Jewish Experience and the DOMA Decision: Religious Right Reaches Its Cheeseburger Moment

Exodus 23:19, 34:26, Deuteronomy 14:21

Speaking from the standpoint of the historic experience of the Jewish community, Neil Steinberg provides some unsolicited advice to right-wing evangelicals and Catholics who are angry that they've (as they imagine) lost control of American culture with the DOMA ruling. As he points out, the bible is very clear about the immorality of mixing milk and meat, but Jews have never tried to force McDonald's to stop selling cheeseburgers.

Do As I Say, Not As I Do: Debates about Kosher and the Limits of Paternalism in Making of Religious Meaning

With my recent focus on the aftermath of the California Supreme Court decision about prop 8, I don’t want to lose sight of a valuable article that updates a previous discussion on this blog. In a number of previous postings (here and here), I looked at a fascinating discussion now underway in American Judaism, following the raids at the Agriprocessor meat-processing plant in Postville, Iowa, in May 2008.

As those postings note, the plant at which immigrant workers were rounded up by federal officials processed kosher meats, in conformity to Jewish dietary laws. Following the federal raid, questions arose about the labor practices of the plant’s owners and managers. There were allegations that those working under rabbinic supervision at Postville included children, and that laborers were physically abused and forced to work 17-hour shifts six days a week.

These revelations gave rise to a discussion in American Jewish communities about what kosher can possibly mean, when food that is declared ritually pure is produced in circumstances that violate a religious tradition’s ethical norms regarding just treatment of workers. As Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld noted in a New York Times op-ed discussion of the issues last August, when ritual action is done by a ritual authority figure whose behavior undercuts the ethical tenets of his or her religious tradition, the significance of the ritual action is itself undermined. One may ask, in light of what came out following the Postville raid, whether one can really kosher meat when one treats any human being as tripe.

Other Jewish thinkers commenting on the revelations about the Postville plant called for the creation of a set of “social justice criteria” to accompany the koshering of food, so that food stamped as kosher would also receive a stamp of approval verifying that it was produced under ethically tenable working conditions.

Several days ago at Religion Dispatches, Benjamin Weiner offered a summary of this discussion, as it now stands. Weiner notes that while some ultra-orthodox believers have rejected criticism of the labor practices at Postville’s Agriprocessor plant as a “blood libel” against a pious family, other Jewish communities have continued the discussion of what kosher can mean, when a kosher food producer contravenes ethical teachings about the treatment of workers.

As Weiner indicates, some groups are now proposing that food declared kosher would receive a seal that simultaneously declares it to have been produced under fair labor conditions: heksher tzedek, a phrase that combines the terms "kashrut seal of approval", and "righteousness." Other groups are proposing the development of what is called a Tav HaYosher—an "ethical seal" that would supplement the kosher designation, assuring that the food which is declared kosher was also produced in circumstances that do not violate norms of ethical treatment of workers.

As Weiner notes,

The ancient rabbis taught that since the destruction of the Temple a Jew's own table is his or her sacred altar, and should be subject to the same degree of sanctity. Kashrut is not meant to be a system of arbitrary food taboos, but a discipline that elevates the human drive to eat above the kind of desecrations Agriprocessors may have committed.

And this observation captures why this Jewish argument should be of significance to Christians, I would argue. Christianity shares with (and borrows from) Judaism the sense that table practice has sacred significance: that a home’s table is its altar, and that when a family gathers around the table for a meal, it does so not only to eat, but to pray and give thanks, as well.

This understanding of the “secular” table of families is built into Christianity through Jesus’s own constant emphasis in the gospel stories on table fellowship with outcasts. Again and again, Jesus chose to share his meals with those pushed to the fringes of his society, those not welcome at the tables of the righteous and the “normal” or normative.

The Christian practice of Eucharist or Lord’s Supper incorporates these themes, reminding Christians every time they gather to worship that breaking bread with others in the ritual action of communion obligates us as well to share the bread of daily life with others—particularly with the dispossessed and marginalized—in our workaday lives. For Christianity—if we read the gospels aright—there is no separation between the ritual action of church and the “secular” action of breaking bread together at the family dinner table. We cannot claim to be celebrating the Lord’s Supper faithfully if our behavior at the other, everyday tables at which we sit to share food violates all that is implied in ritual communion.

