Taking Obama To Shul
I’m very belatedly getting around to discussing the whole Obama-goes-to-a-racialist-church-whose-pastor-is-pals-with-Farakkan-and-why-won’t-he-denounce-him-Jeepers-maybe-he’s-a-secret-Muslim-I-should-vote-Hillary-or-McCain-because-they-are-better-for-the-Jews thingy. You know what that whole business made me think of? My first Rosh Hashanah as an undergraduate.
I went to the Conservative service on campus. And my roommate, who was from Missouri, and didn’t know much about Judaism (though he’d grown up in an academic household in Columbia, so he’d certainly met Jews), decided he’d come along, to learn something.
The rabbi gave a rather gassy sermon, the theme of which was that Judaism revolved around four key themes: the Jewish God, the Jewish law, the Jewish land, and the Jewish people. And he divided Jewish history into four periods based on the relative centrality of each theme.
First, we had the era of the Jewish God: the period of revelation and prophecy, and of the Temple service.
With the rise of rabbinic Judaism in the late Second Temple period, and particularly after the destruction of the Temple and the second exile, we had the era of Jewish law: the codification of the Mishnah and the Talmud, and the spiritual regulation of everyday life.
Nearly two thousand years later, with the rise of Zionism, began the third era: the era of the Jewish land, focused on establishing Jewish territorial sovereignty and securing a physical home that could be defended by Jewish arms.
Apparently, this era was a very short era, because the rabbi was prepared to declare it over, ushering in the fourth era: the era of the Jewish people. What, precisely, this era consisted of he was rather vague about, but it was one part “putting people first” and two parts ethnic solidarity. You know, we’re all brothers, we’re responsible for each other, we have to celebrate our diversity but never forget that we’re all in this together, blah blah blah.
Now, this speech struck me as extremely banal, the kind of thing I’d heard dozens of times before. Well: that was not the way it struck my roommate. We walked out of shul together, and he said, “I can’t believe the racist sermon the rabbi gave.”
Racist?
Basically, from his perspective, what the rabbi said was: Jews need to look after the Jews first, and look after each other because they’re fellow Jews, and the Jewish religion is substantially about racial solidarity and exclusion, and that this is not some residue of the past – it’s what Judaism especially is today!
So we had a long talk, and I tried to establish the context in which the rabbi’s sermon is properly embedded, and about the peculiar nature of Judaism (a religion that is bound to a people that is not precisely a nation). But I noticed, as we talked, that there were only two ways the conversation could reasonably go: I could be defensive and apologetic and try to convince him that Jews should be forgiven our bizarre ethnocentric religion because we can’t help it and don’t mean any harm; or I could convince him that Judaism made sense in its own terms, and, effectively, “witness” to him about my faith in a way that a Christian spreading the evangel might. And, you know, I really didn’t want to do either thing – and honestly, neither was what he wanted to hear anyway. He wanted to make sense of what he’d heard from some neutral standpoint that was neither affirming nor condescending. And we both kind of concluded that this wasn’t possible.
I thought about this in the context of Obama’s own “rabbi” because, as I’m not the first to point out, there are some points of contact between the African-American and the Jewish experience, most particularly the experience of coming from a people that is not precisely a nation. And I think it’s striking that so many Jews, aware of their own peculiarity in this regard and of this parallel, have gone out of their way to be uncharitable in their understanding of why Obama might associate with a chuch of the sort he chose.
Last Shavuot, at our tikkun, the theme of our study and discussion was Jewish chosenness. And the rabbi who led the discussion began by handing out two quotes. The first quote was from Jerry Falwell, and it related to the eternal damnation of those Jews who do not accept Jesus as the Christ and their personal savior. He asked the group whether this quote was bigoted or racist. (I said no, but most of the participants said yes.) Then he handed out the second quote, which said that Jews were not the same species as human beings – human beings were created creatures, with souls created by God, whereas Jewish souls derived from God and were not really created. This quote came from the Chabad Lubavitch website. Again, the rabbi asked: is this quote bigoted or racist? And thr crowd hemmed and hawed, some saying yes and some saying no, not really, and some saying, in effect, that you have to make allowances for what the Jews went through when you hear something like this, and so forth.
