Moral Clarity, Transition and the Street

As much as I like to read one book at a time, my recent acquisition of a Kindle (love it) has shifted my reading into overdrive.  I am juggling three things at once (not well, I should admit).  I started with Susan Neiman's "Moral Clarity" after seeing it cited in a Haaretz op-ed piece that struck a chord with me.  Neiman is an expert on Kant and the Enlightenment and she turns to that era for guidance for "grown up idealists" today.  She starts by acknowledging that the American left has ceded moral principles to the right and now holds nothing more than "helpless pragmatism."  She puts it like this in her introduction: "This book aims to reclaim moral concepts that the left no longer uses with full voice.  Reclaiming them from the right isn't a matter of packaging but of the conviction that without them we will lose our souls - whatever we take our souls to be.  We will also lose our footing, and our young. The inevitability of cynicism often looks like the twenteith century legacy, but one goal of philosophy is to enlarge our ideas of what is possible... [that] will take us back to concepts that have been abandoned to the right: good and evil, hero and dignity and nobility."  I admit here that my journey from academia to the pulpit was, at least in part, a response to my growing cynicism: frustration (and at times out-right disillusionment) with the leading intellectual ideas on the left, my discomfort with knee-jerk anti-Israel sentiment from the left, my rejection of moral relativism.  Some would see my most recent moves as a shift to the right: I am now reading the Wall Street Journal as my daily paper of choice and the New York Times for Sundays only (I'll still take Frank Rich and David Brooks' over Karl Rove and Peggy Noonan).  When I get to DC, I will surely add the Washington Post to my daily regimen. We'll see how my eyes hold up under the strain.

It is not a shift to the right so much as an embrace of moral clarity. You can call me old fashioned but I believe in the values of duty, patriotism, and character; the power of faith; and the importance of family. I do believe that there is right and wrong, good and evil.  I believe in phrases like "Never Again" and "There but for the grace of God go I."  I believe in the power of ideas (that led me to academia) but it's where the rubber meets the road that we make the world a better place (that led me to the rabbinate).  It doesn't hurt that a congregant is an editor at the Journal while the Times laid off a congregant who had loyally stuck with the paper through ups and downs.  Personal connections matter.

My other book actively open at this time? Michael Watkins, The First 90 Days.  A Harvard Business School publication about executive leadership transition.  Very helpful stuff.  I know you will see its impact on my work and we will all enjoy success through the upcoming transition because of it.  A gem: "The overriding goal in a transition is to build momentum by creating virtuous cycles that build credibility and avoid vicious cycles that undermine credibility."  Sounds easy enough on paper, why's it so hard in practice?