CHARLOTTE, N.C. — This could get awkward.
Rabbi David Wolpe of Los Angeles’ Sinai Temple, where Monica Lewinsky and her family were congregation members for decades and where Lewinsky attended religious school, is scheduled to deliver the benediction at the Democratic National Convention tonight — not long after Bill Clinton speaks.
Not only was Wolpe the Lewinsky family’s rabbi, he also sharply condemned President Clinton at the time his sexual relationship with Lewinsky, then a 24-year-old White House intern, was dominating national headlines.
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“He was a brilliant, talented, extraordinary child, and for the leader of the United States we need an adult,” Rabbi Wolpe told his temple, according to a 1998 Associated Press account. He said Clinton needed to “cleanse his soul.”
What’s wrong with this Rabbi? Even after Obama continually throws Israel under the bus, he’s still willing to show up to the DNC to pray in front of a bunch of anti-Judeo/Christian atheists that removed God from the platform.
You just can’t make this stuff up.
Seriously. What a maroon.
– Roger might ask for a word with him.
“…where Lewinsky attended religious school”
Guess she was absent on the day they were teaching the Ten Commandments.
Dave,
Obviously Lewinsky’s behavior merits strong disapproval. But in fairness, her bit of fornication isn’t likely to have been caused by ignorance of what was right and wrong (and if it had been, that fact would have made it non-culpable!).
She sinned, for the same reasons that I do (and, odds are, that you do): There was something she liked even more than being righteous. That, and she was a young woman infatuated with power and a bit silly. Still, youth alone isn’t the whole explanation; she enjoyed and was excited by blowing the president more than she would have enjoyed behaving morally, so she did it.
Any one of us could become saintly at any time. The sad fact is that most of us don’t want to: There’s stuff we love more than goodness. I myself wouldn’t be inclined to blow the president: My habitual sins are more petty and dull than that, resulting more from laziness. But there it is.
God willing, she’s not only grown up, but repented, since then. Him too. I hope the best — which would include actual holiness — for them both. Not gonna speculate on the odds, but I hope for it.
Gentlemen,
I think it’s possible that this Rabbi thinks that a bunch of sick souls — especially with Clinton in attendance — is exactly the kind of group that could use his prayers the most.
Once he came to that view, the fact that he shares their political views in many (though probably not all) ways would make showing up that much easier a choice for him.
I know that when Cardinal Dolan agreed to pray at the DNC, he certainly didn’t intend his presence there to be an endorsement of everything the DNC stood for, let alone the personal behavior of its denizens. (And I don’t think there’s any danger anyone misinterpreted it that way!)
Perhaps this Rabbi is taking the same approach. If so, then his only failure is that it’s less clear whether his presence is an endorsement or not than it is in Dolan’s case.
But I’d guess that he assumes that people will assume he doesn’t endorse everything the DNC folks say and do, since they know he’s a Rabbi and Rabbis don’t typically support immorality and dishonesty.
Give that rabbi a cigar, Bubba!
Everything the Democratic party tries to do involves a great deal of awkwardness.