In last Tuesday’s newsletter, we linked to Michael A. Helfand’s legal analysis of Louisiana’s new law mandating that the Ten Commandments appear in public-school classrooms, the First Amendment issues it raises, and the new approach to these issues arising from recent Supreme Court decisions. Now, Helfand looks at how Orthodox Jews ought to see this shift in constitutional thought. He does so by examining a 1976 sermon, titled “Can We Afford a Praying President?,” delivered by Norman Lamm, one of the great American rabbis of the day:

In that sermon, . . . he argued that the Jewish community’s reluctance flowed from an “uneasiness . . . at the religious expressions of Governor Carter.” As typical, Rabbi Lamm pulled no punches. “I suspect it lies in a dogmatic, doctrinaire secularism that is the dominant attitude in the Jewish community, and that cringes at the prospect that one who is, or seems, deeply religious will become president of this country, even if he is firmly committed to pluralism.”

Lamm believed such an approach was deeply misguided. Referencing the Watergate scandal, Rabbi Lamm contended: “Something has got to be done to restore the integrity of the office of the presidency. The presidency, as we have heard time and again, is the most powerful office on earth. It cannot hurt to entrust the vast powers of this heady office to someone who knows that he is not God.”

It turns out Jews were right to mistrust Jimmy Carter, albeit for different reasons. And by the same token, Lamm seems to have been right to accept Carter’s piety:

Rabbi Lamm laid out—albeit briefly—his vision for separation of church and state in America, which began with the Founding Fathers.

Rabbi Lamm outlined a constitutional approach that may very well track the Supreme Court’s new approach to the First Amendment. Prayers in public school cannot be so sectarian so as to prefer one religious denomination over another. And no child in public school should ever be put in a position where he or she feels coerced to participate in prayer. . . . Put differently, Rabbi Lamm envisioned an America that embraced religion without embracing a religion—and that made room for religion without imposing religion.

Stephen Daisley writes about the slaying of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim:

Yaron and Sarah were murdered in a climate of lies and vilification and hatred. . . . The more institutions participate in this collective madness, the more madness there will be. The more elected officials and NGOs misrepresent the predictable consequences of asymmetric warfare in densely populated territories, where much of the infrastructure of everyday life has a dual civilian/terrorist purpose, the more the citizenries of North America and Europe will come to regard Israelis and Jews as a people who lust unquenchably after blood.

The most intolerant anti-Zionism is becoming a mainstream view, indulged by liberal societies, more concerned with not conflating irrational hatred of Israel with irrational hatred of Jews—as though the distinction between the two is all that well defined anymore.

For years now, and especially after the October 7 massacre, the call has gone up from the pro-Palestinian movement to put Palestine at the heart of Western politics. To pursue the struggle against Zionism in every country, on every platform, and in every setting. To wage worldwide resistance to Israel, not only in Wadi al-Far’a but in Washington, DC. “Globalize the intifada,” they chanted. This is what it looks like.