Concluding essay by Rabbi Clifford E. Librach:

The first observation I want to make is regarding my worthy and esteemed interlocutor, Rabbi David Saperstein.  He is a champion of the best values that we Jews represent in the world, and has served as both laborer and leader in so many important causes and coalitions.  Although our disagreement here is considerable, I am honored, sincerely,  to share this space with him.  
 
Having said that, I am a bit chagrined at his argument that my position is wrong because it is “out of sync” with the views of most Reform Jews.

If the universe is enlarged – to America, for example, we might find Rabbi Saperstein and most Reform Jews “out of sync.”  So what?  Does that make them wrong?  Surely he would agree that one may stand alone and still be right.  If popularity were all that mattered in intellectual discourse, why bother?

And it would also help the discussion not to characterize me as holding extreme views that I do not actually assert.  Who can forget that moment, a mere few hours after President Reagan had nominated Robert Bork to the Supreme Court?  Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts took to the Senate floor and delivered his famous excoriation: “Robert Bork’s America.”  In it, he predicted and described a scene of unbridled legal horror – wholesale racial discrimination, lynchings, loyalty oaths, back-alley abortions, and wanton police brutality.  All of this was around the corner if Judge Bork were confirmed. 

It was, quite simply, one of the great smears in American political history, cooked up (we now know) by the coalition gathered to derail the nomination by destroying the reputation of the nominee.  It was successful.

Did Rabbi Saperstein grab for his notes from those coalition meetings when confronted with a challenge to his political orthodoxy?

What scintilla of evidence has he to justify his murmur that I favor “government funding for parochial schools, clergy salaries, and missionary activity . . .  the posting of Roman crosses in city halls and court rooms . . . [and] [public school] teachers leading students in Christian prayer”?  Relax and chill, Rabbi.  I am not Robert Bork  . . . and you are no Ted Kennedy.

Rabbi Saperstein suggests that I live in a bubble – in Connecticut, of all places. 

Really?

The people who are still committed to the absolute, maximalist interpretation of the separation of church and state are the people who are about to have their own bubble of self-congratulation burst.  They are coming to realize that few Americans have ever agreed with that interpretation, or put it into practice, or felt any compulsion to thank the strict separationists for their efforts.   Indeed, much of the dreadful and frightening America they anticipate has been true for decades, without complaint. 

Government funding of clergy salaries?  Well, I trust that Rabbi Saperstein himself takes full advantage of the privilege (some dare call it a loophole) accorded only to ordained clergy to have the full cost of their housing deducted from the calculation of their taxable income.  How high is that wall between church and state that permits such financial discrimination in favor of religious leaders?

And what of the phobia regarding government entanglement with faith-based initiatives?  The federal government routinely – since the 1950s – has contracted with various non-governmental organizations (today the operative term is “outsourcing”) to administer dozens of its social service programs.  The value of this is in millions – if not billions – of dollars.  Such NGOs as Catholic Charities and the UJA (now the UJC) are in nothing less than full symbiosis with the government. For every dollar raised by the UJA/Federation, some $8 is forthcoming from government contracts for the administration of social service programs.   Rabbi Saperstein is like a great camp counselor: his spooky ghost stories around the campfire sound strangely like the reality of every day.  That is because they are.

On the legislative history of the First Amendment (which was written, pace Justice Hugo Black’s dictum, when Thomas Jefferson was in France), I suppose we should appreciate the effort of Rabbi Saperstein to rely on the Framers' original intentions for the interpretation of the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses – not the usual position of those who oppose the confirmation of judicial conservatives..  Unfortunately he gets it wrong (most states had established churches when the First Amendment was ratified by them), but I applaud his technique of constitutional evaluation.

Is it the harmony of government and religion in public life which we fear, or the influence of Christians and Christianity? What is the issue before us: the proper role of religion in American life or politics by another name?  Why are the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jimmy Carter and Abraham Joshua Heschel to be praised but the efforts of James Dobson or Ralph Reed to be condemned and demonized?  Do we fear an American Holocaust (with Jews as its victims) or some strange atavistic revival of The Crusades from this hemisphere? Why do we modern American Jews recoil from the mere mention of God in the public square – or, as Rabbi Saperstein would have it, in the government square?

I am in favor of a robust, muscular and public Judaism – not one which apologizes for its uniqueness and attempts to “lay low” so as to bring upon itself and its adherents no attention or curiosity. I do not rely, for any religious or secular purpose, on Rabbi Saperstein's unusual and strained effort to analogize the political separation of church and state to the Torah's distinctions between the roles of Moses and Aaron.    Let a million sukkot dot the American suburban landscape.  Let our neighbors gaze with awe as we spend the entire night of Shavuot learning and celebrating the Torah and our sacred inheritance.  Let our Passover seder – as a ritualized and family-based annual recapitulation and review -- be the model which America emulates in teaching its birth story to its own largely uninitiated youth.  Let the streets be blocked by our loud and boisterous celebration of Simchat Torah.  Let them see that our Shabbat endures while their Sunday has crumbled in the face of modernity.

I am grateful that we live in a religious country, so young and yet so great.  I do not fear its Christian character or the religious intensity of its Christian citizens.  To the contrary, I applaud their piety and note their general acknowledgment of our virtue, our enduring covenant with Almighty God, and the justice of the existence and security of the State of Israel.  No one said it better than the great Franklin D. Roosevelt, in another context . . . we have nothing to fear but fear itself.