{"id":84,"date":"2010-10-04T10:09:23","date_gmt":"2010-10-04T10:09:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/10\/the-synagogue-at-the-cave.html"},"modified":"2010-10-04T10:09:23","modified_gmt":"2010-10-04T10:09:23","slug":"the-synagogue-at-the-cave","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/10\/the-synagogue-at-the-cave.html","title":{"rendered":"The synagogue at the cave"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of months ago, trying to come up with a situation parallel to the “Ground Zero mosque,” I imagined<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n
\n

An irenic Jewish group proposes building a community center
\ndevoted to peace and understanding a couple of blocks from the Cave of
\nthe Patriarchs, where on February 25, 1994, the Orthodox Jewish zealot Baruch Goldstein <\/a>opened
\nfire in a room being used as a mosque, killing 29 worshipers and
\nwounding 150. Would the ADL oppose construction, out of deference to the
\nanguish of the victims’ families, or would it attack the opponents as
\nirrational bigots? I think I know the answer.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/span><\/span>Well, it turns out that in May, the Jewish community that lives in <\/span>\"329558.jpg\"the Hebron settlement of Qiryat Arba erected<\/a> a little synagogue within sight of the cave, known in Hebrew as Machpelah. And let’s just say that the impulse was less than irenic. As William Saletan pointed out in a piece<\/a> in Slate last week, <\/span>the settlers in question venerate Baruch Goldstein, gathering around his grave each year to celebrate his smiting of their enemies. In February, Israeli troops cleared a path so they could conduct a march to the cave on the holiday of Purim–the holiday that Goldstein seized on to conduct his rampage.<\/p>\n

To be sure, the Machpelah shul is a very modest affair, and its inauguration preceded the controversy over the proposed Islamic community center in lower Manhattan. The ADL can, perhaps, be forgiven for overlooking the parallel. But not, I think, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, the rabbi to the stars who blogs in this space. In his most recent post<\/a>, Boteach takes up cudgels on behalf of the Qiryat Arba settlers, who piled on the hospitality for him during the holiday of Succot this year. All they want is to live and let live, he claims. They are “liberated from hatred.”<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Yet these residents have been demonized by the entire world. They
\nface daily character-assassination in the media by those who would
\ndecry their simple desire to walk in the footsteps of Abraham.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He recites the violence perpetrated against Jews in Hebron by their Arab
\nneighbors but makes no mention of Baruch Goldstein and his place in
\nQiryat Arba civil religion.<\/p>\n

Back in May, when the “Ground Zero mosque” tempest was just a gleam in the eye of its opponents, Boteach proffered<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I have a simple, elegant, and deeply moral solution. Let the Islamic
\nCultural Center be built. Let the mosque be included. But, the Muslim
\norganizations building it should commit right now to making the
\nprincipal focus of the building a museum depicting the rise of Islamic
\nextremism, its hate-based agenda, and how it is an abomination to Islam.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I have a simple, elegant, and deeply moral solution too. It’s that Rabbi Boteach advise his friends in Qiryat Arba to commit to building a museum adjacent to their synagogue that depicts the rise of Jewish extremism, its hate-based agenda, and how it is an abomination to Judaism. And then let us know how they react.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of months ago, trying to come up with a situation parallel to the “Ground Zero mosque,” I imagined: An irenic Jewish group proposes building a community center devoted to peace and understanding a couple of blocks from the Cave of the Patriarchs, where on February 25, 1994, the Orthodox Jewish zealot Baruch Goldstein…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nThe synagogue at the cave - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/10\/the-synagogue-at-the-cave.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The synagogue at the cave - 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}