I’ve just delivered this message to a group of Jewish communal representatives focused on high-level international interreligious dialogue.

This past Shabbat’s Torah reading has special resonance for all those active in interreligious engagement, but also so many simply navigating relationships in a diverse, multireligious world.

The Torah portion, Kedoshim, points to the tension that can be inherent in balancing individual religious commitments and convictions with a broader dedication to humanity and to intercommunal peace—fundamental religious imperatives themselves. In traditional terms, these might be described as mitzvot ben adam la’Makom and mitzvot ben adam lachavero—duties between people and their Maker, and between people and our fellow human beings. In just the opening verses of Kedoshim we have commandments such as those to observe the Sabbath and to reject idolatry. But we also have the commandment “v’ahavta l’rei’acha kamocha”—“and you shall love your fellow as yourself”—that is considered not just important but the very essence of Judaism.

The current season on the Jewish calendar is one that highlights the tumultuous history of Jewish relations with other peoples and faith communities. After celebrating on Passover our liberation from foreign bondage during ancient times, Yom Hashoah marks the culmination of two millennia of primarily European Christian anti-Semitism, while Yom Hazikaron memorializes the over 27,000 Jews and Israelis from different backgrounds who have lost their lives over more than a century of conflict, primarily with Muslim Arabs, over the return of Jews to the Land of Israel and to statehood there. And, of course, Yom Ha’atzmaut celebrates the achievement and perseverance of that statehood despite such sustained challenges—an epic event with practical but also real doctrinal implications for Jews and non-Jews alike.

Our hatafara, or prophetic text, this Shabbat seemed to also foretell a time such as ours. In the text customary among Sephardic Jews, Ezekiel has God relating of swearing to the Israelites to take them “to a Land that I had sought out for them, flowing with milk and honey, a splendor for all the lands.” In the text customary among Ashkenazi Jews, Amos has God saying this: “I shall bring back the captivity of My people Israel, and they will rebuild desolate cities, they will return and plant vineyards… I shall implant them upon their Land; they will not be uprooted again from upon their Land that I have given them.”

While we may not yet have reached a utopian era of true harmony and universal acceptance— something borne out in the continued incitement and terrible violence that we have seen again over recent days and weeks—there is genuine cause for hope in progress toward greater mutual understanding, kinship and common purpose in the region.

Twenty years ago, it could not have been taken for granted that Gulf and other Arab states would formalize not only open government-to-government but also broad-based people-to-people relations. The same was true 30 years ago of official diplomatic relations between Israel and the Vatican, bookmarking the very same century of Theodor Herzl’s unsuccessful appeal to Pope Pius X to support his Zionist cause. But this too is by now a well-established reality.

The rebirth of Jewish national sovereignty has bestowed upon Jews not only great blessings but also new responsibilities and new challenges. In the case of a nation-state named Israel, on a small territory known by so many as the Holy Land, these challenges involve not only mundane, worldly matters but questions of religion, religious identity and belief. In this, we can continue to play a distinctive and meaningful role. May we be guided with wisdom to support true peacemaking—and to forging vital new friendships.

Read the op-ed in English on Ynetnews.

Read the op-ed in Hebrew on Ynetnews.

Translated below from the original Ynet publication in Hebrew:

Last month, the leader of the Presbyterian Church (USA) said that Israel was guilty of “21st century slavery.” He did not level a similar charge against any other country – including those where slavery actually does exist.

In November, the General Synod of the Church of Sweden voted to urge investigation of Israel, the only democracy in its region, as an “apartheid” state, and the United Church of Canada may soon do similarly.

The synod did not level a similar accusation at any other country – including other Middle Eastern states where Arab Muslims, let alone Christian and other minorities, enjoy far fewer civil rights than they do in Israel.

Soon before the pandemic, the World Council of Churches issued a statement condemning “this violence” after an allegation by Orthodox Archbishop Atallah Hanna that he was “poisoned” in a possible “assassination” attempt by the Jewish state.