I am especially taken with the argument that the very designation of a food as kosher implies that it is not merely ritually pure, but also produced in ethically defensible circumstances. One of the most significant developments in the world of religious thought during the modern and postmodern periods has been the recognition that ethics is not somewhere over there, as we determine the meaning of religious beliefs. It is part and parcel of what religion and the beliefs of a religion mean.

Prior to modernity, various religious groups established the “truth” of their religious teachings entirely apart from any consideration of the ethical behavior that lay behind those “truths,” and often without serious consideration of the ethical implications of the “truths” under consideration. With modernity and its turn to the subject in philosophical thought, the divorce of systematic theology from ethics became insupportable.

We now recognize that what a religious teaching does—what it does to real-life human beings, in their everyday lives—is part and parcel of what it means. It is no longer possible to talk about the meaning of religious ideas without examining what those ideas do to people—without examining their ethical effect on people.

This is a turn that has long been resisted by authoritarian and literalist religious traditions, including the current leaders of the Catholic church, as they continue the battle against modernity even as we enter the postmodern period. The reason for that resistance is obvious: as long as we can determine the meaning of religious ideas from some center of authority, without attending carefully to the ethical significance of those ideas—and, above all, to the ethical behavior (or lack thereof) of those occupying a community's center of authority—we do not have to look at the connection between what we proclaim and what we do and live.

But once it becomes clear that what we proclaim is inherently connected to what we do and what we live, the question of establishing authentic meaning (“truth”) in religious communities becomes much more challenging. And at the same time, far more like what the founding figures of religious traditions, like Jesus and Moses, usually envisaged as they set their communities of faith into motion . . . .

Newman and Jägerstätter, Kosher Ethics and Hurricane Fay: Ruminations on the News

John Henry Newman Exhumation Story

I’ve blogged several times about the plans underway to exhume the body of the 19th-century theologian and Catholic cardinal John Henry Newman (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/08/update-on-churches-of-main-street-usa.html,
http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/07/men-who-rule-us-collusion-of-male.html, http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/07/flying-saints-and-anglicans-crossing.html). As my previous postings note, since Newman has been declared blessed by Rome (a preliminary to canonization, the step at which a blessed becomes a saint), the Vatican has announced plans to move Newman’s body from its resting place in a small cemetery in Rednal, England, to a shrine in Birmingham.

As I’ve also noted, the ostensible reason the Vatican is giving for this move is to allow the faithful to venerate Newman more readily than they can do at the present burial site—where Newman shares a grave, at his explicit end-of-life request, with his lifelong companion Ambrose St. John. I’ve also discussed the protest of gay activist Peter Tatchell, who views Newman’s exhumation as “an act of religious desecration and moral vandalism.”

The story continues. This past week, National Catholic Reporter published an outstanding overview of the story, including the question of Newman’s sexual orientation and relationship to St. John—Dennis Coday’s “Moving Cardinal Newman’s Body Runs into Controversy” (http://ncronline3.org/drupal/?q=node/1663). Coday’s article notes that the London paper Church Times has an online poll in which readers can vote regarding whether they approve or disapprove of the removal of Newman’s body. The poll is at www.churchtimes.co.uk/previousQuestions.asp?id=222.

Last I checked, the vote was 80% against the exhumation of Newman’s body and his separation from St. John, and 20% in favor. And how this whole thing feels to me? Frankly, as though churches that can’t do enough to make the lives of gay folks hell on earth won’t even leave us alone in death!

There. I’ve said it. And am happy to have that off my chest.

Newman Story in Light of Story of Franz Jägerstätter

As I reflected recently on the story of what the church wants to do with the resting place of Newman and St. John, it occurred to me that there’s an interesting parallel case that, to my mind, represents the disparity between how the churches treat gay relationships and gay human beings, and how they treat straight relationships and straight persons. This has to do with the Austrian martyr Franz Jägerstätter.

