MY QUARREL WITH FUNDAMENTALISTS – OF ALL FAITHS

Intellectual enlightenment, if not common courtesy and social grace, has taught us to be tolerant of viewpoints other than our own. “We will agree to disagree.” “I respect your right to disagree.” “Honorable people can honorably disagree.” Our vernacular is brimming with clichés of tolerance.

Some of us actually come to cherish – not merely tolerate – diversity, pluralism, and honorable, respectful disagreement. Some of us come to understand that “truth,” particularly God’s unfathomable truth, compels us to be like blind men trying to surmise the appearance of an elephant by touching only one of its parts. Trunk and tail feel so different that we are led to profoundly differing conclusions. Yet, we are compelled to remain open to the broader reality that both are simply separate elements of the same organic whole.

“Compelled,” you say? Well, maybe not “compelled.” The inclination to be open to a vision of God and God’s ways that transcends our finite grasp of “The Truth” is fragile and certainly not a foregone conclusion. And why not? Show me someone who does not like to be right. Show me someone who does not take a moment’s private – or even public – delight in being exclusively right.

The capacity to be inclusive, to be open to a variety of paths that lead to the same Divine Truth, to cherish diversity . . . these are not inbred human traits. They are behaviors we must learn from loving parents and venerable mentors, and they come only with our conscious determination to sublimate the impulse to exclude people and ideas that are unlike our own.

I should have figured it long ago, but I am just now coming to fully grasp the profound asymmetry in attempting to promote diverse perspectives and dialogue with fundamentalists and fundamentalism. The recent back-and-forth about abortion that graced these pages is a pristine case in point:

We proposed an alternate way of interpreting Biblical texts, rooted in a venerated ancient tradition that Jesus of Nazareth claimed as his own. It underscored the moral gravity of the decision to terminate a pregnancy, but left it in the realm of a situation-to-situation moral decision, not a categorical yea-or-nay.

Our purpose was to introduce a different perspective, the way that the Jewish tradition has concluded its operative truth from the portion of “the elephant” we have been privileged to feel. In no way, conscious or subliminal, was our motive to impugn the legitimacy of fundamentalist Christian belief. Alternative, not critique.

The asymmetry – call it intolerance or exclusivity, if you will – came in the barrage of responses determined to prove our perspective wrong. Dialogue, intellectual discourse, vigorous give-and-take, is all but impossible when one side welcomes diversity and the other asserts its exclusive claim to Ultimate Truth. And, as dialogue is thwarted, mutual respect and basic fairness will soon follow, so long as we keep arrogantly drawing lines between the saved and the damned, the included and the excluded, those who arrogate to themselves the role of God’s exclusive mouthpiece and those who humble themselves before God’s call.

Lest anyone think that my protest is simply a diatribe against fundamentalist Christianity, please know that this rabbi has the same feelings toward self-professed “Orthodox Jew” Dr. Laura Schlessinger, who wields the Jewish Bible as a tool of intolerance and smug self-righteousness as virulently as any tin-whistle demagogue. Unforgiving, bereft of compassion, unhumbled by her own less-than-pristine past, she picks and chooses Biblical passages not for guidance, but for confirmation of her own copious prejudices.

Juxtapose her and fundamentalists of all persuasions, though, to former President Jimmy Carter, who introduced to the world the term “born-again Christian.” Could anyone better exemplify the Christian piety that welcomes all of God’s diverse Creation into its loving arms?

No, claims of Jewish orthodoxy are no guarantee of a tolerant, inclusive demeanor. Nor does devout Christianity necessarily demand the arrogant damnation of people who reach God by feeling other parts of “the elephant.”

Will a day come when fellowship and lively debate revolve around the symmetry of mutual respect and honor of diversity? This is not in God’s hands, but ours. Yet, God does have a distinct prejudice in this matter. It is the Golden Rule. So taught Moses. So taught Jesus. So teaches, each in its own compelling way, every community of faith that blesses our earth.