The rabbi then gave us his opinion: that the quote from Chabad was much worse than the quote from Jerry Falwell, because while Falwell was denying the validity of Judaism, and condemning us to hellfire, he was not saying Jews were in any way inherently distinct from other human beings, whereas the Chabad position was “spiritual racism” and truly abhorrent. He did, in other words, what I think Obama’s critics on this point would like to see him do with respect to the Reverend Wright.
But I objected to this conclusion. And I made the following analogy: imagine two political systems. In one case, the sovereign is a single individual, a hereditary ruler of a longstanding dynasty who has theoretically absolute power, unlimited by a written constitution. In the other case, the sovereign is the people, and the written constitution explicitly grants a variety of freedoms and total social equality; moreover, the heads of state have included several individuals of modest birth, attesting to the fact that anyone could rise to the top. Which regime would you prefer to live under: the first, or the second? What if I told you that the first regime is that obtaining in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, while the second is that which obtained in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics? The point being: you can’t tell what is an oppressive system simply by looking at a few cherry-picked beliefs or tenets; you need to know more.
I hasten to add that I do not believe that Jews are distinct from other human beings, having a fundamentally different soul, not being created by God, or any of that – nor are these mainstream Jewish beliefs. But neither do I believe that I am obliged, to remain a member in good standing of polite society, to cast Chabad into the outer darkness and refuse to associate with them. Nor do I believe that Senator Obama is obliged to denounce his pastor. I believe the bar should be set really high for these kinds of defenestrations, and that the important thing to discern is not whether you believe the right thing, but whether you do the right thing.
The single biggest difference between Noah and Obama is this: Noah was born into Judaism, and he was raised in and around Jewish religon and culture. If now, as an adult, he finds there are aspects of his religion or heritage that make him uncomfortable, he can try to overlook them while continuing to embrace what he loves.
Barack Obama was not born into the church he belongs to. On the contrary, he SOUGHT it out, and seems to have embraced it largely BECAUSE of its ethnocentric message.
Most religions, even the most admirable ones, come with some unattractive baggage. Most of us who are religious acknowledge that privately, even as we defend our faiths passionately in public, and slam any outsider who points out that baggage.
In the case of Obama’s church, what’s off-putting is not a few minor issues or a few troubling implications. It’s the essence of the church’s message.
Am I asserting that Barack Obama is a racist? No- but I do think that, as a biracial child who felt like an outsider in the white family that raised him, Obama made a conscious decision to try to become “black.” I think he came to idealize blackness. And instead of forming his own definition of what an African-American should be, he looked to militant Afrocentrists as the only “true” blacks.
It’s as if an adopted child found out as a teenager that his birth mother was Irish, and decided to join the IRA, since they’re the only “authentic” Irish in his mind.
— astorian · Feb 1, 11:27 PM · #
I have to admit that astorian’s suggestions above are among the more bizarre I’ve read to date about Obama. Soooo, on the one hand, for most traditional black nationalists Obama is a sellout precisely because he seeks to find an identity and a politics that isn’t defined in ultimate terms by racial ancestry. On the other hand, he is now somehow idolizing the very Afrocentrists who find him wanting, and he feels somehow like a poor lost motherless child? This strikes me as pop psychology run amok. My general sense is it’s not Obama’s racial attitudes that are unbalanced here.
— Peter Kerry Powers · Feb 2, 01:22 AM · #
“I believe the bar should be set really high for these kinds of defenestrations, and that the important thing to discern is not whether you believe the right thing, but whether you do the right thing.”
how very jewish of you noah to have that opinion ;-) this is of course a hard sell for some confessional protestants. in any case, there is a tension in this country between the assertion that universalism and pluralism can somehow coexist. a little more frankness would be good, but i’m not holding my breath….
— razib · Feb 2, 03:14 AM · #
My suggestion seems “bizarre” only because very few people have taken any time or trouble to read what Obama himself has said!