Jägerstätter was an Austrian layman who refused conscription into the Nazi army, and was executed for this refusal. He defied the pressure of priest and bishop to enter the army; these pastoral counselors told him that Christians have a solemn duty to obey the dictates of the state. Jägerstätter insisted that Catholic teaching stresses the inviolability of one’s sacred conscience, which one must follow even if church authorities tell one to do otherwise. He was executed because of his defiance of the Nazi regime.

Last October, Pope Benedict declared Franz Jägerstätter blessed. Insofar as I know, Jägerstätter is still buried in his parish cemetery, in a simple grave that is not marked with any conspicuous signs. If I am not mistaken, his elderly widow Franziska still lives, and is to be buried beside him in the rural parish cemetery.

My source for this information is a moving account by Jesuit writer John Dear in National Catholic Reporter of a pilgrimage he made to Jägerstätter’s grave in the 1970s (www.fatherjohndear.org/NCR_Articles/Feb6_07.html). Dear notes that no signs mark the way to the shrine, and that Jäggerstätter is buried in an humble grave outside the chapel in which he attended Mass, his grave marked by a simple crucifix.

And so it should be, in my opinion. And so it should remain—Franz Jägerstätter buried with his wife and family beside him in the simple churchyard where he attended church, to remind us that sanctity is accessible to all of us, is the call of every one of us, who achieve sainthood as he did, by living our “ordinary” lives in the light of the gospel. I would be appalled, frankly, if the church should choose in future to move Jägerstätter from his current burial site, and to separate him from his wife.

With churches, I’ve learned, anything is possible, no matter how outlandish and how obviously cruel to some folks’ eyes. It will be interesting to see if there will be any pressure in future to move Jägerstätter from his current burial site. If not, one cannot help concluding that the churches employ a cruel double standard, when it comes to how they treat gay persons and our relationships.

Discussion of Kosher Ethics

I blogged some time ago about how the federal raids on the kosher meat processing plant in Postville, Iowa (raids that led to the deportation of a large number of Mexican and Central American workers) have resulted in a discussion of the ethics of declaring food kosher (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/08/what-god-has-declared-clean-kosher.html). In my previous posting on this topic, I linked to an op-ed article by Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld, who quotes 19th-century Rabbi Yisroel Salanter, who is believed to have refused to certify a matzo factory as kosher because its workers were being treated unjustly.

I noted my own interest in this discussion: is ritual truly effective (in the literal sense of that word: it effects, it accomplishes) when circumstances in which the ritual is celebrated undercut the fundamental ethical proclamations of the religion mounting the ritual? I’ve noted on this blog that where I find myself vis-à-vis my own church, the Catholic church, and its central ritual, the Eucharist, is a position of alienation.

I am alienated—I cannot participate in the Eucharist—precisely because I believe in the Eucharist. I believe in what it means. I believe that communion in the sacred, ritual sense must be mirrored by the intent to effect communion within the body of Christ, or the ritual contradicts what it proclaims at the most fundamental level.

For me, as a gay person who has been hounded out of a livelihood and career—out of daily bread—by church officials who never have to question where their daily bread will come from, the disparity between how the church behaves and what it proclaims has become too stark to support. I simply can’t stomach that disparity by participating. My very presence at Eucharistic celebrations would be, I feel, a confirmation of the emptiness that surrounds the Eucharistic proclamation, until the church examines the radical injustices it is doing in the name of a clerical system based on power over others who are dominated by clerics. And until those of us at the receiving end of the clerical lash receive a mere apology.

As I have also noted, my gay believer’s experience at the Lord’s Table has not really been any different in some other churches—notably the Methodist church, with which I have had close contact due to my work in two United Methodist colleges. Though, as an alienated Catholic doing administrative work in Methodist institutions, I felt for some time a strong sense of welcome and communion within the Methodist context, that communion ended decisively when I knelt one Sunday at the communion rail beside a Methodist university president who, the following day, told me she/he wished me gone from the campus, and two days later, out of the blue, terminated me in the ugliest way possible.

