Friar Yid

Privileges of the Majority

2012-01-30T06:00:00.000-08:00

Peter Beinart had an interesting post about American Jews' religiosity, in which, among other things, he noted that American Jews tend to vote liberal because statistically, "U.S. Jews practice their religion far less than their American Christian counterparts."

I think this also ties in with why American Jews have traditionally been wary of people being or becoming "too" religious. Part of this is that there can often be a correlation between personal religiosity and carrying that over into the public sphere. Particularly in America, people tend to be very bad about keeping their personal faith off of others.

This often seems to be something that's very hard for non-Jews, particularly Christians (even "cultural" ones), to understand. I once had a very animated discussion with a college friend about the issue of prayer in public schools-- and even though she identified as a religious minority (Unitarian Universalist), I found it very hard to communicate the discomfort and frustration that that issue, and ones like it, raised in me. Since she still very much associated with the majority culture, it was hard for her to understand how threatening or offensive the idea that we are a Christian nation, or an inherently religious nation is, when you're in the minority.

For a religious minority with a long history of persecution, I feel that Jews are particularly sensitive to issues of majoritarianism, and it's part of the reason so many Jews on the more liberal/secular end of things are so cagey about bringing religion into public discourse. As soon as we start having a more religious public society, we inevitably get into the dicey questions of how and what to include and what to exclude. Frankly, it's something that is hard to do well.

Things also aren't helped by the fact that as the evangelical population in America has become more vocal in their religiosity and desire for a more publicly religious society, it becomes increasingly clear that they haven't worked out all the sticky parts that would come with this new dynamic-- and particularly, what acceptable roles for non-Christians would be in a "Christian" country. One place this has popped up is with Mitt Romney's candidacy.

While I have little in common with Romney politically, it's been rather disconcerting to see the evangelical Republican population publicly debate whether his faith should prevent him from being "allowed" to be the GOP candidate. There's an incredible amount of hubris and privilege present here that for me, really exemplifies why I and so many other liberals, particularly liberal Jews, much prefer to have an American political sphere that is as secular as possible.

First example comes from the Christian Post, where columnist Jim Denison felt the need to defend the argument that candidate's faith should be a consideration by voters.

are there religious commitments that affect these "pivotal points" to the degree that they should be considered by voters? I believe there are. My position does not relate specifically to Romney and Mormonism; it applies to any candidate from any political party.

Let's consider some examples. Ronald Reagan was shot by John Hinckley nearly 30 years ago. If he had been a faithful Jehovah's Witness, he would have died – his church's teachings would have forbidden the massive blood transfusions that saved his life. In 1991, President George H. W. Bush was diagnosed with hyperthyroidism, which caused a rapid irregular heartbeat and atrial fibrillation. Drugs were effective in returning his heart rhythm to normal. If he had been a practicing Christian Scientist, would he have refused medical treatment? Do we want presidents whose lives could be endangered by their religious beliefs?

How would a Sunni president have prosecuted the war in Iraq? Would a Shiite view Iran more sympathetically? Would a chief executive who was a Tibetan Buddhist be more sympathetic to the Dalai Lama in his ongoing conflicts with the People's Republic of China?

Admittedly, none of the current presidential candidates espouse religious commitments so contrary to mainstream America. But would their policies be influenced by their religious beliefs? I would hope so.

And this is an area where we have a foundational disagreement. I want elected officials who either share my political philosophy, or at least have a view of government, country and society that won't be actively harmful to them. Their religious beliefs are far less important to me than their political beliefs, and it doesn't particularly matter to me what they are as long as they don't impair their ability to do their jobs well. And I don't really buy Denison's claim that he really wants all presidential candidates to make decisions based on their religion regardless of whether he agrees with those beliefs.

Would Mormonism's distinctive beliefs influence a Romney or Huntsman administration? Would evangelical commitments affect Rick Perry's presidency? Would Catholic moral positions gain consideration in a Gingrich or Santorum White House? Would Baptist convictions influence Ron Paul's policies? Do the United Church of Christ's theological positions alter Barack Obama's worldview and leadership?

You and I may disagree on the answers to these questions, but we should agree to ask them.

First, this is really funny given how irritated conservatives got when liberals bashed Bush for saying God talked to him and gave him foreign policy advice. Second, sorry, no. Asking random questions to yourself is not a particularly useful activity, and given Jim's stated beliefs and biases, it comes off as poisoning the well. This is like all those people who kept questioning Obama's patriotism or eligibility but claimed they were "just asking questions." If you're curious about the effect Romney's faith might have on his administration, do some journalism. Don't just sit around going, "Hey, Mormons don't drink, do you think he'll repeal the 21st Amendment?"

