On Voting and other Good Behavior

I'm on the aish.com mailing list, ever since I entered their raffle for a free trip to Israel several months ago. Their emails consist of a composite of links to their most recent collection of articles. I don't always read right them right away, but I don't delete them either, and usually I go back at some point and skim for the good pieces. That's how I came to be reading about Life in the Swing State over a month after elections.

If you read the article, you might find yourself wondering, inconsequentially (as I did), who Rabbi Leff actually voted for. But of course, that's completely irrelevant to his point. He suggests that no matter how worked up everyone got about the election, each person's vote is matched in importance by his or her behavior every day, every minute. He explains that just as every single vote has an impact on the end result in a swing state, every single action -- good or evil, considerate or thoughtless -- has an impact on the direction of the world. His image of a person touched by gentleness being in a better mood to interact with other people down the line resounds to the theme of the movie Pay it Forward, which I appreciate greatly.

When I happened to mention to several people that I might not.../...didn't vote last month, I got vehemently disapproving reactions. "But it's your responsibility!" was the general gist. My response (besides my tirade on the electoral system making my vote, from a non-swing state, completely useless anyway) was that I didn't feel I knew enough about the individual candidates, or even about the issues on which they based their platforms, to be able to make a choice that was at all meaningful, and that I didn't feel an arbitrary choice would do the country any good...and might, in fact, do quite the opposite. Educating myself sufficiently on any of the above would take much longer than a dose of pre-election cramming would allow for, and besides, although I'm always trying to educate myself, for the most part my topic priorities just aren't motivated by U.S. politics. I don't think that makes me a bad person, or even necessarily a bad American. I tend to live my life on a smaller scale, trying to give time and energy to the things I see in my daily life on which I can have a positive effect. (See the Emerson quote in my profile...) I certainly don't claim to be tremendously accomplished even in this arena, but given my limited time (or, more accurately, my limited capacity to make productive use of my time), I'd rather devote my energies to personal interactions, and to self-edification on subjects that naturally attract my interest.

No, I don't think Rabbi Leff's article was intended to advocate menschliness instead of voting. He was just drawing a parallel to emphasize the significance of daily activities that don't have nearly the fuss made over them that voting has. But I already find the object of his urging far more personally relevant than the choices on a ballot, and the connection he points to has been in my mind since long before reading the article, so I found the piece a good springboard to explain my views.

Oh, and since I happened to use the term "menschliness" -- check out Rabbi Haskel Lookstein's landmark sermons: "Menschliness Before Godliness" and "If Menschliness Before Godliness, Then Why Godliness?" Having attended the school of which he is the principal for 13 years and the shul of which he is the rabbi for more longer than that, I have a hunch that his views may have influenced me just a tad.