God Bless America?

I don’t think of rabbis as especially naive. As a class, we tend to be watchful and observant. As individuals (me), we are occasionally alarmists, reacting strongly to putative danger. More than once, I have called out a peril that did not actually materialize on schedule. It wouldn’t be wrong to imagine me as a canary in the coal mine: a few faint tweets and then feet up in the cage.

The exception might be Meir Soloveichik. Whenever he’s mentioned, he is referred to as a “scion.” The Soloveichiks are an American rabbinical dynasty with a name that carries the perfume of aristocracy. I don’t how he’s related to the founder, but the fact that he is related at all already confers platinum-grade zechut (privilege). Suffice to say that he is no Fitzerman. From his exalted perch, everything must look different.

The problem is that he has been thoroughly co-opted. He accepted an appointment to the President’s Religious Liberty Commission, another of Trump’s crypto-crazy operations which seeks to demolish Jefferson’s Wall of Separation by turning the Constitution inside out. Its founding principle is that the Fathers of the Revolution did not oppose the entanglement of religion and state, but rather sought to free religion from its shackles. If you do not fund a parochial school in Oklahoma, you are interfering with the free exercise of faith. There is purity in this bullshit, but it is bullshit all the same.

Yet Soloveichik went further than joining the Commission. Over last weekend, he became its Jewish poster boy, speaking as the sole representative of the Jews at the President’s godawful “Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise, and Thanksgiving.” Following hard on “Shabbat 250,” another of Drumpf’s addled brainchildren, the official purpose was to reaffirm faith as a central category of American life. The unofficial purpose was to valorize Christian nationalism and to advance the central religious argument of MAGA, that we are nation founded by religious visionaries who inscribed their Christianity in every line of the Constitution.

This is, of course, high-grade nonsense, but in the erosive tumult of current American life, many people will believe anything. The Founding Fathers were creatures of the Enlightenment, many of whom benefitted from the horror of slavery, but nevertheless believed in the brotherhood of man. They did not create a creedal nation, but made room for diversity, equity, and inclusion. And they were careful to separate conflicting domains. They didn’t want the government messing with religion and they didn’t want religion messing with the state.

Soloveichik spoke as if these distinctions didn’t matter. He hailed Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” as his personal statement of American belonging. I wish, instead, that he had stopped to note that not a single Muslim, Buddhist, or other infidel was invited to share the podium with His Rabbi-ship. Instead, he allowed others to use him as a prop, a tokenized voice whose very presence did nothing to bump out the nature of American ideals, but validated the gathering with a veneer of mutuality. Meanwhile, Pastor Paula White-Cain hoped aloud that Rededicate 250 would not be polluted by “praying to all these different Gods.”

And so we have one for the ages, or at least a classic example of life imitating art. The most repellent figure in Philips Roth’s Plot Against America is the deluded, oleaginous Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf, water-carrier for the Roth’s fascist Republicans. The book is a counter-factual masterpiece that warns, among other things, that credulous Jews sometimes do themselves enormous harm. Bengelsdorf is a power-hungry, low-level operative in a regime that seeks to subjugate his community.

The novel was published in 2004, but it could have been written with Meir Soloveichik in mind. Shame on rabbis and other religious folk who allow themselves to be used as props. Despite their eminent place in Jewish Orthodoxy, the aristocratic Soloveichiks are clearly capable of idiocy. In this case, they gave us a corruptible dud, fully blind to his own debasement.

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Written without the use of artificial intelligence, this article is the actual product of a struggling human mind.