The events of the past several years and months, and especially of this past week, have confirmed in all of us the feeling that something is dreadfully wrong with the currents running in our civilization that can no longer be suffered with amusement as the passing fad of young people. Too much blood has been spilled, and too much heartache has been experienced, for such easy toleration. He who has eyes to see and ears to hear and brains to perceive and interpret, will recognize that just as the reactionary Right, in the days before World War II, proved to be no mere collection of crackpots, so the radical Left, with its revolutionary rhetoric, invitation to violence, and permissive morality, must be identified as a danger to survival.

For me as an individual, the whole cultural arena — from politics to pot and morals to medicine — reminds me of a simple but incisive insight of my late grandfather, of blessed memory. In one of his last discourses to his people, Moses reminds the Israelites that they had come from Egypt, a land of idolatry, to Canaan, another land of paganism. He warns them: "And you shall see their detestable fetishes and loathsome idols, made of wood and stone, gold and silver. I warn you lest there be amongst you a man or a woman... whose heart turns this day from the Lord our God in order to serve the gods of those people... the Lord will not be willing to forgive you" (Dt. 29:16-19).

Now, that is a most strange remark. One can understand that Moses is concerned lest the Israelites abandon the service of the Lord in order to indulge in the cult of idols that are made of gold and silver. Gold and silver are at least attractive.

But (&*v£)livj ^^^ I p •$,-- detestable fetishes and loathsome idols? Why should any Jew leave Judaism for that which is abominable and obnoxious?

The answer is that this indeed is the nature of idolatry: it evokes moral filth and loathsomeness within the human breast; it arouses the passion for the ugly, the hideous, the repugnant. This is a reversal of the usual fr^mulation, for according to the conventional wisdom, paganism represents beuaty and art and esthetics, while monotheism is plain and severe. But what we learn from this verse is, on the contrary, that paganism opens man's soul to the disgusting and the abominable, and teaches him t£ like it! It shows him c^vf^^J r^v})?^ — and his heart turns toward them. The Torah teaches us that before idolatry corrupts a man morally, it desensitizes him esthetically.

It is in tiiis sense that one can say of our culture that it is idolatrous. For the pendulum has swung to the extreme. Literature began by celebrating the anti-hero, by plumbing the depths of human depravity and exploring the far reaches of sadism and violence, and these literary devices heralded the complete perversion of values by which decent men once lived — and which indecent men once knew they were flouting, thus nver pretending to saintliness because they were sinners.

We have embraced the *« » -r y \I f^i^t /*^ vj / ? **L , the detestable and the loathsome, and learned to admirel it. The Talmud (Pes. 50a) tells us that Rabbi Joseph was dying, but then he suddenly revived. His father, Rabbi Joshua

did you see when you were already half way in the other world? And the son answered: ;\ ft * * f T*; p^>v\\ CNCrif r* 'Jv J^, M»lo f >$^ **

"I saw a topsy-turvy world, where up was down and down was'up." Whereupon his father responded: ^v\o M*>r* ^\ft, J^ j son, that world that you saw, the world of the spirit -- tnat is the upright, normal, right-side-up world! It is this world up is down and down is up. We live in a society where pornography is celebrated as art, obscenity is hailed as literature -- and "liberating" because it is "honest"; where ehuthan«sia is a cause advocated by physicians who are commited by their oaths to the preservation of life; and abortion (no matter what one may think of the various individual problems concerning this issue) has become the symbol of women's liberation, when nature specifically endowed women with the capacity to bear life. Indeed, it is *£ft 9 o n e *-n which we have learned to reverence Shakespeare, in the opening scene in his Macbeth, depicts the witches who, in common chorus, proclaim: Fair is foul and foul is fair, Hover through the fog and filthy air.

This is a true prophecy -- not only because the phrase concerning "filthy air" is literally true in our polluted times, but because Shakespeare was anticipated by a true prophet who many centuries earlier uttered a strikingly similar passage.

The prophet Isaiah (5:20) tells us: "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who turn vil goo darkness to light and light to darkness, who turn bitter to sweet and sweet to bitter!T! To which we may add: and those whose hearts turn from the values of Judaism to the cherishing of r*?N*Of'jJ f>^v?)jr*^ > the detestable and the loathsome.

In perhaps no other area is this perversion of values as prominent as in the realm of morality. This summer, Time magazine treated us to a full issue on "Sex and the Teenager."

