Warren's Inclusive Invocation and Obama's Jewish Speech

The combination of Pastor Rick Warren's invocation and President Obama's inaugural address set the stage for a new kind of public religion in this country. It is both more inclusive and simultaneously proud of particularity than anything we may have seen before.

For starters, Rick Warren was introduced as Dr. Rick Warren, not Pastor. The latter was simply stated as his position at Saddleback church. To have clergy who can distinguish between their professional roles and their personal identities is already a quantum leap forward. It speaks to a modesty of which all clergy should avail ourselves. We are not our titles and would not treat all disagreements, theological and otherwise, as personal attacks if we remembered that more often. Making that distinction alone would bring a refreshing dose of calm and civility to public debates about faith. But Warren did much more that that.

By quoting from Deuteronomy 7's words, "Hear oh Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one", Warren used a text that is meaningful to a wide variety of believers, including Christians, Muslims, Jews, and many followers of so-called polytheist traditions which value oneness as much as do the monotheist faiths. More importantly, he used a text whose real teaching is that we listen. Instead of telling us what to believe, who will save us, or anything else, the words he quoted were Moses' command to the ancient Israelites that they be good listeners -- not proclaimers, converters, etc.

Oneness is not limited to any particular faith, or inaccessible to those who are proudly atheist or agnostic either. Listening for oneness is a powerful message which transcends creed, political affiliation, or our position on any given topic. In fact, Warren's use of that text might be a way of reminding himself and his followers that even if they have chosen a particular path to salvation, and even if they believe it to be the only way, theirs might not be the final word on the topic.

Tellingly, Pastor Warren, when he finally got around to mentioning Jesus (by his Hebrew, Arabic and Greek/English names), described him as "the one who changed my life and taught us to pray". He did not call on Jesus as the one who changes all of our lives, or the one who should do so. He simply shared the facts of his own spiritual journey and the role which Jesus played for him in that journey.

Warren expressed pride and joy in what he believes while choosing words that made it clear that no one else was expected to share that journey with him. And I challenge any person of any faith, including no faith at all, to tell me that we can not all learn about prayer from the poetic words of a document which only some of us consider to be the word of God. That is game-changing rhetoric and should be welcomed by all of us. And President Obama kept pace perfectly.

President Obama's inaugural address moved me for many reasons, including how Jewish it was. There was no Hebrew (had to listen to Rick Warren for that), nothing about Israel, and no pleas on behalf of the Jewish people. There was nothing that was uniquely Jewish about it. It would have been odd if there had been. But his basic approach to addressing this moment in our nation's history, was deeply, if not uniquely, Jewish.

Like Pastor Warren, the President's method borrowed a page from Moses' playbook, otherwise known as the Book of Deuteronomy. Like Moses before him, he reminded a new generation that we have much to accomplish and can do so precisely because we stand on the shoulders of ancestors who, while not perfect, achieved so much.

President Obama invoked both our collective past and our desire for a better future as he called on Americans to usher in "a new era of responsibility". He reminded us that we must confront the challenges we now face as a nation with both a dream of how the future could be and the memory of past times when we have achieved our collective dreams. That sums up a good portion of Jewish liturgical formation and a fair bit of the Hebrew Bible's great speeches as well.

Obama's words reminded me of every Jewish holiday celebration from each Friday night's Kiddush prayer which ushers the Sabbath to our dinner tables, to the Passover Seder which challenges each of us to see ourselves as both our slave ancestors and as those who can fulfill their dream of achieving freedom.

In this approach, history is not a chain which weighs us down, nor is the future an excuse for discarding the past. They are taken together as tools to inspire us to meet the present with courage and excitement. That is about as Jewish a methodology as one will ever find.

Of course, there is nothing zero-sum about this kind of Jewishness, or President Obama's politics for that matter. In fact, I hope that Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and Atheists can claim that the speech was deeply rooted in their traditions as well. One measure of the speech's success might be precisely how many different groups can do just that.

Actually, it would be a good lesson for all of us to imagine that it is precisely those themes which we so identify, which represent the deepest messages of the particular traditions we hold most dear. If individuals as seemingly different as Rick Warren and President Obama can do it, so can we.

Brad Hirschfield

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Warren's Inclusive Invocation and Obama's Jewish Speech

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