Wednesday, March 19, 2008
I have known my rabbi for more than 20 years. The synagogue he
serves as spiritual leader is one I have attended for a
quarter-century. He officiated at my wedding and was present for
the circumcision of each of my sons. Over the years, I have
sought his advice on matters private and public, religious and
secular. I have heard him speak from the pulpit more times than I
can remember.
My relationship with my rabbi, in other words, is similar in many
respects to Barack Obama's relationship with his longtime pastor,
Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. But if my rabbi began delivering
sermons as toxic, hate-filled, and anti-American as the diatribes
Wright has preached at Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ,
I wouldn't hesitate to demand that he be dismissed.
Were my rabbi to gloat that America got its just desserts on
9/11, or to claim that the US government invented AIDS as an
instrument of genocide, or to urge his congregants to sing
"God Damn America"
instead of "God Bless America," I would know about it
straightaway, even if I hadn't actually been in the sanctuary
when he spoke. The news would spread rapidly through the
congregation, and in short order one of two things would happen:
Either the rabbi would be gone, or I and scores of others would
walk out, unwilling to remain in a house of worship that
tolerated such poisonous teachings. I have no doubt that the same
would be true for millions of worshipers in countless houses of
worship nationwide.
But it wasn't true for Obama, whose long and admiring
relationship with Wright, a man he describes as his "mentor,"
remained intact for more than 20 years, notwithstanding the
incendiary and bigoted messages the minister used his pulpit to
promote.
In Philadelphia yesterday, Obama gave a graceful speech on the
theme of race and unity in American life. Much of what he said
was eloquent and stirring, not least his opening paean to the
Founders and the Constitution -- a document "stained by the
nation's original sin of slavery," as he said, yet also one "that
had at its very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the
law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and
justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over
time." There was an echo there of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.,
who in his great "I Have a Dream" speech extolled "the
magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of
Independence" as "a promissory note to which every American was
to fall heir."
The problem for Obama is that Wright, the spiritual leader he
has so long embraced, is a devotee not of King -- who in that
same speech warned against "drinking from the cup of bitterness
and hatred" -- but of the poisonous hatemonger Louis Farrakhan,
whom the church's magazine honored with a lifetime achievement
award. The problem for Obama, who campaigns on a message of
racial reconciliation, is that the "mentor" whose church he
joined and has generously supported with tens of thousands of
dollars in donations is a disciple not of King but of James Cone,
the expounder of a "black liberation" theology that teaches its
adherents to "accept only the love of God which participates in
the destruction of the white enemy."
Above all, the problem for Obama is that for two decades his
spiritual home has been a church in which the minister damns
America to the enthusiastic approval of the congregation, and not
until it threatened to scuttle his political ambitions did Obama
finally find the mettle to condemn the minister's odium.
When Don Imus uttered his infamous slur on the radio last
year, Obama cut him no slack. Imus should be fired, he said.
"There's nobody on my staff who would still be working for me if
they made a comment like that about anybody of any ethnic group."
When it came to Wright, however, he wasn't nearly so categorical.
Oh, he's "like an old uncle who says things I don't always agree
with," Obama indulgently explained to one interviewer. He's just
"trying to be provocative ," he told another. "I don't think my
church is actually particularly controversial," he said. Far from
severing his ties to Wright, Obama made him a member of his
Religious Leadership Committee only four days ago.
Such a clanging double standard raises doubts about Obama's
character and judgment, and about his fitness for the role of
race-transcending healer. Yesterday's speech was finely crafted,
but it leaves some serious and troubling questions unanswered.
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)
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