The United States Supreme Court’s recent decision in the case of Town of Greece v. Galloway held that prayers may be offered at the outset of legislative sessions even when local demographics ensure that it will almost always be Christian clergy doing so. The vote was 5–4 reflecting the Court’s conservative-liberal split. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion held that so long as local clergy of all faiths were entitled to their turn and the prayers offered were respectful of other religions the opening prayers at the Greece New York town council’s sessions were not coercive and thus did not result in a constitutionally improper establishment of religion.
Writing for the dissenters Justice Elena Kagan agreed that a town council “need not become a religion-free zone ” since prayer in legislative settings is a well-established practice in American life. That acknowledgment represents a rebuke of sorts albeit unintended to the Obama administration’s attempt to cut religious life down to size which is the issue at stake in the Hobby Lobby case challenging the Obamacare regulations addressed here recently.
Not unlike the haskalah-era byword of “Be a Jew at home and a man in the street ” the Obamacare mandate’s extension of a freedom of conscience exemption to houses of worship but not to religious-owned businesses is an attempt to dictate when where and how the individual may live the life of the spirit. But the very notion of legislative prayers however ceremonial in nature conveys that people turn to G-d for guidance in every realm of life that even almighty government might need the Almighty in order to succeed.
But Kagan went on to argue that the Court should have required legislative bodies to take greater account of the diversity of religious belief that exists in America today and to ensure that a plurality of religious voices is heard on a more equal basis. This is particularly important she contended when ordinary citizens of various faiths appear before a governmental body to petition for its largesse or for protection of their rights; in that already vulnerable position the formal recitation of prayers not their own only furthers their self-perception as outsiders.
Her argument on behalf of what liberal Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. calls an “empathy test ” carries a certain moral power one that we Jews in particular as perennial societal outsiders seemingly ought to appreciate most. Why indeed as Dionne elaborates shouldn’t the Court have taken “the opportunity Kagan offered to find a balance that would both honor religion’s role in American public life and safeguard the rights of those whose faith commitments diverge from the majority’s”?
And yet for all the facial appeal of Justice Kagan’s position I have a difficult time commiserating with Susan Galloway the Jewish plaintiff in this case or the many other of my coreligionists on whose behalf Elena Kagan seeks the Court’s empathy. It’s not that I don’t like my fellow Jews; I actually try to love them. The reason for my empathy deficit is simple: Much of the discomfort they feel when confronted with public displays of non-Jewish religiosity is self-inflicted.
If more Jews lived more as Jews ought to live the discomfort and alienation they feel when encountering others’ publically expressed piety would largely recede if not disappear. Simply put the more comfortable Jews feel with their own Jewish faith the less anyone else’s profession or display of their beliefs tends to bother them. They don’t feel guilty about their own absence of faith or their fluency in their own literature. And that certitude of belief prevents them from feeling threatened by others’ potential proselytization enabling them to actually understand and respect others’ faith commitments.
Why have secular American Jews and their Torah-observant brethren been at such sharp odds for so long regarding the role of religion in American life? I don’t think it is adequately explained away by the fact that religious Jews stand to gain from governmental support for their schools which the nonreligious don’t have. And the idea that Jews are genuinely concerned about a slippery slope leading from government-funded textbooks in yeshivos to a societal takeover by the galloping hordes of the evangelical right never made very much sense.
The issue is much deeper and is far more one of psychology than law sociology or anything else. My belief in the irrepressible Jewish neshamah tells me that as the Yiddish saying goes (perhaps originally intended in a slightly different sense) fun zich antloyft mehn nisht one can’t run away from oneself.
The Jewish guilt complex isn’t a fabrication of vulgar American-Jewish novelists. It’s a real phenomenon rooted in the fact that the fire of Sinai at whose base all Jewish souls once stood and declared their eternal loyalty to Hashem’s Torah is seared into our collective subconscious. And when we see others unabashedly acknowledge the very presence of the Divine from which we have fled that dredges up the most deep-seated angst imaginable.
The soul-torment triggered by an abject failure to live authentically Jewish lives despite the historically unparalleled opportunity America has given us to do so is one might suggest the “unified field theory” of the American Jewish experience. It is what underlies the secular Jewish battle against religion in the American public square.
It is also what underlies the frequently voiced canard that Torah Jews regard their non-Orthodox brethren as Jewishly illegitimate. Just recently the president of the RA (as the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly calls itself) wrote that there “are other members of the Conference [of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations] whose views are not consonant with my own… including my legitimacy as a rabbi and as a Jew…” Why does this baseless claim resurface time and again? Because when this fellow says “the Orthodox don’t consider me Jewish” what he really means is “you who lead Jewish lives proudly shot through with Torah values make me feel Jewishly inadequate.”
And visceral guilt is also what helps make sense of the otherwise inexplicable American Jewish obsession with the slightest trace of anti-Semitism. As David Klinghoffer wrote in a powerful 1998 essay in First Things:
We have quit teaching our children that G-d lives that He loves us that He wants a relationship with us — but that He wants something from us in return. That is not merely to be nice people as some liberal rabbis would have us believe but to observe the entirety of His Torah as almost all Jews did until about two hundred years ago.
We American Jews are not as ignorant as we seem. We know in our souls that we have gone astray; but to borrow a hackneyed phrase of psychological jargon we are in denial. We have a guilty conscience. We are unhappy about that. What can we do what defensive strategy can we adopt to lift the weight of guilt?
Fortunately for us in the 1960s the Cult of Victimhood made its appearance…. It does something… for us which it may not do for other groups. We believe that any hostility we can detect on the part of non-Jews is entirely unmerited. We have done nothing to deserve it. G-d isn’t angry with us. And even if He were He couldn’t send dangerous Gentiles against us. Our G-d is the impotent Harold Kushner [g]od….
The function of our obsession with anti-Semitism is to remind us on a daily basis that that is the [g]od we sort of kind of barely believe in. Every ADL newsletter; every big black fundraising envelope from the Simon Wiesenthal Center; every obsessive discussion of what Pat Buchanan or Pat Robertson may have said about Jews fifteen years ago… every monstrous Holocaust memorial in the parking lot of a JCC — they all declare to our great relief that anti-Semitism is meaningless. They declare this by failing to name G-d in any discussion of anti-Jewish persecution. They say that anti-Semitism is demonic. It doesn’t come from G-d. G-d… is in Heaven weeping on His pillow.
We don’t live like Jews but that’s alright. G-d doesn’t mind. He isn’t going to punish us for our disobedience. Our fear of Gentiles who don’t like us our made-up manufactured fear is the greatest comfort we can give ourselves.
An early 20th-century Yiddish writer addressing his assimilating coreligionists remarked that “there is no other people like the Jewish people that talks about itself so much but knows itself so little.” And to cure that lack of self-knowledge what American Jewry needs more than anything is some good therapy — and imagine the size of the group discount.