The contest between Norm Coleman and Al Franken over who would become the U.S. senator from Minnesota verged into silliness over the past eight months. But it was instructive, particularly in light of the contested election in Iran, about how a democracy works.

As Coleman himself said on Tuesday, “Ours is a government of laws, not men and women.” Some 20,000 pages of legal briefs had been filed, and ballots statewide recounted by hand, before Tuesday’s dénouement, a decision by the state’s Supreme Court in Franken’s favor. He won by a mere 312 votes.

Of course, the citizens of Minnesota, while they may have been thoroughly sick of all the political maneuvering, never took to the streets demanding that one or the other of these middle-aged Jewish men be seated in the Senate. And the incumbent never called out the riot troops to quell the opposition.

The very thought is laughable — except that it sends a superstitious shudder up the spine. What might this country have been if its guiding principles had not been framed by exceptional, far-seeing men? (We do not slight the “founding mothers” here but hew to history.) The founders were wise enough to know that they could not foresee the future. They set in place instruments — Congress, the Constitution, the Supreme Court — by which generations could plot a safe course. Sometimes the course does not seem all that safe and things may go horribly wrong. There are certainly inequities and inefficiencies in employment, education, and health care. (Go to jstandard.com for this week’s Web exclusive, “Groups lining up with Obama on health-care measures.”)

But ours is still a young country, with growing pains and possibilities.

As we write these words, the Iranian opposition leader, Mir Hossein Moussavi, has rejected an offer by the government to conduct a partial recount, calling the election illegitimate. We wish him and his supporters well but we fear, alas, that their pursuit of liberty is doomed to fail.

Dear readers, we wish you a glorious and meaningful Fourth.

As we approach the Fourth of July, our thoughts turn to the many freedoms we enjoy as citizens of a free and democratic nation. One of our most precious rights is that of free speech. Yet, as we all know, speech can, and should, be used with some care. (None of us, for example, has the right to yell “fire” in a crowded theater — unless, of course, there is a fire.)

This week’s arrest of the controversial Hal Turner, a blogger and Internet radio host based in North Bergen, raises some interesting free speech questions.

The issue here is not whether Turner’s speech is pleasant or even palatable. Indeed, it is generally accepted that he is a white supremacist, both anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic. The question is, are his words “protected speech”? That is for the courts to decide.

Were the case to be decided in the court of public opinion, it’s likely he would be convicted. Certainly, the fact that his home contained both weapons and ammunition gives credence to the argument of the federal authorities that he did, in fact, mean to harm three appeals court judges who had upheld handgun bans. (He certainly did, after all, write on his Website, “Let me be the first to say this plainly: These judges deserve to be killed.”)

Still, the courts have ruled broadly on the issue of free speech, and some experts have contended that racist and hateful as Turner undoubtedly is, his words cannot be considered either threats — since he didn’t say he was going to harm the judges himself — or incitement, with its connotation of “imminent lawless action.” (The Supreme Court held in Brandenburg v. Ohio, 1969, that the government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless it is likely to incite “imminent lawless action.”)

Judaism has a lot to say about free speech as well. And here, too, we encounter some limitations. So harmful did the rabbis consider the sin of lashon hara, “evil speech,” that they linked it with terrible diseases requiring purification. And, teach our sages, evil speech is not a victimless crime. In fact, they say, there are three victims: the speaker, the listener, and the subject of the conversation.

This Independence Day, as we count the blessings of living in this wonderful country, let us remember that a society is only as civil as its members. We don’t have to like Hal Turner, or his ilk, but we do have to grant them their day in court.

L.G.

I was filming a program in Iceland with my family when my office called and shared the terrible news of Michael Jackson’s passing. My wife and children were with me in the van. We could scarcely believe what we had heard. The children all remembered Michael fondly. He had given them their dog Marshmallow, who is still a member of our family today. My daughter teared up. And while I was heartsick at the news, especially for his three young children, I was not shocked. I dreaded this day and knew it had to come sooner rather than later.

