I have a lot of respect for Rabbi Michael Moskowitz, but I think he wasn’t completely right this week when he said, “An attack on any synagogue is an attack on Jews and Judaism itself.” What he ought to have said is that it is also an attack on America, on our Constitution, and on real Americans of every flavor.
We don’t attack and demonize and murder and kill our fellow Americans who don’t look like us or speak other languages or have different religions. When we do, it defeats the whole purpose of America. I am well aware we haven’t always lived up to our ideals.
This nation’s original sin was slavery, a horrendous mistake, one we are still reaping the consequences of daily. Even before that, the European colonists treated the Native Americans so poorly it amounted to a form of de facto genocide. Following that, we discriminated against nearly every group that came to build a new life on these shores.
John F. Kennedy, possibly the closest thing to a natural aristocrat to occupy the White House in modern times, was only two generations removed from “no Irish need apply.”
The Ku Klux Klan attained great power in the north as well as the South in the 1920s, preaching messages of hate against Catholics and Jews as well as blacks. And yet we’ve always been better than that because our ideals and our founding principles were better.
We’ve had a black President now, and very nearly elected an Orthodox Jew vice president.
But tolerance ebbs and flows in this country, and we now seem to be in a particularly ugly and evil time. Some of this is due to uncertainty and stress. We live in a frightening world. Geography, the thing that saved our homeland from being devastated in either world war, no longer is any protection, as Americans found out on September 11, 2001.
However, what is most wrong is at the top. Presidents of the United States are supposed to be our leaders, to remind us of what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”
They are meant to be parental figures, in a way. We needed George W. Bush to reassure us on 9/11, just as we needed Franklin D. Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor, and Ronald Reagan to address the nation after the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded.
I opposed many of the second President Bush’s policies. Yet I am proud to note that within days of the 9/11 attacks, he delivered a major speech defending Muslims in America and around the world, calling Islam a religion of peace. President Bush noted that millions of American citizens were Muslims, and pointedly saying that “women who cover their heads on this country must feel comfortable going outside their homes.”
That’s what presidents are supposed to do. We don’t have that now; instead, we have an occupant of the Oval Office who seems more interested in dividing and attacking us.
He did a little better, belatedly, in a speech after Pittsburgh. But for two years, he has spoken as if it was fine to demonize those you disagree with, maybe even physically attack those who are not like us, an attitude that is totally un-American.
We are better than that. Our role model should be the head of the hospital where they took the Pennsylvania shooter after he was captured. That doctor led the medical team that treated Robert Bowers. He was, by the way, a Jew and a member of the synagogue he attacked.
Afterwards, Dr. Jeff Cohen said “my job isn’t to judge him, my job is to care for him.” That’s the kind of nobility, and leadership, we need in America today.
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