Hi All, Below is a very nuanced and incisive analysis
by Andrew Silow-Caroll (NJ Jewish News) about the Rev.
Wright controversy and how the Jewish community might
better consider it in the context of our own
experience.
by Andrew Silow-Caroll (NJ Jewish News) about the Rev.
Wright controversy and how the Jewish community might
better consider it in the context of our own
experience.
Between clergy and congregant
by Andrew Silow-Carroll
NJJN Editor-in-Chief
March 20, 2008
Nothing I am going to write about Barack Obama and his
controversial pastor -- check that, former pastor --
will help you better understand the issue than what
Obama himself has to say on the subject. So I urge you
to read the speech he gave in Philadelphia on Tuesday.
Many Jews are going to focus on his brief remarks on
Israel. He called the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's views on
the subject "profoundly distorted" because they see
"the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily
in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead
of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies
of radical Islam." That paragraph will undoubtedly be
singled out in the dueling e-mails exchanged by many
Jews over the next few months.
But in some ways I am even more intrigued by what the
Obama-Wright affair has to say about relationships
with our clergy. To what degree are any of us
responsible for or implicated in whatever is said from
the pulpit and beyond?
Obama addresses directly the question that's been
nagging at pro-Israel Democrats: why he associated
himself with Wright in the first place. If all he knew
of Wright "were the snippets that have run in an
endless loop on television," says Obama, he too might
never have joined the church.
But Obama insists that the angry and sometimes
shocking excerpts do not reflect the Wright he knows.
That pastor "is a man who helped introduce me to my
Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our
obligations to love one another, to care for the sick
and lift up the poor." Obama quotes from his
description of the church in his 1995 memoir, Dreams
from My Father. Because he is a superb writer, he
conjures up the ecstatic attraction of any faith
community, a place that becomes "a vessel carrying the
story of a people into future generations and into a
larger world." And as he did in a meeting earlier this
month with Jewish leaders in Cleveland, he likens
Wright to a member of his family, warts and all.
My own experience tells me that the relationship
between congregant and controversial clergy is more
complex than the cable squawkers will acknowledge. For
a few years before we moved to New Jersey, my family
belonged to an Orthodox synagogue. Its rabbi is a
national figure whom you would be as likely to find at
a demonstration as on the bima. Before joining the
shul, I mostly knew him as a right-wing firebrand,
often on the side of the angels, but just as often
making statements that -- especially in that
overwrought time that preceded the assassination of
Yitzhak Rabin -- would make my blood boil.
But say this about the rabbi: He built an amazing
community. Shabbat services were rollicking,
jam-packed affairs; holiday celebrations were vibrant;
his insistence on hospitality spilled over into an
endless round of invitations to Friday night dinners
and Saturday afternoon lunches. The typical synagogue
event was not a dinner-dance or bagel breakfast, but a
bus ride to a United Nations protest or a model seder
for developmentally disabled adults. By sheer force of
his vision, his synagogue became a magnet not only for
the area's Orthodox but for families like mine who
would normally have been more comfortable in a
Conservative or Reform congregation.
The rabbi's rhetoric in shul was never as divisive as
Wright's (which is why I won't mention his name here),
but I'd sometimes hear him quoted in the media. That's
where he'd say the kinds of things that made me worry
whether my membership in his synagogue signaled that I
condoned them. In the end, I measured him as a man
whose political passions were of a piece with his
passion to build Jewish community. The rabbi was
someone who, as Obama says of Wright, "contains within
him the contradictions -- good and bad -- of the
community that he has served diligently for so many
years."
Applying scrutiny
This doesn't forgive Wright his overheated rhetoric on
race or support for Louis Farrakhan, but it helps me
understand why Obama would be a part of his church in
spite of that. And if you think that sounds
apologetic, then consistency suggests that you begin
to apply new scrutiny not only to rabbis, but to the
non-Jewish clergy we consider friends and to the
friends who consider them their clergy.
You can start with the evangelical ministers, like
John Hagee, who move us with their commitment to
Israel but insult Catholics, Mormons, homosexuals, and
secular folk with their (literally) unforgiving
theologies. For years, the pro-Israel strategy has
been to separate the evangelicals' Zionism from the
darker, intolerant implications of their
eschatological vision. In light of the Wright
controversy, can we still do so?
Or you might consider the case of Rabbi Hershel
Schachter, dean at Yeshiva University's rabbinical
school, who entertained some American yeshiva students
in Israel by suggesting they should "shoot the rosh
hamemshala" (prime minister of Israel) if the Israeli
government were to "give away" Jerusalem. Confronted
with the YouTube clip of the incident, Schachter
apologized, saying the statements were "uttered
spontaneously, off the cuff, and were not meant
seriously." (Shachter makes news like this every so
often, once drawing an analogy between "monkeys and
parrots" and women reading aloud from a marriage
contract. Perhaps you had to be there.) Shachter is
not running for president, but last time I checked
he's still got his job at YU and was recently
appointed as one of three American rabbis who will
oversee America's Orthodox conversion process.
If we're going to ramp up our outrage over angry
political rhetoric from the pulpit, are we going to
direct it at the rabbis who take a "problematic"
Jewish text -- say, the Purim Megilla, whose
celebratory climax is the death of an untold number of
the Jews' enemies -- and use it to suggest Israel isn't
being tough enough on its enemies? Would these rabbis
pass the YouTube test?
There's a precedent for this kind of scrutiny and
action: In 1995, the Anti-Defamation League's national
director, Abraham Foxman, quit his Teaneck shul of 20
years because, as he told The New York Times, its
rabbi "spews hate and vitriol toward the elected
leaders of Israel." Among some other choice
statements, the rabbi had compared Rabin's government
to a Judenrat, the Jewish councils forced to carry out
the Nazis' ghetto policies. (The rabbi's still in
place, by the way.) Foxman's act stands out because
few can remember another.
You might argue that critics of Schachter or of angry
right-wing rabbis don't understand the internal
language of Jewish life and the subtlety of speech
that draws on the Torah. Indeed, in his own speech,
Obama paraphrased the saying, often attributed to
Martin Luther King Jr., that "the 11 o'clock hour on
Sunday is the most segregated hour in American life."
Some exploit the ignorance that results, forgiving
their clergy's excesses by saying outsiders don't
understand the "coded" nature of their speech. And
others ignore the differences, and presume to know
exactly what can be found in another's heart and
faith.
So take your moral stands, tolerant or severe -- just
make sure you're setting a standard that you and your
leaders can meet.
"Always remember that no matter what obstacles stand in our way,
nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for
change..In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been
anything false about hope."--Senator Barack Obama
by Andrew Silow-Carroll
NJJN Editor-in-Chief
March 20, 2008
Nothing I am going to write about Barack Obama and his
controversial pastor -- check that, former pastor --
will help you better understand the issue than what
Obama himself has to say on the subject. So I urge you
to read the speech he gave in Philadelphia on Tuesday.
Many Jews are going to focus on his brief remarks on
Israel. He called the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's views on
the subject "profoundly distorted" because they see
"the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily
in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead
of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies
of radical Islam." That paragraph will undoubtedly be
singled out in the dueling e-mails exchanged by many
Jews over the next few months.
But in some ways I am even more intrigued by what the
Obama-Wright affair has to say about relationships
with our clergy. To what degree are any of us
responsible for or implicated in whatever is said from
the pulpit and beyond?
Obama addresses directly the question that's been
nagging at pro-Israel Democrats: why he associated
himself with Wright in the first place. If all he knew
of Wright "were the snippets that have run in an
endless loop on television," says Obama, he too might
never have joined the church.
But Obama insists that the angry and sometimes
shocking excerpts do not reflect the Wright he knows.
That pastor "is a man who helped introduce me to my
Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our
obligations to love one another, to care for the sick
and lift up the poor." Obama quotes from his
description of the church in his 1995 memoir, Dreams
from My Father. Because he is a superb writer, he
conjures up the ecstatic attraction of any faith
community, a place that becomes "a vessel carrying the
story of a people into future generations and into a
larger world." And as he did in a meeting earlier this
month with Jewish leaders in Cleveland, he likens
Wright to a member of his family, warts and all.
My own experience tells me that the relationship
between congregant and controversial clergy is more
complex than the cable squawkers will acknowledge. For
a few years before we moved to New Jersey, my family
belonged to an Orthodox synagogue. Its rabbi is a
national figure whom you would be as likely to find at
a demonstration as on the bima. Before joining the
shul, I mostly knew him as a right-wing firebrand,
often on the side of the angels, but just as often
making statements that -- especially in that
overwrought time that preceded the assassination of
Yitzhak Rabin -- would make my blood boil.
