Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

We enjoy hosting a wide variety of guests around our Shabbat table. Wide variety has its limitations, of course, since this is an invitation-only event. Nonetheless, through social, ministry, and business associations, we have hosted Amish families and Ghanian factory owners, rabbis, priests and pastors, pilots, soldiers, politicians, successful business leaders, leading conservatives, and committed liberal progressives.

It’s that last group which is least fulfilling, because the obligations of being a good host mean that we avoid, rather than discuss, our differences. Lately, I’ve been thinking of the table that I would like to assemble. It would include Monica Guzman, Bari Weiss of The Free Press, Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic, and Nicholas Kristof, op-ed writer for the New York Times. I disagree with some of these individuals on a few issues, with others on many, but I think they are honest, intelligent, and caring citizens of the United States. Most importantly, however, I think they have a measure of humility that allows them to hear discordant views. In addition, we might welcome Victor Davis Hansen into the mix to provide balance. My personal challenge would be to match the humility of some of our imaginary guests.

I was reminded of Nicholas Kristof while looking through past bookmarked articles. Since I don’t regularly read the New York Times, a paper I have long stopped trusting, I don’t regularly see his posts. Yet, twelve years ago, I had read and marked an article of his admitting that a well-intentioned ‘help the poor’ initiative in Appalachia had the disturbing result of increasing illiteracy among those very children whose lives it hoped to improve. As he wrote, “Our poverty programs do rescue many people, but other times they backfire.” He discovered that, based on the program’s metrics, parents lost substantial government funds if their children became proficient readers. As a result, they sometimes deliberately kept their children out of school and literacy programs.

Re-reading that piece, I searched for a more recent Kristof column. Serendipitously, an article from this past June popped up, this one admitting that, “Centrist voters can reasonably ask: Why put liberals in charge nationally when the places where they have greatest control are plagued by homelessness, crime and dysfunction?”

Mr. Kristof is unabashedly a liberal. Yet, he doesn’t take that to mean that liberal policies are automatically correct and sacred. In today’s world, that is a rare admission. My guess is that we have never voted for the same candidate and that is not going to change soon. And voting does matter. It may be a cliche, but Hitler did become the leader of Germany by a completely legal and democratic process in 1933. Many thoughtful and well-intentioned Germans voted for him. Could they—should they—have seen what was marching down the road? That was probably impossible to visualize, but there were huge warning signs that could have been heeded. It takes immense time and effort to put enough energy into properly vetting a candidate. And, after all, the opposition has its own flaws as well.

Why do I want to assemble this group around a table? I need to be reminded that some of those who support policies that I abhor and those who vote in ways that make no sense to me are decent people with whom I could exchange ideas, probably tweaking all our thoughts for the better. We may never agree, and we may each feel that the other “side” poses danger, but if we can remember to respect each other, and mutually reject those who lie and shut down honest communication, there is still hope for this troubled country of ours.

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