Donald Trump’s “Rededicate 250,” a nine-hour prayer-fest on Sunday billed as “A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise, and Thanksgiving,” and his despicable attempt to politicize the Jewish Sabbath into some sort of “National Shabbat” on Saturday, are crass attempts to destroy the precious line separating religion and state. No one should be fooled.
And those Jewish groups scampering to join in this politicized fun ought to run the other way - and aim to turn every Shabbat into a special Shabbat - or to partake in Shabbat Across America, a successful annual event that does not try to subvert a religious celebration into a strident political message. For thirty years, Shabbat Across America’s sponsors have brought over a million Jews together, from across the widest spectrum of denominations.
We don’t need the government to “Shove us into Shab-bos” while at the same time betraying our deepest religious principles. It constantly astounds me how willing Jewish groups are to bend the knee before this false idol and accede to this hostile takeover of our most cherished institutions. It projects shame and weakness. First the Kennedy Center. Now, Shabbat has been sullied with Trump’s name scribbled all over it with a Sharpie.
Trump’s trying to project a singular religious vision where our Constitution promotes pluralism, an idolatrous vision at that - one where he is God’s Chosen - and to carefully edit and recast America’s story through the lens of extremist White Nationalism. And Trump ends up as Dr. Jesus for Jews too, if you haven’t read the fine print. He’s the Chosen, whether you are reading from right to left or left to right.
Jews and Christians should observe their Sabbaths this weekend, by all means, but not by buying into this charade. If Trump’s “National Sabbath” could include a discussion of how the fourth commandment calls us on us to liberate those who are enslaved, protect the environment, refrain from violence and be kind to animals, maybe I can begin to share it with the nation. A conversation on why it’s dangerous to slap that fourth commandment on courthouses across the land? Sure. A discussion that calls on us to prepare for Memorial Day by recalling the extreme cost of our nation’s wars in human terms, and calls us to account for wars we should have avoided and a Civil War that has still not ended? Well, maybe.
But otherwise, hands off my Sabbath!
For in fact, with this farce, Trump is trying to do to religion what his partisan gerrymander scheme is attempting to do to this November’s midterm elections. It’s a last-ditch, desperate attempt to steal back what is summarily slipping away. No matter how many busloads turn out on Sunday, the messianic right knows that they are losing the religious narrative, in Middle America and on the coasts, on farms and in factories, in villages, suburbs and our largest cities, just as they are losing the political narrative. They are not the majority.
Pete Hegseth’s choreographed performance of “Onward Christian Soldiers” has hit a snag in the Persian Gulf - not one I would have hoped for, but a catastrophe that will eventually lead anyone pinning their messianic hopes on this war to ask profound theological questions. This is not the path that God has chosen. God is speaking to us through the voice of the psalmist. Hear the cry of Psalm 118:5: “Out of the straits I called upon the Lord. He answered me and set me free!”
And what did God answer?
“I’m nowhere near Hormuz, nowhere near that narrow place. Nor should you be. Take the wide view! Quit with your narrow messianic dreamscape, get rid of the gauzy visions, get real - and LEAVE ME OUT OF THIS!”
I’m disappointed that no mass response from the interfaith community has been organized to counter this “jubilee.” The Freedom From Religion Foundation, an atheist group and Faithful America,1 a Christian resistance group, are running counter programming, complete with a golden calf, but there should be a more serious and substantive collective response.
Still, we can respond privately. And maybe that’s most appropriate.
Faithful America’s petition regarding this event is one that, while aimed at Christians, Jews should reflect upon, especially those Jews so willing to capitulate to Shabbat 250 even as the 4th commandment is being improperly plastered on the walls of public school classrooms throughout the nation.
To: The organizers of Rededicate 250
We declare that as Christians, we reject Christian Nationalists’ Rededicate 250.
We name Rededicate 250 for what it is: the Trump regime’s attempt to rewrite a nationalistic pseudohistory and homogenize the country’s religious identity for its own purposes.
To spread a white Christian Nationalist agenda that props up Trump’s own image under the guise of celebrating the nation’s 250th anniversary. To propagandize a very specific, exclusive, and self-serving version of Christianity.
You claim it will be a national jubilee.
We confess, we cannot rejoice when you are stealing food from the mouths of babes.
We cannot celebrate while you defund the essential aid programs that sustain people.
We cannot condone your continued perversion of the name of God to further Christian Nationalist ideology.
We profess our faith differently. The God we know loves, serves, and teaches compassion, humility, and sacrifice.
He feeds the hungry, clothes the poor, heals the sick, frees the oppressed, and loves all sinners.
So let us make clear: We Christians reject Rededicate 250.
Here’s something for normal American people of faith to ponder as they observe their own private Sabbaths this weekend, while White Christian Supremacist bullies make a mockery of our nation’s ideals in Washington. It’s from my Substack on this topic, written last March when the FCC tried to censor James Talarico’s interview with Stephen Colbert (they failed to silence them, as they will fail to silence Colbert’s voice after “The Late Show” leaves the airwaves this week. It will only be amplified all the more).
Something remarkable is occurring right now. Religion is making a comeback. Not the fake religion that justifies oppression, abuse and discrimination, but real religion, the kind that preaches love of the stranger and stands up to power, the kind that disdains corruption, the kind that provides comfort and community when your life has fallen apart, the kind they taught in religious schools of all faiths and denominations when I was growing up. We are seeing a religious revival, one keyed by values of compassion and courage. Old faith groups are finding new voices and new denominations are coalescing around time-tested messages.
The fact that the Trump administration didn’t want the nation to hear James Talarico’s interview with Stephen Colbert, however they tried to parse the matter later on, stemmed from their fear that Talarico is reasserting the religious symbolism that the right had co-opted and perverted for decades. His message of social justice and love-of-neighbor has hit a nerve, countering the anti-empathy ideology of the Trumpists. They know that cruelty might be the point, but it ‘aint selling.
On his website, Talarico explains why he ran, as a chance to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather, a Baptist minister in Texas, and…
“…a barefoot rabbi who gave us two commandments: love God and love neighbor. Because there is no love of God without love of neighbor. Every single person bears the image of the sacred; every single person is holy — not just the neighbors who look like me or pray like me or vote like me.”
I’m a rabbi too, though I typically wear shoes, and I can attest that precisely these same ideals are the soil from which Talarico’s rabbi and my rabbinic sages emerged, though there were religious hypocrites then as there are now.
I must say that Talarico’s candidacy is one of the most important statements about religion and state that has happened in some time. If successful - and that’s a huge “if” - he could accomplish something that no one this side of Raphael Warnock has accomplished: he could help take religion back to a place of political neutrality and spiritual centrism, so it can be precisely the fount of wisdom the Founders wanted it to be.
The message of Talarico’s candidacy is loud and clear: Right wing nationalists no longer own religion.
They’ve lost the narrative and are about to learn today’s Bible lesson: This is one election you can’t rig.
You can’t partisan-gerrymander God.
Shabbat Shalom
Faithful America’s press release:
