America is not about politics; it’s about honest work

By Rabbi Ben Kamin

Rabbi Ben Kamin
Rabbi Ben Kamin

ENCINITAS, California — None of the innumerable presidential contenders is saying much about it: there is great dignity in the work of human hands—regardless of the labor involved.  The vanities of the impetuous, limo-riding Donald Trump and the platitudes of the entitlement-ridden Hillary Clinton are light years away from Dr. Martin Luther King’s stellar declaration:

If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.’”

The New Testament admonishes the upper classes: “Behold, the hire of the laborers who have reaped down your fields.”  So, when it comes to the old texts that the preachers are invoking, a lot of the material is about not preaching, not talking, but doing.  Building, laboring, endeavoring, creating, repairing, and planting.

Religion—and politics—throw out more platitudes than we can handle and then distort the spiritual landscape with a follow-up round of judgments.  Read the Bible and you will actually discover a manual for labor, economic teamwork, and ethical behavior.

Among Moses’s final sermons encased in Deuteronomy, he tells corporate management to be fair and nondiscriminatory:  “Don’t take advantage,” he cries, “of a hired worker who is poor and needy.”  And he adds—just to head off any secondary bias—“whether that worker is a fellow Israelite or a foreigner living in your town.”

Is there any question that the Bible, too often ripped off by moralizing men who want to control other people’s will, is steeped in the moral certitude of work?  For the entire first week of Creation, all God did was labor.  No prayers, no theologies, no sermons, just toil and formation.  He designed, separated, spread out, inserted, implanted, watered, rearranged firmaments, and populated the fresh ground as well as the new seas.  Scripture puts in plainly: “And for six days God worked, and on the seventh day he rested from his labors.”

You can’t argue with work and you can’t knock a person down when he or she has created things that facilitate the needs of other people.  Do you want to imitate God?  Then create; don’t pontificate.  The hands of the workers are the tools of the angels.  Read enough Bible and you find yourself studying the dignity of work.  There’s a lot more labor in the old writ than there is levitation.

The same modest dynamic applies to the careworn teachers in our public schools, struggling to break through the din and violence of their urban adolescent pupils.  These educators are rarely even begrudged a moment of benevolence and appreciation from the greater community, which increasingly evangelizes the political system, moralizes about teenage crime and pregnancy and indolence (often with racial insinuation) but doesn’t even give these teachers and those kids a prayer at the ballot box.

More and more, the hard-working lower and middle classes are producing, manufacturing, and servicing.  Exhausted, deprived of economic security, humiliated that their children are burdened with several times more debt than they ever were, they are disenchanted by rote liturgies and outsourced by hypocritical business codes that preach a new, mawkish religious patriotism and just break people’s hearts.

When the Trumps and the Clintons and the Bushes appear to be interested in the quiet statures of those who actually work for a living, then we will begin to have a morally-driven national discussion.

*
Rabbi Kamin is an author and freelance writer.  He may be contacted via ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com