Jews and Rabbis in the United States Military today
"It's hard to get kosher food in the U.S. Marines"
From http://www.haaretz.com/
By Shlomo Shamir
Sun., November 14, 2004 Kislev 1, 5765

"Rabbi Irving Elson, a Jewish chaplain for the U.S. Marines, was on his way to lecture students in a rabbinical seminar in New York when he learned that a Jewish marines officer was among the casualties in the Fallujah battles.

Elson, a tall, mustached man in marines uniform, who recently returned from active service in Iraq, tried to persuade the rabbinical students to join the marines after their ordination. He believes that "every young Jewish man and woman ordained to be rabbis should aspire to serve in the U.S. Marines."

"Believe me, the challenge to serve in the armed forces in a spiritual capacity, administering to the religious needs of Jewish soldiers, is greater and much more fascinating than the role of a rabbi in a synagogue," he says.

Elson never met First Lieutenant Andrew K. Stern, who was killed in Iraq in September, but he did know four other Jewish marines who were killed in Iraq. There are no official figures of the number of Jewish soldiers killed since the invasion to Iraq. An American soldier's dog tag bears his name, personal number, blood type and religion, but in its official announcements, the army does not refer to their religion.

"There are American soldiers in Iraq who do not reveal their Jewish identity and there are Jewish soldiers who don't bother to contact the chaplain," an official in the Jewish Chaplains Council's office in New York says. This makes it difficult to document authoritatively data on Jewish soldiers who have been killed during the war in Iraq.

Some 37 military rabbis are in active service, 11 in the U.S. Air Force and seven in the U.S. Navy. Chaplain (Rabbi) Lieutenant Commander Irving Elson, 44, is completing his 18th year of service in the U.S. Marines.

He first served as military rabbi at the Okinawa marine base. Between 1992 and 1994, he was rabbi of the Sixth Fleet. "We visited Haifa several times," he says. In the first Gulf War, he was based on an aircraft carrier "far from the real action."

When the preparations for the invasion into Iraq began, he was attached to a marine artillery brigade that spearheaded the invasion. Elson estimates that 800 to 1,000 Jewish American soldiers are taking part in the war. His first term in Iraq lasted nine months. He was sent there again in August 2004, returning to his San Diego base in October.

There are some 400 Jews in the Marines Expeditionary Force. Elson describes his service during the High Holy Days with Jewish marines in Iraq as "a spiritual experience" that will stay with him for many years. He was stationed at the Marine base on the outskirts of Fallujah, from where he would take off on a jeep or helicopter to visit Jewish marines.

He "stretched" Rosh Hashanah out to five days "because I wanted to hold holiday prayers every place I knew there were Jewish marines," he says. He held Rosh Hashanah prayers, including shofar blowing, 17 times. "In one place near a battlefield, I blew the shofar for two Jewish marines," he says. On Yom Kippur, despite the terrible heat, Jewish marines fasted all day.

"I decided to enlist as a rabbi to the army instead of looking for a synagogue, because in the army, religion is devoid of politics," he says. "Among the Jewish soldiers, there is no distinction between Reform, Conservative and Orthodox. I never ask a soldier which stream he belongs to. Every Jew gets equal treatment in the army."

The only complaint Elson has against the military authorities is the chronic shortage of kosher food rations. A Chicago plant manufactures kosher combat rations, but for some reason they are hard to come by. Elson says 3,000 kosher combat rations are stored in a base in Kuwait and for bureaucratic reasons the army is delaying their distribution. Every package of 12 standard rations has two vegetarian rations, "and this is what I lived on for months during my service in Iraq," he says.

Elson, who was awarded the Meritorious Service Medal, is married and father of three, wears a knitted skullcap and speaks Hebrew he learned during his studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Elson says that many senior marine commanders admire the IDF. "When they hear that I'm a rabbi, they ask if I've visited Israel and compliment the IDF."

"Jewish marines ask me what will happen to them if they are killed in battle, or why was their friend, a decent, good guy, killed in battle?" says Elson.

Many of the marines are 18 and 19-year-old men, who are stationed out of the United States for the first time.

"A Jewish marine recently asked me if he may say kaddish [mourning prayer] over a gentile marine who was a close friend of his and who was killed. I told him he was permitted to express his grief any way he felt. But I recommended he say psalms," says Elson."

- posted by Izak @ 5:50 PM (0) comments

 
2004 US Election Results: Orthodox Jews in sync with the Republicans, and their liberal co-religionists feel left out...
Values War Splitting Jews:
Orthodox now closer than ever to epicenter of American politics, while liberals are ‘blue.’

