Rabbi to give invocation before Obama’s acceptance speech

Barack Obama’s outreach to Jews continues. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, though he might want to focus on the general electorate, with which Reuters reported today he is trailing John McCain by 5 percentage points.)

I mentioned Sunday that Rabbi David Saperstein had been invited, along with many Christian leaders, to participate in a faith caucus at the Democratic National Convention next week. What I didn’t know was that Saperstein, director of the Religion Action Center of Reform Judaism, is scheduled to deliver the invocation before Obama’s acceptance speech on the final day of the convention.

“In both the Democratic and Republican conventions there are thousands of people whose sole focus is on making America better,” Saperstein told The Forward. “It is perfectly appropriate for them to ask for God’s blessing and God’s guidance. I don’t see it as a partisan issue.”

Perfectly acceptable, indeed. But cynical old me suspects the Obama campaign is more concerned with Isaac’s blessing than God’s.