On Fridays, if all goes according to plan, I would like to try and respond to the comments my readers made during the week. Because of the sheer volume of responses I cannot address each one of them, let alone a fraction of them. But hopefully, you will soon trust that I am not avoiding tough questions and opposing viewpoints in an effort to ensure myself a restful weekend. A few other things to bear in mind:
1) I never write anything in the “comments” section under my name or any other.
2) Please recall that this is a blog, not a Heidelberg dissertation. The challenge consists of conveying reasonably complex ideas in the space of a few pithy paragraphs. If you would like to see me develop arguments with the depth and precision that befits scholarship, kindly consult my work published by academic presses and journals.
3) If at all possible, please resist the temptation to assume that I am shilling for this or that candidate. I will have more to say about my loyalties (and ambivalences) in due course. But before concluding that I am a member of the elite liberal media, or a cheerleader for Rudy Giuliani, or a paid member of Mitt Romney’s campaign staff, permit me to work my way through all of the leading presidential aspirants (Next week: Barack Obama).
To the comments. In terms of themes, I noticed that many respondents expressed frustration with the people known as “values voters.” I am more exasperated with the concept known as “values voters.” It strikes me as being incapable of accurately describing the facts on the ground.
In any case, THE MODERATE has some interesting things to say on this issue. We actually agree about one thing: the term “values voters” should not be taken to mean that such voters have a heightened or superior moral standing. “Values voters” is a value-neutral designation, a sociological designation. It describes a class of people who cluster around a set of issues which they, and/or the punditry. believe bespeak “values.” Whether their views on these issues are inherently more moral and value-laden than those of others is a question for an ethicist to probe.
Following in the flume of those exasperated by values voters, JANET and a few others expressed a desire to cobble together a mass movement of secularists and atheists. GARAK suggests that many liberal Jews and Christians would vote for a secularist. These commentators and others have drawn attention to one of the most important questions concerning American secularism today. And that question is: exactly how many secularists are there and how many votes can they deliver to a candidate who will pander to them? I have written about this elsewhere and I hope in the next few weeks to engage a question that is drenched in hyperbole and misinformation.
Last, DEBRA EICHENBAUM, Program Associate for the Commission on Interreligious Affairs for Reform Judaism submits a somewhat scathing comment. In her own words:
What exactly is Berlinerblau insinuating by classifying Reform Judaism as a “secularized religion”? Granted, Berlinerblau offers no definitive meaning, but to me I interpret such a statement to mean that he considers Reform Judaism a non-religion.
What did I mean by "secularized religion"? In the post which so upset Ms. Eichenbaum I suggested that readers consult previous posts (see in particular, “Rudy Giuliani: The Perfect Imperfect Catholic ”) so as to get a sense, “a definitive meaning,” of what I meant by this term. Too, I treat the question at length in a recent book.
I read my column over and over, trying to understand what could possibly have triggered such a response. Then it finally hit me that for Ms. Eichenbaum the term “secular” must be something like a four-letter word (Though how she concluded that I believed Reform Jews were a “community of atheists” or a "non-religion" is well beyond my powers of comprehension).
That a representative of a Reform Jewish organization would imbue the word “secular” with exactly the same connotations that the Moral Majority once attached to it is a pretty astonishing occurrence. I would urge Ms. Eichenbaum to abandon her Falwellian interpretation of the term and consider that “secular” may also connote virtues like a commitment to tolerance, a respect for Church/State boundaries, a privileging of the aesthetic dimensions of the human psyche, a sort of faith, if you will, in the capacities of human rationality and reason, and a willingness to be critical of one’s own cherished assumptions.
It may or may not gladden Ms. Eichenbaum to learn that I found all of these virtues in abundance among the Reform Jewish rabbinical students of Hebrew-Union College whom I had the honor of teaching a few years back.
Jacques Berlinerblau is the Rabbi Harold White Chair in Jewish Civilization in Georgetown's Walsh School of Foreign Service and senior advisor to the Center for Jewish Civilization, where he was director from 2006 to June 2020. Berlinerblau has published on a wide variety of issues ranging from the sociology of heresy and modern Jewish intellectuals to African-American and Jewish-American relations.
