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Reply to Rabbi Librach’s essay: Religion is Good for America and for the Jews of America
Fittingly, this is the season when, in our parashot, we read of God’s bifurcation of power between Aaron’s religious authority and Moses’ political authority. Clearly this system, based as it was on religious law, merged religion and politics in a manner that differs from our concepts of Church and State separation. However, God’s warning against the merging of political and religious authority still holds true today.
Rabbi Librach has long been a thoughtful critic of the liberal sensitivities held by overwhelming percentages of the membership of our synagogues and therefore represented in our Movement’s positions. But on this issue he is so out of sync with the concerns of our members as to be bewildering.
First, Rabbi Librach asserts that the only thing the establishment clause prohibits is: the establishment of a state religion or church. Indeed, this is what the religious right believes and explicitly fights for. But it is a radical reshaping of America and would represent a far more restrictive test than even Justices Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas have ever proposed. Such a view would allow government funding for parochial schools, clergy salaries, and missionary activity; it would allow for the posting of Roman crosses in city halls ands court rooms; it would allow for teachers to lead students in Christian prayer. Rabbi Librach, do you really want your grandchildren to grow up in such an America?
Second, Rabbi Librach makes the classic blunder that so many who argue the religious right’s view point make: confusing the public square and the government square. There is no “naked public square” in America where it comes to religion. On the other hand there should be a “naked government square.” Government should be neutral on religion, neither supporting or infringing upon it. To echo Justice O’Connor, no one should be made to feel like an outsider because their religious beliefs, identity or practices differ from those their own government endorses.
But do Eilu v’Eilu readers really agree that religion has been sanitized in the public square? I can’t vouch for what life is like in Rabbi Librach’s area of Connecticut but in the America I travel broadly, the notion that there is a war on Christianity, a war on Christmas, or an effort to sanitize all mention of religion in public is simply bewildering and belied by what I see and hear every day. In the public square: our bookshelves, music stores, radios, televisions, corporate America including store property abound with Christmas displays, religious music and books, televangelists on TV, Christian music throughout our airwaves, fundamentalist voices on talk shows. Above all, in the over 300,000 houses of worship, religious worship and teaching widely proclaimed. It is only the government, which must remain neutral on religion, not the public.
Third, on the history of separation of church and state he is just wrong. Rather than it being a fanciful creation of Jefferson or a reflection of anti-Catholic bias, it reflected core concerns of our framers. They represented a populace who fled the brutal religious and political oppression in Europe that flowed from the linking of church and state.
Yes, there were division on these issues and yes, the framers felt God’s presence in the creation of this new nation and were comfortable acknowledging it. They expressed this however in our aspirational documents and symbolic acts– the Declaration of Independence, Thanksgiving proclamations, “In God we Trust” on coins and “Gold Bless this Honorable Court” each session of the Supreme Court. But when they wrote our laws, they scrupulously omitted mention of God in the Constitution. And in the debates over the words of the First Amendment they intentionally rejected the very understanding of the Establishment Clause that Rabbi Librach argues for, settling on the broad wording of “Congress shall make no law (even) respecting an (not the) establishment of religion.”
Over the next century, eventually even those states with established religion abandoned it and many wrote state constitutional establishment clauses even stronger than the federal constitutions over the past 70 years.
Rabbi Librach suggests this strong separation is relatively recent, a mid-20th century invention of the Supreme Court. Well, yes. But not because it was a change--only because the Court never really addressed either free exercise or establishment cases until then. It wasn’t as though they were changing their position when in 1947 Justice Hugo Black wrote that:
The "establishment of religion" clause of the First Amendment means at least this: Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another., Neither can force nor influence a person to go to or to remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion. No person can be punished for entertaining or professing religious beliefs or disbeliefs, for church attendance or nonattendance. No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion. Neither a state nor the Federal Government can, openly or secretly, participate in the affairs of any religious organizations or groups or vice versa. In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect "a wall of separation between church and state." __
Justice Hugo Black, in the opinion for the court, Everson v. Board of Education , 330 U.S. 1 (1947)
Finally, what Rabbi Librach and I agree on is one urgent and vital point for our nation and American Jewry: The Roberts Court will likely abandon the strong establishment clause tests of the past sixty years. With the addition of Judge Alito the prospects have skyrocketed -- which is why we opposed his appointment. Rabbi Librach celebrates that change. I suspect that the vast majority of American Jews and even grater numbers of reform Jews, fear it will lead to a very different, Christianized America for their children and grandchildren. That hardly calls for celebration.
