By Rabbi Michael Berk
The competition for the Catholic vote has intensified in the days since the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Vice-president Biden is appealing to a broad spectrum of Catholics as a fellow-Catholic, highlighting how his faith guides him. President Trump is appealing to those Catholics for whom abortion is their primary deciding issue, promising a Supreme Court nominee who is likely to oppose Roe v. Wade.
This courting of the Catholic vote highlights how deeply divided we are in America. Identity politics, on both sides of the political spectrum, tells us as much or more about many voters than political identification. For some, loyalty to their group or demographic leads to making decision about issues or candidates based on what’s good for their side.
One Jewish Trump supporter recently wrote, “There has never been a better friend of Israel and the Jewish community in the White House.” Evangelicals want conservative judges and are willing to support a man who is the antithesis of an Evangelical Christian but delivers the judges they want. A Catholic who will vote for Trump because of abortion was quoted in the New York Times recently as saying, “I care a lot more about what he does than what he believes.”
This reasoning raises a moral question: how does one weigh what’s good for one’s group against what’s good for the larger society. As Star Trek’s Mr. Spock famously framed the conundrum, it’s a competition between the “needs of the many” against the “needs of the few.”
Seeing the world in this way originates in an instinctive fear that there is not enough of what is necessary to survive. The result is xenophobia, when we project our fear onto others, with whom we are in competition for limited resources. Fear often turns into hatred.
When humans developed religion, this fear and hatred morphed into a theological tension. Every monotheistic faith believes that God selected them to be in a special relationship with God. The belief that God has picked a side means the diminution of the humanity of those God didn’t pick. This is not just a problem for religion, it is also manifest in racism, and in a distorted patriotism that denigrates other peoples and nations.
The Hebrew Bible provides profound insight into the tension between particularism vs. universalism. While the Hebrew Bible is quite biased in favor of the people God first picked to be His messengers, there is also an insistent universalistic theme which is essential to the Bible’s message. In navigating this tension, the Bible teaches us about what mature religion looks like, helping us live with the tension between loyalty to one’s group and obligations to all humanity.
Think about the Book of Job. One of the first things we learn about Job is that he is not a Jew. With that biographical fact, the Bible teaches us not to confine the source of our information solely to our own group/religion/gender/cable news network. The Bible uses a non-Israelite to teach wisdom. Wisdom can be learned from many sources, not just your own.
The Hebrew Bible begins with a majestic and poetic description of Creation. It is a universal perspective — the beginning of everything. In the beginning we read that human beings are created in the image of God.
What does it mean that humanity was created in God’s image? The Hebrew word for “image” is “tzelem.” A tzelem was an icon; an image of a god in pagan temples; a spiritual magnet that drew to it and captured some of the essence of that god. You knew the icon is not the god, but the god’s presence is there in it.
The Biblical story of the creation of humanity “in God’s image” is not the first time that the idea of “in the image of God” was applied to human beings. In Mesopotamia and Egypt they had this idea. But it was only the kings or the elite that were created “in god’s image.” The revolution of Genesis is that ALL people are made in the image of God.
After the initial universal chapters in the Bible, during which human failure follows human failure, God decides to choose one family, headed by Abraham and Sarah, to disseminate the idea that there is only one God. One nation is chosen; Israel. Israel belongs to God. They are called “The Children of God.” So, within the first book of the Bible you have both the most radical universal statement ever made in history, that we are all of equal worth and bear the image of God; as well as the particularistic idea that God chose one nation, Israel, as His favored people. Which is the real voice of God?
The Israeli philosopher, Micah Goodman, suggests that the resolution to this question is found in religion that has matured. He interprets these two messages as teaching that God is universal and Jewish tradition is particularistic. To resolve this tension, we can look at how the great 12th century philosopher and physician, Moses Maimonides treated slavery in the Bible.
Though we wish it were otherwise, the Bible allows for slavery. It knows of two kinds: the non-Israelite slave (most probably a captive of war) and an Israelite slave (someone who sold himself into slavery due to overwhelming debt). The Israelite slave was treated far better than a non-Israelite slave. To Maimonides, while Biblical law doesn’t require one to treat a non-Jewish slave the way one would a Jewish slave, the spirit of God’s laws DOES expect you to treat the two types of slaves with the compassion and high regard for human dignity that the law requires for the Jewish slave.
To Maimonides, the spirit of the law (“the attribute of piety and the way of wisdom”) is bigger than Jewish law. That spirit expects Jews to go beyond the law and strive to emulate God. Since we learn in Psalms 145:9 that God’s mercies are “upon ALL of His works,” that means that God’s mercy, and therefore, ours, extends to all of humanity. The more one becomes God-like, the more universal in your goodness and compassion one becomes.
It’s as if we monotheists have two relationships with God. We have our particular religious traditions, which inspire and build a loyalty to our faith and our co-religionists, while also expressing solidarity with our fellow Jews, Christians, or Moslems. This faith leads us to go beyond the requirements of our religion (derived from biblical laws and traditions) and imitate God. Being a Jew, Christian, or Muslim is supposed to mean being a devoted, “patriotic” member of your faith, and a universalist who is concerned about the well-being of all humanity. That’s mature religion.
No matter who you support, mature voters should consider not just what’s good for them, but what’s good for the nation, indeed, the world at large. A mature person understands what the Jewish sage Hillel meant when he taught, “If I am not for myself, who am I? And if I am only for myself, what am I?”
Michael Berk is Rabbi Emeritus of Congregation Beth Israel, the largest Jewish congregation in San Diego and the oldest in Southern California.