In the two years that I had attempted, ultimately unsuccessfully, to help Michael repair his life, what most frightened me was not that he would be arrested again for child molestation, although he later was. Rather, it was that he would die. As I told CNN on April 22, 2004, “My great fear, and why I felt I had to be distanced from Michael ... was that he would not live long. My fear was that Michael’s life would be cut short. When you have no ingredients of a healthy life, when you are totally detached from that which is normal, and when you are a super-celebrity you, God forbid, end up like Janis Joplin, like Elvis.... Michael is headed in that direction.”

I am no prophet and it did not take a rocket scientist to see the impending doom. Michael was a man in tremendous pain, and his tragedy was to medicate his pain away rather than addressing its root cause. On many occasions when I visited him, he would emerge from his room woozy and clearly sedated. Who were the doctors who were giving him this stuff? Was there no one to save him from himself? Was there no one to intervene?

By the time I met Michael in the summer of 1999 he was already one of the most famous people in the world. But he seemed lethargic, burned out, and purposeless. He wanted to consecrate his great fame to helping children but knew he could not because of the 1993 child molestation allegations against him. He was cut off from family and was alienated from the Jehovah’s Witnesses church that had nurtured him. He could barely muster the energy to complete the album he was working on. The only thing that seemed to motivate him was his children, to whom he was exceptionally devoted.

As we grew closer, I tried to impress on Michael that his salvation would come not from further concerts or album sales but from reconnecting with loved ones, finding a spiritual anchor, replacing his desire for attention with a hunger for righteous action, and surrounding himself with serious and wise friends. I took him to meet Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate. Michael and I lectured at Carnegie Hall together. At Oxford University, he delivered a lecture asking all children to forgive their parents if they had been neglectful. On the way down to the university, he had called his father Joe to tell him he loved him. All this was significant progress. He came with me to synagogue and regularly attended Shabbat dinner. He seemed directed and content.

Alas, Michael could not sustain the spiritual effort. He felt that many of the activities I advocated he undertake, like the day he handed out books to parents to read to their children in Newark, were too ordinary for a superstar. He felt he was being demystified. He needed the throngs. He thrived on the adulation of the crowds.

In many ways his tragedy was to mistake attention for love. I will never forget how, when we sat down to record 40 hours of conversations where he would finally reveal himself for a book I wrote, he turned to me and said these haunting words, an exact quote: “I am going to say something I have never said before, and this is the truth. I have no reason to lie to you and God knows I am telling the truth. I think all my success and fame, and I have wanted it, I have wanted it because I wanted to be loved. That’s all. That’s the real truth. I wanted people to love me, truly love me, because I never really felt loved. I said I know I have an ability. Maybe if I sharpened my craft, maybe people will love me more. I just wanted to be loved because I think it is very important to be loved and to tell people that you love them and to look in their eyes and say it.”

One cannot read these words without feeling a tremendous sadness for a soul that was so surrounded with hero-worship but remained so utterly alone. Because Michael substituted attention for love he got fans who loved what he did, but he never had true compatriots who loved him for who he was. Perhaps this is why, when so many of his inner circle saw him destroying his life with prescription medication — something he used to treat phantom physical illnesses that were really afflictions of the soul — they allowed him to deteriorate and disintegrate rather than throwing the poison in the garbage.

Michael’s death is not just a personal tragedy, it is an American tragedy. Michael’s story was the stuff of the American dream. A poor black boy who grows up in Gary, Ind., and ends up a billionaire entertainer. But we now know how the story ends. Money is not a currency by which we can purchase self-esteem, and being recognized on the streets will never replace being loved unconditionally by family and true friends.

I miss Michael. I miss him very much. He was far from a saint, but there was a gentility and nobility of spirit that I found humbling and inspiring in a man so accomplished. My heart bleeds for his children, whom he adored and who adored him in turn. I think of Prince and Paris and how attached they were to a father who regularly told me that he knew that when they grew up they would be asked by biographers what kind of father he had been. He wanted them to have only warm memories to share. Alas, the memories will remain incomplete.

I pray for them, I pray for his family. And I pray for America.

The Fourth of July is a time for the American Jewish community to celebrate the unprecedented freedom that the United States has afforded its Jewish citizens. While anti-Semitism has not disappeared, Jews living in America enjoy religious liberties that few Jewish communities in history have experienced, have attained economic and educational success, and have risen to the highest echelons of political power.