Nearly two years on, not a shred of evidence has supported the claim by Hanna – who is also notorious for urging Israel’s destruction, saying “Zionism is a racist, terrorist movement” and calling the Israeli government “money changers in the Temple” who want to “control the world.”

And in December, the patriarchs and heads of major churches in Jerusalem – who, during the last hostilities in Israel and Gaza, echoed Hamas’s narrative that the fighting was caused by “violent events” at the “Al Aqsa Mosque or in Sheikh Jarrah,” with no mention at all of rocket fire or mob attacks by Palestinians – issued a new statement on a “threat to the Christian presence in the Holy Land.”

The statement only specified objection to actions by Israeli Jews, and added – in a nod to tropes about Jewish greed and exploitation – that Christian tourism yields billions of dollars for the Israeli economy, as if Palestinian and other Arabs don’t benefit at least as much.

Even some typically circumspect ecclesial leaders have been caught up in this one-sided politicizing of bully pulpits against the world’s small, sole and oft-beleaguered Jewish state.

The Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Pierbattista Pizzaballa, in a Christmas homily meant to unite Catholics in Israel, Jordan, Cyprus and the Palestinian territories, alleged only wrongs done to the people of “our Palestine,” but not to Israelis.

He certainly did not credit Israel for what in reality have been extraordinary efforts to preserve religious freedom and to pursue peace with its neighbors.

And Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby published an op-ed echoing alarm about the “massive drop” of Christians in the Holy Land – when in Israel itself the Christian population has grown continually – and he apportioned at least some blame to an Israeli “Separation Wall” that is neither for the most part a wall nor motivated by some capricious intercommunal separation.

Rather, it was necessitated as a costly, but thankfully effective, response to a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings that exacted an infinitely greater toll on both sides of the partition.

The singling out of Israel for demonization, double standards and discrimination – as in the case of the PC(USA), which began pushing for divestment in 2004 – is not helpful to actual peacemaking in the region, and to furthering vital contemporary strides in Christian-Jewish relations.

It is also profoundly unjust: routinely obscuring Jews’ long history in their ancestral homeland – inseparable from the origins of Christianity itself – as well as the equal rights and lived experience of Jews today.

The WCC, which lambastes Israel but not Iran or North Korea at United Nations forums – and deems Jewish returnees “illegal” while urging a Palestinian “right of return” – has promoted calls for punitive economic campaigns against Israelis and an odious assertion that the “West sought to make amends” for Nazism by giving Jews a foreign land.

Following the Holocaust, ecumenical groups have shown noble readiness to acknowledge past Christian antisemitism – from Augustine to medieval crusaders, and from the inquisitors to Luther.

However, few denominations seem as self-aware when it comes to anti-Jewish animus in the present. This moral fallibility was perhaps epitomized by Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, whose pursuit of reconciliation at home stood in stark contrast with his simplistic, hyperbolic rhetoric when it came to Israel and the Jews he associated with it.

Israel, to be sure, is imperfect, but so are its circumstances, and so is every other human society. Unlike Hamas or even the Palestinian Authority, Israelis and their mainstream leadership overwhelmingly deplore any manifestation of violent extremism in their midst.

After another international Remembrance Day for the Holocaust – that genocide born of longstanding religious contempt for a people’s legitimacy – let us ensure that false witness never pass as prophetic voice.

Faith institutions censuring the Jewish state more than all others promote prejudice, not peace.

For some two millennia, a strain of anti-Jewish animus within Christendom — most certainly not representative of all Christians, but toxic and persistent nonetheless — has resulted in the unspeakable dehumanization and persecution of Jews.

In our era, following the cataclysm of the Holocaust — the most systematic and documented genocide in history — many churches have engaged in noble, painful reflection and repudiated this evil that became known as anti-Semitism.

Even over the course of long periods characterized by widespread intolerance, incitement and barbarism, there always existed brave, compassionate voices who, sometimes at great risk to their own wellbeing, stood in defense of the shared humanity and equality of Jews.

Heartrendingly, the Rev. Dr. J. Herbert Nelson, II — current Stated Clerk of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) — is not one of those heroes.

