Must read by Rabbi Lapin!
Stephen
 

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We Jews aren't chic any longer.  Not too many people care for Jews these days.
 Europe, including England, makes little secret of how it feels towards Jews.
If possible, they care even less for Israel.  All Moslem countries, more than
a billion angry people frequently at one another's necks, are magically
unified over hatred for Jews and resentment over that little patch of sand in
the Middle East which Jews turned into a country.  Much of Africa and most of
Russia feels the same way.  Hate the Jews.
It is very challenging for a small group of people to survive with no friends.
But wait!  There is one group of people who unconditionally love Jews and the
Land of Israel.  These people are called Christian conservatives.  They are
made up of Catholics, and Protestants, Baptists and Lutherans and many others.
 Although theologies differ widely, they all share a deep conviction that God
gave the Ten Commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai.  They all fervently believe
that in so doing, God presented humanity with a blueprint for life.  Needless
to say, these views should be shared by every Jew committed to his faith.
Yes, I know that some may have their own reasons for their friendship.
However I ask you to remember that Jewish morality dictates we judge others by
their actions not by what we believe lies in their hearts.  Sometimes I am not
too sure of what lies in my own heart, let alone in the hearts of others.  We
leave God to peer into other's motivations and we are called to judge other
people by how they act.  And the overwhelming majority of Christian
conservatives in America act with astounding goodness, generosity, and
friendship.
A common understanding of the Bible, its promises and its directions, lies at
the foundation of the special friendship the Christian Right has for Jews.
Most Jews are profoundly grateful to have such faithful friends during a
period when events are echoing frightening times of the past.
It is a remarkable thing, this friendship.  Very different theologies, very
different histories and backgrounds, and even different visions of the future,
yet a shared recollection of our Biblical past assures the present in an
atmosphere of trust and amity.
Into this delicate relationship strides an extremist demagogue whose
intemperate denunciations this past weekend threaten to destroy friendships
between Jews and Christians.
The director of the ADL, one of the large Jewish organizations in America,
attacked Christianity as an intolerable threat to religious tolerance.  He
denounced several famous Evangelical organizations by name accusing them of
wishing to implement their Christian worldview.  He demonized Christians and
assured his audience that "they intend to Christianize all aspects of American
life.their vision of America is far different from ours."  (Just imagine what
would happen to a Christian leader talking thus about Jews!)
Mr. Foxman has yet to apologize for how wrong were his dire predictions of
what Mel Gibson's Passion would bring in its wake.  Yet off he goes again
defaming the only people left on the face of the planet who actually love
Jews.
There is one reliable rule that most people learn in grade school: If you
consistently bully your friends and treat them disrespectfully, pretty soon
you won't have any friends left.
Leaving aside the fascinating analysis of the pathology that makes a Jew
alienate our best and only friends, maybe the attack itself needs to be
refuted.
The ADL has been attacking Christianity now for over ten years.  It began with
an embarrassing book the ADL published in 1994-The Religious Right: The
Assault on Tolerance & Pluralism in America.  It has never let up.  Given the
ADL's obsessive preoccupation with Christians, anyone would think that on
their way home from church every Sunday, most Christians engage in robbing and
raping, mugging and murdering any Jews reckless enough to be out on the
streets.  Is it possible that this organization, originally founded to protect
Jews, cannot find any greater threat to Judaism than America's conservative
Christians.  Or is it possibly the threat they legitimately pose to secular
liberalism that really bothers the ADL?  If so, why pose as a Jewish
organization?  It would be more honest to identify as an activist arm of the
Democratic Party.
This may be a good time for me to expose the five slanderous lies surrounding
America's most misunderstood movement:

1) The Christian Right wishes to impose a theocracy on America.

A hint for those of you out there planning on imposing a theocracy:  In order
to succeed, you would first need to subvert the entire United States
Constitution.  A word to the rest of you worried about a theocracy-if the
Constitution goes, you have far bigger problems than a theocracy.
Who really does have a record of forcing their values down the throats of
everyone else?  Over the past forty years life in America has been made
indescribably more squalid, expensive, and dangerous.  Mocking moral standards
and vulgarizing the culture has brought to any teenager's ears the throbbing
rhythms and hideously violent lyrics that would have brought a blush to the
face of a convict in 1960.  Back then, a family lived an enviable middle-class
lifestyle on one salary.  Today, high taxes, regulatory costs, and feminist
propaganda have forced mothers into the workplace.  Abolishing the Biblical
idea of people being capable of evil, crime is now understood in terms of
social problems.  The result is a sharply diminished sense of safety and
security.  Forget city parks at night; we worry about children surviving a day
at the local public school with its metal detectors and ludicrously unarmed
guards. So who has more successfully forced its values down our throats?  I
think the record speaks for itself.
For Christian leaders to encourage conservative Americans of faith to vote for
like-minded candidates is of course no different from Jewish leaders ardently
having encouraged all Jews to vote for the Gore-Lieberman ticket in 2000
because "Joe is a Jew."  Secularism is as much a belief system as is
Christianity and secularists who work to elect secularists shouldn't complain
when Christians try to elect Christians to public office.  There is a good
old-fashioned word for this activity and it is not theocracy.  It
is-democracy.  Every group in America practices it.  Christians should be able
to do so too without being demonized by a Jewish organization.
 

