Shelter Rock Jewish Center

Dear Friends,

As I'm sure you all know, it is the almost universal practice of rabbis in pulpits not to endorse specific candidates for public office. I know there are exceptions to this rule, and I also know that some of the rabbis who constitute those exceptions feel forcefully that the right thing for any clergyperson attempting to serve a congregation as its spiritual leader to do is to choose a candidate for sound moral reasons and then publicize the reasons for his or her choice, but I myself have never endorsed a candidate and I have no intention of doing so now. On the other hand, I don't see any reason to translate that thought into a general disinclination ever to address issues that arise from a campaign, and I think that that is an especially reasonable approach to take when an election has as profound a potential impact—on us as individuals, on our country, on Israel, on our country's support for Israel, and on our relations with the rest of the world—as the 2008 presidential race will undoubtedly have. Therefore, I would like to devote some of my letters to you over the next few months to issues arising from the campaign, but without actually suggesting whom you should vote for or, even, revealing to you for whom I personally plan to vote.

Last week, I was invited by the Obama campaign to participate in a conference call. On the line were Obama's chief Jewish supporters in Congress, including Congressman Adam Schiff of California, Congressman Steven Rothman of New Jersey, Congressman Robert Wexler of Florida, and Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky of Illinois...and a huge number of rabbis like myself who had been invited to participate.　 Why specifically I was invited, I'm not sure. We were a disparate group in terms of location, denominational affiliation and, as far as I could tell, political orientation. Of course, I was only able to identify those rabbis who spoke up either to ask questions or to comment on something someone else said. I myself just lurked in the background and listened.

There were a lot of issues on the table, but the one that I found the most personally interesting had to do with Barack Obama's relationship to the clergyman he himself calls his mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., pastor of the Trinity United Church of Christ　in Chicago. That someone running for president has an individual he considers his personal spiritual advisor speaks well for him, I think. But it's only fair to judge the man by the company he keeps...and by the people he himself singles out to admire publicly...and that thought brings us to the Reverend Wright's association with Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam and an unapologetic anti-Semite. Richard Cohen (not the Shelter Rocker, the Washington Post columnist) summarized Louis Farrakhan's worldview just last week for his readers by comparing it to Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech using the following words: "(Reverend King's dream, however,) is not Farrakhan's dream. He has vilified whites and singled out Jews to blame for crimes large and small, either committed by others as well or not at all. (A dominant role in the slave trade, for instance.) He has talked of Jewish conspiracies to set a media line for the whole nation. He has reviled Jews in a manner that brings Hitler to mind." That's enough for me. Richard Cohen is an intelligent and fair author. (You can read his column at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/14/AR2008011402083.html and see for yourself.) And, besides, which of us doesn't know the truth about Louis Farrakhan? But the Reverend Wright doesn't see it our way at all. His church's magazine, The Trumpet, offered the Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. Trumpeter Award to Louis Farrakhan last year, to a man it said "truly epitomized greatness." The Revered Wright himself referred in public to Farrakhan's "integrity and honesty." And also relevant, and possibly even more so, is the Reverend Wright's rabid anti-Israel stance. Indeed, I just read an article by the Reverend Wright himself (you can read it too at http://www.cmaucc.org/EMRJeremiahWright.pdf) in which he unapologetically refers to Zionism as a kind of racism and suggests that a good way to bring Israel to its knees would be for Americans to refuse to do business with companies that have any ties to Israel at all, let alone with actual Israeli companies.

The question for us to ponder, though, is not whether　the Reverend Wright is or isn't　entitled to express his views in public—surely a non-starter for supporters of the First Amendment—but the degree to which a candidate should be vilified for opinions he himself (or, to be fair in this campaign, she herself) does not actually hold. Nothing in Barack Obama's past suggests that he himself is an anti-Semite or an anti-Zionist. Just yesterday, in fact, the Obama campaign sent me a copy of the candidate's letter to Zalmay Khalizad, the American ambassador to the United Nations, urging him to vote against any Security Council resolution that considers the situation in Gaza without reference to the incessant barrage of rockets that Gazans have been firing at Israeli towns and villages near the border for over two years.  Nor would I find it rational for people, say, to abandon our congregation because they don't agree with me about some specific opinion I hold. Surely, within the bosom of our caring community, we can agree to disagree! And yet—and this is the part I want to ask you to help me think through clearly—and, yet, must there not be exceptions to that rule? Are there, for instance, points of view by their very nature so odious that for a minister (or a rabbi, or any clergyperson) merely to espouse them should make it impossible for decent people to affiliate with his or her congregation? Surely, I think, we can all agree that there must be some stances that fall into that category! So the question is, then, does open support for America's most vocal, and best-known, anti-Semite fall into that category? Or does hostility towards Israel so intense that it renders reasonable the grotesque comparison of Zionism and South African racism, a perversion of historical reality lately made almost fashionable by ex-President Carter in his next-to-last book?

Barack Obama is neither an anti-Semite nor an enemy of Israel. That much, I think, is completely obvious. But I find myself wondering if the same can reasonably be said of the man Obama describes as his "spiritual mentor." So the question I want to propose we discuss is, therefore, does any of it matter? Surely, people are free to express their own opinions! And, equally surely, people are free to choose their spiritual leaders in life. So the question, really, boils down to whether candidates should be damned for the company they keep. Should they be? Or should people grant candidates the same privacy they insist on for themselves, and judge our candidates for public office solely on the views they themselves espouse formally and officially, on their websites and in their spoken words, in their campaign brochures and policy books, and in their public interviews on television or elsewhere in the media? That's the thorny question I've been wrestling with.  I hadn't anticipated this being such a burning question in this particular election...but I was clearly wrong about that. It is a serious issue to consider...for me and, I'm guessing, for most of us. Let's talk about it! I'm very curious what all of you think....

Sincerely yours,