Sage and Sages

For those of us who are following the constitutional struggle over religious freedom, it was quite a moment last night when the Agudath Israel of America gathered for its annual dinner here in New York. There at the Hilton, in the middle of a four-tier dais on which were seated scores of the most distinguished rabbis in Judaism and between the Novominsker Rebbe, Yaakov Perlow, chairman of the Council of Torah Sages, and New York's police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, was the justice of the Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia, who has marked this issue more clearly than any other. Call it a fundamentalist of constitutional law among fundamentalists of the laws of Moses.

The justice chose to talk about the establishment clause. He did not go beyond views he's already given from the high bench. But he couldn't have chosen a better time or venue — particularly with our laws being tested at every turn by such issues as gay marriage, prayer in schools, the question of abortion, and a war being waged by terrorists acting in the name of extremist Islam — to mark the point that America's constitution was never meant to exclude religion from our life or public sphere. In respect of this, the justice drew a sharp distinction between America and the Europeans.

He also offered marvelous insights into the thinking of at least one-ninth of the highest court in the land, including one story he told about a class in Shakespeare at Xavier, where the future justice went to high school here in Manhattan. He did a marvelous imitation of the Boston accent of his teacher, Father Murray, explaining that when one studied Shakespeare, it wasn't the Bard who was on trial. It was the students. What an insight into the humility of a constitutional fundamentalist as he sits down to judge the laws of a Congress of mortals before the Founders who wrote the Constitution under which we all live — and wrote it, the record shows, well aware of the light of Sinai which animates so much of the tradition in which America prospers.