There are two cases pending before the Supreme Court regarding the Ten Commandments. The first one (Van Orden) involves a six-foot high monument placed between the Texas State Capitol and the Texas Supreme Court.
The second case (
For those interested in the legal arguments, the briefs in the two cases (which were argued on March 2) are here. Jeffrey Rosen has an interesting analysis of the legal issues in this week’s
The eventual positions of the Justices are pretty predictable. The right wing of the Court will argue that God and the Bible were a fundamental influence on the formation of America and thus can be acknowledged by the government, as long as religious worship is not coerced.
The left wing of the Court will argue that the "wall" separating church and state cannot be breached by a governmental display that might be taken as an "endorsement" of religion, unless it is so minimal as to be inconsequential (such as the "God save this Court" that introduces each Court session).
And then Sandra Day O’Connor will decide the two cases, somewhere in the middle.
It is a measure of the uncertainty in the law that Rosen says that O’Connor may vote one way in one case and another way in the other case — but that he is unable to say which case will be which.
The nation is probably not in danger no matter which way the Court ultimately goes. The more interesting issue, for a blog focusing on current Jewish issues, is how the Jewish community became so associated with the left wing view on this issue — and developed an almost theological commitment to separation of church and state that in some ways exceeded the commitment to their own religion.
There is an interesting history behind that, and — like all interesting history — it may contain some lessons for the present.
Elliot Abrams, in "Judaism or Jewishness," recounted that history as follows:
For the Puritans, the
New World had provided the opportunity to practice their religion more freely than had the Old, and they saw themselves as the successors to the ancient Hebrews striking out into the wilderness.
For the descendants of those Hebrews, life in
America, far from reinforcing their religious practices, eroded them.
* * *
Some came for economic opportunity, some to escape the draft, and many to escape oppression, but they did not come to pray. And when they did come to
America for religious freedom, very often they were seeking the freedom to be irreligious.
* * *
[T]he German Jews arrived here when the goal of previous generations, government neutrality, was already ensconced in the Bill of Rights. They did not have to fight for toleration or legal rights, at least from the national government. They could raise their sights and ask for more: a society where religion played no public role.
For, as they became more and more American in their ways, religion alone was what separated them from their fellow citizens. To minimize this divisive factor seemed the safest path. . . .
Safety through secularism, integration rather than separatism, and life under the new sacred Law of the Constitution rather than the old Law of the Torah became the American Jewish ideology.
Jonathan Sarna, author of "American Judaism: A History," described the history this way in an essay entitled "On an Equal Footing:"
American Jews late in the nineteenth century abandoned their longstanding commitment to equal footing and forged a new alliance with advocates of strict church-state separation.
Only a complete divorce between government and religion, they came to believe, could prevent the kind of abuses that would otherwise transform
America into a bigoted Christian state. The "wall of separation between church and state" that Thomas Jefferson invoked in his famous 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists became Jews’ new rallying cry.
Midge Decter, in a 1995 essay entitled "A Jew in Anti-Christian America," argued that Jews should encourage religion in public life, or at least better understand the feelings of their neighbors who supported it, for American Jews are a:
people whose very existence depends on a mere stroke of luck — the luck of someone’s having immigrated to the
United States. Such people ought to be the first rather than the last to be found each day on their knees in gratitude to God. And such people ought to be the first rather than the last to understand the anxieties of the devout Christians — evangelicals, fundamentalists, orthodox Catholics and Protestants — about, precisely, the growing chaos in a country from whose public life religion has not so much disappeared but been banished.
Thus have the neoconservative Jews sought — so far, to put it mildly, with mixed success — to convince their mainstream fellow Jews that the growing political strength of Christian believers is not a danger to them, that, on the contrary, in the long run it will conduce far more to the security and well-being of their children and grandchildren.
Richard John Neuhaus, in "Anti-Semitism and Our Common Future" challenged the prevailing Jewish view of the beneficence of the absence of religion from the public square:
[M]any Jews have assumed that the more secularized America is, the safer it is for Jews. In this view, Jewish security and success has been achieved despite the fact that America is a predominantly Christian society.
This view, which is probably shared, at least intuitively, by a majority of Jews, is of relatively recent vintage. An alternative view is that Jews are secure and successful because this is a predominantly Christian society.
All too obviously, there have been predominantly Christian societies in which Jews have been anything but secure. But the argument is that Christianity in
America really is different, that it has internalized the imperatives of tolerance as a matter of religious duty, and that, more recently, it has come to see Judaism as an integral part of God’s purposes in history. . . . It would be a tragedy of historic proportions were the opportunities of this new circumstance to be wasted in politicized rantings against the public assertiveness of conservative Christians.
The essays excerpted above have been collected in "The Chosen People in an Almost Chosen Nation," edited by Richard John Neuhaus of First Things. The book — which also includes essays by Ruth Wisse ("Inculcating Humility"), Marc Gellman ("Shabbat Candles for Life") and Milton Himmelfarb ("Mordecai’s Hope"), among many others — is essential reading.