Cubs vs. Dodgers. Without a TV, without cable service, I had to connive my way onto the live stream. I sat, prodigal that I was, with my Israeli brother-in-law who had never seen a baseball game, and I elaborately explained it all. The rules. Why innings don't have a timer. How a normal game lasts as long as a movie but a memorable game with extra innings is like an opera. Why all the spitting (I had to make this one up) and crotch adjustments (ditto). What makes baseball fans better people. Pointing out how casual and respectful opponents were with each other. I felt all my love for the Cubs – not for these particular players, who were new to me and were all born long after my last visit to Wrigley Field, but my love for this religion that is the Cubs, that pours through and from me.

I relaxed in a deep way, a way that encompassed my entire life and not just that moment on the sofa. I forgot my work. I forgot the fatigue of the ongoing High Holy Days. I forgot the awful election. It was the 6th day of Sukkot, when we call in the biblical Joseph to be our guest in the Sukkah. Instead, it was my Grandpa Joe who was clearly at my side, his scotch in hand, in answer to my glass of local Sonoma wine.

And now tonight I settle in for the World Series. Sure, I'd like us to win. But it doesn't really matter. We want it but don't need it. We deserve it and so do the people of Cleveland who have been waiting a lifetime as well. We'll be fine either way. Because that's who Cubs fans are. That is our theology. We love, we believe, and we do so without proof or promise of reward.

Now play ball.

Joe and Sade arriving for Sunday baseball.

Take Me Out To The Ball Game!

The Neshama of Baseball Part I: Lessons learned in Wrigley Field

I often say I grew up in Wrigley Field.

That is not really true.

My grandfather, Uncle Stanley and great uncles Ted and Lee did all take me to a number of games.

Rusty, Uncle Stan, me and John

I spent more than a few hours on Waveland Avenue during batting practice, hoping to catch a ball launched over the left field wall (I never caught one, it was usually crowded).

And I had many exciting moments in the park, usually in the third base grandstands (made famous some years ago by Steve Bartman - who had absolutely no impact on the final score of any playoff game) or the left field bleachers.

Like most Cub fans my age, I was certain that I was the kid being portrayed by one of the actors in the play "Bleacher Bums," because I was a kid who sat in the bleachers when the play was written. (I certainly was not the kid. I never knowingly met the playwright.)

I did learn a lot of important lessons there.

Ernie Banks taught me that when God gives us a beautiful day for a ball game, we should play two. Because when God gives you the gift of a beautiful day you should take advantage of it and do what you love best.

I learned that you can trust strangers who share your passion. Because when someone passes a ten dollar bill across fifteen seats, they will receive their hot dog or frosty malt and ALL of their change.

Jack Kearney*, the ball park organist of my youth taught me that we can each have a theme song and that music can bring meaning and fun to life. And it can rouse a crowd to cheer even when there is little to cheer about on the field.

I learned that when the opposing team hits a home run you throw the ball back onto the field. We don't make trophy's of things that hurt us. Not in our house.

And as any Cub fan will tell you, I also learned how to deal with disappointment and failure. Lots of disappointment. And tons of failure. For Star Trek fans who don't follow baseball, imagine the Kobayashi Maru scenario, played out six days a week, occasionally twice in a day, 105 days or so per year, for most of your (in my case) 55 years of life.

It wasn't always that bad. When I was 8, life in Wrigley was nearly perfect. Until September 4. That was when the Miracle Mets took first place away from the Cubs. They went on to win the pennant and the World Series. We finished third.

And there have even been some stabs at the playoffs. And they were thrilling as long as they lasted. But so far, they have been graduate level courses in dealing with missing the mark.

Last year I was lucky enough to get a ticket for game 3 of the National League Championship Series against the Mets. I went by myself, skipping a dinner with colleagues. It was a sublime experience. Memories of all of those games from my youth, and the beloved men in my life who brought me to Wrigley (only Uncle Stan is alive) came flooding back and they were standing next to me cheering as we battled DeGrom and the Mets. They took us apart. But I was there.