From his own book: “I was young and stupid back then, and maybe not quite right in the head. These days, I’m not into black racialism and anti-middleclassness. After black voters broke my heart by rejecting me in 2000, I came to accept that I’m half white and all middle class. And I’m not lonely anymore, so I’m not so hung up on why Daddy and Mommy didn’t want to be around me, which means I’m no longer such a sucker for father figures like Rev. Wright.”
Obama pretty much ADMITS that my simplistic pop psychology was on the mark! And I don’t really hold that against him. He was looking for a new identity, and he sought out a militant church because he thought that was a shortcut to finding it. That doesn’t make him evil- it makes him a mixed up young man who turned in some odd directions while trying to find himself.
But many white people perceive him as a man who transcends race, who has found his own identity that makes old-fashioned black/white distinctions archaic. They’re sorely mistaken. Race was and is VERY important to Obama, and his choice of churches reflects that.
Meanwhile, many black Americans were slow to take to him because he’s a Harvard grad, an intellectual who talks and dresses too “white” to feel like “one of them.” I don’t think they perceive just how badly he WANTS to be be like one of them, or how hard he’s tried to do so.
Ask yourself, why would a middle class boy who’d been raised by a white family immerse himself in black nationalism? Why would such a boy seek out an Afrocentric church?
A man who’s transcended race doesn’t do that. A man who WANTS to be black, but doesn’t know exactly how to accomplish that, does.
— astorian · Feb 2, 06:05 AM · #
I guess reading Obama’s words you quote above sends me in a different direction. You’re argument is about Obama in the present. Obama himself suggests that this was a matter of the past, though not the ancient past. Indeed, as we find our way in to maturity, we often pop psychologize our own identities. But in what you cite above Obama explicitly asserts he came to understand the shallowness of these kinds of efforts to discover a reassuring sense of identity based in biology.
My read of your post is that despite this, Obama is self-decieved. Or worse, he’s trying to deceive us. The evil black nationalist lurks within ready to spring out with bared teeth on unsuspecting and innocent white people. Ummm…Ok.
As to why Obama chooses to go to the church he goes to, I think identifying Obama’s own beliefs and values with everything that comes from a specific minister suggests an overly simplified understanding of the life of churches. I’ve never been in a church where everyone agreed about everything, or where I agreed with even half of what the minister said on Sunday morning. Going to particular churches involves complex and intuitive negotiations about the role of a church in your community, the people you are with and wanting to serve throughout the course of the week, the style of worship, the comfort of the building, who your friends are, what the music is like, and on and on. Obama’s developing disagreements with specifics of his minister’s understanding of what it meant to be black might or might not be a sufficient reason to leave a church. That would depend a great deal on how those views impinged upon the rest of Obama’s participation in and service in the church itself.
It also might be that Obama discovered that race is ascribed to people in our society much more than it is a matter of simple choice. You seem to assume that because he was raised around white people, obama would naturally want to remain among white people in his choices of religion. Any number of sociological studies show this is not the case for biracial children, or for children adopted outside their race once they enter late adolescence. In part this is because regardless of the culture they have been raised in, they are treated as “black” by the encompassing white society and have to grapple with what it means to be “black” regardless of their individual cultural backgrounds. It is a typical thing, rather than an unusual thing, for non-white children raised in white suburban backgrounds to spend their college years and a good many years thereafter grappling with the question of what it means for them to have blackness ascribed to them in our society, regardless of the particularities of their family background or the specifics of their own desires.
No one, of course, asks why white young people choose to go to white churches that advocate politics and practices that reinforce white priviledge and dominance in our culture. See Emerson and Smith’s book, Divided by Faith. This is a version of the old question of why all the black people sit together at one table in the cafeteria. No one seems to ask why all the white people are sitting together at 99 tables in the cafeteria.
The difficulty of Obama’s position is that he is arguing that as a people we can choose to transcend race. I’m not so sure. The politics of the Democratic race so far have already demonstrated that his campaign will be racialized by white people even if he wants to work against that. How much more so will this be the case in a national campaign against a party that has shown it’s willingness to divide the electorate by race at every turn.
