On Tuesday, at a campaign event in Michigan, Vice President Mike Pence brought out Rabbi Loren Jacobs to lead the room in prayer for the victims of the Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh.
The problem: Jacobs’ synagogue, Shema Yisrael, is a “Messianic” institution, and Jacobs belongs to a sect of Judaism that effectively proselytizes Christianity. This was evident in the prayer Jacobs used:
In choosing Jacobs, Pence managed to seriously offend many people. Soon, Twitter was full of angry reactions.
Pence has gotten into trouble with his depictions of the Jewish faith before. In January, during a tour of Israel on Holocaust Remembrance Day, his tweet about how the 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust “rose up from the ashes to resurrect themselves to reclaim a Jewish future” was roundly criticized for its overtly Christian imagery.
Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license