Two Pulpits, Two Michigans

This Rosh Hashanah I listened to a dozen Metro Detroit rabbis. Over the summer I listened to the imams who put Abdul El-Sayed on their stages. The contrast is the whole story of this election.

What the rabbis preached

Six months after a gunman rammed Temple Israel with 140 preschoolers inside, Detroit's rabbis had every excuse to preach rage. They didn't. Rabbi Harris told his congregation that fear does not get to decide who our neighbors are. Rabbi Matthew Zerwekh warned against the mind that leaves no room to be wrong, because that is the mind that ends up killing for its certainty. Rabbi Aaron Bergman, who paused his synagogue's interfaith work after the attack, stood up on Rosh Hashanah and said we must not become prisoners of our wounds or of other people's hatred. Rabbi Aaron Starr asked for a community that embraces its own faster than it judges its own. Rabbi Yoni Dahlen defined Zionism in one word: hope. Not supremacy, not the objectification of anyone else. Home.

Not one of them named an enemy people. Not one of them told the congregation to frustrate anyone. Not one of them prayed for anyone's death.

What El-Sayed's clerics preached

At the Islamic Center of Detroit, where El-Sayed has spoken repeatedly, Imam Imran Salha called Zionists the cockroaches of history and told worshippers their job in America is to frustrate the Zionists with every tool within reach. On the mosque's own YouTube channel.

At the Muslim Community Association of Ann Arbor, his home mosque, the imam led a funeral prayer for Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh and called him a heroic martyr and a symbol of jihad.

At the Islamic Institute of America in Dearborn Heights, Imam Hassan Qazwini told the congregation not to let the Zionist candidate win, minutes after El-Sayed's own campaign speech, with his posters moving through the hall. Qazwini's son asked worshippers to pray for the President's death.

At the Islamic House of Wisdom, an Iranian-trained imam and former officer of the Islamic Republic's navy called voting for El-Sayed a religious obligation. At the Karbalaa Center, the imam stood beside him the day before the primary and called his win a victory for God.

The difference is not politics. It is theology.

Both communities believe their cause is righteous. Both have been attacked. Both have buried their dead. The difference is what each pulpit does with that pain.

The rabbis turned inward and asked their people to be more loving, more humble, more human. The imams turned outward and named a target. One tradition says: we may not possess the whole truth. The other says: God has a candidate, and the enemy has a name.

Zerwekh described the second mindset exactly — the certainty that compromise is betrayal, that the other side is not merely wrong but vermin. He was describing a general danger. El-Sayed's endorsers are its Michigan address.

To be fair, and to be clear

The Imams Council of Michigan condemned the Temple Israel attack without reservation and said every house where God's name is remembered deserves protection. Rabbi Dorit Edut reported that Muslim partners called her within hours. That decency is real and I will not pretend it isn't.

Which is precisely why the pulpits El-Sayed chose matter. He did not stumble into these rooms. He sought them, returned to them, accepted their endorsements, and has never disavowed a word spoken from them. A candidate who wanted the Imams Council's Michigan could have found it. He found Salha's instead.

The question for Jewish voters

Our rabbis just spent the holiest days of the year teaching us to love our neighbors without surrendering our judgment. Loving our neighbors does not require us to elect a man whose spiritual backers call us cockroaches. Judgment requires us to notice that he has never said they are wrong.

Detroit's rabbis showed us what moral leadership sounds like. El-Sayed's clerics showed us the opposite. His silence tells us which one he heard.