Montclair, a town of 40,000, established its police chaplaincy via ordinance in 2017, joining hundreds of communities nationwide with similar programs. Clergy volunteers go through a couple of days of training and then are on call to join officers at crime scenes, accompany them when informing family members about a death, or counsel them through a challenging case.
The police “face so many traumatic things on a daily basis, more in one week than we’ll see in a lifetime — even in Montclair,” explained Pastor Ron Gonzalez of Christ Church, who helped start the program and has been its heart and soul. “I believe that God loves law enforcement officers — I’m not saying more than anyone else, but He knows they’re doing God’s work.”
In a relatively sleepy suburb like Montclair, police chaplains are sometimes called a few times a month — and sometimes, months go by without a call. There have been between eight and a dozen volunteers on the roster at a time, but Gonzalez has been a constant.
He recalled counseling one off-duty officer who was in a car accident that killed a pedestrian: “I just did a lot of listening.” He remembered responding to the scene of a suicide, and to the accidental death of an 11-year-old child. Then there was a 90-something matriarch who died while in hospice.
“That was a little over a year ago,” Gonzalez told me. “I went to her home. I was there and stayed with her family for a while. The next think I know, they asked me if I would eulogize their mom.
“Just last week,” he added, “I got a Christmas card thanking me for serving them.”
Imam Amin, who told me he’d lived in Montclair for 50 years, was sworn in as a police chaplain in September 2023. He said he’d only been on one call, and couldn’t remember what it was about: “Thank God, nothing is ever happening in this town.”
We spoke for a frustrating 15 minutes before the council meeting was in full swing. He was defiant, refusing to acknowledge that there was anything wrong with putting horns on Jews or implying we control the media.
He pointed out that when someone threw a Molotov cocktail at Ner Tamid a couple of years ago, he was among the allies who showed up, just as he’d done at the local Reconstructionist synagogue after the Tree of Life massacre in 2018. He also said that since he got most of his anti-Zionist material from Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow and the website Mondoweiss — whose founder is Jewish — he was on safe ground.
“People have to know the Jewish community is not a monolith,” Amin said. “The religion that I practice is sufficient for me not to commit bias or hate against anyone.”
I asked him several times if he had any regrets about anything he’d said or done during this extended kerfuffle. Nope. I tried suggesting, several times, that when it comes to antisemitism, maybe he should give berth to Jewish colleagues to define it — just as I would give him, as a Black man, more credence in discerning racism. He wasn’t having it.
“This is what I see: All Jewish people have this magic judgment that they can know when something is antisemitic,” Amin said derisively. “I’m an American citizen; I don’t need to have a rabbi tell me that I’m amplifying antisemitism.”
Maybe Montclair doesn’t need a police chaplain who is so hard-headed. But it does need a town council and town manager who are not so easily cowed.
The solution to this crisis is just not that hard. Serving even as a volunteer for a public agency is a privilege, so it’s not a problem to have it come with some social media guidelines preventing hateful posts. A little anti-bias training that includes Islamophobia as well as antisemitism could help. And when a bunch of rabbis or other community leaders say you’ve hurt or offended their people, try apologizing.
If only a deal to end the war were as simple. | 