We posted about the first stirrings of disagreement with the resolution against the Iraq war presented at the annual conference of the Jewish Reform Denomination. That disagreement is boiling over.
[Republican Jewish Coalition] executive director Matthew Brooks, a member of the Reform Temple Rodef Shalom in Falls Church, said the URJ's resolution did not acknowledge that there were a number of Reform Jews who do not agree with it. . . . . Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism director Rabbi David Saperstein acknowledged that not every member of the movement would agree with the resolution, but said that the biennial assembly's delegates do "speak for the vast majority of Reform Jews."After seeing the RJC's full-page NYTimes ad, Saperstein wrote a "scathing" open letter to Brooks (which I have not been able to find a copy of). Brooks replied.
Now Reform Rabbi Marc Gellman - who writes an occasional column for Newsweek on spiritual matters - has weighed in.
Gellman lays out the humanitarian case for the war from a Jewish perspective (the connection to the Exodus seems blindingly obvious to me, but I never saw anyone but Joe Katzman make it):
The movement of which I am a member has just voted against a war that I support. This vote by the Union of Reform Judaism was the first vote by a major national Jewish organization or religious movement opposing the war in Iraq.Read the whole thing.This war was and is being fought for American reasons, not Jewish reasons. However, to see this war that toppled one of Israel's fiercest enemies—an anti-Semitic dictator who sent $25,000 to the families of every jihadist who had been able to kill and maim Israeli children and other innocents—opposed by Jews is more than an act of ingratitude to this country and this president. This vote was an act of stunning and incomprehensible historical blindness.
One argument raised in support of the antiwar resolution passed in Houston was that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11 and was thus an illegal and inappropriate military target. This putative fact is both debatable and irrelevant. The idea that unless we have a credit-card receipt showing that Saddam Hussein paid for Muhammad Atta's plane tickets to New York, he must be presumed to be an innocent in the war on terror is ludicrous. He was a trainer, a protector and a funder of terrorists around the world.
Yasher koach, Rabbi Gellman.
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