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This week I attended two events which highlighted the importance of religious freedom in America. The first was a gathering of the Rumi Forum, an organization founded by American Muslims to bring together people of different religions for dialogue and study. Their study method, called scriptural reasoning, involves looking at an idea as it is expressed in the texts of various religions, with the aim of showing that although we are different we are much alike and often complementary. This message is an especially important one in our time, when intolerance is growing. As Jews, we value religious tolerance as part of our tradition, since we do not believe, as many other religions do, that ours is the only path to God. As Maimonides states (Mishneh Torah, Laws of Repentance, 3:5), “The righteous of the nations of the world have a share in the world to come.”
The second event was a movie at the Museum of the Bible, “Free Exercise: America’s Story of Religious Liberty.” The movie is really about America’s very rocky road to religious freedom. We may know of the highlights, such as George Washington’s letter to the Jews of the Touro synagogue in 1790 declaring the United States’ commitment to give “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance,” but the First Amendment did not guarantee religious freedom in practice, only in theory.
Not long after Washington sent that letter, as Catholics came from Ireland to America, they found themselves the victim of enormous intolerance, physical persecution and the burning of their churches. In the eyes of the majority who were Anglican Protestant, the First Amendment did not apply to the newcomers. It was the same story with every group seeking religious freedom: the Mormons who were slaughtered by edict of the governor of Missouri; the persecution of the Quakers by Peter Stuyvesant and his attempt to ban their religious practice in the colony of New Netherland (later New York); the Jews of Paducah, Ky., who were exiled from their homes and business by Ulysses S. Grant during the Civil War (though he did repent later and attend a three-hour service at Adas Israel, Washington's second synagogue).
It seems from this history that we cannot rely on the Constitution alone to guarantee our freedoms. We also depend upon people of good will who value those freedoms and are willing to protect them and upon a culture which values welcoming and diversity instead of particularism and intolerance.
In this week’s Torah portion, Abraham leaves God's presence to welcome three nomads wandering in the desert. A great rabbi once pointed out that these were not Hebrews or even monotheists—there were none yet, save for Abraham. Indeed, Rashi comments that Abraham washed their feet because they were idolaters who worshipped even the dust on one’s feet. How is it then that Abraham sees welcoming these people as so important? What idea underlies such profound respect for those who hold beliefs diametrically opposed to his own?
The Talmud concludes from this story that “Rabbi Dimi says welcoming guests is greater than rising early to go to the Beit Midrash [the house of study]... and Rav said, ‘Greater is the welcoming of guests than receiving the Divine presence.’” The Maharal, Rabbi Yehuda Loew of Prague (1525–1609), understands this to mean that people contain the image of God, so honoring a person is actually a more intimate encounter with the Divine than interacting with God, since God is abstract and indirect and a human being is before us here and now:
“For when one brings a guest into their home and honors them because they were created in the image of God, then it is as if they are honoring the Divine presence Itself, which is greater than honoring the Torah. And welcoming guests is even greater than receiving the face of the Divine presence, for none can encounter the face of God directly. But when one welcomes and honors a guest who is present, the host attaches himself completely to this image of God” (Chidushei Agadot, Shabbat 137b).
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