The convergence of politics and religion

The separation between religion and politics is often misunderstood. The manmade borders between religion and politics should not serve as an obstruction to the interaction between these two critical forces in our society. Politics should learn from religious sensitivities the barriers to incivility and injustice. So too, religion must be a participatory voice in the endorsement or condemnation of the political actions that govern our society.

From the political perspective, the connection to the religious component can provide an elevated purpose to banal political discourse. From the religious perspective, the connection with the political component can serve as a gateway for religion to interact in the marketplace of ideas. Politics can serve as the link between social policy and the application of religious principles in daily life. Religion and politics also can each serve the other in tempering the more imperious zealotry that can infect both political and religious dialogue.

Regardless of how the boundaries between religion and politics are drawn, there are circumstances where religion must engage on political turf. There should be no disagreement that religion’s adherents and religious leaders must not distance themselves from current events that threaten human dignity, freedom, or civil tranquility. There should be little debate that religion should not have remained silent about slavery. Religion should not have turned its eyes away from the rise of authoritarianism in Europe in the decades preceding World War II. Religion should not have remained blind to the threats of Senator Joe McCarthy’s false claims of an entrenched deep state communism that ruined thousands of lives in the 1950s. Religion should not blinker its vision from overt antisemitism, racism or sexism. Religion cannot be a barrier to the condemnation of morally odious public comment or conduct. Nor can religion acquiesce — via active support or feckless silence — to threats to our nation’s democratic principles.

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Tragically, far too frequently, religion, including Judaism, has failed to meet the moment when society encounters evil. Judaism, in its most edifying aspiration, must attempt to enlighten and uplift, guide and instruct, ennoble and sanctify the society in which it thrives. Judaism must not be relegated to study halls or confined to the issuance of halachic responsa. Undoubtedly these activities are critical to the architecture of Torah true Judaism. But Judaism must flourish in the world and not apart from it. Judaism, as a religion, and Jews, as its adherents (of multiple stripes), must interact with society, confront societal needs, participate in our countries’ democracy, and help secure its future. Judaism, to our good fortune, no longer lives in a shtetl. Judaism thrives in the interaction with the world we live in. We do not shrink from engagement with our world. We thrill to participate in our society’s health, growth, and well-being.

History has confirmed that, all too often, this participatory mission of religion in general, and Judaism in particular, is preached but not practiced. The centrality of injecting religious values into political discourse is recognized and revered. However, when the task is to challenge hatred, reject vengeance, criticize racism, or speak out against sexual discrimination, the application of that revered value is often hidden from view. Preaching values and teaching Jewish ethics are not abstract notions. Integrity is not a theory. It is a course of conduct. Halacha is not found only in legal texts. It must be exhibited in public praise and public condemnation when necessary. Judaism’s core values compel engagement with the world and impel those who treasure its message to raise their voices and redeem the honor of God in the embrace of decency and the rejection of hatred.

There are many forces that wreak havoc with the religious person’s quest for moral independence and courage. It is often assumed that a widely accepted opinion must contain some wisdom. This has been a presumption from time immemorial. In American culture it was true with the Dred Scott decision that confirmed that it was not incorrect to view a slave as the rightful property of another. It was assumed by a large proportion of 17th-century Jews that Shabtai Tsvi was indeed the messiah (until he converted to Islam under threat of execution). It was assumed by many Christians through the ages that there was truth to the blood libel against Jews.

Such faith in public opinion is not hard to understand. Intelligent people, trusted leaders, religious figures, even saintly individuals believed that Shabtai Tsvi was the messiah. Similarly, either in response to economic realities or in reliance on entrenched racial biases, the majority of southerners believed that slavery was ordained by God as sanctioned by political leaders and clergy. Many Christians who placed their faith in centuries of lore passed down from communal leaders and church fathers, communicated from many locales and in multiple tongues, believed that the blood libel was a mandated ritual observance of Jewish law.

If history is our teacher, we have learned that unchallenged falsehoods become facts. Some large historical fictions have altered the course of Jewish life and of the world. It is therefore not astonishing, yet morally challenging, that Donald Trump, as a potential leader of America once again, has earned the terrifying silence from many in the Jewish community who recognize the clear and present dangers of his re-ascension to power.

There are many who believe that Trump’s policies — most specifically as they pertain to Israel — should override all considerations of character. For others — even those who may agree with those policies — such an analysis lays bare the poverty of faith in a policy emanating from a man who is perceived as devoid of character and untethered to principle, and whose personal power and authority subsume every other consideration. For them, the fallacy of relying on the policy of a dishonest and dishonorable man is that any policy has the longevity of his self-interest.