From the New York Jewish Week (11/12/2004)
http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/newscontent.php3?artid=10125
By Steve Lipman - Staff Writer

From deep in the political wilderness, from the “bluest” fringe of America, Rabbi Michael Lerner this week saw the writing on the wall.

“We have a tough fight in front of us” to influence American politics while being outside of many positions of power, Rabbi Lerner, editor of the San Francisco-based Tikkun magazine http://www.tikkun.org/ , told The Jewish Week.

“Liberals,” he wrote in an e-mail to Tikkun subscribers this week, are “trapped in a long-standing disdain for religion” and “have been unable to engage [conservative] voters in a serious dialogue.”

The challenge for the left, he said in a phone interview, is to speak the language of morality but from a progressive perspective.

And from the opposite coast, this from a leading liberal: “I think some of those people [in her liberal circles] may feel depressed and angry, and some of them may feel marginalized,” said Ruth Messinger, president of American Jewish World Service and former Manhattan borough president.

But as the widest swath of American Jewry — the non-Orthodox — struggled to comprehend the dramatic realignment that now sees them on the losing end of the “moral values” debate, Orthodox community leaders were pleased with the re-election of President Bush.

The growing Orthodox community now finds itself closer to the epicenter of American politics, perhaps more in line than ever before with the conservative values of red-state America and with an administration that has a distinct, fundamentalist Christian flavor.

“Certainly there is a sense that the Orthodox community has not always received the respect and recognition within the Jewish world we feel we deserve,” said David Zwiebel, executive vice president for government and public affairs at Agudath Israel of America.

And this from conservative talk-show host Dennis Prager http://www.dennisprager.com/ : “Right now there’s a good feeling. I have felt less and less lonely since 9-11.”

While three in four American Jews stayed true to their Democratic roots and cast their votes for Sen. John Kerry, the fact that 22 percent of Americans in exit polls said “moral values” — not the war in Iraq or terrorism or the economy — was the issue that most drove their votes has turned the American Jewish landscape upside down. Eleven percent of Jewish voters listed “moral values” as their driving force, but Iraq was their top issue with 27 percent.

In this election season, in a major departure from communitywide Jewish voting patterns, “Religion is eclipsing ethnicity as a force in American politics,” New Republic editor Peter Beinart wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece just before the election.

Beinart explained that Jews, like Catholics and Protestants, increasingly make their electoral choices for ethical, not ethnic reasons, and soon “the Jewish vote, in a meaningful sense, will cease to exist.”

Exit polls suggested that 70 percent of Orthodox Jews voted for Bush.

“What this election showed is that there isn’t a [single and unified] Jewish community anymore,” said Rabbi Daniel Lapin, president of Toward Tradition, a Seattle-based organization that brings Jews and Christians together to lobby for political stances based on “Torah values.”

“It’s a major realignment,” Rabbi Lapin said, adding that membership applications to Toward Tradition http://www.towardtradition.org/ had increased dramatically since the election but offering no specifics. “We vote our values rather than our ethnic identity. Orthodox Jews, Jews who take Torah and tradition seriously, voted the same way that [conservative] Christians voted.”

“Traditional Jews, conservative Jews have far greater access to the [current] administration than we’ve ever had before, while the conventional centers of power in the Jewish community are feeling anxious about diminished access,” the rabbi said.

The network of non-Orthodox Jewish organizations, which represent the majority of American Jewry, are likely to find diminished access to lawmakers during a second Bush administration and little support for their positions on such issues as abortion and gay rights.

It’s too early to predict which Orthodox institutions and causes will benefit most during the next four years, observers cautioned. But such access could translate into financial support for Orthodox institutions and political support on such issues as vouchers and the stalled Religion in the Workplace Act.

On a national level, the Republican Party positioned itself as the spokesman for these values, as Orthodox organizations have largely done in Jewish circles.

“It’s clear that the Orthodox Jewish groups are going to be listened to,” said Marshall Breger, a law professor at the Catholic University in Washington and Jewish liaison in the Reagan White House.

Nathan Diament, the Orthodox Union’s http://ou.org/ director of public policy, asked the question, “Are we in the Orthodox community better positioned to work with the administration in public policy?”

His answer: “Yes.”

“The Republicans know that a majority of our community supported the president and they’ll hopefully be appreciative of that,” Diament said. “There are many community institutions that may benefit from having access.”