One cannot believe in Communion when members of the body of Christ grossly violate the most fundamental principles of communion. I have now seen what the “welcome” offered me by the Methodist church really means. The total absence of any protest or pastoral outreach by the Methodist bishop and ministers sitting on the governing board of this university shows me how they regard me as a gay human being, and what that church’s open door slogan really means for me and my kind.

How can someone kneel beside a brother or sister in the Lord on Sunday, intending all the while to do a grave injustice to that same person on Monday—to deny him his daily bread, knowing full well that one’s reasons for doing so are vicious—how can one engage in this behavior, and mean what Communion is all about? My thinking about this issue has long been decisively shaped by German Lutheran martyr-theologian Dietrich Bonhöffer, who notes,

In the Eucharist . . . we receive not only Christ, the Head of the Body, but its members as well. . . . Wherever there is suffering in the body, wherever members of it are in want or oppressed, we, because we have received the same body and are part of it, must be directly involved. We cannot properly receive the Bread of Life without sharing bread for life with those in want.

When Christian institutions deny employment to people unjustly—in the cases I am addressing, solely because those people are gay—they radically undercut all they proclaim about the Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion. The current pope echoes Bonhöffer’s analysis of Communion and communion when he notes,

The consequence is clear: we cannot communicate with the Lord if we do not communicate with one another . . . . Fellowship in the Body of Christ and receiving the Body of Christ means fellowship with one another. This of its very nature includes mutual acceptance, giving and receiving on both sides, and readiness to share one's goods . . . In this sense, the social question is given quite a central place in the theological heart of the concept of communion.

All this as a preliminary to noticing another story about the fascinating discussion now going on in the American Jewish community following the Postville raids. Last week, Julia Preston reported in a New York Times article entitled “Rabbis Debate Kosher Ethics at Meat Plant” that a debate about the meaning of kosher regulations is now underway among rabbis (www.nytimes.com/2008/08/23/us/23kosher.html?scp=4&sq=kosher&st=cse).

To be specific: while some rabbis are urging the creation of a set of “social justice criteria” to accompany the koshering of food, others resist the proposal to add to the criteria by which food is koshered considerations about the social ethics of the food plant in which food is declared kosher.

This debate mirrors, in a theological context different from the Christian one, the discussion I have highlighted above. Is it possible for church or synagogue to keep engaging in ritual actions whose fundamental significance is belied by the behavior of those mounting the actions?

For me—and, I suspect, for many alienated believers—these are real questions, and profound ones. If communities of faith expect to be taken seriously when they call us to worship, they need to reflect much more seriously about the ways in which the lives of the members of the worshiping community either proclaim the message imparted in worship and ritual action, or impede that message.

And they need to listen to those of us who have been seriously hurt by communities of faith, and who can easily point to the areas in which the message is definitively broken by the behavior of the bearers of the message.

The Weather and God’s Wrath

This is another have-to-get-it-off-my-chest item. Following the California Supreme Court’s decision to legitimate gay marriage, not only blogs, but the mainstream media buzzed for weeks with stories about the “unprecedented” lighting strikes in California and the fires those lightning strikes caused.

The subtext was clear, and was particularly gross, when it appeared in “unbiased” “secular” media statements from places like the AP: God is hurling lightning bolts on Californicators because of their recognition of gay marriage. “Christian” blogs, of course, made the subtext very clear, as they jubilated about the wildfires even as the red states of the heartland were being inundated by unprecedented floods.
And now along comes Fay. And soaks Florida. Another red state, one in which a lesbian not too long ago was denied access to visiting her partner as the partner died, while hospital workers told her that she was in an anti-gay state with anti-gay laws and had better just accept it.

And news reports are noting that Fay’s constant twisting and turning around the peninsula of Florida, and its drenching rains, are highly unusual and unprecedented events. But never a peep of that ugly subtext of God’s wrath raining down on Florida.

Double standard? Indeed. This selective use of the weather to underscore God’s wrath has been going on a long time among the religious right. It’s really time for it to stop, and for the AP and other “unbiased” “mainstream” media outlets to stop taking talking points from people who not only predict monsoons as punishments for areas that try to be merely humane to gay folks, but who actually crow when any weather disaster occurs in a state they have targeted.