For many others, the well-intended desire to protect Israel or the belief that Donald Trump is the protector of our constitutional freedoms obscures the dangers that others recognize in Trump. For those Trump supporters, as much as it may appear to others to be antithetical to common sense and inimical to foundational principles of decency, it is a religious duty — a Jewish obligation — to make their views known and to urge support for a policy that they believe is critical to the survival and support of Israel, and perhaps even to American democracy.

For those who oppose Trump, placing trust in an untrustworthy leader is a rickety foundation for even the most noble policies. There must also be a Jewish mandate for those who understand the dangers of Donald Trump, who recognize the disease endemic in his dissemination of human hatred, who grasp the unsheathed peril of vile racism and discern the dangers of a puerile espousal of a doomed narcissistic utopia to let their views be known. Those who recognize the toxic dangers of a demagogue who has exhibited a desire to undermine election results, who threatens insurrection, and who has placed personal loyalty above all other considerations must give full-throated expression to their opinions.

Many Jewish leaders have expressed their personal despair over Donald Trump’s attempt to rise to power once again but have chosen to remain silently aloof from political engagement. It is a painful fact that many people fear being outspoken about what they recognize to be Donald Trump’s despicable actions and his soiled rhetoric. Many Republican leaders and members of Congress who pay public homage to Trump (or who remain silent) have confessed to their colleagues that they fret over the danger of revenge from an emotionally untethered Trump. Many others, secular and religious, fear the loss of prestige, power, or position by alienating those who are passionate loyalists of Donald Trump. Many of our Jewish leaders, occupying public positions of trust and rabbinical posts, have privately shared their fears of Trump but recognize the dangers of expressing those fears publicly. There are many Jewish communities who will reject the messengers who publicly express opposition to Donald Trump. For every Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney there are dozens who fear the expulsion, the disdain, and the humiliation that Donald Trump and many of his followers shower on his critics.

The roster of Trump’s racist comments, sexual assaults, demeaning comments about Blacks, women, and Jews, insults of religious, political, and military heroes, threats of dictatorial action, unapologetic hosting of Holocaust deniers and white supremacists, vengefulness, malignant narcissism, support for Nazi sympathizers, and disrespect for the law are revealed in multiple documented primary sources. The extent of this vile compendium of wickedness should be sufficient to ignite the indignation of those who understand Trump’s perfidious threat to our society. Those Jewish leaders, religious and secular, who have placed their political and social fears above their religious and social ethics risk being a future generation’s examples of ethics preached but not practiced, of a culture embraced but not protected, of religious precepts privately observed but not disseminated.

To be clear, it is as much an obligation for those who support Donald Trump to speak out in his support as it is for those who believe that he is a threat to our society to shun the comfort of silence. Those who recognize that Trump is an existential threat to our democracy, to decency, and to our societies’ moral well-being, must allow their consciences — shaped by Jewish experience, law, and lore — to give public expression to this impending peril.

For those who recognize the dangers of Donald Trump, this is not a dispute about policy. This is a value judgment regarding Donald Trump’s venality. For them the topic must be more fundamental than political rectitude. For them it  must be a threshold responsibility to repudiate moral turpitude.

Biblical commentators have noted that when Abraham pleaded with God to save the lives of the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah his offer was to assuage God’s anger by finding a certain number of righteous people within those communities. The specific request identifies those righteous people as coming from “within the city” (metoch ha’eer). Commentators underscore that the use of this specific language is to distinguish between righteous people who remained tucked away in houses of study and those who engaged in affairs of the community. The righteous people who could spare the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah must be found in the marketplace — “within the city.” To be virtuous in the community — to speak out against those who would discard the tenets of our constitutional liberties, to reject the use of law to pardon loyalists and punish oppositionists, to repudiate racism, sexism, and threats of violence, to reject those who do not acknowledge electoral defeat and sow distrust and disseminate destructive conspiratorial theories for personal benefit — this is the standard of righteousness that is demanded if our society is to be spared.

If those who understand the moral and mortal threats contained in a Trump victory fail to make their views publicly known, we, as a society and as Jews, will have relegated moral imperatives as socially impractical and as religiously inapplicable. Such an outcome is unthinkable. They must raise their voices. It is a religious imperative.

Jack Nelson is a longtime resident of Bergen County. For many years he practiced law in New York; now he is a business executive.