Many comments on my previous post about the challenges of hate speech found on both the left and the right, deserve a response not only because they are so interesting (they all were), but because they offer real opportunities to raise the level of decency in our public discourse. Ultimately, what ought to distinguish such debates, especially when conducted in a spiritual context, is not that we fight more about religion-related topics, but that we access our respective spiritualities to treat each other better even (perhaps especially) when we deeply disagree.

“D C Fem” calls me “disingenuous”. How can she know? Why do we so often resort to personal attacks about each others’ motives when we disagree? Perhaps she is right, and my analysis is wrong, but as long as we fail to assume the best about each others’ motivations, nothing is going to get better. It’s what the Rabbis of the Mishnah meant by teaching us to assume the best about each other (dan l’kaf z’khut in Hebrew). It never means giving up what we believe. But it does ask us to argue based on what we believe and not based on the bad things we presume about others.
“Rob the Rev” and “Anne” confuse disagreement with ignorance —

Each of them assumes that I do not watch MSNBC because we do not agree about the content we all see there. As it happens, I watch regularly. We just disagree about the meaning we attach to what we all see. But the definition of openess is the ability to appreciate that reasonable people can do just that. If we can not, then it simply furthers my original observation that the idealogues of the left and the right are equally close-minded, even if I happen to prefer the conclusions of one over the other.

Anne, I am sorry that it “upsets” you to see a “rabbi talking this way”. But is that because you assume that a rabbi must agree with you to be a good rabbi? Now which one of us is being ultra-orthodox? You may want to ask yourself if you, like most people, and all of us at times, are confusing what’s Jewish with what you already believe.
The only thing of which I am certain, is that when what we think our faith demands of us always confirms what we already believe, that’s not God/our faith talking — it’s us dressing up our own opinions with fancy footnotes.
Finally, for “Klein”. I do not edit the comments. I would love to see your comments about Leo Baeck.