We are each other

In recent years, I’ve come to appreciate more and more The New York Times columnist David Brooks (b. 8/10/61), who came to the newspaper in September 2003, to replace William Safire as the “designated conservative.” As a dedicated reader of Brooks’ columns, I have noticed that over the years he seems to have been moving leftward from a fairly traditional “rightish” Republican stance to a man who could be defined as a political moderate who occupies a position a bit right or a bit left of center, depending upon the particular issue. He now appears to be a man who is trying to lay out a path that can bring together the redder and bluer sections of America into a single red, white and blue United States.

Brooks begins the second paragraph of his long Oct. 3, 2024, Times essay, “A Recipe for a Striving America,” with “Of course, we’ve always had vast inequalities in America, but it used to feel like inequalities within a single society. Now it feels like separate societies with almost no social exchange between the two.”

Brooks goes on to point out that over the past several decades, our economy has shifted from manufacturing (making things) to ideas (information technologies), from brawn to brain. As a result, we have been stressing the importance of extending our workforce’s schooling beyond high school, leading to undergraduate degrees and, increasingly, graduate and professional degrees. At the same time, the value of non-academic skills, the kind that used to be taught in vocational schools, has been downgraded. Today Brooks calls upon us to reevaluate the wide range of capabilities that our workers can bring to their jobs.

“I strongly believe that any healthy society needs to reward a variety of abilities, not just the one our meritocracy rewards: the ability to please teachers and take tests during adolescence.”

I will never forget that unusually cold Thanksgiving weekend, when I came to appreciate the non-academic “smarts” of the automobile mechanic who showed me how to get my car’s seemingly frozen carburetor to come back to life by means of the precise placement of his screwdriver. Not a single one of my many undergraduate courses at Columbia College could have been of any help in rescuing my wife and me from being stuck on the frigid South Fork of Long Island.

As Brooks emphasizes toward the end of his Oct. 3 essay, “To create a just society, we need to build a society that rewards a diversity of skills…We have to find more ways to reward the abilities that don’t involve information analysis on a laptop.”

In his Nov. 8 Times column, just three days after Election Day, “Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?” Brooks continues his theme of rewarding the diversity of abilities within our working population: “The great sucking sound you heard was the redistribution of respect. People who climbed the academic ladder were feted with accolades, while those who didn’t were rendered invisible. The situation was especially hard on boys…Schools are not set up for male success; that has lifelong personal, and now national, consequences.”

Further on, Brooks chides his readers with the following barb: “…there’s something off about an educated class that looks in the mirror of society and sees only itself.”

In his Times column this past Nov. 29, “The Moral Challenge of Trumpism,” Brooks seems to switch his sympathy away from those millions of Americans who have not climbed the academic ladder – many of whom happened to be Trump voters; rather, in this op-ed piece, he focuses on what he considers to be the immorality of Trumpism, a political world that is, at heart, profoundly anti-institutional.

Brooks is by no means blind to the multiple serious problems with our American democracy: “Today it really is true that the Pentagon is administratively a mess. It really is true the meritocracy needs to be rethought. It really is true that Congress is dysfunctional and the immigration system is broken.”

Nevertheless, Brooks insists upon working within our time-tested institutions; his aim is to help reform, to repair, to renew our system of government, not to destroy it. Brooks chooses to end his Nov. 29 column not with a ringing affirmation but with this question: “What kind of person do you want our children to become – reformers who honor their commitments to serve and change the institutions they love or performative arsonists who vow to burn it all down?”

I have told again and again this story from our Talmud: Two men are sitting in a small wooden boat in the middle of a wide and deep lake. All of a sudden, one of the men takes out a drill and begins drilling a hole under his seat. “What in the world are you doing?” asks his partner with mounting alarm; “Are you trying to sink our boat?” “What are you worried about?” asks the other nonchalantly. “I’m only making a hole under my seat.”

This ancient Talmudic tale well illustrates what Brooks has been trying to tell us: We Americans, be we red-state or blue-state, are all in the same boat; it is urgent that we all seek to become, once again, a red, white and blue nation. We need to learn from each other. We need to help each other. We need to respect each other. Because WE ARE EACH OTHER!!

JAMES B. ROSENBERG is a rabbi emeritus at Temple Habonim in Barrington. Contact him at rabbiemeritus@templehabonim.org.