Renegade rabbi embraced by GOP in D.C.

BY HANNA ROSIN
Washington Post Service

Every few weeks or so Rabbi Daniel Lapin finds a reason to fly east from his home in Mercer Island, Wash., near Seattle, and spend a few days in Washington, D.C. He might be leading a Bible study on the Hill, having dinner with his ''close friend'' House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, breakfast with Karl Rove. Last year he came for a private Shabbat dinner with President Bush. ''The president recognizes my enthusiasm for his faith,'' says the rabbi.

QUAINT NICHE

Usually on these trips Lapin stays with Jack Abramoff, a lobbyist who is an old friend of the Lapin family and one of a small elite who share Lapin's very particular niche in Washington: a practicing Orthodox Jew who is a renegade among the city's Jewish establishment but moves comfortably among conservative Christians.

Abramoff is under investigation for allegedly defrauding his Indian casino-owning clients and for allegedly breaking lobbying laws. In a stack of e-mails released last week by the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, several scandal sidekicks made unexpected cameos. Among them were Daniel Lapin and his younger brother David, rabbis from South Africa who are heirs to a 200-year-old rabbinical dynasty and very updated ambitions.

With a city increasingly dominated by the religious conservatives who appreciate Lapin, he can now be described as Republican Washington's Official Rabbi.

''When you're talking to a pastor he could be inspired by God, etc., but he may not have the scholarship,'' says Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California, one of several Republicans who refer to Lapin affectionately as ''my rabbi.'' ``When you're talking to Rabbi Lapin you know you're getting an expert, someone who's the equivalent of a PhD at a major university.''

For evangelicals who are used to reading about Jews as God's chosen people, Lapin solves an essential mystery: ''A lot of people are surprised when they leave church and encounter essentially Dershowitz Judaism, Jews who are liberal,'' says conservative activist Grover Norquist, who is also a friend. ``Lapin is the opposite of that.''

CITING THE TORAH

For conservatives searching for biblical foundations for their political positions, Lapin is validation from the original source. His specialty is finding support in the Torah for what turns out to be the current Republican platform: lower taxes, decreased regulation, pro-traditional family policies.

''The principles of the Republican Party and the convictions of our president more closely parallel the moral vision of the God of Abraham than those of anyone else,'' Lapin said at the dinner with Bush, hosted by Ralph Reed.

Lately he has joined the crusade against what conservatives call ''activist judges.'' In an interview, he said, ``It's like the verse in Jeremiah where God says, I will be your king and I will be your lawgiver and I will be your judge. Therein lies the core. The founders enshrined three branches of government . . . and I find unusual this seizure of power by judges that rightly belongs to the people.''

Daniel Lapin is standing over by the drinks table in an upstairs room of the Manhattan Jewish Center, at a Jewish singles event organized by his daughter Rena, 22.

CAPTIVATING SPEAKER

Lapin is known as a fluid, captivating speaker -- he has coached members of Congress in speaking -- and right now he looks like he's in a trance, summoning energy to address the crowd of about 50.

Lapin's subject this day is ''Jewish guilt'' -- more specifically, ''Why the Torah discourages guilt about sex and money,'' and much of it is drawn from one of his books. It may sound ''anti-Semitic,'' he says, but there must be a reason why Jews are disproportionately represented on the Forbes 400 list, and he concludes that the best explanation is that ''Jewish success is embedded in the Torah system.'' We don't believe it to be an evil process.''

''Does God want people to be rich?'' he asks. ''Yes!'' he says, and explains how God ''wants us to be obsessively preoccupied by one another's needs,'' a habit that the commerce relationship fosters. ''Wealth is a consequence of doing the right thing,'' he says, ``and this is one of the secrets of Jewish success.''

Several members of Congress are under investigation for illegally accepting perks from corporations they oversee, and among those under suspicion are many of Lapin's close political pals: Abramoff, DeLay, Reed and, distantly, Norquist. But Lapin dismisses it all as an accounting error.

''You can't just make money and then as an afterthought think of ethics as a cost item, something that cuts back profits,'' he says. ``The right way is the best way.''

Lapin's first taste of ministering to the powerful came in Venice Beach in the '80s, when, newly arrived from South Africa, he ran the Pacific Jewish Center with conservative radio host and movie critic Michael Medved. The center was housed in a synagogue on the boardwalk that had lapsed in membership. Lapin and Medved targeted young Jewish strays, people looking to rediscover their roots. Young people would roller-skate in, and Lapin would invite them over for Shabbat dinner; eventually some Hollywood stars discovered the charismatic Lapin.

