Proclaim Liberty… the Supreme Court Got it Wrong (May 9, 2014, Parashat Behar)
Our Torah portion this week from Leviticus 25:10 teaches, “Proclaim liberty throughout the land, to all its inhabitants.” — “Ukratem d’ror ba’aretz, l’chol yoshveha.” These were the words inscribed on the Old State House Bell in Philadelphia, later named the Liberty Bell. It rang on July 8, 1776 to celebrate the Declaration of Independence, and it continued to ring for every anniversary of the Declaration until 1835, when the bell broke when being rung for the funeral of the Chief Justice of the United States, John Marshall.
The Bell broke again this week, albeit figuratively, when the current Chief Justice joined the majority 5-4 in a ruling permitting highly Christian religious language to prevail in the Town of Greece v. Galloway, where all the justices in America’s minority religion were in the minority. The court ruled that sectarian, coercive, faith-infused language can continue in Greece, NY under the guise that we are a prayerful nation with a long, historic tradition of legislative prayer. We had a long tradition of slavery and denying civil and voting rights to minorities and women, but thankfully those traditions were able to be overturned by government leaders more sensitive to the rights of the minority.
So, in response to this egregious ruling, I have written a prayer of my own:
Dear God,
I feel excluded and disenfranchised by the ruling of our Supreme Court’s majority this week, and offended by journalists like George Will who called those who objected to exclusively Christian prayers filled with faith messages and exclusivity as “prickly plaintiffs,” who needed to be more congenial and less offended.
Longer than America has been a nation, has the Jew been excluded from the public sphere, religiously and communally, from feudal Christian Europe to our time as dhimmis under Islamic rule. We have spent most of our 5774 years excluded from government and society, dwelling in a world where our citizenship was denied, just because we practiced our faith, while the majority practiced theirs, sanctioned by their governments, leaders, judges and courts. For many years, we were even excluded from the courts of nations we lived in.
God of Liberty,
When Christian justices rule that prayers including a request for all to pray to a Savior that is not ours, and a resurrection that is not in our Torah, are part of America’s national tradition of public, governmental prayer envisioned by our Founders, they exclude me as a faithful American Jew and rock the foundations of the separation of church and state to its very core.
God of Moses Seixas (pronounced “Sayshes”) and George Washington, two men cited by the exceptional minority opinion written by Justice Kagan,
I want an America true to the values of 1790, Rhode Island, where the Jews of the Touro Synagogue and the President of the United States, George Washington, declared that our new government is and would be, “a Government, which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance, – but generously affording All (with a capital “A”) liberty of conscience, and immunities of Citizenship; deeming every one of whatever Nation, tongue, or language, equal parts of the great governmental Machine.”
God of Joshua and Jefferson, Abraham and Alito, Kohein and Kagan,
A public prayer in a US government setting or public place, including our courts and schools, our town halls and polling places, should never be allowed if it crosses the line of civility and respect of All by invoking religiously laden precepts of faith, dogma and doctrine, not held by all Americans, even if it is held by the majority of all present.
Creator of All – from babies to bigots, the minority who is hurt by this opinion, and the majority who has perpetrated the hurt,
It is no one’s right to put one citizen’s religion over another, or to compromise the equality of one in a minority religion or one with no religion at all, by exclusively inviting members of one religious persuasion or faith into a government chamber to put forth an exclusionary religious message in prayer. Help me find a way, God, to forgive the injustice of those who have been appointed to be just.
Eternal and Infinite One,
As long as I am praying tonight, I would like to pray for a few more things: I want Your name removed from our Pledge of Allegiance, as it was when it was originally written, for it was only added in the 1950’s to attack communist atheism and ideology, not to honor you. I pray for an end to high school baccalaureate services, which infuse religious overtones into graduations that should remain secular and safe for all students, no matter their beliefs or practices.
We remember, all too well, the pre-Nazi schools of Austria that asked Jewish students to leave class so that Christian students could pray. And we know too well that the distance between leaving classes and leaving homes and lives became indistinguishable once we had been deemed “the other.”
God of my Childhood,
I remember the little girl who was so happy to be included in the school chorus, but was told that she needed to sing every word of the Battle Hymn of the Republic (“in the beauty of the lilies Christ was born to make men free”) and all the words of every religious Christmas song, or she would have to leave the chorus.
God of the Court’s Majority Justices,
You know that prayer conducted under government auspices is not a mere ceremonial traditional as those justices ruled. When we gather to pray to You, it matters. Our words and our ceremonies that invoke Your name matter to us. That is why we gather here, in Your sanctuary, where we can use language venerated by our tradition and filled with meaning. Prayer is not insignificant and it is not universal. Prayer is personal and powerful, profound and passionate. Prayer should never be coercive or meaningless, ceremonial or majority driven. What is said and to Whom, and by whom, and for whom … matters.
All nine justices believe that legislative prayer is constitutional and an American tradition. Part of me wishes that were not the case… the part that wishes there would be no national Christmas tree. So, when I do agree to give a prayer when called upon in a governmental setting, I strive to live my values, American and Jewish, to be inclusive and faithful to the spirit such a prayer should invoke.
I pray with all of my heart that the fight to purge parochial religious prayer and language from the courts and congresses, city halls and study halls continues despite this unfortunate ruling. For, until liberty from coercive religious messages is proclaimed throughout our land to all of our inhabitants thereof, there is no liberty.