Personal recollection on the historical addition of "under God" to the Pledge and its impact on Jewish identity

4.2.12 WC: 191694 Chapter 17 The crumbling wall between church and state: from separation to christianization The “equal protection clause” of our Constitution is not the sole mechanism for security equality. The clauses that require separation of church and state were designed, at least in part, to assure religious equality. My first memory of being aware of the separation of church and state goes back to the 1950s, when the words “under God” were being added to the pledge of allegiance. The Yeshivas I went to as a kid were very patriotic. We recited the pledge at assemblies, and some teachers made us say it every day in class. Most kids hate change, so when the two words were added, there was some grumbling, not because of the content of the words, but just because it was different from the way we always had done it. I remember thinking about the meaning of the two new words. Under which God? Under whose God? Is there only one God that all American can pledge allegiance to or are there different gods that different religions worship? What about the Trinity? Is Jesus God? And what is that thing the Catholic kids call “the Holy Ghost?” Scary! But is it God too? Are Jews even supposed to say the word God (we were always taught to spell it, G-d)? Is Allah the same god as Elohim? What about Jehovah—the name we were absolutely prohibited from pronouncing? These were precisely the sort of theological questions we were not supposed to be thinking about. We were supposed to do and not do—go to shul, don’t eat shrimp—and to ask our Rabbi what to think about such esoteric issues. They know the religiously correct answer. Yet the addition of the two words to the pledge forced me not only to think about them but to try to place them in the context of my own role as a young Orthodox Jewish skeptic in a largely Christian America. Our school taught us that even though America was a majority Christian country, George Washington, in his famous letter to the congregants of the Truro Synagogue in Newport, had assured Jewish Americans that in this New Republic “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.” Here, all Americans “possess alike liberty of conscience and immunity of citizenship” because our government “gives to bigotry no sanction [and] to persecution no assistance.” These powerful words written by the father of our country were displayed on the bulletin board of our Yeshiva as if they constituted the Magna Carta for American Jews.* Yet we saw bigotry all around us. We knew that no Jew had ever been elected president. No Jew had ever been the head of a major corporation or university. We knew that there were quotas limiting the number of Jews at most Ivy League colleges. Still, we believed that this was a land of opportunity and that we could do anything, within certain limits, and that even these limits were narrowing, though not yet disappearing. °° Most of the words were borrowed by Washington from the letter written to him by the Rabbi of the Truro Synagogue. 300 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017387