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March 2, 2001/Adar 7, 5761, Vol. 53, No.22
Smash idols of moral relativism
Barry Cohen
Community Editor
A family man puts on his suit coat, kisses his wife goodbye and leaves for the office. He arrives, checks his caseload and updates his complex system of databases, those he urged his employer to install to organize the massive amount of data he tracks.
When he gets home, his family greets him at the door. They eat dinner. Discuss the day. Talk about their weekend plans, including attending mass on Sunday at their local parish church.
Faithful husband. Devoted father. Devout Catholic.
And spy.
Robert Philip Hanssen, counter-intelligence officer of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, allegedly has spied against the United States since 1985, first for the Soviet Union and then for Russia. Yet his colleagues never suspected he was capable of perpetrating what is possibly the greatest intelligence breach in FBI history.
Hanssen doesn't drink, swear or spend lavishly. He attends Mass and confession not just weekly, but daily. He has sent his six children, three boys and three girls, to expensive private schools. He chaperones school dances and attends school sporting events.
As a spy, he not only allegedly shared highly classified information with a nation once our enemy, but his activities also may have led to the executions of two double agents in Russia.
If guilty as charged, Hanssen is a moral relativist. He has one moral code for himself and his family and another code for everyone else. In his mind, he has disconnected his faith from his actions and his actions from their repercussions. He bases his personal moral code on piety and guilt, while his professional code checks his conscience and constrains culpability.
In our society, with its emphasis on self - self-improvement, self-absorption, self-righteousness - how many morally counterfeit Hanssens are out there? Where are they in our workplace? Our congregations? Do they live next door? In our own homes?
Hanssen's story is a reminder to each of us to recalibrate our moral compasses. It is a reminder to look to our tradition, where we find a nexus of faith and action that can keep us on course. Torah Parshat Kedoshim (Leviticus 19 and 20) commands us not to turn to idols, not to deal deceitfully with one another and to keep an honest balance with honest weights. It reminds us that we do not live in a vacuum. If we overcharge a customer - even if we use the money gained for our family's welfare - we are stealing from someone else who has a spouse, a father, a child.
If we deceive someone, then we lessen the chance that person will fully trust others again. We also decrease the chance we will trust others, since we will be all too aware of the deception in the world - the deception we helped create.
In Kedoshim's two chapters, we read variations of "I am the Lord" at least 15 times. The repetition calls on us to seek a divine model of behavior at all times, in all places. It commands us to reject self-absorption and embrace our God-given mission to make the world a better place. It exhorts us to smash the idols of relativistic morality.
We can learn from Hanssen that the pursuit of the sacred has no bounds, that it encompasses all aspects of our lives. Holiness does not reside solely in a house of worship. It must and can be found, for those who choose to create it, in our homes and in our workplaces.
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