Then there's the recent Broadway play Getting and Spending. Its subject was moral redemption in an age of corporate greed. Someone asked me whether I'd be offended if the characters who had been morally disrobed so disrespectfully were rabbis, and not priests and nuns, or if a Jewish ritual such as religious circumcision were parodied on television. Both examples have occurred. In another installment, a ritual circumcision was treated with levity.
Satire is satire.
And even if the episodes are exaggerated and sensationalist, they should prod us all to cap our human foibles with some godlike absolutes. Moving from satire to the real world, Pope John Paul's most recent encyclical was intended to remind priests that the study of philosophy and logic, resulting in transcendent principles of truth, is as integral to the charge of Catholic clergy as is their ministry to the human world, with all its fluidity and relativism. As a teen-ager growing up in the Midwest, my decision to become a rabbi stirred bewilderment among my friends. Popular culture has returned me to being one of the guys. It has moved the image of the clergy from geek to chic by portraying, even to the extreme, the human side of the person who stands in the pulpit.