I wonder, if Obama was choosing now to go to a white church, would we be asking why Obama so desperately wanted to be white? Or would we say that a white person who goes to a black church somehow desperately wants to be black? Isn’t this kind of thinking a very simplistic form of racial determinism? That every choice we make is determined one way or another by our deep and atavistic need to reconcile ourselves to the imperatives of race. If I love opera or go to an Episcopal church, it must be because I’m white or want to be white. If I love jazz or go to my local AME Zion church, it must be because I’m black or want to be black. Really??? Does it take more than a forefinger’s depth of probing to see the poverty of this understanding of human motives, desires, histories, and interests?
— Peter Kerry Powers · Feb 2, 02:57 PM · #
I really don’t have anything more to say about Obama. All I want to say is that I didn’t make my initial post to slander him.
Will I vote for him? No, because I’m conservative Republican and I don’t share Obama’s positions on any of the important issues.
On the other hand, he’s definitely an interesting and compelling guy. MORE interesting, in both positive and negative ways, than his admirers know. I suspect his books are a lot like Allan Bloom’s; that is, loads of people buy them, skim through the parts that confirm what they already believe, and skip the truly original, important parts that might make them uncomfortable.
— astorian · Feb 2, 11:11 PM · #
I assume that the quote from Obama cited by astorian above is invented, the “I was young and stupid then. . .”
Am I wrong about this?
— scott · Feb 3, 01:59 AM · #
Senator Obama has said he does not entirely agree with his pastor’s points of view. He has also said he wants to work with all people. The quote above is more disturbing to me than the things I have heard him say personally because while he seems to be disavowing Rev. Wright harshly and in a way that would break trust he remains a member of the church Rev. Wright pastors. I think the point of the original post is that action speak louder than words and as long as Senator Obama walks the talk what he actually believes is of no consequence. Given this kind of logic we can let President Clinton off the hook for suggesting that the only reason an African-American would vote for Senator Obama is because he is black since he has worked for civil rights. But, we shouldn’t give the same president as much credit for being a supported of women’s rights since his personal behavior discredits his talk.
— Margaret · Feb 3, 01:59 PM · #
I’m still interested in the quote above, which I think was made up-or at least not in any edition of Obama’s book that I’ve ever seen.
— scott · Feb 3, 02:47 PM · #
It’s not an Obama quote – it’s from a piece about Obama. The author of the piece says, Obama might say these words by way of defending his choice of church. But he hasn’t, and I can’t imagine he would. Google the quote and you’ll find the original source. Astoria: is this an innocent case of misattribution, or are you trying to cause trouble?
— Noah Millman · Feb 3, 07:34 PM · #
I’m perplexed that so many conservatives are up in arms about Obama’s church and the oft repeated gotcha statement that “The Media would be up in arms if he attended a church that defends white culture.” Of course they would be. But that’s a fault of the media toeing of the SPLC party line, not of Obama’s church.
I do have trouble swallowing his membership in a church which so forcefully promotes and defends particularity in light of Obama’s favored “beyond race” rhetoric. Both ideas can’t both be too firmly rooted in the same man’s heart. Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s anything in Obama’s record that points aways from his greatest fidelity being to a rational, benevolent, centralized state. Exactly the kind that finds particular culture and local autonomy inimical.
— Anthony King · Feb 4, 12:32 AM · #
I’ve been to the TUCC website and read what they have to say about themselves there (which is most of what most people who aren’t actually members or neighbors of theirs know about them) and frankly, I haven’t found anything there that gives me a moment’s pause about Obama and his fitness for higher public office.
I’m not sure how different the world would have to look to me for that not to be true.
— Robert · Feb 4, 06:38 PM · #
Mr. Millman: I was not trying to cause trouble, but clearly I did so anyway.
As you suspected, I linked to what I thought was a quote from Obama, but which was merely a blogger’s slanted take on what Obama had written.
I was stupid and irresponsible to print that as if it were a genuine quote. I apologize to you, without any reservations. If I could apologize to Mr. Obama, I would do so.
— astorian · Feb 5, 12:48 AM · #
Astorian: apology accepted!
— Noah Millman · Feb 5, 03:16 AM · #