An imperfect Carter rates an ‘A’ for moral leadership

Jimmy Carter may not have been this nation’s greatest president, or even its best president. Many in the Jewish world actually viewed him negatively because of the unfortunate comments he all too often made about Israel being an “apartheid” state. Yet he, alone of all U.S. presidents, best exemplified Judaism’s requirement for a national leader, that he or she must be a role model for the people being led.

Some of our Sages of Blessed Memory put it this way: “As the leader, so the generation.” (See the Babylonian Talmud tractate Arachin 17a.) In other words, the leader must set the moral and ethical tone for the nation. Carter fulfilled that role as no other president before or after him. He fulfilled that role long before entering politics and continued to do so long after leaving office.

Other U.S. presidents found effective ways to continue to benefit society after their terms ended. Carter, though, surpassed them all. What other president ever even considered spending retirement by building or renovating homes for the poor who needed those homes? Only Jimmy Carter got “down and dirty” to do that work — and he continued to do that work into his mid-90s. Carter and his late wife participated in what became known as Habitat for Humanity’s annual Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Work Project, during which they helped build, renovate, and repair more than 4,330 homes in 14 countries.

The Carter Center the couple founded has racked up an impressive list of accomplishments in several areas, most notably in the public health field. Thanks to the Carter Center, for example, a debilitating parasitic infection known informally as Guinea worm disease has been 99.9 percent eliminated. The last disease to be eradicated was smallpox.

Thanks to the Carter Center, too, in 2022 Georgia’s legislators passed the Mental Health Parity Act, which requires insurance companies to provide the exact same coverage for mental health and substance use as they do for physical health problems. The Center also helped pass a weaker federal law along the same lines in 2008 and has helped promote successive rules changes to strengthen it, including significant changes that were made just last year.

Carter not only believed in the moral and ethical code of “the Old Testament,” meaning our Torah, but he dedicated his life to fulfilling its precepts. He did not always get it right, but those precepts were part of his DNA. He even dedicated his presidency to fulfilling them.

Carter taught Sunday School. Unlike the extremist Christian right, he taught his students to respect Jews because Christianity emerged from Judaism. He also was very vocal in warning us about why the Christian right supports Israel: There can be no “second coming” unless the Jews control every inch of biblical Israel, Christian extremists believe. When Jesus does reappear, “all Jews will either be converted to Christianity or be burned,” Carter, who firmly rejected this belief, warned.

Do not get me wrong. Carter had his faults. He was no angel.

Carter admittedly — and even deservedly — gets mixed reviews in the Jewish world. He is deservedly celebrated for brokering in 1979 the very first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state, a peace that was so well crafted that it has withstood numerous challenges ever since, including the current war in Gaza. But he is deservedly denigrated for his often over-the-top criticisms of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians, made most evident by the title of his 2006 book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.”

Abe Foxman, then the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, railed against Carter for that. “The title is to de-legitimize Israel because, if Israel is like South Africa, it doesn’t really deserve to be a democratic state,” Foxman said. “He’s provoking, he’s outrageous, and he’s bigoted.”

In a 2009 letter released through the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Carter apologized for the title and the stigmatization that came with it. He praised “Israel’s achievements under difficult circumstances,” and said that “we must not permit criticisms for improvement [in its relations with the Palestinians] to stigmatize Israel.” Referencing the Great Confessional that we recite over and again on Yom Kippur, he concluded the letter by saying, “I offer an Al [C]het for any words or deeds of mine that may have done so.”

Unfortunately, that “for the sin of” apology was too little, too late by then. Carter had used that “apartheid” analogy so often that it became the mantra of Israel’s detractors the world over. In Judaism, that would make him guilty of both halves of the category of sins known as ona-at devarim, verbal wrongs. These are lashon hara (bad speech; spreading information about someone for derogatory purposes regardless of whether that information is true), and motzi shem ra (defamation of character, the spreading of false information about someone in order to disparage him or her).