To say that such behavior is unbecoming among people of faith would be a gross understatement. Might be better, in this age of capricious weather when God seems to send rain on the righteous and unrighteous alike, to stop claiming that you can call down God’s wrath in the form of bad weather on anyone at all.

What God Has Declared Clean: Kosher Ritual and Kosher Labor Practice

Home now from the funeral. I know Steve must be far tireder than I am—which is to say, very tired. Travel is more purgatorial as one ages, and traveling in a time of bereavement doubly so. We had the ill luck to be seated beside avid talkers everywhere we found ourselves—in the Minneapolis airport, where we had a long layover, and on both flights.

What is it with folks who seem to think that everyone around them needs to benefit from their (often inane) conversations, when it’s perfectly possible to pitch one’s voice so that the person beside you can hear it, while the entire plane doesn’t? The maddening drivel we heard on the flight from Minneapolis to Little Rock—a young woman who managed somehow to get her bare feet propped onto the wall of the plane next to her, while droning at top volume to the woman next to her, using the word “like” every second statement: it just about did me in. A holy person would have been springing souls from purgatory right and left by accepting the suffering; me, I fumed and fretted and shot the woman futile looks of reproach totally wasted on someone who may never even have been taught to moderate her voice and to keep her feet off walls.

Interesting observation in what I was reading on the plane (when not fuming, fretting, and shooting withering looks)—P.D. James on the lack of theological conversation accessible to interested laypersons today:

Theology like other professions has its own obscurantism. The problem is surely that theology should impinge on the lives of ordinary non-theologians if it is to have influence. Surely it can sometimes be written in language the intelligent lay man or woman can understand (Time to Be in Earnest [New York: Knopf, 2000], p. 175).

P.D. James is exactly right, and that’s one reason I keep blogging here, even when doing so seems like an uphill battle. Far too much theology is written in abstruse code designed to baffle and conceal. Theologians today are often flatly afraid to write plainly—particularly in the Catholic church, but in other communions as well, where the push has been very strong in recent years to rein in critical discourse and discipline those who want to think across the boundaries.

In graduate school, I was advised never to write so that “ordinary” people could understand what I wrote as a theologian. It would get me fired.

And so it happened: my mentors were absolutely right. It’s when theologians make theological ideas accessible to the “masses,” when we write as if everyday churchgoers have something invested in the process of doing theology, as if theological ideas ought to be the common coinage of the entire people of God and not only of a trained elite class: it’s when we do that, that we get into trouble.

And not merely with church authorities, who certainly have a vested interest in controlling what we write and censoring our speech, but also with the powerful interest groups that fund the academic institutions that house theology as an academic discipline. The real pressure actually comes from the captains of industry and the right-wing political leaders who increasingly seek to control the governing boards of church-affiliated colleges and universities. They do not want theological discourse accessible to the laity, because they fear what “ordinary” people might do, armed with careful reflection on scripture and its implications for everyday life—including how we view the treatment of workers, our exploitative economic systems, and the rapacious approach to the environment that drives those systems.

Of course, I have also been a sitting duck for those movers and shakers of the academy, due to my “lifestyle”: a gay theologian trying to involve layfolks in theological conversations . . . a rather easy target for those who have manifold underhanded ways of controlling the decisions made by college presidents, behind the scenes.

And yet, if someone doesn’t risk struggling to make these conversations inclusive, what’s going to happen to the churches? It’s absurdly arrogant for theologians to think that our specialized discourse is the only possible, and the only important, theological discourse going on in communities of faith, anyway. Not only would breaching the walls that separate theologians from layfolks benefit the laity: it would cross-fertilize an academic theology which, in its intent to befuddle and avoid plain truth, all too often ends up becoming merely preciously jejune—altogether beside the point.

+ + + + +

Speaking of theology designed to reach people where we live, move, and have our being, the New York Times today carries a great op-ed piece by Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld entitled “Dark Meat” (www.nytimes.com/2008/08/06/opinion/06herzfeld.html). Rabbi Herzfeld is commenting on the raid that occurred last May at the Postville, Iowa, Agriprocessors, Inc., meat-processing plant.