Rather, he carries forth a tradition of leaders fueling anti-Semitism, wittingly or not, in the guise of lofty ideals. No self-respecting anti-Semite ever did otherwise — and, like other bigots, very few actually acknowledge their bigotry.

Although I am a member of a community whose suffering is exceedingly well-known, I am among those who — in part hemmed in by some haters’ preemption of condemnation with a straw-man claim that Jews tarnish all “criticism” as anti-Semitism — exercise real caution in wielding that charge.

However, as a person affected by Reverend Nelson’s weaponizing of his influence as a faith leader, I do not hesitate to call out his abuse for the atrocious dereliction of duty that it is. I can only hope the Stated Clerk won’t belittle my highlighting of his actions in a way that he never would a member of another long-denigrated religious or ethnic minority.

We stand at a moment when even storied figures have been held to account for their misdeeds, when the privileged are forced to grapple with misuse of their privilege, and when hard truths are spoken to those in power. In this case, the power is wielded by the leader of a denomination that, its own recently diminished numbers aside, remains a pillar of the world’s dominant religious group and is the one to have claimed more presidents of the United States than any other except the Episcopal Church. And that religious leader has conveniently taken aim at a familiar target: the Jews, and the small Jewish state, Israel.

In a statement on Martin Luther King Jr. Day — that day dedicated to combating prejudice, honoring that Rev. Dr. King who epitomized a heroictradition of speaking out also against peers demonizing and delegitimizing the Jews and the Jewish state — Reverend Nelson issued what could have been a message stirring us to better empathize with all our fellow people created in the Divine image.

Instead, this leader of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) not only prolonged his denomination’s modern record of blatantly singling out for dismay only “the occupation in Palestine/Israel” — a one-of-a-kind formulation casting aspersions on the very legitimacy of Israel’s existence — but outrageously branded that condition as “21st century slavery.”

To be clear: no actual situations of contemporary slavery or other, equally monstrous atrocities are mentioned by Reverend Nelson. And neither are the existential threats, perennial discrimination and acute violence to which Israelis of all backgrounds have been endlessly subjected, with tragic resultant consequences for the dignity and welfare of Israelis and Palestinians alike.

No, in the moral imagination of Reverend Nelson, there isn’t room for nuance, complexity and shared solidarity, praise or reproach. There is no Iranian theocracy, no Palestinian extremism or chauvinism, no Assad regime, no Hamas, Islamic Jihad or Hezbollah. Just the presence of the Jew, standing in the way of peace.

No other human’s presence would ever be deemed by Reverend Nelson illegal or immoral.

Shamelessly, in a statement on “unity of spirit,” the world’s only Jewish state — the Middle East’s only pluralistic democracy — is the sole foreign country deserving of incendiary opprobrium and mention altogether.

Intolerably, in a statement invoking the Golden Rule — not just promulgated in Luke, as he cited, but in the earlier, Hebrew Leviticus, surely formative to Jesus as a Jew in the Jewish homeland that the Stated Clerk simplistically terms occupied — Reverend Nelson finds nothing positive to say about the growing number of Arabs and Israelis who actually are taking steps toward coexistence, cooperation, mutual respect and even friendship.

And obscenely, the week before International Holocaust Remembrance Day — right after another traumatic attack on a synagogue, in Texas, as Jews even in America remain by far the leading target of faith-based hate crimes — Reverend Nelson had the cruel temerity to actually call on American Jews to do more against the Israeli policies he opposes.

Needless to say, the Stated Clerk would never apportion responsibility to the American Muslim community for the British Islamist hostage-taker in Texas, or to any community for others linked to it by association. Yet Reverend Nelson’s appeal — cynically and cryptically mentioning “the history of Jewish humble beginnings and persecution,” as if no ongoingpersecution continues today — precisely foments the type of more general anti-Jewish hostility that wild anti-Israeli hostility repeatedly yields.

But if only the problem were just Reverend Nelson, as dispiriting as that would be. Rather, the Stated Clerk’s betrayal of justice — by directing nothing but indifference and self-righteous double standards at Israel’s Jews — is all too common.

