Before every U.S. presidential election, there is almost always an “October surprise” that throws everything awry and has the potential to swing the contest in a completely different direction.
This year’s “surprise” happened Sept. 18 with the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The term “black swan” is also popular in social media, when talking about this kind of plot twist.
Barely a few minutes had passed after the announcement when a lot of folks noticed that she’d died just before the start of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, giving her instant mythic status with reporters from everything from NPR to Reuters. The latter described what last Friday was like for American Jews.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Just as many Jews in the United States were sitting down to a post-sunset Rosh Hashanah dinner on Friday, preparing to dip apples in honey to signal the sweetness of the year to come, news came of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death.
Ginsburg, the first female Jewish member of the U.S. Supreme Court, died on one of the holiest days in Judaism, as many of the country’s nearly six million Jews welcomed the new year 5781, based on the Hebrew calendar…
Her death on the eve of Rosh Hashanah also has significance in Jewish tradition, rabbis and friends said. “One of the themes of Rosh Hashanah suggests that very righteous people would die at the very end of the year because they were needed until the very end,” said Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism.
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, which has been giving wall-to-wall coverage of RBG’s death, encapsulated why the mourning for Ginsburg has been so intense — because the justice “had come to represent the liberal American feminist spirit for so many.”
JTA asked Jewish leaders around the country what their congregants were doing when the news came through.
(Durham, N.C. Rabbi Matt) Soffer’s tribute was among countless salutes made by rabbis and Jewish community members this weekend as the news of Ginsburg’s death broke over Jewish communities like a wave in the first moments of the Jewish New Year, or the last moments of the one that was just ending.
In some parts of the country, many synagogues had already launched their Rosh Hashanah services on Zoom and many families had already sat down for a holiday meal when the alert came. On Twitter, Rabbi Michael Latz reported that a colleague had “rushed the bimah” with a note scrawled on a piece of paper ripped from a spiral notebook: “RBG died.”
JTA has a ton more stuff, such as this piece on Ginsburg being the first Jew and first woman to lie in state at the U.S. Capitol and how that is a departure from Jewish tradition that mandates burial within 24 hours.
A Jewish teaching says those who die just before the Jewish new year are the ones God has held back until the last moment bc they were needed most & were the most righteous. And so it was that #RBG died as the sun was setting last night marking the beginning of RoshHashanah
— Nina Totenberg (@NinaTotenberg) September 19, 2020
Also, there’s been no lack of religious reference in other outlets about Ginsburg, who’s been called everything from a “tzaddik” (meaning a person of unusual great righteousness) to a great sage. As to what difference being Jewish made in her Supreme Court career, the Huffington Post –- pointing to a 2018 interview Ginsburg gave The Forward — gave it a shot:
Ginsburg recounted how she fought to get changes to Supreme Court bar membership certificates, so that they didn’t always read “in the year of our Lord.”
“One of my colleagues, and I will not disclose who, said, ‘In the year of our Lord was good enough for Brandeis, it was good enough for Cardozo, it was good enough for Frankfurter, it was good enough even for Goldberg,’” she told The Forward. “And before he got to Fortas, I said ‘It’s not good enough for Ginsburg.’”
There are now choices in how the date is listed on those certificates, including options that don’t reference Christianity.
Ginsburg also helped make sure the Supreme Court doesn’t sit on the High Holy Days. She told The Forward her religion shaped her as both a lawyer and a justice.
“I grew up in the shadow of World War II. And we came to know more and more what was happening to the Jews in Europe,” she told The Forward. “The sense of being an outsider — of being one of the people who had suffered oppression for no … no sensible reason … it’s the sense of being part of a minority. It makes you more empathetic to other people who are not insiders, who are outsiders.”
There’s been some question as to whether the last justice to die while serving at court -– Antonin Scalia in 2013 –- had as much positive attention called to his religion as Ginsburg has had to hers. Well, there was some.
This piece in Time magazine by Elizabeth Dias, now of the New York Times, noted that when Scalia was appointed in 1986, Catholics were quite rare on the Court. His rulings frequently agreed with Catholic social doctrines. A Washington Post piece talked about how his funeral represented his faith life.
His Roman Catholic faith often seemed to lurk in the background of his opinions, especially in cases involving abortion and homosexuality. But above all, he was committed to a literal, originalist interpretation of the Constitution, along with strict attention to the texts of federal and state laws. His views didn’t always align with those of the Church, and he didn’t always side with people making religious-freedom claims.
I can’t say there’s been similar erudite commentary about Ginsburg, who was known more for her rulings on sex discrimination. Religion News Service said that Ginsburg’s other passion in legal matters was in protection of minorities.
1. So how is this still wrong? The Guardian now claims that RBG “moved away from strict religious observance” over upset that women could not join a minyan to mourn her mother’s death (they mean “say kaddish” but don’t know what that is). But… https://t.co/jENVqKrcIe
— (((Yair Rosenberg))) (@Yair_Rosenberg) September 22, 2020
The RNS piece brought up a fact I wasn’t aware of; that Ginsburg was turned off of religious Judaism as a girl when her mother died.
From then on, she almost never darkened the door of an actual synagogue.
Ginsburg, who had remained on the court despite suffering a long series of health challenges, rarely attended services, but she was passionate about Judaism’s concern for justice and was shaped in the crucible of its minority status. …
Although the Ginsburgs were secular Jews, after (her husband) Martin’s death in 2010, Ruth began accepting more invitations to speak to Jewish groups. In 2018, she received the $1 million Genesis Prize, awarded annually to a Jewish person for talent and achievement. (She donated the proceeds to various Jewish charities.)
Ginsburg attended Washington’s Adas Israel Congregation once a year for the Kol Nidre service on the eve of Yom Kippur, but she was never a dues-paying member.
All this coverage of Ginsburg’s enthusiastic embrace of many Jewish tenets seems a tad odd. Would we write up the faith of a non-observant Baptist, Mormon or Muslim the same way? I don’t think so.
Haaretz talks about this tension here when it refers to the “ambivalence” Ginsburg showed toward Judaism and how she ultimately chose feminism over faith. Sadly, the piece is behind a paywall.
Some forms of Judaism have changed a lot since 1950, when Ginsburg’s mother died. Her daughter was not allowed to say kaddish (a mourner’s prayer) for her mother at the time, as only men were allowed to be part of the daily minyan (group) required for public prayer. Ginsburg, who was then in high school, was so upset at this regulation, she swore off any kind of religious involvement for decades.
Once rules for minyans were changed (as they eventually were in some congregations) and women began being ordained as rabbis in progressive forms of this faith, why didn’t Ginsburg join a synagogue? Why did she keep her distance until about 10 years ago when she was in her late 70s? She didn’t really give interviews until only a few years ago and the book and two movies about her only came out in the past five years.
So, for her first 20 years on the Supreme Court, she was largely silent about the faith from which she was estranged. There was obviously more to this justice, in terms of her personal take on her faith, than meets the eye and I’m hoping journalists can tell us more as we await her funeral and trip to the Capitol.
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