27 May 2020

Recently, the Interfaith Leaders of Greater Lafayette (ILGL) created a “Virtual Rally” in response to the distribution of KKK flyers in Battle Ground. The “Virtual Rally” raised up the voices of those who know that diversity is one of our community’s greatest strengths. 

While we were heartened by the response, the faith leaders of ILGL also recognize that many of our sisters and brothers are grieving. The disproportionate effect of COVID-19 on communities of color -and the recent murders of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, Breonna Taylor in Louisville, and George Floyd in Minneapolis- highlight and reinforce the on-going legacy of racism and white supremacy in our nation. When incidents of hate show up in our state or local community (such as the KKK flyers and a cross burning in Battle Ground or recent police shootings in Indianapolis), this grief can become overwhelming and justifiably turn to anger. Such events are an on-going sign that, as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King remarked in 1963, America’s promissory note of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” has come back marked “insufficient funds,” at least for many Americans. 

As faith leaders, we recognize the divine spark in each and every human being regardless of the categories that are too often used to divide us. More than that, we are committed to justice for all people. When we see our sisters and brothers grieve because of racial injustice, we recognize this as a sign of the world’s brokenness. As people of faith, we acknowledge in our own unique ways that the divine grieves with them, that creation longs for peace and justice, and that we are called to respond. 

In response, ILGL remains committed to the work of anti-racism within our community; to raise up the voices of peace, love, and justice; and to work together to make the world where all people can live in harmony. To this end, we call on people of every faith and all those of goodwill to speak out against bigotry and to educate themselves for anti-racist work (that is, the work of dismantling racist structures and institutions that pervade our society). We call on our political leaders and our local police departments to guarantee the safety of all members of our community by investigating, arresting, and convicting those who threaten or intimidate others and by developing rules of engagement that protect people of color. ILGL recommits ourselves to working with faith leaders, other community leaders, and people of goodwill to make Greater Lafayette greater still.  

Sincerely,

The Interfaith Leaders of Greater Lafayette

Dear Members of the Interfaith Leaders of Greater Lafayette,

In light of Governor Holcomb’s recently announced decision to allow houses of worship to hold worship services starting Friday without limitation, we offer the following Response:

The Mission Statement for ILGL reminds us that we are a coalition of leaders of religious institutions and organizations in greater Lafayette dedicated to dialogue, service, hope, and a shared vision for our local community. During these uncertain times, we all must wrestle with what our shared vision must be in order to keep members of our communities safe and healthy. 

The situation in our state of Indiana is a dire one, with COVID-19 cases rising and the numbers of infected truly unknown due to lack of testing.  We also know from experts, as well as experience from past American pandemics, that COVID-19 will come and go in waves, and that the future is, indeed, unknown.

Therefore, in response to the Governor’s decision, we give the following response:

While we appreciate the Governor’s appropriation of religious communities as “the most responsible” groups to fully open, we recognize that this level of responsibility does not and should not rest on the shoulders of individual faith leaders.  In our continued quest to preserve and protect the lives of our flocks, we rely upon our safety networks such as our governing bodies, hierarchies, boards of directors, and most importantly, the secular scientific evaluations of these kinds of risks.  These are matters of life and death, and no one faith leader should be fully responsible to make these difficult decisions alone. 

It is for these reasons that we strongly encourage all houses of worship, all congregations, of every size, their leaders and members, to refrain from in-person religious gatherings, including worship, for the foreseeable future.  We strongly encourage all our faith communities to begin or continue virtual worship, education, and pastoral care opportunities in place of gathering in person.  

Additionally, we wish to respond to the Governor’s statement in hoping faith communities will serve as a “test or control group” under his reopening plan. As faith leaders who spend our days caring for our flock, members of the human race who are flesh and blood, we do not see any reason to risk the lives of our members in order to test the outcome of gathering together.  While we appreciate placebo and control groups in experiments, possibly exposing our vulnerable members to a deadly virus is not a test in which we, as those who honor the value of human life, wish to participate, for it breaks the principle of treating others as we would have others treat us. 

It is our sincere hope that faith leaders and lay leaders within our community will put the safety and health of their congregants first, and continue to wait patiently for the day in which we can all safely embrace one another in the same holy spaces. 

In almost every religion, dating from ancient Egypt to modern times and spanning the globe across cultures, there is some form of what is often called the “golden rule.” This is also present in secular philosophy and ethics across cultures and history. It is articulated in the 1993 statement by the Parliament of the World’s Religions entitled “Declaration Toward a Global Ethic” which states, “We must treat others as we wish others to treat us.” We believe this is a universal principle that can extend to all faith communities. 

