c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) August, the “dog days of summer,” is supposedly a slow time for hard news.

But it’s not true. World War I began in August 1914, atomic bombs were dropped on Japan in August 1945 ending World War II, and Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in August 1974. This month, Israel disengaged from Gaza and Iraqi leaders in Baghdad struggle to create a constitution.

While many Jewish leaders are currently on vacation, their thoughts cannot be far from Gaza and several other major problems confronting Israel and the American Jewish community; it’s hardly the stuff that contributes to relaxing at the beach or hiking in the mountains.

The conservative Israeli leaders, Prime Minster Ariel Sharon and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have bet their political futures on two hugely different results from the Gaza pullout. Sharon believes it will advance the so-called “road map” for peace and provide Israelis with greater security. Netanyahu, meanwhile, predicts Gaza will become a major base for lethal Palestinian terrorism. Who is correct? No one knows, but one of them will be proven wrong.

For well more than a thousand years, Jews living under either Christian or Islamic rule have been expelled from their homes by a never-ending series of horrific anti-Jewish actions, including the August 1492 expulsion from Catholic Spain. But this August was different and especially wrenching because the democratically elected government of the world’s only Jewish state legally and forcibly removed about 9,000 Jews from their homes in Gaza.

There are other major problems during these “dog days.” When Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI last April, both the Vatican and the Jewish community recognized a new relationship was required after the historic 27-year reign of John Paul II. That became clear when Benedict XVI recently omitted Israel from his public list of terrorism victims.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry reacted angrily to his remarks, and the Vatican responded to Jerusalem with its own anger. Although it appeared the two sides were on a collision course, astute observers noted the Vatican and Israel were predictably encountering the road bumps that always accompany a new set of diplomatic relationships.

Hopefully, Benedict’s visit this month to a Cologne synagogue in his native Germany will help ease the heightened tension. The world’s Jews and Catholics will be closely watching Vatican and Israeli behavior. Both communities will be the losers if that carefully nurtured historic relationship turns sour.

America’s large evangelical Christian community presents Jewish leaders with a unique challenge. Evangelicals are passionate about modern Israel’s security and survival because they believe the Jewish State is a necessary precondition for the Second Coming of Jesus. And many Jews welcome that support when they see large numbers of evangelicals constantly traveling to Israel and endorsing pro-Israel public positions in churches and the halls of government.

But frequently the same evangelical community actively seeks the conversion of Jews to Christianity. In 1996, the Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest Protestant body, voted to increase its activity in the “evangelization of the Jewish people.” There are constant warnings that the evangelicals’ strong support for Israel masks their true intention: conversion.

There is a sense that evangelicals may love Israel (for their own religious purposes), but they perceive Judaism as a spiritually exhausted faith that long ago served its purpose as a preparation for Jesus and the rise of Christianity.

Liberal “mainline” Protestants are among the loudest critics of evangelicals and are allied with most American Jews on a host of domestic issues including the principle of church-state separation, abortion rights, gun control, and embryonic stem cell research.

But sadly, the Presbyterian Church (USA) and elements within the United Methodist Church and the Anglican Communion are moving forward on divesting their financial holdings in companies they deem are supporting the Israeli “occupation” of Palestinian areas of the Holy Land. Fortunately, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the United Church of Christ are avoiding divestment at this time, although their recent conventions left the door open for future economic punishment of Israel.

The American Jewish community is right to be furious about the divestment movement since calls for divestment come just as Israel has unilaterally pulled out of Gaza and parts of the West Bank. Divestment, and the scathing Jewish criticism of that policy, has ruptured relations with leaders of those liberal Protestant groups who have forfeited their traditional “peace maker” roles through their anti-Israel actions.

The Presbyterian Church and other Christian groups are now part of the Middle East problem, not the solution.

KRE/JL END RUDIN

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s Senior Interreligious Adviser, is Distinguished Visiting Professor at Saint Leo University.)