The seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe likewise feared a United States sans God and advocated a constitutional amendment permitting non-denominational prayers in public schools after the Supreme Court deemed school prayer unconstitutional in 1963. “Children have to be ‘trained’ from their earliest youth to be constantly aware of ‘the Eye that seeth and the Ear that heareth,’ ” he wrote. “We cannot leave it to the law-enforcing agencies to be the keepers of the ethics and morals of our young generation.”
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Despite the logic in fighting for a more moral America, few Jewish leaders nowadays – with the prominent exception of Rabbi Meir Soloveitchik – have emulated the examples of Rabbis Neumann, Levin, and Lapin. It’s true that Agudath Israel and the Orthodox Union have on occasion protested the moral degeneration of society. Agudah’s David Zwiebel, for example, testified against gay marriage before Congress in 1996. Nonetheless, these groups have not made fighting the culture wars a priority and, more often than not, only lobby legislators when the law in question affects Orthodox Jews directly.
Rabbi Lapin believes this attitude is a mistake: “We should recognize that we have a stake in America. To not care about broader society is a lot like sitting in a lifeboat while somebody’s drilling a hole in the floor of the boat a few seats down, and you say, ‘Well, as long as my seat’s okay, everything’s fine.’ ”
The prophet Jeremiah told the Jews going to exile in Babylonia, “Seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captive, and pray unto the Lord for it; for in the peace thereof shall you have peace” (Jeremiah 29:7).
Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch writes that this exhortation obliges us “to work as patriots wherever [God] has placed us, to collect all the physical, material and spiritual forces and all that is noble in Israel to further the weal” of the countries we live in.
An immoral society cannot long survive. Neither God nor the laws of history allow it. As Rabbi Sacks told this writer, “Moral breakdown leads to social breakdown leads to lack of morale leads to lack of national strength, and that is a story that’s been repeated by every civilization in history.”
