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December 8, 2006 - Vayishlach

I surprise even myself sometimes. Most of the time I don’t, but his time, I find myself agreeing with Dennis Prager. Prager is a conservative radio talk show host and columnist, a self described non-denominational religious Jew, who sparked a national debate recently for speaking out against Keith Ellison, a Congressman from Minnesota, who requested to take his oath of office using the Koran instead of the Bible. I sympathize with Prager’s conclusion that as diverse as the American people are in the private practice of many religions, the Bible remains the proper communal symbol for the occasion of entering public service and pledging to uphold the Constitution of America. The two of us just come to that conclusion from slightly different vantage points. Essentially, what Prager venomously argued in his column which appeared on Townhall.com, was that the act of choosing one’s own book, like the Koran, should be viewed as an attack levied by multicultural activists to undermine American civilization. In typical shock jock fashion, Prager goes on to lump those on the Left with Ellison’s fellow Muslim supporters in characterizing Ellison’s request as a statement that America’s holiest book is of no consequence to them. All that matters and should matter is what any individual holds to be his holiest book. As far as I am concerned, this line of argument is a cheap shot.

It is always easy to accuse the political Left or social liberals of sinking into relativism- the ultimate assertion that if anyone thinks something to be true, it must be honored as true. Prager then deftly puts forth the slippery slope train of thought. If we let Ellison do it, what else might happen? If a racist Congress was elected, would we stand by while Mein Kampf, the Nazi bible, was used for their oaths of office? Could we stomach a Scientologist swearing to uphold the Constitution on a copy of L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics? On what grounds then, Prager argues, can we defend Ellison’s request to use the Koran and not theirs? And finally, Prager offers precedent.

Many minorities, Jews and Mormons included, have not objected to swearing into office on the Bible which makes it clear according to Prager that the real reason so many sympathize with Ellison at this moment in time is precisely because he is a Muslim and we do not want to offend him. In fact, allowing Ellison this public act would give Americans the opportunity to show Muslims all over the world what an open society America is and how much Americans honor and respect Islam and the Koran. (And maybe then, they won’t hate us so much or react to us as they did recently to the Pope after his remarks.)

Prager goes on to assert that what would really happen if the public allows Ellison to swear into office on the Koran is that it would embolden those who hate us to pursue their ultimate goal, the “Islamicization” of America and we would be cause more damage to our own country than the terrorists of September 11th. He certainly pulls out all the stops and hits all the buttons. But if you pick through the sharp edges, the distracting insults to liberals, and the fear-mongering, Prager does have one point right in my eyes. Not his general idea that our openness to Muslims is a doorway for them to Islamicize America. That is just plain abhorrent.

While America and the West are the objects of hate of many fundamentalist Muslims for a variety of reasons including that we are open societies, at the same time, America still has the best chance of being the soil upon which a liberal movement of Islam might flourish to counteract the voices of extremism that is fomenting the terrorism and hatred of the West we are seeing in the world today. Therefore, we, each of us, should see it as a sacred responsibility to engage in dialogue with the Muslim community in our midst, identifying and empowering those individuals whose message is one of friendship and co-existence. The Baltimore Jewish Council has a very successful, ongoing interfaith dialogue with the Christian, Jewish and Islamic communities.

If you would like more information on those programs, I can speak with you after services. More precisely, a point Prager neglects, is that the act of oath, whether or not it is actually public, is still a public act. The rabbi in me knows that any ritual or ceremonial act is only efficacious and meaningful when all the participants buy in to the agreed upon symbols. The electorate as well as the candidate are all implied in that moment of oath taking. By using the Koran, not the communally agreed upon symbol, the emphasis is on Ellison’s particular faith, at the expense of the community he is pledging to serve.

That is not to say that one’s private faith can or should ever be completely severed from one’s public service. An elected person’s values are oftentimes shaped and informed by his religious tradition, and in that way religion is implicated in politics, even with the Establishment Clause intact. However, we are free to elect individuals whose values, record and policies represent us. Sometimes we share a faith tradition with that person and other times we don’t. Rather, the Establishment Clause allows us to assume in the governing relationship that a person’s private religious tradition is secondary to their position as elected official, representing a diverse group of individuals.

Moreover, as appealing the notion is that one should swear his oath on that book which is most holy and sacred to him, giving greater weight to the oath and the relationship implied by it, the argument doesn’t hold enough water, because the moment is not just about him. I can’t help thinking it would be as awkward as someone bringing a seder plate to Chanukah services next week, instead of a Chanukiah, because they don’t really resonate as much with the message of Chanukah as they do with the message of redemption and freedom that is Passover. It might be true for that person, but it makes no sense in the context of the community in which that individual places themselves.

And what of the religious character of the chosen symbol of our democracy’s oath taking ceremony? It is Bible, not a universal and ubiquitous symbol, even for us as Jews, since it presumably, though not necessarily, would include the New Testament. Here is where I am most aligned with Prager. The truth of the matter is that the architects of our democracy derived the values and rights of our Constitution from the marriage of their Enlightenment thinking and their Christian Bibles. Some of them were believing Christians, others were not. But they recognized and pulled a universal concept from that Bible declaring in our Declaration of Independence that it is not men who decide what rights and privileges the citizens of a country enjoy.

There is a Creator who has endowed each precious individual with inalienable rights. And it is to that end, that we have striven as a country to live up to that ideal, to create a society where each individual can reach their God-given potential without being hindered by others. It doesn’t bother me that it wasn’t my Bible the framers were reading when they affirmed those values in our Constitution, because those values have allowed me to grow up and live and be who I am today. We should not make the mistake in this case of thinking that in that oath taking moment anything other than the Constitution is the text that an elected official is swearing to uphold, not the Bible.

That the Christian Bible was a source text for the Constitution makes it an appropriate symbol. And a symbol is something which represents something else, in this case, the universal values of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This afternoon our Confirmation class left for Washington DC to study issues like the world AIDS epidemic, the health care crisis, global warming, homelessness, workers rights, Israel with the team at the Religious Action Center. This weekend they will experience the awesome workings of our democracy as they prepare to lobby their Representatives in Congress.

And they will discover that each of them has a voice to bring to the way our government is shaped. And they will draw on the Constitution and their Jewish values to put words to that voice. It should make us think a little that for all these years that people have been swearing on the Christian Bible, it is still appropriate that our children will go into the heart of our country and quote Torah, chapter and verse, to support their positions and express their values. It is not only appropriate, it is essential for us to live comfortably as Jews here in America. And after he is sworn into office, if Mr Ellison finds it appropriate to characterize and support his positions using the words from the Koran, he is free to do so as well. It is his Constitutional right, even if he swears in on the Christian Bible

Rabbi Batsheva Meiri