Second example is from old friend Dennis Prager, playing, of all the things, the role of sage voice of reason. He can do this, he informs us, because,"as a Jew, I have no religious pony in this race," though he does want us to know how awesome Christianity and Mormonism are.

I believe that American Christianity has been the greatest force for good in the modern world and that evangelicals are at the core of America’s backbone. And I have enormous respect for Mormons.

As he so often does in his columns, Dennis doesn't believe in showing examples or anything, he just states the facts and moves on before anyone can argue with him. A sort of drive-by op-ed, if you will.

Dennis has three take-aways he wants evangelicals to know. First of all, Mormonism isn't a cult, because Dennis says so.

Over the course of time, as a religion establishes itself and its members act more or less like members of the older religions, the charge is usually dropped... After nearly 200 years, Mormons are an integral part of American society, with impressive reputations for family life, integrity and other values. The “cult” label just doesn’t seem appropriate.

Got it, Christians? It used to be a cult. Now it's cool. Get with it.

Second, evangelicals need to get over labels.

in the view of most evangelicals, if people wish to believe in the divinity of the Book of Mormon and the prophecy of Joseph Smith, that is their business, but to call these and other distinctive Mormon beliefs “Christian” bothers many evangelicals. Of course, Mormons respond that a religion that calls itself The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, can hardly be dismissed as non-Christian. But it is not my interest here to adjudicate this debate. I only wish to offer one reason that evangelicals might be disturbed by Mormonism calling itself Christian.

Well, that wasn't very decisive. Not taking a position on something? Live and let live? It looks like Dennis is getting all wishy-washy and liberally in his old age.

Last, Mormons can still be conservative without being evangelical.

Traditional Jews and evangelical Christians have quite different theologies, but they often have virtually identical values. (That is why this Jew is so supportive of evangelicals and why evangelical Christians syndicate my radio show.) Conservative Catholics and evangelicals differ on theology but share virtually every important value. The founders differed on theology but rarely on values.

Sigh.
A- Duh?
B- Nice weaseling by Dennis here. I know he went to Yeshiva day school, but he just had a column on how he isn't Orthodox, and he's publicly spoken about not keeping kosher. Exactly who is he kidding with this line about being a "traditional" Jew? Dennis is a liberally observant Jew with conservative politics. "Traditional Jew" implies something very specific, particularly to a non-Jewish audience, and it seems misleading.
C- Have you read anything the Founders wrote? They totally had different values, that's why they had different political parties!
D- I like how Dennis, judgmental crank par excellence, is telling the Christian right that they need to get over themselves and ratchet their righteous indignation down.

Last example comes from WND writer Jane Chastain, chastising her Christian brethren for their anti-Romney fears.

For too long, people of faith, and Christians in particular, have been lulled to sleep politically by anyone who claimed to be a member of the “right” church. He or she, in effect, had their religious ticket stamped. We elected them, hit the snooze button and they robbed us blind. How is that working out for you?

...It wasn’t that long ago that many Protestants were afraid to vote for a Catholic for president for fear that the pope would be the de facto ruler of the country. Now, we are hearing the same kind of thing about Mitt Romney and the LDS president or prophet of the church.

Another concern is that a Mormon president may mean more Mormon converts. Was there a surge of Catholic converts after the election of JFK?

...There is no perfect candidate in the Republican field. However, short of a brokered convention, one of the four men still standing will be the GOP nominee. Let’s not rule one of them out simply because he is not a member of our faith.

Like Dennis, Chastain makes decent points here, but for me what's amazing is that these arguments have to be made in the first place. No kidding, you should elect someone who shares your values, even if you don't overlap with them 100%! That's how voting works. That evangelical voters are struggling with this just illustrates how much majoritarian privilege they are used to holding. It bothers me as a Jew that these folks are so culturally sheltered that the concept of voting for a non-Christian has never even crossed their minds before.

I guess it's nice that evangelicals are having these discussions, but for me it also shows just how large the gap is between my cultural and political experiences and theirs-- and the fact that this makes them so uncomfortable underscores why, for me, a specifically "Christian" America is one I do not want to live in.

A Tzimmes in a Teapot

2012-01-29T12:00:00.000-08:00

As a general rule, Jesus is not a particularly well-understood figure in Judaism. Since the topic dovetailed with my undergrad thesis, I spent lots of time examining Jewish attitudes towards Jesus in college-- ranging from the medieval polemic Toldot Yeshu, to philosophers like Profiat Duran, Jacob Emden and Moses Mendelssohn. I also looked at Enlightenment and Reform thinkers like Graetz, Geiger, Kohler, and the rabbis Wise (I.M. and Steven), as well as Yiddish modernists like Melech Ravitch, Itzig Manger, Peretz Markish, Abraham Sutzkever, Lamed Shapiro, Zalman Schneour, H. Leivick, Sholem Asch, and even Uri-Zvi Greenberg, all of whom incorporated depictions of Jesus into their writing at various points.