2) The Christian right believes all who disagree with them are going to hell.

Even if some believe this, so what?  Does our Constitution guarantee freedom
of belief only to secularists?  I am always amused by those who are most
indignant that some Christians have this belief but are themselves secularists
who firmly announce their disbelief in heaven or hell in the first place.  Why
should they care if someone else believes they are going somewhere they don't
believe exists?  Go figure.
For me personally, it bothers me not at all that many of my Christian friends
believe I am headed to hell.  Frankly I am deeply grateful to be living among
such wonderful Christian neighbors who do absolutely nothing to accelerate my
arrival there.  Does the phrase "Spanish Inquisition" mean anything to you?
For most Christians I know, it is not so much a belief as it is a genuine
concern for my spiritual future.  I appreciate that concern amidst ongoing
friendship and generosity to me though I remain a firmly committed Orthodox
Jew.  It was not always so for Jews in other countries during the past two
thousand years.
Israel's safety belt is undoubtedly America's Bible belt and I am sure that
America has provided history's safest and longest lasting haven for Jews, not
in spite of, but precisely because of her deep Christian conviction.
Christian belief, no matter how difficult for non-Christians to accept, poses
no threat to anyone.  On the contrary, it has turned out to be the source of
blessing for all who cherish the freedom and tranquility of the United States
of America.  The same George Washington who wrote "May the children of the
stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the
goodwill of the other inhabitants" was a George Washington who was a deeply
religious and very conservative Christian.
One way for the descendants of Abraham to merit the goodwill of our Christian
neighbors would be to stop Jewish organizations from endlessly insulting and
attacking our friends.
 

3) Christian conservatives are anti-Semitic and racist.

This might be a good opportunity for me to point out the sheer evil of
accusing someone of an undefined crime.  You see, with no definition of the
crime, it is impossible for the accused to defend himself.  Think about it for
a moment..do you know the definition of anti-Semitism?  See, it isn't so
simple.  Is it hurting Jews or their property?  That doesn't need the term
anti-Semitism-it is already a crime called assault or vandalism.  And in any
event, is that really what they are accusing Christian conservatives of doing?
I think not.
Does ant-Semitism mean harboring a dislike for Jews in one's heart?  Do we
really want to criminalize thought?  What about the old liberal disdain for
"thought police?
I do believe it might be time already for some Jewish leaders to abandon their
Sharpton-tactics and graciously shelve the term anti-Semitism.  It has become
nothing but a bludgeon to silence dissent and cause resentment.  When Jewish
leaders accuse good and decent Christians of anti-Semitism because they oppose
wholesale abortion and homosexual marriage, it is more of an indictment of the
Jews hurling the epithet than it is of the victims.
The problem is that many Jews, having abandoned the faith of Abraham, Isaac,
and Jacob, have embraced the alternative faith of secular liberalism.  In do
doing, they adopt the misleading equation that Judaism=Liberalism.  Believing
that the values of Judaism have nothing to do with the clearly expressed
wishes of God in the Torah, they mistakenly assume that the values of Judaism
are congruent with those of secular liberalism.  Thus anyone who loathes the
values of secular liberalism surely must hate the values of Judaism since they
are the same.  Therefore, any conservative is, by definition, an anti-Semite.
It thus becomes the holy duty of organizations like the ADL, originally formed
to fight bigotry and anti-Semitism, to fight religious conservatives.  This is
tiresome, anachronistic, and just plain wrong.  This is an error with
potentially tragic consequences and it should stop.
I can only tell you that I regularly deliver speeches to audiences, often of
thousands, for the very organizations listed by the ADL in its latest
anti-Christian diatribe.  I do so as an Orthodox Jewish rabbi and on the dais
I wear the same black yarmulke I wore during my Torah studies in yeshiva.  I
talk of the same Biblical values I was taught in that yeshiva.  After the
speech I frequently enjoy a dinner brought by the organizers with considerable
trouble and expense from a kosher restaurant, often from another city.  I am
received with enthusiasm and genuine warmth.  If this be anti-Semitism, my
grandfather in Europe would surely have welcomed it.
Oh, did I mention that many of the pastors making up the Christian Right are
themselves black Americans?  Of course, to many of the racial demagogues on
the Secular Left, any black who becomes a conservative has renounced his
blackness.  I am accustomed to this because a representative of the Jewish
Federation of a large west coast city recently told a friend of mine that
"Rabbi Lapin isn't a real Jew because he is friends with those Christians."  I
estimate that at least ten percent of most every audience I address is African
American.  The charge that the Christian Right is racist is made exclusively
by people whose antagonism is exceeded only by their ignorance.
 