Decent and intelligent parents who may have once thought that they were sophisticated and alert, must have been shocked that they were so benighted and so much behindA^imes. For truly "modern" parents have capitulated and abandoned their parental roles -- probably because they first failed in their personal roles -- and have learned to yield to the desires and submit to the mores of their young teenage children who demand a free life without any moral restraints, and insist upon practicing what they practice in the very homes of their parents! Of course, some parents do not merely acquiesce reluctantly, but encourage such conduct as a principle — turning their homes into what, in a quainter age all of us lived through, was called "a house of ill repute." Indeed, it is an a crazy world, where foul is fair and f*ir is foul, wh4re the air is filthy with the stench of p ^ ^ 3 *

Last week I was invited to a symposium on marriage to be held on a Saturday in October in a distinguished Kosher resort institution. I had to declinr because I would not be away fror*\ Shabbat, and for other reasons. The man who invi te was depressed because, he said, ha had such difficulty finding a speaker who was willing to advocate the classical and conventional concept of the institution of marriage! Praised be experimentation with fetishes and idols, no matter how repulsive, repugnant, and obnoxious! We have enshrined p^yDC/M f ^ ^3 ' f *"* * • There are those who will argue that man was always immoral, that it is not the invention of the counter-culture. Of course I agree. The Bible taught us that unbridled passion is as old as man - Snft/^ \ ~ > ^ )o> ^t "*3 • • Koheleth observed that no mark is completely guiltless - U<MV |£\ >lc 9^' ^<?k 4s|<^ V^ He pic.

And the Sages told us centuries ago that _yvV4l <&\^"vG^|c \k there is no guarantee for anyoneTs morality, that every human being has a penchant for throwing off moral shackles. But I do not conclude therefrom that today's culture is less hypocritical because it brings its passion in the open. That every individual is driven by passion does not imply approval of public orgies.

Despite the self-righteousness and so-called "honesty" of the counter-culture, I hold the reverse to be true. Passion and moral weakness is as old as man, but it makes a significant moral difference whether he does what he does secretly or openly. If secretly, it means there is still restraint and inhibition, which may somehow call a halt to his appetite and concupiscence, and at least a furtive acknowledgment of objective standards. But if it is in the open, if it is shameless, if there are no holds barred, then man has polluted his atmosphere, he has brought down all standards. Then he calls the good evil and the evil good, and hovers through the fog and filthy air, besmirched by his beloved loathsomeness.

This, indeed, is the way Ra-shi understood tfyerwords of Moses e m ^i H'J^l I I) 1 ^Ukl >M ,'/f*K *% -OX*ol?l "the secret things are TO the^lord our God, but the revealed are to us and our children forever." What does this mean? Rashi explains: when man sins in secret, it is a sin between him and God, and he must personally answer to God for himself. But if the infraction is one which is open and exposed and exhibited without shame and without restraint, if it is something which society learns to accept and even approve, then it is pfH ^^ IP J^J*I J) V J it is something for which we and our childrerritmst answer forever after. Every man individually must answer for his secret and private sins, but all the society, especially the children, must suffer for _/Ofy)ft , for that which is kept in the open without any shame err embarrassment.

On Rosh Hashanah we must each answer to God for _A\VV°I *>' > our secret and private failures. But we must answer for each other, and for our children as well, for ^\\ {\ I^, for allowing our children to grow up in an atraosphfere of I interpret a sorry religious phenomenon of our days in the same way: the allure of the repulsive. I refer to the Jews- for-Jesus movement which has recently gained some notoriety. We ought not panic over this, but it should worry us, because there are some cities on this continent where this movement has made shocking progress among young Jews.

Now, I have no argument with the Christian who believes; on the contrary, I usually prefer him to one who does not believe at all. But, Jews who believe that?! After centuries and generations untold where our ancestors were forced to kiss the cross or suffer death? After Crusades and inquisitions and pogroms and blood-libels, as integral parts of the history of Christendom? And especially -- after Auschwitz, we have such Jewish freaks? For a Jew to submit to this is to yield to the allure of the repulsive, a symptom of the sickness of our time, the inversion of values, the new paganism rampant.

But perhaps the most shocking expression of the sick discontinuity in our culture is in the realm of polities.