When his book came out, for example, he told a Canadian Broadcast Company interviewer that Israel often “perpetrates even worse instances of apartness, or apartheid, than we witnessed even in South Africa.”

His at times outrageous criticisms of Israel notwithstanding, Carter was an ardent supporter of the Soviet Jewry movement. After the most prominent dissident of that era, Anatoly (now Natan) Sharansky, was arrested on espionage charges, Carter even ignored U.S. policy to publicly defend Sharansky on television and to deny that he was a U.S. spy.

Carter also believed in the need to upgrade Holocaust education here. In 1978, therefore, he created the Presidential Commission on the Holocaust and appointed the late Elie Wiesel to chair it. That led to the creation of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial in Washington.

During the 1979 Iranian revolution, which was responsible for his defeat in 1980 for other reasons, he waived visa requirements to allow more thabn 50,000 Iranian Jews to flee to safety here in the United States.

Judaism judges how leaders live up to its requirements of leadership by comparing them to how Moses fulfilled that role. Moses took swift and decisive action to correct a wrong, even if doing so worked against his own interests. He put his exalted status as a prince of Egypt at risk when he killed an Egyptian overseer who was violently beating an Israelite slave (see Exodus 2:11-12). After fleeing the Pharoah’s wrath, he risked his security to rescue women shepherds who were being harassed (see Exodus 2:15-17).

He also put his people’s interests ahead of his own. After the sin of the Golden Calf, for example, God offered to destroy Israel and start over again with Moses and his family. Moses rejected the offer because his job was to protect his people, even from God. (See Exodus 32.)

Carter did his best to emulate the Mosaic ideal of leadership. Contrast his leadership to that of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, now on trial on charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, or to President-elect Donald Trump, who as of this writing is scheduled to formally become a convicted felon today, January 10th, when he is sentenced by a New York judge after a jury found him guilty of 34 felony counts. Compare Carter to Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal, Warren Harding and the Teapot Dome scandal, and/or Bill Clinton and the Monica Lewinsky scandal, among others.

To guarantee that the people’s money was spent wisely for their benefit, not his own, Moses required a perfect accounting of himself and of everyone else involved in managing that money. (See Exodus 38.) According to a midrash, he also insisted that there be two witnesses to every expenditure, even if it was he who was doing the spending. (See Midrash Tanchuma to Pekudei, 5:2.)

Compare that to Trump and Netanyahu. In his first term, Trump used government funds to cajole Ukraine into investigating a political opponent, and he required the government to use his own hotels and resorts for official functions.

Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, spent excessive amounts of government funds for their personal benefit. According to the newspaper Haaretz, at one point Bibi even tried to bill the government for his cigars. As for his wife, in June 2019 Sara Netanyahu pled guilty to spending massive amounts of taxpayer funds to hire celebrity chefs to cook lavish meals for family friends, to spending $40,000 of taxpayer money on takeout food over a two-year period, and to spending $2,500 a month to fill Bibi’s pistachio ice cream craving.

Another Mosaic trait absent from both Netanyahu and Trump is compassion for those being led. Moses showed that compassion by rejecting God’s amazing offer. Netanyahu stubbornly clings to power despite being on trial, and, as many have charged with good reason, at the expense of the hostages Hamas still is holding. Trump’s inability to admit defeat in 2020 has divided this country dangerously over the last four years.

Jimmy Carter had his faults, but no other president has ever come close to leading us by example on the path God set for us, the path of tzedakah u-mishpat, the Torah’s vision of justice and righteousness that is central to its teachings.

Mixed though his legacy deservedly is, Yehi Zichro Baruch, may his memory serve as a blessing, and may all who choose to be leaders of nations in the future follow his example by living lives of tzedakah u-mishpat and encouraging the rest of us to do the same.

Shammai Engelmayer is a rabbi-emeritus of Congregation Beth Israel of the Palisades and an adult education teacher in Bergen County. He is the author of eight books and the winner of 10 awards for his commentaries. His website is www.shammai.org.

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