Published: 24 September 2018
Last updated: 4 March 2024
We can all agree that no rabbi or synagogue should endorse a political candidate but should we also expect rabbis to stay quiet on the social and political issues that affect our lives? Do we not look to religious leadership for guidance on contemporary challenges? Wherever you live and whatever your views, political issues today are worrying, divisive, and anxiety-inducing.
Perhaps these are also reasons to keep politics out of shule. No one should come to a service and feel excluded because of their political views. Of course, people involved in shule leadership (including rabbis) are entitled to hold and express strong political views; the question is whether they should be asked to stay quiet about them during services.
I spoke to a number of people who attend different shules across denominations and there was an overall preference for keeping explicit politics out of shule. The view is of shule as a place of timelessness, a place to escape from the noise and immediacy of politics.
The preference at the Melbourne shule I attend, Shira Hadasha, which is small and lay led, and which generally has a progressive social and political orientation is for drashot (Hebrew for sermons) that teach Torah . The view is that values and ideas which are relevant to politics can be explored on their merit but should never be used to promote a particular agenda – other than understanding Torah.
Taking this position to a crescendo, the well-known Conservative American Rabbi, David Wolpe, argued in a widely read piece written in 2017 that “you can love Torah and vote for Trump. You can love Torah and think that Trump is a blot on the American political system. What you may not do, if you are intellectually honest, is to say that the Torah points in only one political direction” - a position that I believe needs to be challenged.
One fellow shule-goer quoted the famous Polish-American rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who said the real goal of a sermon was to inspire davening (prayers). That’s a little ironic because many of the energetic young rabbis building active and innovative communities in the US who have placed political activism at the core of their communities, and are overtly political in their sermons, cite Rabbi Heschel as their inspiration.
Rabbi Heschel was a fierce warrior for civil rights in the US, and famously marched with Martin Luther King at Selma in 1965 and for him, religious obligation included public political activism.
One such political activist figure is Rabbi Sharon Brous who leads Ikar, a ground-breaking reform synagogue in Los Angeles that has been described as a magnet for unaffiliated young Jews and is one of the fastest growing Jewish communities in the US. Her sermon for Rosh Hashanah this year was unashamedly and explicitly political.
She never mentions the US President but talks about specific policies and brings Torah to her arguments in a way that Rabbi Wolpe would find objectionable, but which I find exciting and engaging.
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Rabbi Brous and many other have defended the use of the pulpit for politics, by pointing to the Torah's concern for the treatment of the poor and the most vulnerable, for its teaching about honest business practices, ethical labour laws, and fairness in judgment. And they remind us that the key narrative of the Torah is about the quest of an enslaved people taking the journey from degradation and suffering at the hands of oppressors to freedom and dignity.
Why in an urgent political moment would people not want religious leaders to provide inspiration, clarity and courage? For Rabbi Brous: “The answer is not to decouple religion and politics …but to claim religious leadership as moral leadership. It is faith leaders who can bring inclusion, forgiveness, equity and equality, justice and love to the forefront of the national conversation.”
You might add that it is ethically stunted and tactically stupid of religious leadership to comment on anti-Semitism which is enabled by certain political climates, but to turn a blind eye to other racism and hatred in the community enabled by those same forces.
The Hebrew word for synagogue is Beit Knesset, a house of gathering. I want my shule, my gathered community, to help me face the world, not escape from it. I want succour from my shule in the face of urgent political issues such as the detention of asylum seekers, including children, in brutal and inhumane conditions with no prospect of release, no oversight of conditions, and no avenues of redress.
I don’t want to discuss immigration policy on which we will reasonably differ but I do want to feel that I am in community with people who share my opposition to the indefinite detention of children.
I want to be among people who think it’s not enough to celebrate the Torah’s teaching not to oppress the stranger as an idea, when political action is needed to tell both government and opposition what that means in practice.
At the same time I am aware that for others the response to political anxiety is that shule should be a place of sanctuary, where it might be OK to grapple with the underlying ethics of Torah but it’s best to stay away from specific issues.
This is particularly pronounced in how Israel’s politics plays out in some communities, where almost every conversation has the potential to be divisive and upsetting to the point where I now believe Israel has no place at the pulpit, beyond agreed and established prayers.
Perhaps an answer lies in the wisdom of the book of Ecclesiastes that there is a time for everything. Communities that gather around prayer can make time to explore political and social issues outside the set times for prayer and ritual.
And perhaps an answer lies in part in how Torah is taught. Here I want to question Rabbi Wolpe’s position that Torah can be used to justify any view, which he gives as a reason not to look for guidance in the Torah for contemporary political challenges. The idea that the Torah has everything in it is does not mean that every interpretation and application of Torah is correct.
Our work is to decide what is right for a specific moment or situation, and the best teachers guide us in this process by asking questions rather than giving us answers, by examining different views and why they may or may not be correct and by leading us in honest examination of the sources.
Illustration: John Kron
