Trump Disrespects Men, and Yom Kippur
What makes me really angry about things Donald Trump said isn’t that it disrespects women. It’s that it disrespects men.
When our country’s founders wrote “all men are created equal,†or Rabbi Soloveitchik wrote about Halakhic Man, or Hannah Szensh wrote about “the prayer of Man†(actually, in Hebrew, there are two words for “man” and she used adam, which conveys the deeper meaning more than the common word ish)—that language seems archaic now: it would be better to just say “people.†But the classical usage of “Man†also had a deeper connotation: a good, civilized human. A mensch. Donald Trump may have male chromosomes, but he’s not much of a man in this sense.
I’ve always been uncomfortable with “locker room talk.†Not just for the sake of (as the rhetorical trope goes) my mother/sister/daughter, but because it’s a challenge to being a man. Being a man means having testosterone-fueled energy and needing to find a way to sanctify it and to do the right thing. Bill Clinton has clearly struggled with this, and I’ll say to him what he said to us: “I feel your pain.†Mitt Romney has lots of children, so presumably he’s done the same stuff Donald Trump talked about—with his wife, when she consents. Teenagers may talk about this in locker rooms, but grown men are supposed to be better.
What does this have to do with Yom Kippur? In Jewish terms, we have good and evil inclinations, the yetzer ha-tov and the yetzer ha-ra. The little angel and devil on our shoulders, like in cartoons. We need both, and we wrestle to keep them in balance. On Yom Kippur, we check in with ourselves as to how we’re doing with that.
Such work is a big part of being (to quote Glenn Beck!) a “moral, dignified man†and Trump doesn’t seem to have any respect for that.
G’mar chatimah tovah.