Rabbi Jerome Epstein, executive vice-president of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, said the amount of access he had in the Clinton administration “was significantly more than I have at the present time.”

“The people who have access clearly have a better chance of influencing” government policy, he said.

Observers disagreed over interpretations of the election results.

Are we seeing a political realignment of the Jewish community or a confirmation of recent trends, they asked. Will liberal leaders, Jews included, change their positions on some issues or simply adopt religious language to sell their old positions? Did Jewish votes for Kerry represent a repudiation of the campaign’s religious orientation or a reaffirmation of traditional Jewish values?

Rabbi Lerner said the continued Jewish preference for a Democratic presidential candidate was in line with the decades-old Jewish practice of putting ethics before economic self-interest.

“They believe in taking care of others as their highest interest,” part of Judaism’s prophetic tradition, Rabbi Lerner said. “The strong moral commitment of Jews to progressive politics … to ethical values … remains.”

However, a recent survey by the University of Akron’s fourth National Survey of Religion and Politics indicated that 67 percent of Jews are “uncomfortable when candidates discuss faith,” second only to atheists and agnostics at 72 percent. And most Democratic leaders, Rabbi Lerner said, have failed to embrace his “politics of meaning” that combines pragmatic politics with a transcendent philosophy.

That will be the theme of a Tikkun conference to be held here Feb. 4-6.

“In the right-wing churches and synagogues … voters are presented with a coherent worldview that speaks to their ‘meaning needs,’ ” Rabbi Lerner wrote in his e-mail.

“The liberal world has developed such a knee-jerk hostility to religion that it has both marginalized those many people on the left who actually do have spiritual yearnings and simultaneously refused to acknowledge that many who move to the right have legitimate complaints about the ethos of selfishness in American life.”

A choice faces liberal elements in American politics, both Jewish and general, who seek to reverse last week’s election losses — change their package or change their packaging?

The Democrats “have to find their core positions,” said Ed Koch, former New York mayor, a Democrat who supported Bush’s re-election. “They do it every time they’re beaten up” in an election.

“The challenge of the [non-Orthodox] community is to redefine its case both within the Jewish community and to the private sector,” said Steven Windmueller, a teacher at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles and author of a recently published book on Jewish political advocacy.

Rabbi Epstein said, “It would be disingenuous to change the package.

“I think everyone’s going to be arguing for morality,” he said. “They’re going to frame [the debate] in moral terms.”

His words reflected a growing sentiment in Christian circles.

“We need to work really hard at reclaiming some language,” said the Rev. Robert Edgar, general secretary of the liberal National Council of Churches. “The religious right has successfully gotten out there shaping piety issues, civil unions, abortion as almost the total content of ‘moral values.’ ”

The Rev. Carlton Veazey of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice said, “We have to go back and examine what we are saying, why it is not resonating. We don’t just cave in and say they’ve got a monopoly on morality.”

Such issues as abortion, stem cell research, Supreme Court nominations and civil liberties still energize the majority of U.S. Jews, non-Orthodox, who voted for Kerry.

“Seventy-five percent of the Jewish community sees itself as part of that constituency,” Windmueller said.

The election losses are “not going to stop people,” said Messinger, a lifelong Democrat who was trounced by Rudolph Giuliani in her run for mayor in 1996. “These people will continue to organize and speak out on issues. We have a great deal more to do.”

According to most polls, the overall Jewish vote for Bush was 20 to 25 percent. Polling indicated that older Jews tended to vote Democratic, Prager said, while “40 percent of young Jewish males voted Republican.”

“More and more young Jews are going to vote Republican as they feel more secure in America,” Prager said.

Many so-called “post 9-11” Americans turned conservative following the terrorist attacks on the United States, supporting the government’s war in Iraq and overall fight against terrorism.

“9-11 changed my life,” Prager said. “Jews are prepared to engage in the issue of good and evil much more than before.”

Part of the Jewish community’s slow drift to the GOP began with the election in 1980 of President Ronald Reagan, who was credited with energizing a generation of young conservatives. This continued with George W. Bush’s election.

“That’s already happened in the last four years,” Breger said. “It’s not going to be a cataclysmic change” during the next administration.

But, Breger said, the strengthened profile of Jewish Republicans will remain.

“There’s no doubt that now we have a two-party system in the Jewish community,” he said.

The Republican Jewish Coalition, which coordinates pro-GOP activities in the Jewish community, recently established local chapters in some 10 U.S. cities, Breger said, and the Bush campaign drew large numbers of Jewish volunteers.

“The infrastructure,” he said, “is very strong.”

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