The Convergence of the Twain

Next month, Americans will take note of what is probably the most significant thing that never happened in our country’s history. At the time, the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 brought the world to the very brink of Armageddon. Kennedy and Khrushchev stood “eyeball to eyeball” with the world holding its breath and braced for nuclear war, a war that – thank God – never happened. Had the military confrontation taken place (which, with the release of previously classified tapes and documents, we know was actually closer than we then thought) hundreds of millions of Americans and Russians would have been killed.

One of the most interesting retrospectives I read regarding the Crisis was a recent article by Graham Allison in Foreign Affairs (July/August, 2012) on how the horrific clash was avoided. Allison explains how that October, given the discovery of nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba, President Kennedy was faced with two equally bad choices: either a) attack or b) acquiesce to Soviet missiles in Cuba. What we now know, and are grateful for, is that Kennedy and his advisors rejected these options and chose to craft a third option – an imaginative combination of carrots and sticks – which, as described by Allison, consisted of three key components. First, Kennedy pledged publicly not to invade Cuba if the Soviet Union withdrew its missiles. Second, a private ultimatum was issued by Kennedy to the Soviets giving them twenty-four hours to accept the offer. And third, what Allison dubs a “secret sweetener,” Kennedy promised the withdrawal of US missiles from Turkey within six months after the crisis was resolved. The most interesting thing about this third element was that it was so secret that not even Kennedy’s inner circle knew about it. Rather, it was a message delivered by Bobby Kennedy to the Soviet Ambassador during a dinner break. According to Allison, it was this combination of threats and incentives, some issued publicly and some privately, that collectively served to resolve the standoff and avert the terrible collision.

Relevant as our fifty-year anniversary non-event may appear to the global challenges of today’s world, this morning I will leave it to you to read the articles and draw your own conclusions. I would only urge you to remember the comment of Heraclitus that “No person ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and it is not the same person.” These precedents are instructive but not prescriptive and we need to remember that Iran is not the Soviet Union, Netanyahu is not Kennedy and 2012 is not 1962.

Rather this morning, during this season of reflection, I want to focus our attention on the more modest, human lessons of this crisis averted. Because whether by happenstance or by steadily pursued design, President Kennedy’s playbook reveals not just an intriguing facet of diplomacy between nations, but an insight into the nature of conflict resolution between any two parties. Namely, that nobody likes to be painted into a corner, and when somebody is painted into a corner, all the more so publicly, the outcome is fear and conflict. As the Athenian historian Thucydides stated in his Peloponnesian War, “What made that war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.” Kennedy’s model is instructive in that through his public and private actions he avoided Thucydides’ trap by prodding the Soviets towards his desired outcome, providing them with a way to arrive at the desired destination appearing to have gotten there on their own volition. To put it another way, Kennedy figured out that a successful negotiation was not just a matter of identifying, defending and asserting his own interests but also understanding the interests of the party on the other side of the table and creating an option whereby they could squeeze out a face-saving and thus viable resolution.

If you follow this topic, you may know that this past month, the famed Harvard law professor and authority in conflict resolution Roger Fisher passed away at the age of ninety. Fisher served in World War II and, having lost many of his friends on the battlefield, he devoted his life to studying ways of resolving conflict on both an international and interpersonal level. From South Africa to Peru to El Salvador to the Middle East to the Iranian Hostage crisis to the eight million copies of his book Getting to Yes sold, to say that Fisher defined the field of conflict resolution is an understatement. In rereading his book, the chapter I always find most intriguing is the one entitled “Invent Options for Mutual Gain.” Practitioners of conflict resolution must, contends Fisher, not only see conflict through the eyes of the other, but also demonstrate the capacity to produce more than threats, to generate creative solutions that are, for both sides, what Fisher dubs “yesable propositions.” Make no mistake about it, Fisher was not interested in appeasement or concession. After all, the subtitle of Getting to Yes is Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In. But I think, and I am no expert on this by any stretch, that Fisher just understood the nature of people, people like you and me, like all of us. He knew that when it comes time to hear a “no,” when we need to hear a rebuke or warning or even justified criticism – difficult as it will be to swallow – we will be more likely to do so when we do not believe ourselves to be cornered, in our own eyes and certainly in the eyes of others.