I am sitting on a plane bringing me home to Connecticut. I was blessed to have a friend whose brother works for a baseball team who arranged for me to get four tickets to each of the first three World Series games to be played in Wrigley Field since 1945 (a series we lost to Hank Greenberg and the Detroit Tigers, four games to one).

I attended the first game with Uncle Stanley, his son - my cousin Rusty - and my other cousin John (from my dad's side). John and I are closest in age, and as kids watched more than a few games together. We would debate who was more important to the team, Ernie Banks (me) or Ron Santo (him), while swimming at our grandparents pool. The Cubs were beat that night 1-0. It was not an exciting game from an athletic perspective.

But it was Shabbat with my family. A single beer instead of wine. A hot dog bun instead of challah. And those infernal ball park lights instead of candles (I still prefer a day game). But we were together. It was a beautiful evening spent with Stan, Rusty and John. Reminiscing without saying a word at times. Getting to know each other better as adults and fathers, since we often only see one another at special occasions with lots of family around. And it was also sharing the moment with more than 42,000 others who had similar stories and memories.

Last night I attended game four with my cousin Amy (Rusty's sister and Stan's daughter after spending the night at the home she shares with her husband David and their two beautiful dogs, Sesame and Poppy). We spent a wonderful day together before the game and then we were joined by my college roommate and fraternity brother Steve and his wife Nancy. More memories. Another 41,000 cousins-in-spirit. (Sure there were some Cleveland fans. But they were having a similar parallel experience. We were connected.

My dear friend Mark flew to His hometown of Cleveland for game one. He was joined by his brother and sister. We spoke as walked to the train to get to the park before the my first game. We talked about how amazing it was for him, and how excited I was for me to share the experience of each of our teams being in the World Series for the first time in our lifetimes with our families - with people who shared our connections with our recent ancestors who taught us to love our teams. We learned to love our teams because we loved the people who shared their passion with us, who taught us the secret handshake and bought us a frosty malt.

And it was the WORLD SERIES, DAMMIT. Here's the thing about being a lifelong Cub fan - and I by no means the first nor even the one thousand and first to say it - we have faith. We believe in the future. One week from now, whether we are the Champions or not, we will be tied with 29 other teams for first place for the 2017 season. We know in our hearts that there is always next year. And that makes us content, if not always happy.

Much as we believe in the future, and we have come to believe that Theo Epstein, the Ricketts and Joe Maddox have built the real deal in the last two years, none of us EXPECTED to see a World Series in Wrigley Field in our lifetimes before this version of the team. We have always hoped for it. We have always believed it could happen. But unlike my friends who follow the Yankees or the Red Sox (and I live amongst both in Connecticut), we didn't expect it.

And so I am frustrated and hopeful. Totally bummed that as of now we are down three games to one, yet completely excited that thirty minutes, Jon Lester will pitch and David Ross will catch. And I believe with perfect faith that the Cubs can win the next three games and win the World Series on Wednesday. And if they don't, well, it is a young team with a great organization and I am already planning to see them play the Red Sox at Fenway in April - a first for me.

When Uncle Stanley picked me up at O'Hare on Friday, we drove to Westlawn Cemetery. We visited my grandparents, Stan's parents. We told Grampa the Cubs finally made it to the World Series. And we were going. And he was coming with us. Then we placed pebbles on their stones and got ready to take ourselves to the ball game.

I learned a lot at Wrigley Field this weekend. Some I knew from my youth. I learned or was reminded that just like seasons, things go around and begin anew. The destination is awesome. The journey and people who take it with you, are what sustains you. Sometimes for an entire lifetime. Now if we can just get 81 more outs this week!

*I had originally written that it was Nancy Faust, but she was the White Sox organist, who made a deep impact on their fans too. She is the first one to play Na-na-na Hey, Hey, Goodbye in a ball park.