I’ve followed news of that raid and its aftermath with interest, and with shame for our nation and how it uses and abuses immigrant workers. Almost 400 illegal workers from Mexico and Central America were rounded up and deported. Many of them could not speak English and had difficulty understanding or responding to charges against them. Families were separated due to the raid. In many cases, these were families that had been living in Postville for years, their children attending the local schools.

Following the Postville raid, it came out that labor conditions at the Postville plant—which processes kosher meat under rabbinic supervision—were less than desirable. As Rabbi Herzfeld notes, children under 13 were working on the kill floor, and teens were working 17-hour shifts six days a week. An affidavit filed in the U.S. District Court of Northern Iowa to challenge the abuse of labor regulations alleges that a rabbi supervising the processing of meat at the plant, to assure the meat is kosher, physically abused a laborer on the kill floor.

Rabbi Herzfeld’s theological take on this story is fascinating—and is a reflection from which Christians can learn a great deal. He indicates that if the allegation that the rabbi did abuse a worker is true, “this calls into question the reliability and judgment of the rabbi in charge of making sure the food was kosher.” As Rabbi Herzfeld notes, a highly regarded 19th-century rabbi, Yisroel Salanter, “is famously believed to have refused to certify a matzo factory as kosher on the grounds that the workers were being treated unfairly.”

This is an interesting argument. It proposes that ritual action done by ritual authority figures whose behavior otherwise undercuts the fundamental ethical tenets of their religious tradition may be ritual action whose sacred significance is void of meaning. You cannot kosher meat when you treat any human being as tripe.

The ramifications of this argument for the Catholic tradition are mind-boggling: priests who persistently abuse the people of God—either through egregious unpastoral behavior or through sexual abuse—may be totally undercutting the sacred meaning of every Eucharist they celebrate, unless they admit and atone for their abusive behavior. If Rabbi Salanter’s argument is correct, then it is impossible to divorce what happens at the altar from what we do the rest of the week: when our celebration of the Lord’s Supper has no lived connection to how we embody Jesus throughout the week, then we may be engaging in empty celebrations every Sunday.

This is not to return to the theological controversies of the Donatist period, in which some Christians argued that priests that had handed over the sacred vessels or sacred books to authorities persecuting the church had lost the ability to function as valid celebrants of the sacraments. This is not to suggest that the validity of sacraments depends on the personal worthiness (or lack thereof) of the priest celebrating the sacraments.

But it is to note that ritual divorced from lived experience runs the risk of being empty ritual, when the lived experience contradicts in utterly plain ways the most fundamental ethical affirmations of the religious tradition in which the ritual celebration occurs. When the church permits priests to engage in persistently and grossly abusive behavior—in the extreme, when it tacitly permits sexual abuse of minors—and does nothing about this, but even hides (and rewards) the behavior, while protecting the abuser—the church makes it impossible for some of us to continue gathering for Eucharistic celebration.

We cannot gather to celebrate the Lord’s Supper because the gap between what we see around us everyday and what we see on the altar is simply too great, too stark. It is our very belief in the sacredness of our central religious symbols that makes us unable to stomach ritual for ritual’s sake—to stomach continued church attendance, as if nothing is wrong, when everything is wrong at the most fundamental level possible.

The ultimate effect of the clerical system in the churches—with its implied claim that some Christians have the right to dominate others, and that straight males have a higher human value than do women and gay folks—is to call into question all communion celebrations in the churches. How can we celebrate communion when our lives absolutely deny what communion means, in our daily practice of the Christian life?

Until the clerical system is addressed—and until the bogus claim that straight males have an ontological status superseding all other ontologies is addressed forthrightly and with sincere repentance by the churches—the churches will continue to be in very serious trouble, when they try to convince the world of the message of God’s salvific love for all. After all, what God has declared clean cannot be unclean (Acts 10:15)—even when the “unclean” one is an illegal immigrant working to kosher meat under exploitative labor conditions about which she cannot complain, because of her lack of legal immigration status.