When Rhetoric is Wrong

omments.    Considerations.     Questions.

                          by Kenneth Bagnell

      My memory insists it was a late American President who said something that grows stronger within me as the shadow of my years lengthen. I believe it’s now becoming evermore true: “When the action is hot,” he  said, “keep the rhetoric cool.” Those words come back to me, day after day, as the rhetoric, especially from university student unions, becomes louder and nastier, and is directed against Israel and its people. It’s now so heated, actually almost vicious, that a student at Ryerson University in Toronto, a young devoutly Jewish woman, Shannon Riley, has actually said publically: “I don’t feel comfortable on campus.” That’s what can happen when, as the saying just quoted is totally ignored in favor of heated and poisonous rhetoric.

      Moreover while the Ryerson faculty and administration have disavowed the student union resolution, several other Canadian university student unions have voted in favor, including Toronto’s York University and the University of Windsor. (In general the Universities are quick to disassociate the institution from the student body.)  “The university does not support the boycott,” said an official spokesman immediately after the Ryerson student decision in early April. In Windsor, a local MP, Jeff Watson, went further calling the action, what some others called it, “the new anti-semitism poisoning our Canadian campuses.” The boycott, anti-Semitic or not, has support from an array of student unions, academic associations, public sector cooperatives, church bureaucrats, and social federations, virtually all — to be candid but not over simplistic — from one side of the life’s political  horizontality.

       In collective terms the movement is known as BDS: Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, a campaign, to — depending on where you stand — end occupation of certain lands or to actually delegitimize the very existence of the state of Israel. There are informed critics who view it as Anti-Semitic. One is a United Church minister, Rev. Andrew Love, of Arnprior, Ontario, who is at work on a soon to be published book on the subject.  He’s forthright:  “The more research I do on this, the more I believe anti-Semitism is the real driving force behind the BDS movement in churches and universities.” Speaking for myself, I believe we should all at least be open to examining the possibility that Rev. Love sees in his research.

        In part, the apparently growing hostility to Jewish people -– it began to emerge in the 1960s and is called the New Anti-Semitism — developed virtually at the same time as secularism emerged. Secularism was promulgated indirectly, in bestseller books of the 1960s, such as The Secular City, by a major scholar of the era, Harvey Cox. (Full disclosure: I interviewed him for CBC TV.) His historic, widely influential book is still read, but the emerging culture it predicted if not advocated, came with some considerable cost: the view it advanced began to erode traditional expressions of Christian faith particularly in liberal Protestantism: Methodism, Congregationalism, Presbyterianism and so on. For many this created a metaphysical vacuum , as people in the pews, no longer recited (or thereby accepted) The Apostles Creed  or other traditional theological expressions and doctrines surrounding if not supporting what they called “Christology”.  In basic religious language, “the vertical” was thereby diminished in favor of “the horizontal,” meaning, for example, “social justice.”

     But there was a problem, not with social justice per se but something else. That “something else” is costly and was reflected a few months ago in an op-ed essay by journalist Russ Doutat, a former Atlantic writer, now appearing in The New York Times. He’s a practicing Christian who in his columns, welcomed the election of current Pope Francis. But he added a telling note: the Pope’s advocacy of social justice required a modest caution.  Doutat mentioned, in passing, a caution: at times in recent church history: “social justice” has taken over the entire agenda of some Christian groups.  But social justice is not everything. Theology matters. Devotion matters. Tradition matters. And so on.

       I was thinking of Doutat’s reference when I sent a question by email to a respected friend, Rabbi Dow Marmur, former senior Rabbi at Toronto Holy Blossom Temple, who spends winter months in Israel where his son is a rabbi and scholar. I was interested in what he’d say to my view that:  the rise of the secularity culture in our era can sometimes diminish, even replace religious faith and credible theology so that other elements, maybe political, maybe cultural, (maybe both), fill the intellectual space they once occupied.

        In his reply he opened the door on ideas I feel are both insightful if provocative. He recognized the rise and role of secularism designating it as, “the new secular religion.” As for its current place in public affairs, he raised, as an example, “human rights,” which he sees as virtually a new religion which, as it grows stronger, can be intolerant. The question is naturally intolerant of whom?  He makes a very telling observation, that the “new secular religion called human rights” identifies the underdog as those “who suffer from imperialism.” He then answered my question by elaborating: “By ignoring history, it’s possible to perceive Israel as an imperialist state. Forgetting the Holocaust helps and the non-Jewish world likes to forget the Holocaust because of its complicity. The human rights religion loves the underdog. As long as Jews were the underdogs they were ‘fine.’ But now Jews in Israel are perceived as top dog and the Palestinians the underdog. Human rights advocates are selective: they ignore what happens to Christians in Muslim countries or to Palestinans in Muslim countries or the maltreatment of Palestinians by their own leaders. This doesn’t mean that the occupation isn’t ugly; hence the need for peace.”  

     That applies to us all, not just we who practice Christian faith but our fellow Judaic colleagues so many of whom remain hopeful. Their hopes for peace arrived on my desk, a few days before Passover, in a booklet called, Seek Peace and Pursue it, from a group called The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. Inside it said this, “On the ground, the picture is not so bleak. Israelis and Palestinians work together every day to break down barriers, enhance mutual trust and foster a climate that is conducive to peace.”

        The longing for true peace has gone on for decades, and there are days when you wonder if true peace can ever descend. No one would take more joy in its coming, were he still among us, than a late Canadian Prime Minister, a man who — in the language of his day — was, “a son of the manse,” his father being a minister of what’s known today as the United Church of Canada. It was Lester Pearson who, in his early career before politics, was a diplomat in External Affairs, and in the late 1940s, virtually laid the foundation for Israel’s creation and a future, I know, he profoundly hoped for. On the eve of Easter, a paragraph on a Jewish website reflecting on Passover comes back to me: “Who doesn’t need to be reminded that however dark life may be, that however cold the winter has been, the promise of spring and the possibility of rebirth and renewal is always there.” Indeed.

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