So when I hear that Shmuley Boteach has a book coming out about how Jews should relate to Jesus, forgive me if I'm a little skeptical already.

It's not that the topic should be off-limits. It's that Shmuley is neither a scholar, nor a historian, nor, indeed, even a philosopher. He is a salesman, a popularizer. These things can be fine, but when the "products" you decide to sell are people's deeply-held beliefs, it can lead to a volatile mix-- just ask Sholem Asch, who got tossed out of the Yiddish canon for his series of Christian novels. This is also not helped by the fact that Shmuley is one of the Jewish world's most self-aggrandizing and least humble personalities (also like Asch!), a man who never met a media outlet he didn't like, and who can't write an op-ed without either name-dropping a celebrity friend he hangs out with or trying to sell his new book, TV show, or half-eaten sandwich.

Simply put, Shmuley is not the right person to try to market Jesus' Jewishness. And all the more so since he apparently knows very little about the field he is purporting to comment on. As fellow Judeoblogger Izgad points out, there has been a ton of scholarship on "the historical Jesus" over the past 100-plus years, from both Jews and Christians. And unless new material is discovered, at this point it's frankly rather hard to draw any new conclusions about Jesus' identity or ideology without just making stuff up. The Gospel accounts are often vague or contradictory, and their value as reliable evidence is already questionable. Shmuley mines Haym Macoby at length and casts Jesus as a patriotic Pharisee, but it's not the only conclusion one can draw. One early Reform intellectual, I.M. Jost, saw Jesus as a brilliant man trapped by Pharisee culture, which he secretly despised. Heinrich Graetz, by contrast, thought Jesus was an Essene operating on the fringes of rabbinic Judaism. (Most Reform thinkers followed Abraham Geiger's idea that Jesus was a principled Pharisee fighting Sadducee literalism and corruption, a theme echoed by Asch in his novels.)

Frankly, the Gospels are just not all that clear. You can read Jesus any way you want to and find textual evidence for it-- that's part of the reason why there are so many Christian denominations in the world. One quick example is Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. In it, he says that he has not come to abolish the law-- and this claim is backed up within the sermon, as he procedes to create various fences around the Torah, just like the Pharisees did. On the topics of murder, adultery, oaths, and divorce, his pronouncements are far stricter than the Biblical prohibitions or rabbinic interpretations of the day. But at the same time, some of his reformulations of other themes are either more liberal than standard Pharisee teachings (kashrut being one good example), or so radically reformulated that they can't really be compared (loving your enemy and an eye for an eye come to mind). And elsewhere in the Gospels, we see Jesus doing various things that are clearly at odds with Jewish law, such as violating the Sabbath to pick food. He doesn't really justify himself there or clarify why he's doing it, he just does it.

When you look at his actions, the conclusion seems to be that when it comes to Jewish law, Jesus is (by Pharisee standards) inconsistent. Some things are very important, and some things aren't important at all. Does that make him beyond the pale of Judaism for his time period? I'm not knowledgable enough about second Temple-era Judaism to comment, but I sure do wish that when talking about the "historical Jesus" more people would take the time to read what the Gospels say he did and said, as well as get historical context about the mileu he lived in, so they can understand what was and wasn't controversial about what he was doing, instead of reading him through historical prisms from 2000 years later.

And this leads us back to Shmuley. At the end of the day, though I would prefer Shmuley stop writing books altogether, and certainly about topics as dicey as these, I find it absolutely laughable that segments of the Orthodox community sees Kosher Jesus as such a threat that they are banning people from reading it or wringing their hands that now evangelicals will think they've got a rabbi on their side. Evangelicals have been pushing Jesus on us long before Shmuley and if they're expecting an uptick in saved souls thanks to this book, I think they'll be disappointed. Besides, Shmuley lives for publicity and it's a particularly bad move to give him any excuse to claim his new "groundbreaking" book is making him the target of persecution. If you're going to talk about his book, talk about why it's either bad scholarship or extremely obvious marketing pandering.

At the end of the day, the Jewish community have to figure out what it is they don't like about Shmuley and his book. If it's that it's a crappy book, and that there are much better-- and substantive-- things to say about the topic, that's one thing. If it's that they're personally not interested in it, that's fine too. But if part of the backlash to this is that they're worried people are going to convert over it, I would say calm down and give your fellow Jews some credit. Even if that was his goal (and it's clearly not), Shmuley simply isn't that good a writer.

