Endorsing Candidates

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Rosh HaShanah - Thursday, October 9, 2008

I feel strongly about the upcoming presidential election and as an individual I have supported the candidate of my choice in a variety of ways. I also believe that Judaism has important teachings about many of the issues that are at stake this election season. From Health Care to Immigration, from Banking to Tax Policy, Judaism has a long history of taking general principles of community responsibility and applying them to specific issues.

In addition our Reform movement is known for its involvement in social justice and for taking strong stands on contemporary issues. As a movement, we have taken positions on many of the issues being debated this year including same-sex marriage, universal health care, and economic justice.

Since we are a synagogue, and not a political action committee, we do not typically take a position on all of the issues in any given election, but on occasion there is something with a connection to ongoing work we are doing or where our involvement as a religious organization has special significance. Through the actions of our board, we have taken a position opposing Proposition 8, because this is often presented as a religious issue and, as an outcome of the work of our social justice committee on health care, I expect our Shir Hadash board to adopt a resolution later this month supporting Measure A, the retrofit of Valley Medical Center, which is the safety net for many residents of the valley.

But while I applaud all of this election related activity, I have not joined Rabbis for Obama, nor am I planning to use the pulpit directly or indirectly to endorse a candidate in the upcoming presidential election.

In some circles this is not boosting my popularity. I have received polite emails from members of the congregation gently checking to make sure I was aware of the Rabbis for Obama efforts, a group whose co-chair incidentally is Rabbi Henry Karpf, Rabbi at Congregation Shir Hadash from 1982-1985.

My family, immediate and extended, has engaged in a more forceful lobbying effort, pointing to the names of other rabbis, outstanding figures of our generation, here in California and around the country, who have taken the unusual step of endorsing a candidate during this election cycle.

At some level I understand that there are factors that make this election a little different and which call out for a Jewish response. For starters, the effort made to mislead people about Obama’s religion and positions on the Middle East, has to a significant extent been targeted to Jews, which does beg for a specifically Jewish remedy. In January, in a very unusual move, we saw the presidents of the major mainstream American Jewish organizations join together in a public statement reminding the Jewish community that despite whatever they may have read in their email, Senator Barak Obama is not a Muslim, nor was he educated in a midrassa, nor sworn into office on the Koran. The insistent and baseless accusations that Obama is a secret Palestinian or Al Queda operative, have gotten even AIPAC to begin every presentation formally acknowledging that in this election, both candidates have strong records of support for the state of Israel. I am not without sympathy for Sarah Silverman, incidentally, the sister of Rabbi Susan Silverman of Kibbutz Keturah in the Arava, who argues that young Jews have a particular responsibility to undo the damage created by efforts to fraudently discredit one candidate and to make sure that our grandparents, our Bubbes and Zeyde’s, are well informed about the upcoming election.

In addition, without endorsing a candidate, one can speak out about the remnants of racism that still exist within the Jewish community. Racial concerns have not been mentioned to me in my conversations about the election, but I hear from people who have visited some of the larger Jewish communities in the east recently, that they remain an issue. Racial prejudice is the explanation which some analysts provide for the gap between the support Obama is so far believed to have in the Jewish community, about 60% and the support given to other Democratic presidential candidates in the recent past, about 80%. The issue is not the 20% of the Jewish community who are committed to Republican principles and are planning to vote their conscience. The concern is with the 20% who are Democrats in their political philosophy but who don’t seem to be able to vote for an African-American, or perhaps for an African-American whose father was Muslim.

While I do not feel it appropriate to join an organization that endorses a candidate, I would feel comfortable joining an organization called, let’s say, Rabbis Opposed to Racism in the Jewish Community. My parents were “early adopters” on the integration issue. When I was a child they befriended the African-American family who lived across the street, and made sure I always spoke about them respectfully. Years later this neighbor, a law school graduate who ended up teaching piano because there were no jobs for her in her professional field, developed an interest in Judaism and joined my congregation in Brooklyn. I was so well trained by my parents that over than entire five year period I could never bring myself to call her by her first name. My family background calls upon me to remove from the Jewish community the outdated, outmoded, and non-Jewish way of thinking about race represented through the use of the Yiddish word shvartze, which still persists in segments of our Jewish community. But it is more than that.

As Jews we are not pleased when we are identified and judged by our religious affiliation. Just this Rosh Hashanah a father was talking to me about his concern about his son being identified on his sports team as the Jew. Its not that he lacked pride in his Jewish identify, but he was wary about those who lose sight of the individual in the more general religious identification. Isn’t that what some are doing with Obama? As our Jewish version of the golden rule reads, that which is hateful to you, do not do to any other person.

A rabbinic organization dedicated to eradicating racism in the Jewish community could take as its slogan the explanation the rabbis of the Talmud give for the creation of just one Adam: they teach, why was Adam created alone, so that no one can claim that their ancestry is superior. We could adopt Amos as our mascot prophet, for his famous words, halo kivnaei kushiim atem li, bnai yisrael neum adonai: are you not to me like the sons of the Ethiopians, O children of Israel, saith Adonai. Our God doesn’t hold with racial hierarchies. Or perhaps we could enlist some Israeli rabbis. The majority of Israeli Jews are of North African or Arab descent and are not European. Jews in Israel can be from Yemen or Ethiopia, not fitting at all into our old American stereotype of what a Jew looks like. In the Reform movement nationwide and in our own congregation, our internal diversity should speak to a more enlightened view of racial difference.