4) Christian conservatives are poor, uneducated, and easy to command.

This allegation was first made by Washington Post journalist Michael Weisskopf
in a front page story on February 1st, 1993.  In reality, average annual
income for Christian conservatives is well above the national average.
Furthermore, the average net worth of conservative Christian families rockets
ahead of the national average especially when corrected for age and income.
This shouldn't surprise anyone because the values of thrift and industry that
build net worth are among the values encouraged by Biblical faith.  Finally,
the bountiful generosity in the form of charitable donations made by America's
religious conservatives in any year exceeds the gross domestic product of many
nation members of the United Nations.
Most of the nation's hundreds of Christian colleges, with their rigorous
academic standards, routinely outperform state universities.  Christian home
schoolers win the national spelling bees year after year.  In a 2003 article
entitled God on the Quad, the Boston Globe described how well Christian
Evangelical students are doing on New England's liberal elite university
campuses.
As for easy to command, well Evangelical judicial nominee Harriet Miers was
forced to withdraw her nomination precisely because America's religious
conservatives are not easy to command.

5) The Christian right is anti-Scientific.

This charge emerges from secular America's docile homage to the doctrines of
Darwin.  Wise and educated people today realize that the borderline between
cutting-edge science and religious belief is fuzzy.  One need only examine the
work of cosmologist Stephen Hawking, British scientific philosopher Antony
Flew, or Israeli physicist Gerald Schroeder to hear the language of theology.
Only propagandists and ideologues think that Darwin ended the discussion.
The truth is that two incompatible beliefs can account for mankind's presence
on the planet.  The first is that God created us in His image and placed us
here.  The second is that through a lengthy process of unaided materialistic
evolution, primitive protoplasm became Bach, Beethoven, and the Beatles.
Many scientists, including the 40% who are religious according to a University
of Georgia study cited by the New York Times in February of this year, accept
the first view.  Many scientists accept the second view and some scientists
await further evidence.  The issue is hardly cut and dried because a great
deal of modern science flows as much from scientific philosophy as it does
from laboratory experiment.  This is particularly true of non-replicable
science such as that dealing with cosmology and origin of the universe
questions.
This leaves only one question:  Are secular liberals or Christian
conservatives more dogmatic and closed-minded?   To any fair-minded person,
the answer is startlingly simple.  It would be tough to find a single
Christian high school, college, or university in the nation that does not
treat Darwinian evolution seriously.  However, it would be even tougher to
find a single public high school or secular university that grants a
respectful hearing to intelligent design, let alone a religious view of
creation.
It is also only on secular campuses that truth is frequently suppressed in the
interests of political correctness.
If science means being open to all ideas, judging those ideas on the basis of
evidence rather than belief, and withholding judgment in the absence of
evidence, there can be no doubt at all.  Christian conservatives are far less
anti-Scientific than others.
In conclusion, I am sure that the ADL's Mr. Foxman cares for the Jewish people
as much as I do.  It is just that he has a radically different way of
expressing it.  To me, his frequent anti-Christian outbursts are
incomprehensible and I am sure they jeopardize the future of Jews in America
and ultimately, Jews everywhere.  He, no doubt thinks much the same about my
views.
In a spirit of respect for both him and for the traditional Jewish commitment
to the truth and to open discussion that I am sure we share, I invite Mr.
Foxman to a public debate on this topic.  Let us debate one another in order
to determine the direction for the future.  Does Jewish survival lie with a
fervent secularism that ceaselessly snaps at the heels of Christian America or
does it lie within political alliance with those people who stand firm for the
values God imparted to the Jews at the foot of Mount Sinai just over three
thousand years ago.  One way is right and the other is wrong.  Which is it?  A
debate could help expose the true answer. C'mon Mr. Foxman, let's do it.