All of which is, incidentally, the message of this week’s parashah. Long before Fisher or Cuba or Thucydides, it is precisely this insight that was woven into Moses’ swan song – Ha’azinu. It is not an easy song to listen to. It is full of reprimand and rebuke and the consequences of Israel’s betrayal of God. If there was ever a Torah reading containing sting, this is it. Which makes it all the more interesting that the first verse of this song is “May my discourse come down as rain, my speech as dew. Like showers on young growth, like droplets on the grass.” How is it possible, ask the rabbis, that words of rebuke can be characterized so gently? The answer given is that even when one is giving rebuke, perhaps especially when one is giving rebuke, if you want it not only to be heard but more importantly, acted upon, the manner in which it is delivered is as important as the message. God understood that if the divine message was going to have a fighting chance of being “heard,” Israel could not be put in a defensive posture without any face-saving options. The message, in all its directness, had to come like dew, dew from which growth and transformation could emerge.

This past week, much to my chagrin, I discovered that without any ill intent, I had caused hurt to a dear friend of mine. It was a clumsy and callous misstep for which, the moment it came to my attention, I was instantly mortified. And though the generous gift of my friend’s forgiveness puts the incident in our past, never to be repeated, the lesson I will take from it all is the manner in which my friend brought the matter to my attention. He called, he expressed how much he cared for our relationship, he explained his position and made clear his hurt, but he never put me in a corner, and he did all this entirely privately. There was never a moment that I was thrust into an uncomfortably defensive posture. I never needed to justify myself or parry his words of rebuke, because his words, like the parashah, came like dew. He was right, I was wrong – period out. His words were spoken with love and intended to help me grow. I will forever be grateful.

What an incredibly wise and important lesson, not just for me in my own missteps, but for all of us as an insight into human nature. As the philosopher Martha Nussbaum explains in her newest book, The New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age, in our anxious age overcome by fear, we are all in desperate need of what she calls a “sympathetic imagination,” the ability to cultivate an understanding of each other, our needs, our differences, our egos and the “yesable propositions” that exist if we look hard enough. In a world of competing and conflicting interests, personal, communal and otherwise, we need to learn that sometimes the most critical step in finding our way is to understand what is driving the person on the other side of our table and to ask if we were in their shoes, what would be a viable option for us.

I began with the image of a collision averted some fifty years ago. There was a poem written some fifty years earlier, in response to a very different kind of collision that tragically did happen, the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. The poem, written by Thomas Hardy, is called “The Convergence of the Twain,” and as the title indicates it describes the events leading up to the collision. The verses alternate between the opulent and jeweled ship taking shape in one place, and concurrently in the dim moon and deep sea of the North Atlantic an iceberg forming. The two were never supposed to meet, their destinies were meant to be alien to each other, until their tragic convergence resulted in a wicked fate that, in retrospect, could have been avoided. It is an altogether curious poem in that rather than memorializing with compassion those who were lost, Hardy employs the tragic imagery of the Titanic as a poetic vehicle to reflect on human vanity, and the terrible convergences not just of ships and icebergs, but all clashes and collisions resulting from such hubris.

With Yom Kippur still fresh in our minds, we know that our tradition teaches that like everything in our lives, the health of our relationships is something that demands constant maintenance. Because even now, in the shipyards of our souls, there may well lurk the beginnings of future conflict. We can nip those hostile convergences in the bud, long before we, like characters in a Shakespearean tragedy, are felled by the poison on our own swords. We can be, I believe, unflinching about our own needs, as people, and yes, as nations. But it is no great concession, indeed it may just be the mark of wisdom, to realize that conflict resolution involves not one, but two parties, and we need to at least give pause to consider both sides of the equation. In the dawn of this new year, may all of our words, of love and rebuke, come like dew and may our relationships thus grow into the enduring and worthwhile reflections of what we know to be our not just our best interests, but also our best selves.