As a rabbit, I have never faced a tricky topic like Trump -Forward

Have you ever felt confused to choose whether to talk about politics from the sermon pod? Photos by ISTOCK by Getty Image

Immediately after the November election, I preached in Temple Emanuel in New York City -I have been a senior rabbit for 12 years -I have my listeners accept the people who accept different votes as neighbors. We asked to accept those who may not agree. But, nevertheless, people who share love for the United States. In the sermon, I also listed concerns about foreigners, Transfovic, and Nazi Vist’s rhetoric adopted in the campaign of President Donald Trump. In particular, considering that Trump’s first term has seen the rapid increase in hatred crimes, including anti -Semitic violence.

I believe many people who agree to me agree to me, but I have heard from those who were not. I felt that raising such dangerous signals in the presidential election was divided and inappropriate from the sermon. Saint like me is often urged to keep political issues quiet, and churches and synagoggs are too sacrificing in politics. Nevertheless, religion and politics have always occupied two aspects of the same coin. Religion expresses our most deeply held ideals, and politics tries to enact the ideals of society.

Currently, President Trump’s second administration is trying to talk about the values ​​I value, so I talk about their value from the sermon pods, including dividing the minority communities and Jews. It is clear that the Jewish duties are the same. Judaism demands action and laments indifference. The honest scale of Torel’s teaching does not support the Jews’s profits from social concerns.

As a rabbit, I don’t want to be alienated. My main role is the role of the pastor. I respect, respect all the members of my congregation, and all the people who worship with us for one day. And when I make everyone feel welcomed, I accept my drawback by being unable to express my opinion in the fashion that draws them without pushing them.

The congregation I serve is the largest congregation in the United States, but it’s politically mixed, but I talk about my heart about the moment I feel my opinion in the understanding of Judaism. I’m not shy. It may openly criticize the Israeli government. This is a topic called the Sinagog’s preaching pole, the “Third Railway”, and believed that the policy at risk of peace of mind and the future as a democratic Jewish state in Israel. 。 And when we believed that our U.S. government failed, I always said, gun violence and economic justice.

However, the choice of speaking is more loaded now than at any other point in my career.

In many ways, I realize that I am facing new tasks in understanding the complex views of the diverse American Jewish community.

I am particularly grateful for Trump’s commitment to deal with anti -Semitism on the university campus. And I share a wide range of alarms in the Jewish community.

However, many people who seem to have an alarm under Trump’s guidance are Trump’s leaders, authoritative creep, minority demons, ethnicity magnificence, and desperate asylum. Policy to deny a person’s shelter -looks at policies that deny changes with historical echo related to all Jews. 。

How can I talk to those who feel that they are protecting such a deep contradiction?

Sy Agnon, a Nobel laureate in Israel, writes in his impressive story, The Kerchief, about a boy who grew up in a Jewish family. His father often leaves his wife a beautiful snow white handkerchief one day. The boy gives his son as a present on the day of becoming a bar Mitsuba, and ties it around his neck.

He wanders outside, he sees BE food on the street -bloody, hungry, and dirty. The boy endures his first desire to run and overcomes another urge. So he gives BE food a handkerchief. When the boy tells his mother, he is worried that she is angry at him. Of course she is nothing.

Commenting on the story, Rabi Halold Kushner wrote that the boy’s choice was “the best order of religious behavior … there is nothing in religion that refuses to be involved in the world’s mess.”

Judaism has never failed to be involved in the world’s mess. This is because sometimes our survival needed our political involvement. But more in general, the story of our people’s slavery and the history of repression have never lost their resonance. In all generations, tyrannical politics, bloodshed, poverty and despair are suffering from the population nearby.

This is a way to guide and serve my congregation in this split time. By accepting the mess and involving yourself. Rev. FFIN, Rev. William Sloan, said, “There is a true temptation that the problem is not the spiritual mental, but the sanctuary is a sacred place, believing that religion is on politics. It is a sacred grit, and believing that religion should be released from politics, it is a political choice.

There are moments when you need a worship house to provide a sanctuary from a mixed Otic in the outside world and a painful challenge. Nevertheless, Talmood demands that Sinagog has windows. Because, as Rabi Abraham Isaac Cook has taught, we must never be hidden from those issues. The impulse for religious leaders to hide may be strong now. That is also wrong.