Where Was Bishop Budde Since October 7th?

As America’s eyes were set on the inauguration, during the National Prayer Service at the Washington National Cathedral, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde surprised everyone when she suddenly addressed incoming President Trump with a personal plea on behalf of immigrants and members of the LGBT community. “In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy on the people in our country who are scared now,” she said to the surprised president and audience. When I heard Bishop Budde’s heartfelt pleas, I found myself with tears in my eyes. Why? Because for the past 15 months, I have been pleading and begging so many who have shown indifference to the rise of antisemitism, with no success.

While many Jews have found themselves shocked by the staggering rise of antisemitism and crimes against Jews across the Western world since October 7th, it was the burning pain of indifference that many found even more surprising. American Jews who grew up with Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous words: “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends,” never realized how close to home those words would come. 

Bishop Budde’s heartfelt pleas for mercy are the first public ones but clearly not the last. In the coming years, there will be other groups negatively impacted by the incoming administration’s policies, who will be asking for more sympathy from the American people. They may make those calls as individuals, through public figures like Bishop Budde, through elected officials, or via organizations that speak on their behalf. Those calls will not be appealing in the name of power or influence; they will be appealing to the conscience of others—in the name of what is right.

Yet pleading to conscience and appealing to compassion can only be achieved when the appeals come from places of genuine conscience and a sense of what is right. The moment an ulterior motive is detected, or when there is a lack of authenticity about the appeal, it loses much of its potential. Jews, often owing our very lives to people of great conscience like Sweden’s Raoul Wallenberg or Japan’s Chiune Sugihara—diplomats who risked their lives during the Holocaust to issue visas to persecuted Jews—will find themselves in a very different position than they have been in the past.

While Jews have rightfully gone out of their way to support liberal causes that speak in the name of compassion, we will now be asking voices like Bishop Budde a very simple question: Where have you been since October 7th? Where have you been when our children were targeted on college campuses? Where have you been when swastikas were spray-painted on synagogues and when keffiyeh-clad mobs marched through Jewish neighborhoods? Where were you when Jews in America were maligned, libeled, defamed, and slandered on almost every college campus in this nation? 

In the case of Bishop Budde, her record is unambiguous. In the wake of the horrors of October 7th, Bishop Budde released a statement condemning the horrors Hamas has committed but has also drawn a moral equivalency between Israel and Hamas: “It is equally true that God’s heart breaks for the suffering people of Gaza,” Bishop Budde stated. “The vast majority of Palestinians living in Gaza are not terrorists, and half are children who have known nothing but war for their entire lives.” The implication that Israel is to blame for the children of Gaza knowing war most of their lives, even as Hamas has initiated every single attack on Israel since its very inception, was the fuel behind much of the antisemitism we have seen since October 7th. 

In March 2024, even as the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child issued urgent warnings about the conditions of 24 million children in Sudan, hundreds of thousands of whom were subjected to actual famine and deadly starvation, Bishop Budde dedicated her Easter sermon to peddling the unsubstantiated claim that “Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Palestinians, are on the brink of starvation….the fact remains that some leaders in Israel and of Hamas are willing to let an entire nation starve or be killed rather than end this war. They must be stopped. “ This kind of demonizing equivocation, tapping into age-old antisemitic tropes, casting on Jews’ lust for blood and violence, has been feeling the unprecedented wave of hate American Jews have been experiencing. The fact that Bishop Budde, went on to condemn “antisemitism and Islamophobia” in that same sermon without calling out the kind of hatred her words have been fueling is the erasure American Jews have been looking at with disbelief. 

The isolating erasure and silence that Jews have noticed with great pain will resonate with us as we hear mercy and compassion suddenly being echoed by those who have ignored our plight for the past fifteen months. That silence will also stand in condemnation on the witness stand against those who are now evoking “mercy” and “compassion.” The American people have a hard time accepting selective vestiges of mercy and compassion when those have not been applied equally in the past.