May 29, 2008
You could have knocked me over with a feather last week when John McCain stamped “return to sender” on the Rev. John Hagee’s endorsement.
Apparently McCain agreed with the bloggers who charged that Hagee’s interesting Holocaust theology — saying that the Shoa hastened God’s plan to establish Israel, and suggesting that the Holocaust’s victims had defied God’s will in not settling Palestine — was too, too much.
And yet I had to ask: too much for whom? In the short news cycle between the airing of Hagee’s sermon and McCain’s announcement, I counted exactly one Jewish leader who objected to its message. That was Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism. He asked that Hagee clarify remarks that could be interpreted as a “desecration” of the victims’ memories and “an insult to the survivors and their descendants.”
If the Anti-Defamation League issued a statement, I didn’t see it. Ditto for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Zionist Organization of America, and other so-called “defense groups” that are usually quick to spot instances of Holocaust sacrilege.
I think it’s pretty clear, if not excusable, why Hagee’s remarks, or his previous attacks on the Catholic Church, did not rile the Jewish leadership.
First, Hagee’s eccentric eschatology brings him to a pro-Israel position. He heads Christians United for Israel and is passionate in raising support and money for the Jewish state. Yoffie has been nearly alone among Jewish leaders in asking if acceptance of Hagee’s friendship comes at too high a price — namely, a suspension of Jewish values and a tolerance for bigotry.
Second, Hagee’s theology may not be mainstream Judaism, but it is hardly unheard of for a rabbi, then or now, to suggest that God’s hand can be seen in the Shoa. Last week’s Torah portion was Behukotai. God promises that if the people of Israel keep the commandments, they will be blessed. This blessing is followed by a series of “curses,” read sotto voce, in which God warns of exile, persecution, and other punishments if Israel abandons God or the commandments.
Such passages have been invoked by rabbis who have declared that the Shoa was punishment for the Jews’ own sins — including, according to a fervently Orthodox, anti-Zionist (and decidedly un-Hagee-like) interpretation, the “sin” of settling in the Land before the “designated time.”
Perhaps today we prefer to treat Behukotai as metaphor and to insist that the blessing and curses describe a sort of human ecosystem. When we make “sustainable” choices — spiritually and socially healthy ones — the system is rewarded with prosperity, security, and justice. When a society devolves into unhealthy choices — selfishness, injustice, disregard for suffering — we bring about societal ruin, degradation, corruption.
That’s nice, and maybe even true, but it’s a very modern and liberal way to read the Bible. Hagee is from a tradition that takes the Scriptures at their word. It is with absolute certainty that he graphs historical incidents on the biblical template — a collection of promises that will culminate in Hagee’s vision of apocalypse and rapture centering around Israel and the return of its Jews.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Yoffie said that Hagee’s comments were “theologically offensive.” That’s only half right. Hagee’s comments were merely “offensive.” Outside any religion’s own authority, there is no such thing as “theologically offensive” when theology itself is irrefutable and indefensible by almost any standard of analytical thinking. If my reading of the Adam and Eve story leads me to establish an all-nude tabernacle, I may offend fellow Jews but I’ll probably earn a tax exemption. If I decide my prophet is a science fiction writer and my dogma tells me to ridicule conventional psychiatry, you might call me offensive — but the Church of Scientology would call me “brother.”
On the flip side, you don’t have to be religious to offer offensive ideas and interpretations of history. Still, Americans tend to be more forgiving of controversial remarks if they have standing in the Bible.
In recent years a number of pundits, mostly on the Right, have argued that Americans need more religious “vigor.” In the “clash of civilizations,” they argue, we must be as certain in our beliefs and values as the Islamists are in theirs. And such certainty must be rooted in the “faith of our fathers” if we are to avoid the trap of “moral equivalence.” At least one columnist felt President Bush’s Knesset speech, deeply steeped in religious language, could teach secular Israelis a thing or two about deep devotion to the aims of Zionism.
The assumption here is that religious certainty is a sign of strength, and secularism and pluralism are signs of weakness or drift. But there is also strength in a lack of certainty. Humility about one’s ideas and convictions makes it easier to listen to someone else’s ideas and possibly learn something new. Hagee’s sermon was offensive because his certainty led him to ignore how his own words might be heard by the victims and survivors who don’t share his theology — and how bad ideas, however well intended, can be used to justify worse actions.
If that’s what McCain found offensive, I’m glad he gave Hagee the boot.