#BlogExodus: Examine

My friend and colleague, Rabbi Phyllis Sommer has for many years invited people to "Blog Exodus" at this time of year. See her blog from the 11th of April: http://imabima.blogspot.com/2016/04/blogexodus-purify.html Basically, she chooses a theme a day for the fourteen days leading up to the Seder, and invites us all to write on that theme. You can do it on her daily Facebook post or on your blog.

Today's theme spoke to me at a moment when I had some time to write. The theme is Examine.

Now Examine is very Pesadik trope - next week we will clean our homes of all chametz - the stuff that has been leavened. Some will even use a feather and candle to examine the nooks and crannies in our homes so we can find the last of the chametz. We have been examining store shelves for weeks, hoping to find everything we need in order to prepare meals for a week, including one or two fairly large feasts.

But seeing the word Examine as a theme for the day makes me think about something even more intimate. It is interesting that the Israelites were instructed to make sure the lambs they sacrificed on the night of the final plague had to be without blemish, but were not told to purify themselves in any way. But much of the book of Vayikra (Leviticus) is filled with various people in a variety of situations being commanded to purify themselves as they prepared for a ritual or to reenter the camp.

My wife and I agree that Pesach is one of our favorite festivals, and it may be number one. The reason has to do with the cleaning of the house and the switching of the dishes. For me, though, it is also the idea that I need to Examine myself, and find the chametz that is inside me. I need to find the things that are holding me back from setting out on the path to freedom this year. And I need to deal with them. Some I can handle on my own. Others are big enough that I will need some help.


My rabbi growing up, Mark S. Shapiro, used to say that as hard as it was to get the Jews out of Egypt, it is (still!) harder to get the Egypt out of the Jews. We bring our chametz with us, just like packing a lunch for the road. The forty years of wandering was God's attempt to get the chametz of actual slavery - and the fantasy that somehow Egypt was better than the reality of freedom - out of our heads.

Find your own chametz - the kind that is inside you. And get rid of it. I am hoping we don't need to take a whole generation to get it done.

One of my favorite subscription e-mails is from HistoryTech.  It is written by educator, consultant and tech guy Glenn Wiebe. He is definitely my kind of educator. His blog consists not only of his own thoughts about the use of technology in teaching history, but also those of others he learns from. And it is about good teaching, not just good use of technology. Each posting has links to web sites or apps that educators might find useful usually around a common theme or idea. Very accessible. 

History, technology, and
probably some other stuff

Today he relies on his own wisdom as well as that of others to give some insight on how to approach one of the most troubling phenomena we have faced in some time in the American classroom - Donald Trump. It is a big issue for more than the Donald being Donald. In our classrooms - both secular and religious there is requirement of political neutrality on the part of the teacher and the school. But this is not a topic that can or should be ignored. So here is Glenn's post, which can also be found at https://historytech.wordpress.com/2016/03/15/teaching-in-the-time-of-trump/.

---

Teaching in the time of Trump

by glennw on March 15, 2016

Several days ago, I wrote a quick post highlighting seven ways to survive a divisive election while making your students smarter. That post generated an interesting conversation – many teachers began asking similar kinds of questions. Specifically . . . how can we teach diversity and tolerance when much of the campaign rhetoric directly challenges these very American values while at the same time maintaining a neutral political stance?

A recent article in the National Council for the Social Studies journal Social Education can help us address this concern. Titled Teaching in the Time of Trump by Benjamin Justice and Jason Stanley, the NCSS article provides context, rationale, and specific suggestions for focusing on American democratic values and process.
The article is an incredibly useful teaching tool but it also provides a powerful reminder of our fundamental task. Head over to get the full text but I’ve pasted some snippets below to provide some flavor of what Justice and Stanley have to say.

Teaching in the time of Trump raises a fundamental pedagogical question: is it permissible for a teacher to adopt a non-neutral political stance in the classroom, either through explicitly addressing the problems with Trump’s rhetoric or, conversely, by remaining silent in the face of it? How can teachers balance the much cherished value of political impartiality (protecting the students’ freedom of expression and autonomous political development) against the much cherished American values threatened by Trumpish demagoguery?

Why should we even worry about this?

