There’s a church on Old Georgetown Road in Bethesda that I often pass. For a long time, its marquee has said “Every saint has a past; every sinner has a future”. Not a unique thought, to be sure, but one that is often forgotten in our cancel-culture world. I think we should keep it filed in our minds, and refer to it when appropriate.

I don’t know how many of you watched (live or later) the House hearings where members of Congress castigated the presidents of three prestigious universities as they were testifying on antisemitic activity on their campuses. At least two of the university presidents, Claudine Gay of Harvard and Elizabeth Magill of Penn were embarrassingly bad witnesses, generally answering specific questions with the same repetitive, redundant and repeated cliches over and over again.

It’s hard to know what was worse – Gay’s trope that calling for the murder of Jews might be wrong depending on the circumstances, or Magill’s defense of the decision to hold a pro-Palestinian conference last month with avowed anti-semites on the panel. But in either case, it showed the universities’ lack of active concern about antisemitic activity on campus or among students and – perhaps worse, or at least as bad – the universities’ treatment of antisemitic speech and activity more leniently than speech and activities targeting other groups. I had so hoped that someone would have asked Gay, for example, if Harvard and she would have taken the same position of students had marched through the Harvard campus calling for the murder of Blacks. And I was intrigued by Magill’s seeming defense of the different treatment given to speakers who would speak against groups other than Jews – such as Penn’s decision to cancel an invitation to Narendra Moti, now president of India, after a number of Indian faculty members and others objected to his presence (I think I have that right, but there were a number of incidents like this if I am not entirely accurate).

Magill has now resigned her presidency, in advance of a scheduled Board meeting that might have resulted in her being fired. The chair of the Board also resigned. Gay has not (yet?) resigned, but there is more to come on this subject, I am sure. And Rabbi David Wolpe, a member of an advisory council on antisemitism at Harvard, did resign from that commission on the basis of President Gay’s testimony.

Back to the church marquee. Both Magill and Gay have very impressive pasts, and – to my knowledge – apparent antisemitism has not been part of it. And I have no reason to think that they themselves are anti-Jewish or anti-Israel. They clearly did not speak out when they should have, and they clearly blew it at the hearing. As I watched, my reactions were “boy, is this embarrassing”, and “they clearly were told to say what they are saying, and not to say anything more or else – who is telling them this, and why do they seem to be clones of each other in the way they are answering?”

If any of you got to page 28 of the front section of this morning’s New York Times, you saw the answer. Both Magill and Gay were coached on how they should answer. And they were coached by the same law firm – Wilmer Hale – and by specialists in how to respond to questions at Congressional hearings. Say, what?

I am not sure what these legal “experts” had in mind. Primacy of the First Amendment’s free speech provision? Importance of sticking to a university’s “policies and procedures”? There were fatal flaws in this that should have been obvious to everyone. First, once this is your focus, you will find yourselves trapped and unable to give an appropriate answer without contradicting yourself. Second, you aren’t focusing on all of the situations where the same universities undertook very different courses of action, because you haven’t been schooled on those, most of which happened under different leadership and circumstances. Third, you seem stupid, because all you do is repeat phrases that are not really answers. Fourth, you seem like bots, not human beings.

But should this require the resignation or the firing of these university presidents? My answer would be “not necessarily”. Both Gay and Magill are presumably very bright, not personally anti-Jewish, and have the ability to understand when they make a mistake and how to keep the same mistake from being made again. Back to the church: every sinner has a future.

By the way, my comments are not meant to excuse the lines of questioning from the House members, and especially the Republicans. Not the one demanding that the witnesses immediately resign from their positions, not the one that claimed that Harvard lacked diversity because they didn’t have conservatives on their faculty and didn’t even keep records on the political leanings of faculty members, and not the one whose every question contained an irrelevant (to me but not to him, apparently) biblical quote. But that’s the way it is in Congress these days.

One more related new article today: a sixth grade math teacher in the Montgomery County public school system was suspended today because she added the phrase “from the river to the sea…..” after her name on her public school email signature line. She has filed a complaint saying that other teachers have used other, equally controversial phrases on their school email signatures – like “Black Lives Matter”. I don’t know whether this teacher should be suspended – I don’t know much about her, or her politics, or feelings towards Jews in general. So I can’t comment on whether the suspension was warranted. There should be other ways to deal with the situation – why are teachers allowed any such add-ons to their signatures on school emails? Again, saints? Sinners? Pasts? Futures?

It is always a tough call. For a teacher…..at school they should be neutral on anything so controversial. In their private lives, I guess they should have more latitude to express their views. But it’s a tough call.

But “cancel culture”? That just does not seem right to me. It simply divides us from each other more and more, not helping to resolve anything. And it ignores the church’s marquee completely. And it’s much too easy.

(I should remind you that all this does tie in with the “decolonizing” “oppressor/oppressed” social justice philosophy, and that Jews – under this way of looking at history and social science – Jews are “white” and “oppressors”, not “victims” or “non-whites”, who are worthy of extra protection.)