MINNEAPOLIS — Local rabbis here were quick to respond to Gov. Jesse Ventura’s interview in the November issue of Playboy in which he called religion “a sham.”
Ventura told the magazine: “Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers. It tells people to go out and stick their noses in other people’s business…The religious right wants to tell people how to live.”
Since the interview was published, Ventura has said he was not referring to all religions but just to the religious right. He told ABC interviewer Sam Donaldson he “was not speaking generally about all religion and what people do because I have no problem with the way people deal with their own religion, it’s their business.”
But local rabbis who were surveyed felt the governor had gone too far, despite his explanation.
Rabbi Misha Zinkow of Mount Zion Temple in St. Paul, formerly the director of Camp Swig in Northern California, said, “Although the governor’s remarks were offensive to all people of faith, they were particularly insulting to a people whose reliance upon a strong community and ‘organized religion’ has enabled us to survive the last four millennia.
“I feel sorry for Gov. Ventura if he cannot appreciate community-based religious expression. But it is just such expression that enables one generation to transmit its spiritual truths and meaning to the next generation.”
A different apprehension of Ventura’s shoot-from-the-lip opining was offered in a joint response from Rabbis Jonathan Ginsburg and Julie Gordon of Temple of Aaron in St. Paul.
“Our response to Jesse is, number one, it doesn’t apply to us because we’re disorganized. We’re not an organized religion,” wrote the co-senior rabbis.
“Seriously, number two, we don’t consider ourselves an organized religion. We are a people, a civilization that has a strong religious component. Our identity as Jews is as much as our identity as…members of our family, or anything else about our being. This particular people has ideas, values, customs, traditions, folkways, norms, language, literature…like any other civilization. Ours happened to have shaped all of what’s good about western culture…”
Noting that God has chosen the Jews for “a particular duty,” Ginsburg and Gordon stated that the Jewish observance of mitzvot and “hallowing Jewish tradition…has brought only good to the world and continues to drive the world in many ways, to good. Jesse thinks this is just a sham and a crutch.
“It’s his prerogative.”
On the theme of religion serving the societal good, Rabbi Chaim Goldberger of Kenesseth Israel Congregation in surburban St. Louis Park, recalled how both the people of Sodom and the “generation of the Tower of Babel” were punished for “evil deeds…the product of communal wickedness — whole societies organized around the pursuit of ungodly designs.”
The corrective, according to Goldberger, “is for humanity to band together in unified groups to serve and pray to God and to do good works. To the extent organized religion fulfills this mandate it is no sham. On the contrary, it is involved in the sanctification of God’s name of the highest magnitude.”
And Goldberger took a concluding shot at the messenger: “It seems to me that Playboy magazine has done far more damage to our society than has organized religion.”
Clergy of all stripe have castigated Ventura for his remarks, and the furor, which has attracted national attention, is not abating. As a consequence of his comments, Ventura’s public approval rating in a recent media poll dropped 19 percentage points since a similar canvass in July — from 73 percent to 54 percent. Judging from letters published in the Twin Cities daily newspapers, many constituents feel that the governor should be setting a higher standard in his walk and his talk.
In a rabbinic tongue-lashing, Zinkow took Ventura to task for coarsening the public discourse: “The governor’s verbal attack on organized religion is an unfortunate spreading of sarcasm, anger and hostility in a world that needs understanding. Shouldn’t a governor demonstrate some common decency and respect toward his fellow human beings, rather than making such sensationalist statements?”