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March 16, 2001/Adar 21, 5761, Vol. 53, No.24
If I were a Rich man
LEON WIESELTIER
The New Republic
Do ye thus requite the Lord, O foolish people and unwise? Is not he thy father that hath bought thee?
Or so I thought as I read through Jack Quinn's scummy e-mails and discovered that they are, alas, primary sources for the study of contemporary Jewry. (Quinn represents Marc Rich and is a former White House counsel.) It turns out that it is not our father that hath bought us, but a certain fugitive financier in Switzerland who has masterfully defeated the American system of justice by adducing his support for every Jewish cause in creation. Yeshivas, hospitals, dance companies, businesses, museums, universities, theaters, peace groups: Are there Jews anywhere who have not taken some of Marc Rich's money to the bank? If so, it was an oversight. Contact the Rich Foundation, 4 Weizmann Street, Tel Aviv 64239 immediately. So many Jews, so little time.
As a consequence of all this largesse on the lam, his lawyer was able to present the president with a pile of Jewish testimonials proving to a moral certainty that Mrs. Rich's ex-husband is the last of the just. The e-mails document the frantic and somewhat hilarious search for righteous Jews. From the director general of Rich's foundation to Rich's lawyer in New York: "Shimon Peres confirms that he talked to potus on Monday Dec 11th who 'took note' of his intervention." From same to same: "I met Rabin's daughter today. She is going to call potus (president of the United States) tonight or tomorrow." From the lawyer in New York to the director general in Tel Aviv, bizarrely: "We need a rabbi among the people in the (White House) counsel's office." From the lawyer in New York to the lawyer in Washington, on the subject of getting Senator Hillary Clinton involved: "You know of Abe Foxman and of the Israeli connection and of all the giving and of the Brooklyn connection." This is my favorite, from the director general in Tel Aviv to the lawyer in New York: "Bob, having Leah Rabin call is not a bad idea. The problem is how do we contact her? She died last November."
And on and on, until endorsements were produced by, among others, the chief rabbi of France; Rabbi Irving Greenberg, the chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council (Bob, can we count this as six million?); the holy heads of Talmudical academies in Israel and America; the mayor of Jerusalem and the former mayor of Jerusalem; and all the other brothers and sisters whose effusions of gratitude and admiration will eagerly be provided by U.S. Rep. Dan Burton's office. (Burton, R-Ind., with the House Committee on Government Reform, has held hearings on the Rich pardon.) None of them allude to the eponymous financier's illegal business with states that are consecrated to the extermination of the Jewish state.
The pardon of this exemplary son of his people by Clinton, who did his best to hide behind the Jews in his sophistical appearance on the op-ed page of the New York Times, has revealed some highly disennobling characteristics of the Jewish community: for example, the increasing usurpation of the authority of teachers and rabbis by the authority of philanthropists and politicians. Writing a great Jewish check does not make you a great Jewish writer, even if a good deed has been done. Moreover, a good deed does not make a good man. And it is moral solipsism to conclude that a good man is a man who has helped me. For such reckoning, we need to know more. It is certainly an axiom of the Jewish universe that a mitzvah ha-ba'ah b'aveyrah, a commandment that is fulfilled by sinful means, is forbidden.
Since we are considering the matter Judaically, fellow Americans, let us pause also over some of the stringencies of the Jewish laws of charity. Consider this splendid passage from the Talmud: "Rabbi Eliezer ben Jacob said: If a man steals a measure of wheat and grinds it and kneads it and bakes it and sets aside a part of it as hallah (the priestly portion that is prescribed by the Scripture), how could he utter a blessing over it? He would not be blessing, he would be blaspheming. About such a man the verse (in Psalms) said, 'the grasping man reviles and scorns the Lord.' " So if one steals a measure of wheat and grinds it and kneads it and bakes it and sets aside a part of it to the Israel Cancer Association, and a part of it to the Ein Hod Dada Museum, and a part of it to the Alliance Israelite Universelle, and a part of it to the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish studies, how can we utter a blessing over it?
The origins of one's property are pertinent to the moral status of one's property. This principle was affirmed two millennia later, in New York in 1954. In that year Marc Rich went to work for a commodities brokerage called Phillip Brothers, and in that year Rabbi Moses Feinstein, the most formidable Jewish jurist of the age, received an inquiry from "a student who had resolved in his heart to repent completely." The repentance was for an act of theft, and the conscience-stricken man asked the rabbi to clarify the legal conditions for the restitution of stolen property. Near the end of Feinstein's responsum, he writes: "As for your question whether one may accomplish the restitution of stolen property by returning it in the form of charity, (the answer is that) property stolen from individuals must be returned precisely to the individuals from whom it was stolen ... for it is to them that one is liable ... and one is not acquitted by the donation of this property to charity."
The most remarkable item that I found in Quinn's papers appears in a handwritten list of talking points. They seem to be an inventory of arguments for a pardon composed in preparation for a meeting with Clinton, since they include as shorthand for one of the arguments the words "Ken Starr." And a few lines down the attorney has written: "bias - rich Jew." Jack Quinn's anxiety about the spread of anti-Semitism is very affecting. It is also very cheap. But the cheapness is shared, I fear, by some of my brethren, who seem more and more to believe that no Jew sits in a jail justly. Or to put it differently, that there is only a single reason that a Jew would be sent to jail, and it is the old reason.
The welling of Jewish sympathy for Jonathan Pollard is owed in part to such an exploitation of collective memory, to the ancient typological view of Jewish history (every minority has such a view of its history) that there is only one sort of enemy and only one sort of adversity. All this is a deep and ardent expression of solidarity, to be sure; but solidarity is sometimes blinding. It is a simplification of the moral life to let solidarity govern it. Pollard is not Dreyfus, and neither is Rich. Rich did not flee from the Crusaders or the Cossacks or the Nazis; he fled from the SEC and the FBI. Prosecution is not persecution, at least until it is proven to be so. Some things really have changed, O foolish people and unwise.
Leon Wieseltier is literary editor of The New Republic, where this essay first appeared. Reprinted with permission.
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