In the 21st century, the question is no longer whether Jews will make it in this country but what Jews will contribute to the American discourse.

The topic of religion in the public square tends to elicit images of the Christian right fighting for restrictions on abortion, same-sex marriage, and sex education. But religious traditions — Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and others — have much to say not only about social and cultural norms, but also about economic policy, equality and inequality, and interpersonal behavior.

In this time of economic crisis, the United States needs to learn from the wisdom of these traditions, as well as from contemporary social science and the experiences of real people on the ground.

When we think about halacha (Jewish law), we tend to think first of ritual practices — what observant Jews do and do not eat, what activities are permitted on Shabbat, and what blessings to say on specific occasions. But halacha also includes extensive discussion of civil law, including standards for the relationships between employers and employees, the responsibilities that tenants and landlords have toward one another, and best practices for allocating tzedakah (material support for the poor).

Since the beginning of this economic crisis, I often have been reminded of classical Jewish texts that speak directly to the issues now facing the United States. For example, during the first century C.E., Hillel — one of the greatest rabbis of the Talmud — noticed a threat to the system of lending and borrowing. According to biblical law, debts are forgiven during the shmittah, or sabbatical, year. The Torah foresees the likelihood that individuals will avoid making loans soon before the shmittah year, and warns against giving into this impulse.

By Hillel’s time, though, many people were refusing to make loans that would not be paid back. Hillel realized that the economic system was likely to collapse if borrowing and lending stopped, even for a short period. In response, he instituted “prozbul,” a legal fiction that allows debts to be transferred to the court and collected after the shmittah year.

While technically a subversion of biblical law, this innovation protects the poorest members of society from being denied the loans that will help them to survive difficult periods and maintains the stability of the economic system as a whole.

In the past few years, we have learned in a dramatic way that a drastic reduction in lending and borrowing can undermine the global financial system. While prozbul may not be the solution to today’s challenges, Hillel’s willingness to transform ingrained law serves as a model for re-imagining the laws that govern our own economic system.

In addition to pushing us to change laws in order to create a sustainable and just economic system, Judaism teaches specific laws aimed at guaranteeing that employers will not take unfair advantage of low-income workers, that landlords will not evict tenants without fair warning, and that the criminal justice system will preserve the dignity of both victims and perpetrators.

But some of us remain uncomfortable speaking publicly as Jews about current issues. Many Jews who lead community or public policy organizations, or who hold elected office, speak privately about the ways in which Jewish history and tradition have influenced their approaches to social and economic policy but do not necessarily speak about these Jewish perspectives in public. Perhaps our own negative experiences as the victims of religious coercion, or our attempts to protect ourselves from the intrusion of Christian practice into public institutions, have persuaded us that Judaism has no place in the public sphere.

A powerful rejoinder to this view was offered up by the theologian Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.

“We affirm the principle of separation of church and state,” the rabbi wrote. “We reject the separation of religion and the human situation.”

While the teachings of an individual religious tradition should not be allowed to limit individual or group freedoms or religious practices, our fear of coercion should not dissuade us from bringing the best of Jewish wisdom into the American public debate. We have much to learn from the nuanced approaches to social and economic policy that our rabbis and scholars have developed over the past 3,000 years. If we are to build a sustainable American economy for the future, we should learn from this wisdom, as well as from the wisdom of other religious traditions, academic disciplines and practitioners.

The United States needs us to be Jews not only at home, but also in the street.

I was puzzled by Shmuley Boteach’s June 19 sounding of the battle cry against the Obama administration and its call for Israel to stop all building activity in the settlements. While I have no problem championing Israel’s interests and jeopardizing any dinner invitation that the president might be thinking of extending, I would first need more evidence that Israel was indeed threatened by U.S. demands. Successive Israeli governments, both left- and right-leaning, have agreed to dismantle the majority of the settlements and to surrender more than 90 percent of the land in the west bank to the Palestinian Authority, in the context of a negotiated peace treaty. Furthermore, Israel agreed to a settlement freeze in 2002, included in Phase I of the “roadmap for peace.”