Because it’s all too easy to construct a villain among the comparably “humble,” the politically outnumbered and those actually encumbered by democratic norms.

Because it’s easier to deplore others’ anti-Semitism — in past “history” — than to see it in the present, especially in the mirror.

And because the roots of the world’s oldest hatreds continue to run devastatingly deep.

Read the op-ed in Medium.

A growing number of reports have recently emerged of missionaries targeting Jews for conversion. Some of these have even involved Christians disguising themselves as observant Jews in order to infiltrate Orthodox communities in the United States and Israel.

In one such case, in Jerusalem, a missionary passed himself off as a normative rabbi and kohen – or member of the hereditary biblical Jewish priesthood – performing ritual "services" that not only were founded upon false pretenses but deeply violated the spiritual life that religious people consider to be at the sacred core of their very existence.

​Even for Christians who feel unable to completely disavow proselytism, such deceit should not be deemed acceptable. The ends do not always justify the means.

Some Christians may believe that targeted missionizing is an act of love, but such a belief needs to be recognized as just that – a Christian's own belief. Ultimately, true and meaningful love involves treating people as they wish to be treated, not as we insist upon treating them.

"You shall love your neighbor as yourself" is a central pillar of both Jews' and Christians' sense of mission, and early sages paraphrased this injunction as "that which you would dislike, do not do to your fellow." Surely serious Christians would not want others aggressively seeking to part them or their children from their faith as they define it – especially if they were, like Jews, a small and recurrently vulnerable minority. The world today is home to only around 15 million Jews, but more than two billion Christians.

In a spirit of friendship, let us be honest: Jews agree on precious few things, but trinitarianism is as compatible with mainstream Judaism as denial of it would be with mainstream Christianity. Likewise, for virtually all Jews, proselytism aimed at their traditional faith and identity is experienced as hostile, just as physical attacks are.

​For much of nearly two millennia, these two were in fact intertwined. Antisemites sought to bar Jews from practicing their faith, to aggressively convert them to other faiths, to enact discrimination against those who resisted conversion, and to impose torture and even death upon such resisters. Some preeminent figures, like Luther, signaled tolerance for Jews only to shift to vitriol upon realizing that many would not abandon their Judaism.

Indeed, countless Jews sacrificed their lives rather than renounce the religion of their forebears.

To be clear, as a believing Jew, the last thing I want is to insert myself in the internal theological considerations or religious practices of another faith community. I actually find the convictions of passionate Christians relatable, and I recognize that evangelism is particularly important to those who identify as evangelical.

But as with other cherished liberties, every person's religious liberty is inviolable only until it reaches another person's doorstep. It mustn't be exercised to the active detriment of others' ability to live securely and uphold their own commitments free of outside pressure or imposition.

Even more fundamentally: as students of history, we know that while faith offers immense blessing to human life, it can be used – when not stewarded with humility and care – to spur division and even persecution. Religious adherents are thus entrusted with balancing an impulse to share their own faith with a basic respect for fellow people, their rights, and sensibilities.

More often than not, we do more good in witnessing to our faith by fully living its values than by seeking spiritual conquests.

Of course, democracies like Israel proudly uphold religious freedom – enabling, in the case of the world's only Jewish state, the continual growth of the country's Christian and other minority populations, a rarity in the Middle East – but predatory or deceptive proselytism simply cannot be ignored. Camouflaging missionary solicitation as "Jewish" in order to attract Jews of weaker religious backgrounds, like the offering of social services to needy recipients on condition of exposure to a certain form of religious indoctrination, is a longstanding tactic in the efforts by some to capture the souls of others.

Fortunately, since the Holocaust – the physical cataclysm that capped centuries of religious contempt – unprecedented mutual closeness has blossomed between Christians and Jews. Various key church denominations have deplored antisemitism and eschewed active engagement in the targeting of Jewish people for conversion. And many Christians, recognizing the Jewish roots of their faith, are invaluable allies of Israel at a time when it continues to face not only relentless violence in its own neighborhood but demonization and even delegitimization abroad.