We believe that we are all responsible for one another and all have responsibility to keep each other safe just as we would want others to keep us safe. To that end, we implore faith communities to follow the advice of health care professionals about when to safely gather together as people of faith. 

The Interfaith Leaders of Greater Lafayette

At six months since the shooting at Tree of Life Synagogue, and on the final day of Passover, we, the Interfaith Leaders of Greater Lafayette are heartbroken to hear of another attack against Jews in the United States, this time at Congregation Chabad in Poway, California.  We mourn the death of Lori Kaye, and we pray for the recovery of Noya Dahan, a child of only 9 years old, Almog Peretz (34), and Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein (57).  This deadly and bloody hateful attack is yet another indication of the rise of White Supremacy in our country, when, for the first time in our nation’s history, Neo-Nazis, KKK members, and other hate groups feel validated and emboldened by those who serve in political leadership in our government. It is the hope of the ILGL that this incident, as well as the many other incidents that occur each day in our country, fuels a serious conversation about antisemitism and all forms of hate that are rising to the surface. 

Additionally, we cannot ignore the fact that this incident occurred with the use of an assault rifle, causing yet another active shooting incident in America, now the world’s capital of mass shootings.  It is the hope, as well, of ILGL, that this incident triggers a thoughtful conversation in our government about access of civilians to weapons of warfare.  The Jewish community in the Greater Lafayette area thank the outpouring of support and grief from neighbors, and look forward to future interfaith work to bring peace and positivity in our city. 

This Op Ed is co-authored by a Rabbi and Hebrew Bible Scholar and an ordained Christian Minister and New Testament Scholar. This week, among the tens of news alerts, one in particular caught our attention as a clergy and scholars. On Monday morning, President Donald Trump tweeted the following statement: “Numerous states introducing Bible Literacy classes, giving students the option of studying the Bible. Starting to make a turn back? Great!”

The president’s tweet was a response to a Fox & Friends segment where North Dakota Rep. Aaron McWilliams (R) discussed a bill he was co-sponsoring a bill to allow Bible classes in public schools. This bill, as it turns out, is not unique. The ACLU has reported that Florida, Indiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Alabama, Iowa, Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky have all introduced similar legislation and, in Kentucky and Tennessee, this legislation has passed. There has, unsurprisingly, been strong pushback to such bills, in particular because they blur the lines between Church and State. As Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, recently stated “State legislators should not be fooled that these bills are anything more than part of a scheme to impose Christian beliefs on public schoolchildren.” While we fully agree with Laser, and all others who warn about the challenges such bills represent to non-Christians in our public schools, as scholars our concerns also follow a different track.

Fair warning: this Op Ed will contain some very technical information. This is because both Christian and Jewish biblical studies is a very technical endeavor, and that is the crux of the problem with “biblical literacy.” The idea sounds simple, and to most legislators who may be unaware of the technical issues, it likely seems quite simple. However in practical implementation the many technical problems with “teaching the bible” make it a very difficult endeavor to implement fairly and in a balanced way in a public school setting. So this Op Ed will seek to highlight a number of logistical problems with such a seemingly straightforward endeavor, and will seek to demonstrate that such an undertaking will inevitably be one sided and will ultimately elevate one religious tradition above others.

The first question when one is presented with this kind of legislation is “Who’s Bible?” No doubt the initiatives listed above have the Christian, most likely the Protestant Christian, Bible in mind. However there is no one single bible (collection of sacred writings called a “canon”). Jews have a canon with the same collection of writings, or biblical “books” as what protestants have traditionally called the Old Testament, although the books are in a different order. Catholics have more books in their canon that include writings from the time between the Hebrew Bible and what Protestants call the New Testament writings. The Orthodox Christians (Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, etc.) also have a different canon than the Protestant and Catholic Christians. So in a public school, where all voices and traditions are equally important, who’s Bible will be taught? All this, not to mention the fact that other religious traditions such as Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, to name a few, have entirely different sets of sacred writings! Who’s sacred writings should be taught in a public school where all voices and traditions are equal? 

The next question is, “Which Bible?” What most people (and perhaps most legislators) do not know is that any modern translation of “the Bible” is based on a compilation of various ancient manuscripts. No one has the original writings of either the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament! What we have available to us today are copies of copies of copies (and so on) called manuscripts. The printing press had not been invented and to preserve deteriorating sacred writings they were hand copied by scribes who were subject to human error and engaged in intentional changes. Although the vast majority of these manuscripts agree with each other, there are also many differences. 