While the nuances of the word “freeze” may well need to be settled on, this can’t be the casus belli that Rabbi Boteach makes it out to be, as quiet diplomacy between our countries is already bringing us to an agreed-upon definition. I suspect the clear majority of the 78 percent of U.S. Jews who voted for Obama have no problem in supporting the president’s call for the freeze, especially as it was accompanied by a clear and forceful demand for an end to all terrorism and violence by the Palestinians. The presumption by Rabbi Boteach that only a “sunshine Jewish patriot” could support President Obama’s forceful attempt to make both sides adhere to their commitments in moving the peace process forward is unjustified, and doesn’t take into account the dramatic shifts that have already taken place — in Lebanon, in Iran, on the Syria-Iraq border — since the election of Obama. Other than in the Orthodox community, I expect most U.S. Jews to react to our president’s initiatives with cautious optimism. A rapprochement between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, and the release of Gilad Shalit — both distinct possibilities — can change the entire landscape of the peace process. Let us press the White House to bring about these steppingstones to peace, rather than gird for war with it.

It is with some alarm that I read of increased extreme radicalism, and even apocalyptic fervor, among west bank settlers (June 26). The difficulty, politically and militarily, in removing tens of thousands of such people is clear.

Realism should be the watchword in seeking the best peace deal for Israel. Micro-managing what the future Palestinian nation will look like, including the extent of its democratic tendencies, will yield no good. We all know Palestine will be corrupt, badly divided, hostile, and ruled by radical autocrats. Israel should aim for a cold peace, as with Jordan and Egypt, or a glorified armistice, which maintained borders from 1949 to 1967, and not expend political capital nor exchange land in return for illusory paper guarantees about the character of Palestine.

As advocated by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, Israel should excise as many communities of Israeli Arabs as possible in the final peace deal. Israel’s Arab population is a cancer and should be minimized. Much land can be attained in such a swap; perhaps valuable strategic portions of the Jordan Valley could be retained.

The peace deal should and will retain for Israel heavily settled areas of the west bank. As for the remainder: The settlers will have many months advance notice of the treaty’s effective date. They should be notified that, effective the day after, they will be outside the law. Since their fate shall be clear, one hopes they will opt to depart, for adequate compensation.

Even as one who has frequently disagreed with the settlement movement over the years, I feel your June 26 cover story unfairly maligned the settlement movement as a whole.

The followers of the Hilltop Youth and Rabbi Ginzburgh represent an extreme fringe within the settlement movement. Most settlers live within areas that will be eventually annexed under any Israeli government. Others live in areas where there must be a Jewish presence to allow access to places of religious and historical importance to the Jewish people. The greater majority have done either hesder or regular army service. While violence and vandalism unfortunately does exist, it pales in comparison to violence done against them.

Having said that, the reason such a small minority has been able to exist is the failure of the mainstream settlement movement (Yesha Council) and its supporters in America to speak out against them. The illegal settlers associated with the group should not be able to use the power and sewer lines of legal settlements. They should not be receiving money from American Jews. Furthermore, everyone living there must obey Israeli law. If you are receiving protection from the Israeli army, you don’t have the right to flout the authority of the army or disobey it. To enable a violent and extremist element to exist, the Yesha Council and the supporters in America are enabling a cancer to grow both within the settlement movement and within Orthodox Judaism.

Thank you, Jewish Standard, for your June 5 editorial “Paying tribute.”

Your readers should be advised that the Jewish War Veterans of the USA, as an organization, has established and supports the National Museum of American Jewish Military History in Washington, D.C. This facility will forever serve proof to future generations how Jews have served their country and continue to serve it.

A visit to the West Point Jewish Chapel proudly displays the names of each year’s Jewish graduates, starting with the first graduating class of 1802, when 50 percent of the class was Jewish. Thirteen Jews were part of the 2009 graduating class. The Jewish War Veterans of the USA was an active participant in sponsoring and promoting the construction of the Jewish chapel at West Point.

JWV welcomes veterans of all wars (past and present) to sign on and be counted, whether or not they can be active at the present time.