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Reply to Rabbi Saperstein’s essay: The First Amendment and the Religious Right
Rabbi Saperstein is passionate. His position on issues is well stated, even if predictable. But with all due respect and affection, the desire to play a role in American coalition politics should not be the engine driving the legislative or political agenda of a religious movement. The articulated fear of “sweeping changes” has accompanied the elevation of nearly every Supreme Court nominee since the days of Richard Nixon: Stevens, Souter, O’Connor, Kennedy, Scalia, Rehnquist (when elevated to Chief Justice), Thomas, Roberts, and Alito.
I don't question Rabbi Saperstein's point that, in general, the historic American separation of church and state under the First Amendment--before the Warren Court as well as after--has benefited religion. But that fact does not prove that even more rigorous legal separation will benefit religion even more. The exaggeration of what is reasonable and just may not bring more of the same; indeed it may bring confusion, abuse, and a culture coarser and less decent than before.
What, for example, was offensive or constitutionally suspect in the benign and non-sectarian blessing offered by our colleague Rabbi Les Gutterman at a middle school graduation exercise? It was ruled unconstitutional by a Supreme Court (voting 5-4), obsessed, it seems to me, with the mere mention of God in the public square. The separation of church and state does not mean an antagonism to religion, faith, and God.
I ask Rabbi Saperstein: in what way has America become a better, more tolerant, more refined, more just society now that students are prohibited from saying these words at the beginning of their school day:
Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country.
In what way?
Our currency proclaims “In God We Trust;” our legislatures begin each session with invocations articulated by a variety of ordained clergy; our court sessions regularly hear some bailiff, clerk or constable bark “May God save this Honorable Court;” and (for the time being) we pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands,”one nation, under God.” Rotary Clubs, Cub Scout packs, sports fans and political gatherings of both major parties routinely belt out the popular anthem (composed by a Jew) “God Bless America.”
In this, we Americans are not sycophants of the aging caricatures Rev. Pat Robertson and Rev. Jerry Falwell.
The "religious right," whatever that may be, did not "set out to reshape America in their image," whatever that image might be. Rabbi Saperstein may think he knows what all those supposedly fearsome things are. But he is just playing the old game of demonization –conjuring a vast collective bogeyman he has constructed himself out of fragments of loosely stated opinion. I, for one, am glad that America is a predominately Christian country – in consideration, especially, of the alternatives. We American Jews surely are more secure, more protected, more accepted and more integrated than we would be in the midst of Islamo-fascism or a vast pagan or secular desert. But for Israel, only in America could an Orthodox Jew be nominated by his party for a national office and campaign freely without a shred or whiff of anti-Semitism in response.
Rabbi Saperstein assumes that it was the judicially-mandated separation of church and state during the Warren and Burger Court eras which enabled Jews to move to the center of American life. But this argument would be news to Justices Brandeis, Cardozo and Frankfurter, all of whom served before Earl Warren. It would also be news to Levi Strauss, Emma Lazarus, Bernard Baruch, Louis B. Mayer, Hank Greenberg, Albert Einstein, Hyman Rickover, Jonas Salk and Irving Berlin. Jews gained public influence by our own talents and efforts, and by rising out of poverty to economic security, as the nation generally became more prosperous after the Second World War. We were already becoming more central to American life long before the Warren Court. Nobody is trying to move us from that center; and we shall not be moved.
People who think – or say they think – that Jews are about to become strangers in America because of marginal changes in constitutional interpretation have been listening too long to their own propaganda. It was 1952, six years after the Holocaust and two years before California Governor (and Republican) Earl Warren joined the Supreme Court, when Columbia University Professor Salo W. Baron instructed us to forsake the "lachrymose" version of Jewish history in favor of a more realistic appraisal of our resiliency and success.
But who (or what) are we Jews going to believe – the purveyors of the same old scary stories, or our own eyes? |