Without a doubt, many Christian supporters of the Jewish people are utterly pure in their friendship, with no motive other than solidarity as well as mindfulness of the biblical promise to Abraham: "I will bless those who bless you."

These friends deserve to be embraced, not feared. Let us ensure that the friendship of the many not be undercut by the overzealous actions of the few.

The rest is in God's hands.

Read Michaels' insights and analysis in Real Clear Religion.

The United States was again elected this month to the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) after an absence of more than three years. The United States fully deserves to be recognized as a global leader in promoting human rights.

Often, however, election to the world’s preeminent human-rights body is not founded upon countries’ merit but political horse-trading. In fact, none of the 18 vacant seats to be filled at the start of 2022 was contested; each will essentially have been claimed in advance by a “candidate” government without assurance of governments’ actual performance in protecting human rights or of equal opportunities for a stint on the council.

​Case in point: Since the establishment of the council, around 120 of the 193 U.N. member states have enjoyed membership on it, some repeatedly.

Among the countries perennially left out is one subjected to far more harsh treatment by the body than any other: Israel.

​This comes as no surprise to those within the U.N. system. After all, Israel is one of the United Nations most longstanding members, dating back to 1949, and it has also gotten more than its fair share of attention from the Security Council. Yet it has not been one of the 130 countries to have had at least one term in that powerful forum either. That’s unlike Algeria, Libya, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen.

To sum it up: Over the course of nearly 75 years, one side of the Arab-Israeli conflict has repeatedly had a voice, and vote, on relevant matters in key international institutions. The other hasn’t.

One side has wielded an automatic majority in these critical settings—there are some 60 Arab and Muslim U.N. member states—and the other is the world’s only Jewish state, Israel.

But the inequity is not limited to questions of mere representation.

When the United States withdrew from the Human Rights Council in 2018, The New York Times characterized the pullout as protesting “frequent criticism of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.” No country is immune to fair criticism, but this portrayal, sadly commonplace, represents nothing short of journalistic malpractice. What the council dishes out to Israel is not “criticism” but simple demonization—delegitimization and double standards.

The Human Rights Council was formed 15 years ago to replace its corrupt and utterly ineffective predecessor, the Commission on Human Rights. But the council has been little better, particularly when it comes to Israel and the human rights of its diverse citizens.

At the council, what is the only country permanently probed under a dedicated agenda item? Israel. The only country even tarred as racist under yet another agenda item? Israel. The country targeted with more condemnatory resolutions than all others? Israel. The country that has been the subject of more “emergency” sessions than all others? Israel. The country repeatedly targeted with so-called fact-finding missions whose one-sided findings are endorsed in advance? Israel. The country scrutinized in perpetuity, though not its violent adversaries, by a “special rapporteur”? Israel. The only country subjected to a discriminatory corporate blacklist? Israel.

Too many outsiders assume that the U.N.’s sky-high output of anti-Israel excoriations reflects the real-world misbehavior of a uniquely and wildly aggressive Israel.

In actuality, Israel serves as a convenient target for scapegoating and unjust isolation at the world body, despite an astonishingly humane record in the face of practically unequaled and unending existential threats.

Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad—all openly committed not to limited territorial or political claims but to the outright destruction of the Jewish state—have never been condemned by the Human Rights Council for their fanaticism and terror.

Meanwhile, more Arabs have been killed in just 10 years of civil war in Syria than in nearly a century of conflict over Jews’ return to sovereignty in their small and sole ancestral homeland.

Fortunately, with more and more Arab and Muslim leaders now recognizing not only the permanence of Israel but also its legitimacy and potential to help forge a thriving Middle East, forces long accustomed to weaponizing the United Nations for cynical political purposes may find increasingly little enthusiasm for that stale cause.

As America rejoins the UNHRC, it must make clear that the body’s own legitimacy rests upon abandoning bias and bigotry in the pursuit of human dignity. Only concrete and substantial change at the council will make the body worthy of American membership and sustained investment. That change should start with ending the council’s singular fixation upon defaming Israel at the expense of highlighting the world’s most egregious and systemic human-rights abusers.

Read Mariaschin and Michaels' take in JNS.