An organization against racism in the American Jewish community would have to address prejudice against the Latino as well as the African American community. That’s a prejudice that I wasn’t aware of in Cincinnati in the early 1970’s where the Latinio community was almost non-existent.  But when I became a student Rabbi in San Antonio, where ¾ of the city was Spanish speaking, I learned that racial prejudice in America extends to the brown as well as the black community.

Joining an organization, dedicated to overcoming racial prejudice, even in the present political climate where racial diversity is noticeably more present on one side of the political aisle, is still not the same as endorsing a candidate for political office in my position as rabbi of this congregation.

One of the ways I make decisions, is to consider whether I would be comfortable if everyone took the step that I am considering taking. Thinking about clergy endorsement of candidates, I don’t think it passes this Kantian imperative. As much as some might be pleased with a group of rabbis endorsing a specific candidate in this particular election, are we really happy about the prospect of all clergy doing this regularly in all elections?

Think of the Pandora’s box that this opens up in terms of separation of Church and State and our vision of diversity in America. America has to this point been a community of individuals and not, as some other countries have been, a community of communities. Do we want there to be candidates for different religious communities? Separation of Church and State, has not just been about religious practice, but has been about creating the kind of America in which equality can truly exist. Bringing religious affiliation into politics in this way would be detrimental to the nature of our democracy.

This year there has been a campaign among some Christian clergy to endorse a presidential candidate from the pulpit, in defiance of the IRS code, in order to prompt a showdown with the IRS. They are sponsored by the Alliance Defense Fund, which has long been active on church-state issues at the US Supreme Court and in lower courts. The ADF has been especially interested in promoting government aid to religion, religion in the public schools, and religion-based censorship, and in opposing abortion and gay rights. They have been characterized by Americans United for Separation of Church and State as an organization whose goal has been to merge religion and government. While they accept that the First Amendment forbids the creation of a national denomination, because that would be an 'establishment of religion,' they have an unusual belief that Church-state separation was invented by former Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black in cahoots with the Ku Klux Klan. (We shouldn’t laugh at these outrageous beliefs: Justice Thomas doesn’t believe that the establishment clause of the Bill Of Rights applies to states - contrary to 150 years of judicial history.)

The Alliance Defense Fund’s attempt to legalize religious endorsements has led many mainstream organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League, to conclude that religious endorsements in general are contrary to the American ideal of including all Americans in the political process, regardless of whether they are in a religious minority or ascribe to no faith tradition. It’s not that candidates should hide their religious views from the electorate or not feel comfortable explaining their religious convictions to voters.  But there is a point at which the emphasis on religion in a political campaign becomes inappropriate in a religiously diverse society such as ours.

Some people argue and say that even before this recent campaign, religious groups have been endorsing candidates. Churches produce election guides for their members or have candidates visit at worship and receive a warm and sympathetic welcome. If they do this, some argue, then so should we. Why not have rabbis endorse a candidate?

In some ways it is like the dilemma we experience at Christmas time. Governmental bodies should not be promoting religious symbols, but since many do, there are those, like Chabad, who believe we should take advantage of these opportunities to promote our own symbols as well. But if we really believe that the government should not be promoting religion, then we should not be bought off by the placing of Jewish religious symbols next to Christian religious symbols, nor should we in this current case imitate worst practice in endorsing candidates for political office.

Martha Nussbaum, a lawyer and professor of philosophy, who is the descendent of a Pigrim who came over on the Mayflower, and a convert to Reform Judaism, recently wrote a book on Church State Issues called Liberty of Conscience. She argues that dis-establishment is the key to true liberty. Any orthodoxy creates an in-group and out-group, making some of us lesser citizens than others. America was founded on the principle that “the conscientious scruples of all (men) should be treated with great delicacy and tenderness,” but during periods of fear, America has frequently reneged in part on this promise of freedom of conscience. Even seemingly innocuous statements like Justice Scalia’s ok to an endorsement of monotheism or the suggestion that God blesses America, are a form of establishment and especially in a diverse society such as America today, have great symbolic power in terms of favoring some and subordinating others.

The turmoil of the Civil War and the Red scare of the Cold War each led to the introduction of religion into aspects of the public sphere where religion had not been previously. Nussbaum worries that our current period of anxiety about terrorism, and about change in our society, has evoked a similar response . The gradual acceptance of Catholics and Jews doesn’t mean that Americans have lost their fear of people whose religious observances seem strange. Consider the anti-Mormon feelings that came up during the primaries, and the need all the candidates seem to feel to disassociate themselves from Islam. We have not yet even had the real test case for Buddhism and Hinduism, the fastest-growing religions in the United States today.

With this much at stake for the future of true liberty and equality in our country, I decided to resist the temptation to act in a way that might have been very satisfying in the short term, but detrimental to structures that have served American democracy well. Clergy have many opportunities to speak to issues and values, but in the matter of presidential endorsements, as with many other things, I concluded that restraint in the pursuit of higher goals was in order.