The secret recordings of Justice Samuel Alito that have received widespread attention center largely on his comments that it would be good for America to be more godly. I agree.
But the question is not whether it’s good for a nation to be more godly. The question is what you mean by “godly.” To some it means they know what God wants, and they want to impose their views on others.
Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer report in the New York Times that an “array of conservatives, including antiabortion activists, church leaders and conservative state legislators, has openly embraced the idea that American democracy needs to be grounded in Christian values and guarded against the rise of secular culture.” That means they want to impose their views on others by enshrining them into law.
The religious right has a notion of godliness that is manifest mostly in the negative: don’t do this, don’t do that. Abortion and same sex marriage, sexual morality and certain bioethical issues are primary agenda items that are about restrictions, shrinking America’s tolerance of differences. Also big on the agenda: school prayer and religious freedom (which means something different to the right than it does to me).
On the others side are people who take their religion just as seriously, but it leads them more towards expansion and inclusion than narrowness and exclusion. Here’s how Rabbi David Wolpe described this approach to religion:
“The essential task of religion in this world is to heal, to help, to repair what has been shattered. It is therefore a strange and painful irony that religion has often made the world worse, not better, and broken lives instead of mending them,” he writes in Why Faith Matters. “Religion’s record in history is mixed. No believer can fail to be shamed by the cruelties practiced in the name of God.”
The part of the Bible shared by Christians and Jews is the story of the development of the faith of the Israelites. But it is also contains a critique of religion itself. The authors of the Bible were aware of the dangers posed by religion. We know this by reading Jeremiah.
The prophet describes seeing observant, “godly” people going to the Temple in Jerusalem and performing the rituals and saying their prayers on the Sabbath. And then, after the Sabbath, they go about exploiting the poor and taking advantage of those who have been left behind by society.
Jeremiah tells the people they don’t understand their religion. Godliness is not measured by ritual observance, but by how you take care of the vulnerable in your midst — in biblical language, the stranger, the widow and the orphan. Only if you protect the unprotected are you truly godly. God’s favor is not won through ritual, even if God commanded the ritual; but rather through empathy. Empathy is cultivated by remembering the days when you were the stranger — vulnerable and unprotected by society.
The Bible emphasizes this by commanding 36 times to remember that the faithful were once powerless. That’s why Jews remember the story of their slavery in Egypt in almost every prayer, ritual and holiday observance — to learn empathy. Religion without empathy and compassion is an abomination to God. It is not godly.
It is this approach to religion, imbued with empathy and compassion, that led the Jewish rabbis to reinterpret some of the most disturbing passages in the Bible. The commandment “eye for eye” was never understood by the Jewish tradition as actually meaning what it appears to mean. Rather, it meant that if one takes out the eye of another, they must compensate that person for the value of that eye (which is calculated in much the way it is done today in modern personal injury law).
Likewise, while the text of the Bible permits slavery, the rabbis came to impose strong conditions on how an owner must treat his Israelite slave, ultimately extending the idea of treating slaves with decency (if such a thing is possible) to non-Jewish slaves.
If you use the Bible right, it’s like medicine; but if you use it wrong, it’s poison. The 13th century Spanish commentator known as Nachmanides said it is possible to be a scrupulous observer of the biblical commandments and still be a scoundrel. Alone, godliness doesn’t mean much; it’s what you do with your godliness that matters. Heinrich Himmler, who ran the Nazi death camps, required that “every SS man believe in God.”
Good religion is about developing modesty, not arrogance. It’s about fanning the warmth of love, not the flames of hate. It’s about recognizing that there are many paths to godliness — that is God’s gift to humanity. Good religion opens hearts; it doesn’t harden hearts. Good religion seeks to include, not exclude. Good religion knows when you should not blindly follow the word of God.
Michael Berk is Rabbi Emeritus of Congregation Beth Israel, the largest Jewish congregation in San Diego and the oldest in Southern California.