For example, when Jewish scholars read “the Bible,” meaning the Jewish canon, they read it in the original language, Hebrew. The manuscript they use is the Masoretic Text, which has been deemed the authoritative manuscript for Judaism. As mentioned above, the original text of the Hebrew Bible has never been found. Instead, between the 7^th and 10^th centuries CE, the Masoretes took many manuscripts, including the Ben Asher, and the Ben Naphtali scripts, and created an authoritative text. This manuscript, what we now call the “MT,” differs from the texts found at Qumran, as part of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It also differs from the manuscript that was used to translate the Bible into Greek, known as the Septuagint. Furthermore, it differs from the Aleppo Codex, the Peshitta, and the Samaritan Pentateuch, and it differs from the manuscript used by the rabbis of the 2^nd – 5^th centuries CE in the Mishnah and Talmud. What we as biblical scholars see when we read the MT, in other words, is just one perspective of the Hebrew.

New Testament scholarship has a similar issue. Because we do not have the original manuscripts of the New Testament, scholars sort through the plethora of currently existing manuscripts and compile what is most likely the original text. So, what does all of this mean? Those who translate both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament into English have made choices about what manuscripts they believe are most likely to represent the original writings. These choices are seen in the (more than just stylistic) variation among translations of both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.

This leads to a third question, “Which translation?” Once we have established the lack of consistency in the “original” biblical texts, we can and should move on to the problems in regard to translation. If you are a typical Jew, you read an English translation from the Hebrew, perhaps the translations by the Jewish Publication Society, Robert Alter, the Plaut Chumash, or the like. A Christian might read from the New Revised Standard Version or New International Version or another of the plethora of different English Translations available. All of these translations differ, as they should, because of the vast ambiguity of the original biblical languages, (Hebrew for the Jewish bible and Greek for the New Testament) and the problems of the scribal errors and indecipherable Hebrew phrases that exist in the MT and other manuscripts. You’ll notice, in all translations of the Bible, many footnotes that point you to the all-too-common phrase at the bottom, “Meaning of Hebrew uncertain,” or “meaning of Greek uncertain.” Anyone who has translated anything into another language knows that there are ambiguities, nuances, and double meanings that simply do not translate well. Translators make choices and these choices reflect a particular theological preference. 

Just in relation to the Hebrew Bible, one can imagine that the bills making their way through state legislatures aren’t actually advocating for students in public schools to read translations rooted in Jewish interpretive traditions. Rather, they are advocating for translations containing Christian interpretive traditions, which contain not only the New Testament, which is not authoritative for Jews, but the Christian translations of the Hebrew Bible through a Christian translation lens. In other words, if these bills pass and the “Bible” is taught in public schools, it will be taught through a Christian lens because the translation that they will be using is a Christian one. 

Hebrew and Greek, as stated above, contain many ambiguities, but translators do not. Rather, they frequently push their subconscious or conscious agendas on the reader by choosing meanings of words that fit their theologies. [BL1] Jews, Muslims, Atheists, Hindus, Buddhists, Bahai, and many others would be subjected to a very particular “Bible literacy,” meaning a Christian interpretation of the words of the Bible by Christian translators, with Christian theology packed into the choices of the words on the pages. 

Along these same lines, within Christianity, Christians would also be subjected to a particular theological interpretation. Although Jewish and Christian scholars typically read the original languages, when they do read the Bible in translation, they do so with several in front of them, including those that have been shown to be academic and those that have varying translations so as to see the differing theories behind verses. The goal, in this case, of reading and teaching the Bible, then, is to share the many interpretations of this document. This is not, however, what would be presented to the young minds in our public schools.

Which brings us to our final question: “Who is going to teach it?” Bible study is incredibly difficult; it takes years to master, and far too many “teachings” on the Bible come from unlearned men and women with particular agendas. Just as the translator shows his or her hand by choosing particular words, the teacher has the ability to share his or her interpretations to students, whether they be educated or not. Are these teachers going to be trained to teach the ambiguity and differing opinions about the Bible, or are they going to be reading lesson curriculums meant to teach literal understandings of the texts? We all know that the New Testament contains anti-Jewish sentiment, and the Hebrew Bible contains problematic and outdated laws which challenge our moral and ethical outlook today, such as the verses on slavery, homosexuality, marriage, the roles of women, and the like.

To that end, we should note that the world of reading the Bible is far greater than opening up the Kings James version, and these bills that are being introduced place our children in danger of learning skewed perspectives, ill-informed interpretations, and morals and ethics that are no longer relevant to 21^st century society. In our diverse world that thrives on science and logic, we can think of no greater threat to the learning of public-school children than a class on “Bible literacy.” In Indiana and throughout our country, we need to keep bibles where they belong: in our houses of worship.