The Oath of Office, the Koran and the First Amendment
Sermon, December 1, 2007
Rabbi Bruce Kadden
On November 7, 2006, Keith Ellison was elected to the House of
Representatives from the state of Minnesota, becoming the first Muslim member of
Congress. This historical event was virtually overlooked with all of the focus
on the Democratic takeover of Congress.
But now attention has turned to Representative-elect Ellison, because he has
stated that he will take the oath of office on the Koran, Islam’s holy book.
Jewish talk-show host Dennis Prager has led the attack on Ellison, saying that
if he refused to take the oath of office on the Bible, he should not serve in
Congress.
“When all elected officials take their oaths of office with their hands on
the very same book,” Prager writes, “they all affirm that some unifying value
system underlies American civilization. If Keith Ellison is allowed to change
that, he will be doing more damage to the unity of Americans and to the value
system that has formed this country than the terrorists of 9/11.”
Prager, who has written some important Jewish books together with Rabbi
Joseph Telushkin, has been attacked by commentators from the right and the left,
and rightly so. For his criticism, which apparently made this into an issue in
the first place, is totally out of place, reflecting a total disregard for the
First Amendment of the Constitution and a willful misrepresentation of history.
Prager claims that American Jews routinely take oaths of office on the Bible,
but I am sure that he is aware that most do so on the Tanach, not on a Christian
Bible. And while the Tanach is part of the Christian Bible, what Christians
usually call the Old Testament, The Tanach and the Old Testament are not the
same.
The order of the books is significantly different and translations also
differ based on the priority given to the Hebrew text by the Tanach and the
Septuagint, the earliest Greek translation, by most Christian Bibles. The
Catholic Old Testament also contains a number of books such as the Wisdom of Ben
Sirach, Judith, and First and Second Maccabees, which are neither in the Tanach,
nor in Protestant Bibles. So Prager’s claim that “all elected officials take
their oaths of office with their hands on the very same book” is an outright
lie.
In fact, when Ellison and the other new members of Congress take the oath of
office on January 4, at a group, public swearing-in ceremony, they will not
place their hands on any book. Only afterwards, when each individual stages a
photo-op ceremony, will you find members of Congress using a book.
Furthermore, some elected officials may opt out of swearing an oath of
office, and instead affirm them, as apparently both Presidents Franklin Pierce
and Herbert Hoover did. Jewish tradition, in fact, would support this approach.
While the Torah permits taking of oaths and vows, and insists that we fulfill
such promises, rabbinic literature discourages the taking of oaths. “It is
better to make no vows at all than to make them even if one is certain of
fulfilling them,” according to the Talmud (Chullin 2a). “A person who takes a
vow is likened to a person who builds a forbidden altar,” according to another
passage (Nedarim 60b). While the rabbis could not forbid taking oaths or making
vows, they imposed strict controls over them.
Taking an oath of office on the Koran is not without precedent; in 1999,
Osman Siddique, a Virginia businessman of Bangladeshi origin, used the Koran to
take the oath to become a United States ambassador in 1999. An article in the
Christian Science Monitor more than a year ago reported a controversy in North
Carolina when a judge refused to allow a Muslim woman take the oath to testify
truthfully upon the Koran.
The fact that we are even debating this issue today is the result of the
successful challenge to the Maryland state constitution in the early 19th
century by the Jewish community. Despite the guarantee of freedom of religion
in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, Maryland’s state
constitution “opened offices of trust only to those able to take the oath ‘upon
the true faith of a Christian,’” according to Roy Rosenberg in his book on
American Jewish history. No Jews could hold any municipal or state office or
even practice law, since lawyers were considered officers of the law.
Maryland, as a colony, had been particularly intolerant to Jewish settlers.
According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, the recognition of the Protestant church
as the official church “tended to identify citizenship with church membership
and to disfranchise the professed Jew in the province at large.” When Maryland
adopted its state constitution in 1776, it allowed Jews to practice their
religion and granted them certain political privileges, but it included language
that required office holders to declare a belief in the Christian religion.
Efforts by the Jewish community to change the state constitution began in
1797, but were consistently rebuffed in the state legislature. After the defeat
of a bill to remedy the problem in 1804, the issue lay dormant for 14 years.
The effort was revived in 1818, with what became known as the “Jew Bill” being
introduced in every legislative session until it was finally approved in 1825.
A year later, two Jews who had strongly supported the legislation, Solomon
Etting and Jacob I. Cohen, were elected to the Baltimore City Council.
Some 180 years later, it is hard to believe that anyone would seriously
question a person’s right to hold office based upon his refusal to take the oath
of office on the Christian Bible. Fortunately, most people understand that the
Constitution protects the rights of minorities so that Jews, Muslims, members of
other religions, and atheists can serve our country as elected officials without
passing any religious test of office. Let us celebrate this important right a
rededicate ourselves to the effort to protect religious freedom for all that is
guaranteed by our constitution.
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