CELEBS APPEARED

Dustin Hoffman and Richard Dreyfuss came. Elliott Gould was a regular, and the shul held a fundraising banquet in his honor, with Pia Zadora and Burgess Meredith and his friends, recalls Meyer Denn, a synagogue leader.

Around 1990, Abramoff flew in to meet Lapin and Medved. Abramoff had been living in South Africa filming his B-list Cold War thriller Red Scorpion, starring Dolph Lundgren. A convert to Orthodox Judaism, Abramoff had bought a house next door to the Lapins to attend younger brother David Lapin's Torah study center. Abramoff wanted publicity for his movie, so David Lapin suggested he look up his brother and Medved, Orthodox Jews who knew Hollywood types.

David and Abramoff are spiritually closer. ''My brother was very influential in Jack's odyssey of practicing Judaism,'' says Daniel. Abramoff and Daniel, on the other hand, were a much more natural match. Daniel was then only dabbling in politics -- he'd preached in favor of Ronald Reagan. But in a few years he and Abramoff would move in the same direction as practicing Orthodox Jews who found a home among conservative Christians in Washington.

Some Jews are prominent neoconservatives -- Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol -- but their relationship with the evangelical wing of the Republican Party is somewhat rocky and often distant. Orthodox Jews are socially conservative but until recently have shied away from participating much in American politics.

That left Abramoff and Lapin to fill the vacuum. Neither fit in well with the Jewish establishment. Lapin developed a habit of defending the Christian Coalition at the expense of more liberal Jewish leaders. They became close enough that Abramoff credits Lapin with introducing him to DeLay.

Lapin became popular in conservative Christian circles in 1999, after he published America's Real War, a polemic along the lines of Pat Buchanan's famous culture wars speech at the 1992 Republican convention.

''We are really two separate nations,'' he writes, one side supporting and the other opposing ''Judeo-Christian morality playing a role in American public life.'' He then took on every issue dear to the Christian right -- atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair, pornographer Larry Flynt, the gay rights movement -- and added liberal Jews as a target.

To Lapin, the great constitutional debates about religion in public life are beneath consideration.

''I've always thought it was a quaint notion, the separation of religion and politics,'' he says. ``It's preposterous. Politics is nothing other than the practical application of your most deeply held moral and spiritual values.''

Lapin was invited by some senators to teach Bible classes on the Hill. He gave sessions to members of Congress explaining the biblical roots of conservative policies. In one session on ''Joseph and Taxation,'' he explained that in ancient societies taxes never rose above 20 percent. ''They were fascinated by that,'' he says, ``to learn that this was not an accident, that the tax rate was designed by the Great Architect in the sky.''

Lapin became a keynote speaker at conferences for the Christian Coalition and the Family Research Council. ''It was phenomenal,'' recalls Eli Piepsz, who traveled with him at the time. ``The crowds loved him. People would come up and say, `It's amazing to finally meet someone of the original faith who is true to his faith.'''

''The 700 Club is one of my big all-time favorites,'' Lapin said in beginning an interview last year with Pat Robertson, and then proceeded to call other prominent Jewish leaders, particularly Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, ''breathtakingly arrogant'' for calling Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ anti-Semitic.

Lapin took that spat one step further in an essay that ran in the Orthodox paper The Jewish Press in January. He complained that Jewish leaders criticized Gibson but ignored Jews such as Howard Stern and the producers of Meet the Fockers who were ``debasing the culture.''

''With all due respect, the good people don't know the difference between one rabbi and another,'' Foxman says about the Christian leaders. ``They see a beard and they know he's super-kosher, so they think he's mainstream Jewry. But he's so conservative he's off the wall. He's on the fringes of the Jewish community.''

After he left Venice Beach, Daniel Lapin moved to Seattle -- ''yachting is my religion, Judaism is my life,'' he says. From there he founded Toward Tradition, a group ''working to advance our nation toward the traditional Judeo-Christian values.'' Abramoff is on the board, gave $10,000 to the group and helps deliver senators to its conferences, says Medved, who lives near Lapin in Seattle.

In an earlier set of e-mails, Abramoff calls his Indian clients ''morons'' and ''monkeys.'' For that, Daniel Lapin found the language to criticize his old friend, calling his insults ''horrible, awful.'' But he stops short of saying what Medved does, that as an Orthodox Jew Abramoff ''disgraced the Torah.'' Instead, he edges more toward pastoral forgiveness.

''Abramoff created an extremely effective ideological machine, and I think that bothered many people on the moderate side,'' says Lapin. ``Nobody claims Abramoff did anything different than anyone else. He's a friend of mine and I've seen him do many, many wonderful and decent things.

``My argument is that a human being is a very complicated amalgam. We've all done things we're not proud of.''