But say this about the rabbi: He built an amazing
community. Shabbat services were rollicking,
jam-packed affairs; holiday celebrations were vibrant;
his insistence on hospitality spilled over into an
endless round of invitations to Friday night dinners
and Saturday afternoon lunches. The typical synagogue
event was not a dinner-dance or bagel breakfast, but a
bus ride to a United Nations protest or a model seder
for developmentally disabled adults. By sheer force of
his vision, his synagogue became a magnet not only for
the area's Orthodox but for families like mine who
would normally have been more comfortable in a
Conservative or Reform congregation.
The rabbi's rhetoric in shul was never as divisive as
Wright's (which is why I won't mention his name here),
but I'd sometimes hear him quoted in the media. That's
where he'd say the kinds of things that made me worry
whether my membership in his synagogue signaled that I
condoned them. In the end, I measured him as a man
whose political passions were of a piece with his
passion to build Jewish community. The rabbi was
someone who, as Obama says of Wright, "contains within
him the contradictions -- good and bad -- of the
community that he has served diligently for so many
years."
Applying scrutiny
This doesn't forgive Wright his overheated rhetoric on
race or support for Louis Farrakhan, but it helps me
understand why Obama would be a part of his church in
spite of that. And if you think that sounds
apologetic, then consistency suggests that you begin
to apply new scrutiny not only to rabbis, but to the
non-Jewish clergy we consider friends and to the
friends who consider them their clergy.
You can start with the evangelical ministers, like
John Hagee, who move us with their commitment to
Israel but insult Catholics, Mormons, homosexuals, and
secular folk with their (literally) unforgiving
theologies. For years, the pro-Israel strategy has
been to separate the evangelicals' Zionism from the
darker, intolerant implications of their
eschatological vision. In light of the Wright
controversy, can we still do so?
Or you might consider the case of Rabbi Hershel
Schachter, dean at Yeshiva University's rabbinical
school, who entertained some American yeshiva students
in Israel by suggesting they should "shoot the rosh
hamemshala" (prime minister of Israel) if the Israeli
government were to "give away" Jerusalem. Confronted
with the YouTube clip of the incident, Schachter
apologized, saying the statements were "uttered
spontaneously, off the cuff, and were not meant
seriously." (Shachter makes news like this every so
often, once drawing an analogy between "monkeys and
parrots" and women reading aloud from a marriage
contract. Perhaps you had to be there.) Shachter is
not running for president, but last time I checked
he's still got his job at YU and was recently
appointed as one of three American rabbis who will
oversee America's Orthodox conversion process.
If we're going to ramp up our outrage over angry
political rhetoric from the pulpit, are we going to
direct it at the rabbis who take a "problematic"
Jewish text -- say, the Purim Megilla, whose
celebratory climax is the death of an untold number of
the Jews' enemies -- and use it to suggest Israel isn't
being tough enough on its enemies? Would these rabbis
pass the YouTube test?
There's a precedent for this kind of scrutiny and
action: In 1995, the Anti-Defamation League's national
director, Abraham Foxman, quit his Teaneck shul of 20
years because, as he told The New York Times, its
rabbi "spews hate and vitriol toward the elected
leaders of Israel." Among some other choice
statements, the rabbi had compared Rabin's government
to a Judenrat, the Jewish councils forced to carry out
the Nazis' ghetto policies. (The rabbi's still in
place, by the way.) Foxman's act stands out because
few can remember another.
You might argue that critics of Schachter or of angry
right-wing rabbis don't understand the internal
language of Jewish life and the subtlety of speech
that draws on the Torah. Indeed, in his own speech,
Obama paraphrased the saying, often attributed to
Martin Luther King Jr., that "the 11 o'clock hour on
Sunday is the most segregated hour in American life."
Some exploit the ignorance that results, forgiving
their clergy's excesses by saying outsiders don't
understand the "coded" nature of their speech. And
others ignore the differences, and presume to know
exactly what can be found in another's heart and
faith.
So take your moral stands, tolerant or severe -- just
make sure you're setting a standard that you and your
leaders can meet.
"Always remember that no matter what obstacles stand in our way,
nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for
change..In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been
anything false about hope."--Senator Barack Obama
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