Last week the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in two cases challenging the Obama administration’s assault on religious liberty and although these plaintiffs and the more than 100 others in similar suits across the country aren’t Orthodox Jews we have more than a minor stake in the outcomes of the cases. The main plaintiff in court last Tuesday was Hobby Lobby a family-owned crafts company launched in 1970 in an Oklahoma garage with a $600 loan. Today the Greens Hobby Lobby’s owners have 588 stores in 47 states with more than 13 000 full-time employees.
The Greens are devout Christians whose stores are closed on Sundays. They are also generous employers — increasing salaries for four years straight even during the recession and have signed a pledge to donate the majority of their wealth to philanthropy. But for refusing to have their employees’ insurance policies pay for pharmaceuticals they consider to be abortifacients they face fines of $1.3 million per day under the Obamacare regulations. Despite the Constitution’s guarantee of the right to free exercise of one’s religion the government argues that “Hobby Lobby is a for-profit secular employer and a secular entity by definition does not exercise religion.”
Hobby Lobby fulfills — in line with its own beliefs — what we l’havdil would refer to as a form of b’chol derachecha da’ei Hu. That is it seeks to infuse even the most mundane aspects of life such as engaging in profit-making business with a spiritual essence. This is a quintessentially Jewish concept one that we brought to the world and continue to exemplify.
But it is one that threatens the foundations of the modern liberal worldview in which only the state is to be involved in every aspect of a person’s life. Religious institutions and charitable groups that seek to fill important roles of support and sustenance for individuals families and communities must be cut down to size undermined and if possible done away with.
In the government’s pinched understanding of theology religion is not something to be lived but to be practiced in a certain way in a certain building on a certain day. As Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal put it in a recent major speech on what he called the “silent war on religious liberty ” in the government’s view “faithful business owners cannot operate under the assumption that they can use their moral principles to guide the way their place of business spends money…. In this misbegotten and un-American conception of religious liberty your rights begin and end in the pew.”
In a concession extracted from the Obama administration only after the country’s Catholic priests raised a huge ruckus houses of worship are exempt from the pro-abortion insurance requirements. But in his speech Governor Jindal observed that some believe “diversity of belief is tolerated under our law and Constitution. But that’s wrong. Diversity of belief is the foundation of our law and Constitution. America does not sustain and create faith. Faith created and sustains America.”
The Obama administration egged on by liberal elites that sadly are populated disproportionately by Jews has taken to treating America’s religious communities as barely sufferable stepchildren to be tolerated condescended to and thrown a crumb now and then. But this betrays a foolhardy disregard for the unique circumstances of America’s founding expressed by Margaret Thatcher this way: “Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.” Not for nothing does America continue to be a devout nation in which a majority of citizens attend religious services regularly even when — as in once-intensely devout Europe — religion is on its last legs.
Governor Jindal’s conclusion referencing Hobby Lobby is worth citing:
Last Thursday exactly one week ago something truly bizarre occurred. The person who is at the tip of the spear prosecuting this quiet war on religious liberty spoke at the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. The topic he chose to speak about was defending religious liberty.
I was stunned and I bet the president of Hobby Lobby who was in the audience was stunned as well. Yes President Obama did wax eloquent as he always does about the horrors of religious persecution that are occurring beyond our borders. And good for him…. Yet it is stunning to hear the president talk of protecting religious liberty outside the United States while at the very same time his administration challenges and chips away at our religious liberty right here at home. Once again there is a Grand Canyon sized difference between what this president says and what he does…. So I leave you with this — The president is very concerned about religious liberty… and also if you like your religion you can keep your religion.

HOW DID THE LINES GET BLURRED? Last week I learned of a puzzling development on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. It seems that a leading mainstream Orthodox synagogue there (not one publicly identified with the “Open Orthodoxy” movement that has been racing to and perhaps beyond Orthodoxy’s left fringe) is cosponsoring a “three-part Haggadah text study” entitled “As If You Went Forth from Egypt ” on three consecutive Tuesdays. Its cosponsor? Congregation Rodeph Sholom a leading Reform temple in Manhattan. The classes are being co-taught by a group composed of the shul’s two current rabbis and its previous one alongside clergypeople Robert Levine and Sari Laufer of Rodeph Sholom.
The issue here is not one of membership in a pandenominational rabbinic or communal group where the question at hand is one of merely granting legitimacy to deniers of everything Jews believe. Nor is this even comparable to going into a heterodox temple for shofar blowing which Rav Yosef Ber Soloveitchik famously forbade in the strongest terms.
This latest development goes far far beyond all of that. It involves rabbanim — people who learned Torah in yeshivos and received semichah as morei hora’ah b’Yisrael — inviting those who deny everything sacred and mislead other Jews into doing the same into an Orthodox shul to share their beliefs or lack thereof with its mispallelim and other Jews.
Perhaps this is an instance in which I ought to put into practice the mitzvah d’Oraisa of judging others favorably by assuming that as soon as the Reform clergyperson spouts heresy the Orthodox co-teacher will immediately interrupt and advise him courteously of course that his words are a distortion of Judaism that will not be countenanced. I suppose I could assume that.
What I certainly do assume is that the rabbis in question — good well-meaning people — have only the best intentions in mind: to draw close Jews who are distant from Torah. But then it’s hard to find a deviation from Torah and Yahadus that has harmed our people over the centuries that wasn’t the result of good intentions.
How did we arrive at this juncture where Orthodox rabbis invite Reform clergy to their shuls to teach? Incrementally that’s how. The process begins way before that invitation with abdication of the ability — indeed the obligation — to make distinctions that are far more subtle but no less crucial than between obvious spiritual light and darkness like Orthodoxy and Reform.
As it happens two of the rabbis co-teaching alongside the Reform clergyfolk also participated two years ago in a symposium on Jewish unity in Jewish Action magazine to which I also contributed. One wrote of his dream for the “Orthodox community… to put intra-denominational tolerance on its agenda” through “a seminar that brings together rabbinical students from Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Yeshiva University Ner Israel Chabad Chaim Berlin and Lakewood ” despite the fact that the ordainees of the first institution on the list aren’t recognized as legitimate by any of the others and for good reason.
The other rabbi too wrote that the way to “genuine harmony and greater tolerance within our Orthodox world” was to recognize that “no one perspective has a monopoly on truth and alternative approaches are all equally legitimate.” Left a bit too vague though was whether his proffered legitimacy extends to just any approach to Judaism that self-identifies as “Orthodox ” even if the generation’s greatest talmidei chachamim pronounce it illegitimate.
Once one relinquishes the ability to distinguish between things that seem similar but are in reality vastly divergent all bets are off on the ability to make any distinctions at all. And now we seem to be reaping the bitter fruit of that inability to discern and distinguish.