The New Left, despite its officially small membership, is the avante-garde of the counter-culture and serves as the pace-setter for much of sophisticated public opinion in our country. And they have conditioned us to tolerate their perversions — violence in the name of equality, war in order to achieve peace. If there are clear culprits behind the Arab terrorists in the Munich massacre, other than the terrorists themselves and the Arab states behind them, it consists of those radicals who have made heroes of bloodthirsty murderers, and adventurers of cowardly assassins, and nationalist, patriots of cut-throats, simply because they use revolutionary rhetoric; it is the world liberal press which has shown more sympathy for the criminal than the victim, whether in regard to mugging or the massacre at Lod or the Sabena jet or the chase of terrorists into Lebanon; it is the United Nations which consistently censures Israel for its self-defense against and punishment of the accessories to international crime•

Our hearts go out to the families of the victims of the Munich massacre as we remember them on this Rosh Hashanah. And our hearts and sympathies go as well to the families of the victims of other Arab atrocities, including those Jews languishing in the jails of Syria »nd Egypt, and, as we just learned, those who have been pressed into white slavery in Algeria. They are, to a large extent, the victims of the new idolatry that sweeps the world and that approves Arab viciousness. I could not care less whether Germany's attempts to restore its reputation to the Olypic games has been hurt or not, even though they tried in their clumsy way to save the situation. (Yet, how strange -- a country which 25 years ago was so eminently efficient in mass-murdering Jews is so pathetically sloppy in saving a handful of Israelis in 1972!) I could not care less if the Olympic games continue or do not continue, although I believe it was a piece of unreconstructed callousness that they were allowed to continue.

I could not care less that the massacre occurred at the Olympic games and thus violated "the spirit of the OlympicsTr as the Assistant Prime Minister of Israel and one of the survivors of the games put it, I donTt think Israel should have gone to Munich, the cradle of Naziism, in the first place. And those who read the Israeli press will know what I mean when I say that the officials of the Israeli athletic establishment have generally, through the years, reflected very little credit on the state or the people of Israel.

I am concerned with and I do care about what the cynicism of the world is doing to me and to you and to our children; about the callousness of countries large and small, of newspapers and commentators and political scientists who are thunderously silent when Jews are killed, but delirious when they can attack Israelis who are responding to attacks; who, at most, offer Israelfcondolences, but give their votes to the Arabs. \*> 7*|Cil ;4C \>^>« f»^iU^N '^ • woe to those who invert values, calling good evil and evil good, fair foul and foul fair, who lead society to admire f>>yC)f»Xl p>V^>

How shall we respond to the weird predicament, when the repulsive has become alluring, the loathsome lovely, the detestable delectable?

First, we must no longer be passive followers of every passing cultural whim and social fad. We must not be afraid of being dubbed "square," "not with it," "Establishment," "reactionary," "middle class," or "bourgeois." Let us, individually *nd collectively, slow down our breathless attempts to be young by stamping as "kosher" whatever youth happens to advocate at the moment.

Second, let us not turn to the other extreme, and assume that the values and standards and practices of America of, let us say, the 195CTs, was the last word in morality. We must not turn reactionary or repressive or parochial or narrow. We must not act as if the adults have a monopoly on decency and truth, as if we are beyond criticism by the new generation -- because we are not. We must not feel that we *re confined to the two alternatives of being either Jerry RubinTs or Archie BunkerTs. But most important, we must listen to the shofar and let it call us back to the timely and timeless message of the Torah and Judaism. Let us strive, each in his own heart and family and society, to reassert those values taught and demanded by Judaism — values on which decent civilized life for

all people is predicated.

We must learn, once again, slowly and painfully, what once upon a time came to us automatically and instinctively -- to abhor the repulsive and scorn the abominable; to admire the good and the decent and the moral Shofar, our E.abbis (Lev, R. 29:5) taught us, comes from the word V«y ^ i^hich means "beauty," and the message of shofar is therefore: r>o»>^'i/! -^$ V > beautify your conduct, act beautifully. Shofar means that we must become "beautiful people," not in the half sardonic and sarcastic way that the word is sometimes used to characterize the aristocracy of our society, but in the way the Rabbis used it

Shofar is the call to return to the ways of God and Torah. Shofar is the alarm to beware of the many guises of paganism and its cult of the abominable and obsession with the obnoxious and fascination with the ugly. Shofar is an invitation to a life of ^ ^ * , purity.

And, shofar is, as well, our wordless prayer that we be granted a year of peace and tranquility, a year of true dignity and great creativity, a year which God will fulfill for us the prayer of David ';\ r-UJ^/*V^rs* M rs "* ! is *r\ vv ^^ MV>£, that we be privileged toMiold the pleasantness of the Lord; for with Him is loveliness and beauty, majesty and sublimity.