As a rabbi, I’ve never confronted a topic as tricky as Trump

Just after the November election, I delivered a sermon at Temple Emanu-El in New York City — where I have been senior rabbi for 12 years — asking my listeners to embrace those who voted differently from them as neighbors, with whom they might disagree, but who nonetheless share a love for the United States. In that sermon, I also enumerated my concerns about the xenophobic, transphobic and nativist rhetoric employed by President Donald Trump’s campaign, especially given that Trump’s first term saw a sharp rise in hate crimes, including antisemitic violence.

While I believe many who listened agreed with me, I heard from more who did not — who felt that to raise such red flags about the President-elect was divisive, and inappropriate from the pulpit. Clergy like me are often urged to keep quiet on political matters, told that church and synagogue are spaces too sacred for the messiness of politics. And yet religion and politics have always occupied two sides of the same coin. Religion expresses our most deeply held ideals, and politics attempts to enact those ideals in society.

Now, as President Trump’s second administration is openly challenging many of the values I hold dear — including by terrifying minority communities and dividing Jews — it is clear to me that to speak those values from the pulpit remains a Jewish mandate. Judaism demands action and deplores indifference. No honest measure of Torah’s teachings endorses the distancing of Jewish interests from societal concerns.

As a rabbi, I never want to alienate anyone. My primary role is that of a pastor. I care about and respect every member of my congregation — and all those who worship with us, if only for a day — and I want them all to feel at home within our walls. And I accept that when I have made anyone feel unwelcome, the fault was mine, by failing to express my views in a fashion that engaged them without pushing them away.

Although the congregation I serve, one of the largest in the U.S., is politically mixed, I have never been shy about speaking my mind on the issues of the moment when I feel my views, informed by my understanding of Judaism, are worth sharing. At times I have openly criticized Israel’s government, a topic some have called the “third rail” of the synagogue pulpit, when I believed its policies endangered prospects for peace, or Israel’s future as a democratic, Jewish state. And whenever I believed our own American government had failed us — on gun violence and economic justice, among other matters — I have said so, too.

But the choice of whether to speak or not is a more loaded one, now, than at any other time in my career.

That is, in many ways, because I find myself facing new challenges in understanding the complex views of a diverse American Jewish community.

I am grateful for Trump’s commitment to addressing antisemitism, especially on college campuses. And I share the widespread alarm I see in the Jewish community over the far left’s embrace of an anti-Zionism that often serves as a thinly veiled antisemitism.

Yet I see many of those who proclaim that alarm appear to tolerate, under Trump’s leadership, the creep of authoritarianism, the demonization of minorities, nationalist grandiloquence, and policies that deny desperate asylum seekers refuge — all shifts with historical echoes that should concern any Jew.

How can I speak effectively to those who I perceive as abiding what is, to me, such a profound contradiction?

In his poignant story, “The Kerchief,” the Israeli Nobel laureate S.Y. Agnon writes of a boy raised in a loving Jewish household. His father, away often for work, one day gives his wife a beautiful, snow-white handkerchief, which she wears each Shabbat and keeps immaculately clean. On the day the boy is to become bar mitzvah, the mother gives it to her son as a present, tying it around his neck.

He wanders outside, and in the street he sees a beggar — bloody, hungry, dirty. The boy, withstanding his initial desire to run, is overcome by another urge — to help. So he gives the beggar the handkerchief, which the man places on his bleeding leg. When the boy tells his mother, he worries that she will be upset with him. Of course, she is anything but.

Commenting on the story, Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote that the boy’s choice was, “the highest order of religious action … There is something lacking in a religion that refuses to involve itself in the messiness of the world.”

Judaism has never failed to involve itself in the messiness of the world. This is in part because, at times, our survival has required our political engagement. But more generally, it is because our people’s story of enslavement, and history of oppression, have never lost their resonance. In every generation, tyranny and bloodshed, poverty and hopelessness have afflicted populations near and far.

This is how I hope to lead and serve my congregation, in this divided time: By accepting the messiness, and involving myself in it. The Reverend Dr. William Sloane Coffin once observed that while “there is a real temptation to think that an issue is less spiritual for being more political, to believe that religion is above politics, that the sanctuary is too sacred a place for the grit and grime of political battle,” to believe religion should be free of politics is itself a political choice — one that supports the status quo.

There are moments when we need our houses of worship to offer us sanctuary from the chaotic and painful challenges of the world outside. And yet the Talmud requires that synagogues have windows, because as Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook taught, we must never hide from those challenges. The impulse for religious leaders to hide, now, may be strong; it is also wrong.

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