For Marty Peretz's take on why Obama was correct in not repudiating Reverend Wright, click here. For a taste:
My relationship to the different rabbis whose sermons I have not just
heard, but heard intently over more than 50 years, would make a very
difficult narrative--not quite as difficult as a narrative about my
father and me, but up there. I now attend a synagogue in New York with
my children and my grandson. I love the synagogue; I do not love the
rabbis for I do not really know them personally. More to the point, I
do not love their sermons. Two years ago, Yom Kippur, the rabbi parsed
a banal speech by Bella Abzug, the old and (if truth be told) faithful
red mama, as if it were a sacred text. Feh. One of this congregation's
ingenuous innovations to the routine confessional of sins ("We lie. We
cheat ...") in the prayer book is the following: "We rush towards war
and crawl to peace." This is a lie! Why do I still pray with this
assembly? Because, aside from the offending "hip" politics of the
rabbis, there is an all-embracing warmth that suffuses the fold. There
is beautiful music. The service is almost all in Hebrew. Still, my
then-not-quite-four year-old grandson said to me on the way out, "I
have never felt closer to God." Dayenu, as we say on Passover: "It is sufficient." Or, as one of the songs of the tradition known to almost every Jew puts it, Hinay ma tov ... : "How good it is for brothers to sit together ...".
(Cross-posted at The Plank.)
--The Editors