The majority of American Jews have tended to favor a very strict interpretation of the principle of separation of church and state—often reacting with discomfort to politicians’ invocations of religion, opposing governmental support for religious institutions, and generally favoring what the Catholic thinker Richard John Neuhaus called the “naked public square.” In the 1960s and 70s, when such attitudes among U.S. Jewry were at their height, Norman Lamm, a leading Orthodox rabbi and scholar, took a sharply different view. As Michael A. Helfand explains, Rabbi Lamm’s objection to the “knee-jerk” and “Pavlovian” reactions of mainstream Jewish organizations to the question of vouchers for religious schools stemmed from a carefully articulated alternative approach to the role of religion in public life:

[I]n areas where he viewed separationist claims as more certain, Rabbi Lamm unequivocally did not endorse abandoning First Amendment principles. To the contrary, he was deeply sympathetic to the ways in which violations of core church-state principles caused real harm to American Jews. . . . In 1976, he declared again “I am for the separation of church and state. . . . I am not for denominational prayers. I am certainly not for coerced prayers in public schools.” For Lamm, the problem arose when leaders “speak of an ‘absolute wall of separation’ between church and state.” Adopting such an extreme view was to “ignore the evidence of history.”

But for Rabbi Lamm, the errors of the American Jewish establishment went beyond simply prioritizing “dubious” and “uncertain” constitutional claims above Jewish communal interests. Instead, his deepest worries flowed from the fact that the American Jewish establishment had transformed this absolute constitutional commitment—one he thought went beyond what the actual First Amendment required—and elevated it to a theology of sorts. In embracing a “separationist faith” Lamm believed these constitutional claims had come to replace other core Jewish values. In this way, Jewish advocacy, instead of augmenting traditional Jewish values, had come to crowd out those values. In turn, zealous dedication to misguided constitutional advocacy had come at the expense of the religious fervor necessary to maintain American Orthodoxy.

In [a 1963] sermon, Rabbi Lamm looked to Moses’ staff as a metaphor for the ways in which “religious institutions can sometimes be mistakenly used as psychological crutches rather than as means for the confrontation between man and his Maker; as something to lean upon rather than something to make us worthy of being leaned upon.” Again, Lamm appears to have applied this insight to, among other issues, ongoing advocacy around church and state—or at least what he described more generally as “loyalty to the First Amendment.”

As we mentioned in yesterday’s newsletter, Israeli special forces carried out a daring boots-on-the-ground raid on September 8 targeting the Scientific Studies and Research Center (SSRC) in northwestern Syria. The site was used for producing and storing missiles which are then transferred to Hizballah in Lebanon. Jonathan Spyer notes that the raid was accompanied by extensive airstrikes in Syira,and followed a few days later by extensive attacks on Hizballah in Lebanon, one of which killed Mohammad Qassem al-Shaer, a senior officer in the terrorist group’s Radwan force, an elite infantry group. And yesterday, the IDF destroyed a weapons depot, an observation post, and other Hizballah positions. Spyer puts these attacks in context:

The direct purpose of the raid, of course, was the destruction of the facilities and materials targeted. But Israel also appeared to be delivering a message to the Syrian regime that it should not imagine itself to be immune should it choose to continue its involvement with the Iran-led axis’s current campaign against Israel.

Similarly, the killing of al-Shaer indicated that Israel is no longer limiting its response to Hizballah attacks to the border area. Rather, Hizballah operatives in Israel’s crosshairs are now considered fair game wherever they may be located in Lebanon.

The SSRC raid and the killing of al-Shaer are unlikely to have been one-off events. Rather, they represent the systematic broadening of the parameters of the conflict in the north. Hizballah commenced the current round of fighting on October 8, in support of Hamas in Gaza. It has vowed to stop firing only when a ceasefire is reached in the south—a prospect which currently seems distant.