This is really a perfect encapsulation of Pence’s unique (and, to me, kinda gross) evangelical worldview. What he’s trying to say is some variant of “עם ישראל חי” but he can’t figure out how to do it without the Christian rhetoric of resurrection that Jews don’t buy into at all.
A huge percentage of my family was murdered by the Nazis. And the few survivors who went to Israel didn’t thereby resurrect their dead relatives. For my grandfather’s *entire life* there was a hole in his heart from the moment he was torn away from his mother at Auschwitz.
In an interview he did in 1997, when I was *in college*, he *still* couldn’t talk about the last time he saw his mother, after they got out of the cattle car, couldn’t describe her or what she was like. Resurrected? Bullshit. Entire families destroyed. Survivors broken.
I get what Pence wants to say, the sentiment of it. But he’s SO bad at this because his feelings about Jews are so transparently disingenuous. For him, Jews are either a political prop or a kind of transit point on the way to paradise for him. So it just grates on me.
You can make some nice statement about “Never Forget” and just leave it at that. I wouldn’t say anything if he did that. But the state of Israel didn’t resurrect the murdered Jews of Europe. Nothing can do that, at least not from the Jewish perspective.
It’s from *Pence’s* religious perspective that my murdered family members might be resurrected. But they—and I—forcefully reject that cosmology. We don’t believe what he believes. Believe what you want, man, but I’d appreciate it if you could leave 6 million dead Jews out of it.
