My rabbi's defense of Obama
The rabbi at my synagogue is a large man with a thick beard and a barrel chest and a somewhat misanthropic mien. This last quality is a strange one to find in a pulpit rabbi, but not impossible to understand, given the harangues to which he's frequently subjected on any sermon he gives, any offhand remark he makes, or any slight, real or imagined, of which he's guilty.
So last week, he took the unusual step of sending an e-mail telling the congregation he would, on the coming Sabbath, be giving a sermon about Barack Obama, Jeremiah Wright and the issue of race in the current elections. He did this for several reasons:
1. So that people who knew they'd be offended would stay away
2. So that people who knew they'd be stimulated would come
3. Because it was Spring Break, there was no bar mitzvah, and he wanted to make sure people came to shul anyway.
This was cleverly calibrated to swell attendance, and it succeeded, because most Jews I know love to hear a sermon that offends them. So everyone came: people who hope to hear him slam Obama, people who hoped to hear him defend Obama, and people who like watching train wrecks.
The rabbi's remarks (which are not up on the synagogue's Web site yet, but I'll post a link here as soon as they're available) surprised nearly everyone in attendance. Ours is a Conservative, conservative shul: traditional in its observance, generally right of center in its political orientation. The rabbi, who feels that political endorsements have no place in religion (partly because they can endanger the institution's tax-exempt status), nonethless will sometimes delight the conservatives in attendance with withering remarks about institutionalized anti-Semitism in academia, about the double-standard applied to Israel and the Palestinians, or about positions espoused by other Jewish denominations.
This time, however -- after carefully, repeatedly saying that he was not endorsing Obama or anyone else in the Presidential race -- he said that Obama's speech on race was the best political speech of our lifetime, and that Obama was exactly right not only in what he said but in refusing to entirely end his relationship with his pastor.
The analogy he used was a striking one. What would you say, our rabbi asked us, to an 80-year-old Holocaust survivor who was unmoving in his conviction that all Germans were evil? What would you say to this person, who refused to interact with anyone German, no matter whether they were present at, involved in or even alive during World War II? The rabbi answered his own question by saying that you would, of course, repudiate the views of that person without cutting them off entirely.
He acknowledged that the analogy wasn't perfect, because the Holocaust survivor is among the generation that suffered first-hand the most violent of persecutions, while Jeremiah Wright's generation, a century removed from slavery, is not. Even so, the rabbi went on, slavery is the American Holocaust. It is the morally repugnant and inexcusable blot on America that continues to define the African American struggle for equality and full participation in American life and society. While you can't excuse Reverend Wright's remarks, you have an obligation to understand them in the context. The context of the Holocaust survivor's reaction to interaction with Germans, it seems to me, struck the right note.
The rabbi ended by saying that right-leaning elements in the Jewish community were doing the entire community a disservice by perpetuating slander and innuendo about Obama that is at best irrelevant and at worst clearly untrue. He dismissed the Jewish right's notions that Obama would be hostile to Israel, noting that every president has been a friend of Israel, because every president recognizes the facts of the region and the place of Israel in America's relationships and interests. (Even Jimmy Carter, the rabbi said, was a friend of Israel while in office, and only afterwards "sold his soul to the Devil.") The worst thing we can do, he said, is alienate a viable presidential candidate before the election -- and any of the three remaining candidates would, he said, clearly be a friend of Israel.
I was relieved by his remarks, and secretly delighted by the sight of the ruffled and offended partisans in our congregation. I don't know yet who I'll vote for, but I'm glad that my rabbi did his part to calm the hysteria and distortion that threatens to define the relationship of American Jewry toward the first viable African American presidential candidate.
--T.A.
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