The Orthodox rabbi who serves as chaplain to the Cleveland police delivered the invocation at the start of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
Rabbi Ari Wolf, who also works as an administrator for the haredi Orthodox Telshe Yeshiva in the Ohio city, was a last-minute stand-in, according to Matzav.com, which first reported his invitation to the convention. Wolf replaced the prominent Manhattan modern Orthodox Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, who withdrew on July 15, three days before the convention began.
In the July 18 invocation, Wolf asked for God’s blessings for the convention, and for God’s protection as America faces threats at home and abroad.
“We ask your blessings on our country and our people,” Wolf said. “We seek your guidance and continued protection. Dear God, we live in perilous and dangerous times. Today, our beloved country is under attack. Our family values, our moral principles and even our very democracy is threatened.”
Wolf’s invocation also nodded to the recent killings of police officers in Baton Rouge and Dallas. He asked for God to “watch over and safeguard our police officers and all our first responders who work each day and night in every city, town and hamlet of our great nation to protect us and our freedoms.
The rabbi began and ended the invocation in Hebrew. He referred to God at the start as “Avinu shebashamayim,” our heavenly Father, and ended with the three-verse priestly blessing asking for God’s protection and peace.
Lookstein had accepted the invitation as a gesture to Ivanka Trump, whose Jewish conversion he oversaw, and whose father Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. But following intense pressure from alumni of the Ramaz School, the elite Manhattan Jewish prep school he once ran, Lookstein withdrew.
“Unfortunately, when my name appeared on a list of speakers at the convention, without the context of the invocation I had been invited to present, the whole matter turned from rabbinic to political, something which was never intended,” he wrote in a July 15 letter to his community. “Like my father before me, I have never been involved in politics. Politics divides people.”
Lookstein’s invocation, whose text he released, seemed to give a subtle rebuke to Trump’s rhetoric. The invocation would have asked God’s protection from threats “from within, by those who sow the seeds of bigotry, hatred and violence, putting our lives and our way of life at risk.”
Also speaking Monday, Linda Lingle, the former governor of Hawaii, criticized the Democratic Party’s stance on Israel and scarcely mentioned Donald Trump.
Lingle, who is Jewish, said President Barack Obama’s term has “been a wake-up call to American Jews.” She said the Democratic Party — including its presumptive nominee, Hillary Clinton — has “treated our allies as strangers.”
Lingle, Hawaii’s governor from 2002 to 2010, is now an advisor to Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner.
She claimed anti-Israel sentiment is growing in the Democratic Party, while the Republican Party supports Israel. She praised the Republican platform’s new policy on Israel, which calls for a united Jerusalem under Israeli control, does not mention the two-state solution and opposes the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel, known as BDS.
“On one issue after another, from boycott, divestment and sanctions to the Iran nuclear agreement to the very legitimacy of Israel, they’re divided, with those who don’t care for Israel getting stronger in the Democratic Party,” Lingle said. “You’ll find no such division in the Republican Party’s leadership.”
In her lone mention of Trump, who won the Republican nomination but has irritated a number of party leaders, she said Jews need to support him to “make America great again,” using his campaign’s theme. — jta