I hope those of you in my neck of the woods are surviving the blizzard. If you are reading this, presumably you have power (otherwise, why are you reading this???? Save your battery!) Here’s a photo of Cobie this morning, wondering why his owners don’t invest in a Port-O-San.
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 FCC and Trump administration didn’t want the nation to hear James Talarico on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last week, 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 defines why he’s running 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.1
I must say that I also admire the political courage of Talarico’s opponent, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, but 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 neither Crockett nor just about anyone this side of Raphael Warnock might accomplish: 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.
This reaction to the Christian nationalist perversion of faith has been a long time in coming, but thanks to the Trump administration’s excesses, it has arrived. The corruption and the cruelty were always there, and the hypocrisy and racism predated Trump by decades, but it has all hit a tipping point with the Epstein revelations and ICE excesses.
Even the Pope has gotten off the fence on this one, and the Catholic church is leading the charge against the abuse of immigrants.
And meanwhile, while Colbert has sparred with Trump in one corner, for the main event the religious wing of the Republican Party has been engaged in a massive slugfest over whether Tucker Carlson or Mike Huckabee has it right about Israel. Their conversation last week at Ben Gurion Airport (Carlson visited Israel for the interview but never left the airport) has become a cause célèbre on the right. For me, both of them are scary, Huckabee for his evangelical zeal for West Bank annexation and Carlson for his antisemitic embrace of eugenics, leading to his wacky obsession over whether Ashkenazic Jews have Abraham’s DNA. As you can see from this analysis by JTA, both sides of this debate are throwing wild haymakers, and this is a small indication of how Christian nationalism has been thrown back on its heels.
The religious right is reeling.
All that will assist the sane center to assert itself as the true religion of Jesus, as well as the Talmudic rabbis, moderate Muslims and love-thy-neighbor supporters everywhere. With centrist religious leaders like Talarico and Warnock jumping to the fore, the Trump-Epstein tipping point may just be enough to tip Texas, spiritually as well as politically.
I can imagine a day in the near future when pastors and pols in Texas will follow Talarico’s cue in arguing for the removal of the Ten Commandments from public school walls. As Talarico told Joe Rogan on his podcast last summer, “If we have to force people to put up a poster, that means we have a dead religion.”
Comments like that are why religion is still relevant. As Talarico argues. posting the Ten Commandments and other issues of religion and state are best handled not as a matter of protecting secular principles but of affirming deeply religious ones. If we adopt that posture, we can assert religion’s prominent place in the public square, its rightful place in each policy debate.
Perhaps religion is more relevant than ever right now, and that’s why we need to rediscover the power of our faith traditions and take pride in them, even as we struggle with aspects of them. Even if we struggle with God.2
For more on that hypocrisy in our day, I highly recommend this article in Jewish Currents, “A New Focus on Leslie Wexner Ties Spreads Unease Among America’s Jewish Leaders.”
So as an added bonus, I’d like to go into greater depth as to why religious identity is still important at a time when it has been so coopted by the right.
Right before the election of President Obama in 2008, I gave a sermon extolling the power of religious identity, in particular, Jewish identity. It was a time when Americans were obsessed with identity politics (when are we not obsessed with identity politics?) and Jewish Americans particularly were obsessed with group survival and Israel (again, when are we not…).
Listen to the entire, unedited sermon here:
Here are some highlights:
America’s national identity always been clothed in religious symbolism and tied to liberal religious values, even as it has avoided tying itself to any one particular religion.
Imagine a world without identity, without banners and flags and logos. What a blissful world it would be. Imagine that world….
I feel a John Lennon song coming on…
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace.
Oh, God, no religion. Wouldn’t that be great! I’d be out of a job! But, hey, a small tradeoff for no religious wars. The State Department estimates that 70-80 percent of the world’s conflicts are based on religion. No Iranian apocalyptic fantasies, no Hamas, no Hezbollah. No intolerance. No PROBLEM!
John Lennon’s “Imagine” was chosen by Rolling Stone in 2004 as the third greatest song of all time. That great Lennonista Jimmy Carter, once said, “In many countries around the world… you hear John Lennon’s song ‘Imagine’ used almost equally with national anthems.”
But you don’t hear it on the victor’s stand at the Olympics.
Imagine no Olympics. No national anthems, no flags, no teary-eyed skaters to root for.
On the other hand, Imagine having nothing worth living for, nothing worth dying for – nothing worth praying for. Imagine having no home, no place where you belong, no place to return to when your life has fallen apart, when you’ve gotten a horrible report from the doctor or you’ve lost your job, or your investments are suddenly worthless or a loved one has suddenly died.
National identity matters. Religious identity matters too. We all need a home.
Imagine being a Jew without Israel at the core of our religious identity. Whatever our feelings about the government, we always pray for Israel. But this year, how can we not look over at that flag without some trepidation?
The world would be a far less beautiful and less interesting place to be without religious identity. It gives meaning to our lives; it is what connects us to our past and to our future. It gives us a home base, a warm place that will never reject us.
Remember the Huguenots? At one time there were far more members of this French reformed church in America than Jews. But they failed to maintain their distinctive culture, readily assimilating into the vanilla masses - and now a group with a proud history is no more. Imagine that happening to us. Imagine Jews becoming vanilla – or any flavor other than Rocky Road.
There’s the story of Goldstein who is running late for an important meeting. It seems like the entire borough of Manhattan is waiting for the same taxi and he could not afford to be late. So he’s standing there, desperate as eve; he’s a secular guy but in his desperation he whispers a prayer: “Dear Lord, if you find me a taxi, I’ll keep kosher, I’ll wear tefillin, I’ll double my gift to the synagogue appeal and go to shul every shabbos and festival.” Seconds later, out of nowhere, a bright yellow cab pulls up – right in front him. As he is stepping into it, Goldstein says: “You know what God, forget it. I found a taxi on my own.”
I wish I had a shekel for every time I sit with a family before a funeral and they tell me that the deceased was not religious but fiercely proud to be a Jew. For a long time I asked myself, without religion, how could they hold onto that fierce pride?
It is said that there only two things that will keep a Jew from coming to synagogue: bad weather… and good weather – but most also have no question as to the fact that they are Jews.
And so, albeit with some concerns, I emphatically acknowledge the power of identity.