Democracy has two chief values, liberty and equality. In most conceptions of liberty, demagoguery is allowed in a democracy. Controversial speech is still free speech. The problem of demagoguery lies not in its conflict with freedom, but with the democratic value of equality. Demagoguery causes problems in the absence of equal respect; it feeds off of and strengthens divisions in society.

Public school classrooms are training grounds for liberal democracy, where students learn democratic skills and knowledge.

Students must learn the bounds of reasonableness by interacting with apparently fixed knowledge – such as that in their textbooks – and also by applying knowledge to their engagement with other students in the process of analysis of public issues. In that process, teaching for democracy is not the same as giving free rein to all perspectives so that all are treated as equally reasonable. Rather, teachers lead conversations and set reasonable parameters so that all students can safely participate and learn what is reasonable and what is not reasonable. This is the fundamental political purpose of a public education.

Democratic principles and ideals are not themselves neutral. Neither is teaching students to become citizens in a society that aspires to these ideals. Because of the value of liberty, one should not suppress the speech of those who argue that one religion should have a preference over others, for example. But it is reasonable for a teacher to observe that Trump’s rhetoric is a contemporary example of a violation of the democratic ideal of equal rights for all religions.

Teachers also cannot be neutral about the misrepresentation of facts or the violation of norms of truth in public speech. They should emphasize to students the importance of evaluating the accuracy of statements made by candidates. Some examples of websites that check these are FactCheck, the Washington Post Fact Checker, and PolitiFact.

Why worry about facts?

Trump’s rhetoric exhibits several characteristics of demagogic speech. If political speech ought to be guided, in liberal democracy, not just by reasonableness but also by truth, then Trump’s seeming willful disregard of it is also illiberal, whether it was his efforts as a “birther” to discredit President Obama by demanding his birth certificate or his recent claims about Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the World Trade Center attacks.

In another example, Trump tweeted an inaccurate graphic claiming that 81% of whites who were murdered were killed by blacks; the real number in 2014 was 14%. Such disregard for truth is a mark of the rise of history’s worst tyrants. Hannah Arendt in her book Origins of Totalitarianism grimly observed this axiom in action: “Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such . . .”

Justice and Stanley suggest three strategies for teaching in the time of Trump:

• One approach would examine the material conditions leading to a situation in which voters are attracted by undemocratic rhetoric. Perhaps the institutions of democracy have failed them. A state that promised its citizens a raft of goods, but in fact never delivered them, would in so doing lay the groundwork for a protest candidate who proved his or her credentials by violating its norms of respectability.
  
  
• A second approach involves a comparison of the current material conditions to those present at other times in U.S. history at which demagogues achieved some measure of success through the politics of division and exclusion based on religion, race, and political belief. In short, one could compare the political environment that gave rise to Trump to the ones that gave rise to Father Coughlin in the 1930s and George Wallace in the 1960s, by examining similarities or differences in the state of the economy, social tensions, and disagreements over controversial government policies. Several of my Twitter PLN suggested a similar approach by asking students to look at other places around the world and in different time periods. Compare current US events to leaders and events in the past and discuss implications and consequences of those actions.
  
  
• A third approach would track the genesis of Trumpism to the shift in rhetoric brought into public debate by partisan news media and social media. This would involve a historical project comparing previous media norms to the ones at work in contemporary partisan media. Students might examine the impact of the growth of stridently conservative radio and TV programs and electronic media during the last 25 years, and consider whether they prepared the way for the political rise of Donald Trump.
  

What’s our obligation? Our job?

Silence is not an acceptable strategy. As teachers, we should advocate no particular political party, candidate, or public policy. But we are all obligated, deeply, to hew to the basic principles of democratic life in order to help our students discern what is reasonable. Public school teaching is not neutral and has never been intended or understood as such.

Public schools are places where reason and reasonableness must be cultivated in the best traditions of liberals and conservatives alike, striking the balance between the principles of equality and freedom, preparing students for the maelstrom that awaits them.

It’s not necessarily an easy job. But it’s one that we cannot ignore.

One of my rabbis, Evan Schultz, shared this wonderful article with our staff yesterday. It is definitely a part of the Jewish Educational Theory of Everything! The idea that we do something because we have always done it, completely unhinged from the original, innovative rationale for doing it, can be debilitating. Let's talk about this!

The article comes from www.faithandleadership.com - a learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity. David L. Odom is the Executive director, Leadership Education at Duke Divinity. You can find the original posting here.

---

David L. Odom: History without a reason

Many times institutions have traditions -- such as the Sunday service time -- that are preserved without a reason for doing so.
Wikimedia Commons/Theroadislong

Leaders must be able to articulate why an institution does what it does. Is it a matter of history, or is there a reason? writes the executive director of Leadership Education at Duke Divinity.

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

Early in my new boss’s tenure, I asked her for help.

“Is this one of those situations that has a history but not a reason?” she asked.

The question stopped me cold.

She told me that in her two-week tenure, several people had sought her advice. In each case, she had asked, “Why are we doing this?” In response, the person would launch into a story that never included a reason for the project.

Since hearing the phrase from my boss -- Old Testament scholar Ellen Davis, who is serving as interim dean of Duke Divinity School -- I have repeated it to several leaders whose faces lit up. They can see in their contexts the projects that have a history without a reason.

Learning the history of an issue is critical. It reveals stakeholders whose views might remain important and can give hints about the circumstances that first gave rise to the issue. Those who claim to know the history often care about a situation’s outcome, and giving them a chance to tell the story helps bring them on board.

I have met several leaders who believed that the relevant history started with their own arrival at an institution. My boss was pointing to a different challenge.

During good times, an organization can coast on autopilot. The reasons for an initiative can get lost, though it can still seem to be productive. When times are tough -- economic challenges, leadership changes, neighborhood changes, stakeholder investment shifts -- it is critical to be able to articulate why the organization does what it does.

The starting point is to ask, “Why?”

But be careful. Asking why can make people nervous and cause them to wonder about your motivations -- are you simply trying to control of the situation? Assure them that you’re trying to understand the situation, and listen carefully. If their story doesn’t conclude with a reason, ask the question again.

In my case, Dean Davis asked the question to understand the dilemma and empower me to solve it. I had wanted her to make a decision, but she wanted to offer me some guidelines for solving it myself. The decision had high stakes, and we had not worked together before. Her question enabled us to share information and gain each other’s trust.

When I was a young pastor, I was the one asking questions.

I was troubled that my congregation had its Easter Sunday worship service at 9 a.m. Every other Sunday of the year, we worshiped at 11 a.m.

When I asked why, people said that 9 a.m. was more convenient for Easter, but no one had any evidence that it was. I was worried about the people who came to church only once a year and might assume that we held our service two hours later.

When I pressed the question, I learned that the church had historically held a sunrise service followed by a breakfast. Because of the long delay between the end of breakfast and the beginning of the 11 a.m. service, the second service had been moved back to 9. It had been more than 10 years since the last sunrise service and breakfast. The 9 a.m. service had a history -- but no longer a reason.

I was worried that newcomers in our community would show up at 11 a.m. thinking we would have a service and then feel left out when we didn’t. On my first Easter Sunday there, I decided to hang out in the parking lot after the 9 a.m. service to see whether anyone showed up at 11. Five carloads of newcomers pulled into the empty parking lot about 10:50.

If there is something significant at stake, it is unwise to frame the issue as simply “history or reason.” As a leader, approach the situation with a both-and mindset: How might you preserve the history and make space for something new?

My colleague Greg Jones refers to this mindset as “traditioned innovation.” In our case, church leaders didn’t want to change the time, but they did agree to invest in signs and other media to announce the “special time on a special day” for Easter. We worked hard to reach newcomers in the community who would find the 9 a.m. service appealing.

With the phrase “history without a reason” stuck in my mind, I listen carefully to the stories people tell me about why something is done a certain way. Does the story imply a reason? Does the person hear what the story implies? Does the reason make sense in the current context? Can the history and the reason be brought together?