P.S.

If people are interested in getting a more scholarly Jewish view of Jesus, or of actually "building bridges" between Jews and Christians like Shmuley says he is, one good resource to check out might be this book. I haven't read it yet, but I'm intrigued. God knows it's got to be better than Kosher Jesus.

Time to take your meds

2012-01-17T22:28:00.000-08:00

Remember Larry Klayman? The Jew so super patriotic and Zionist he doesn't know what citizenship he actually holds? He's back, and once again he's only too willing to have other people carry out the crazy ideas he's come up with... and deal with the messy consequences.

Yes, Larry, like many of us, has a problem with how Iran does business. Larry's solution, however, is blunter than most:

LARRY KLAYMAN: TIME TO NUKE IRAN

Uh, come again?

The Islamic Republic of Iran is and has always been the major problem and danger in the Middle East and internationally.

"Always" is a really interesting choice of words, Larry, given that the Islamic Republic of Iran isn't even 35 years old. Just as a reference point, Israel had fought four of its five wars before Islamic Iran ever existed. It must have been comforting to know that all those other wars were just practice.

Iran will within months acquire atomic weapons that can be delivered through missiles, as well as planes and ships, and has threatened – in the face of increased sanctions – not only to annihilate Israel and attack us too, but also to set ablaze the Strait of Hormuz, which is the gateway to oil shipments from Middle Eastern producers throughout the world. This would cripple the world’s economy and send us into an irreparable depression. Iran’s threat is a declaration of war, and we must now respond in kind with massive force!

I don't disagree that Iran's leadership trends towards the nutsy side and that I'd rather they not get nuclear weapons (or frankly any weapon improvements, thanks), but I'm a little unclear about what's suddenly changed that makes Larry think that the time for an Iranian D-Day has suddenly come.

The immediate need to destroy the Islamic regime once and for all is heightened by what is going on in neighboring Iraq...Iraq is now becoming “greater Iran.” Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, even by the admission of the liberal New York Times, “is moving to consolidate authority, create a one-party Shiite dominated state” and in effect throw his lot in with his Shiite brothers in Tehran – the neo-Nazi mullahs who not only threaten and are thus far succeeding with world conquest in the name of Allah, but also torture, maim and murder their own people to hold on to total power. So now Iran and Iraq will essentially be one big terrorist state – with tremendous wealth, thanks to their huge oil resources and revenues – bent on successfully waging Islamic revolution not just in the Middle East, but worldwide.

Larry, you're giving Iraq's Shiite leaders way too much credit here. If Iraq is eventually going to become Iran Jr., it's going to take a lot of internal infighting to get there. In the meantime, this is really just a bunch of hysterics. Also, I'm pretty sure the theological/political goals of Shiism are much more focused on fighting with Sunnis as opposed to waging global Islamic revolution against heretics. This makes sense, given that Shiites only number 10-15% of the global Muslim population. As the underdog, most observers think that a politically dominant pan-regional Shiia movement would be much more likely to try to flex their muscles and settle old scores with various Sunni regimes than go after us Satans of Various Size. Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying I want any radical Muslims to have the bomb, but when you talk about global Jihad, generally speaking, you're talking about Sunnis, not Shiia. Get your facts straight before you start building your Ahmadinejad bunker.

The radical mullahs in Tehran are a scourge that must be destroyed. To allow them to exist one minute more would be tantamount to reliving the mistakes that led to the rise of Adolf Hitler, World War II and the Holocaust.

Hey, remember that time you kept saying you were Israeli when you weren't? Yeah well, all this Godwin rhetoric is making you look even dumber than that.

Importantly, an increasing number of Iranian-Americans now understand that war with Iran will entail significant civilian casualties in their native country. And, while many Iranian-Americans still have loved ones there, they are increasingly willing to accept the consequences of all-out war with the Islamic regime... This is the most evil regime since the Third Reich, and it must be expunged now before it is too late.

Full stop Captain Crazy-Pants: exactly how many Iranian ex-pats support dropping a nuclear bomb on Iran? Did you ask any of them? Did they know this is what they were agreeing to? Saying, "We really need to remove the mullahs from power," or "Ahmadinejad has got to go," is not quite equivalent to your ever-so-precise, "Nuke 'em all!" proposal. Seriously, Larry, how were you not embarrassed to submit this to your editor with your name on it?

It is indeed sad that it has come to this. If Presidents Clinton, Bush and now Obama had had any foresight, a nuclear attack on Iran could have long since been averted. Much like taking out a small lump in a cancerous female breast, the operation could have been simple and done with. Now a total radical double mastectomy is required.

I love how when you can't decide which atrocious comparison to make, you go with both. Classy.

Obama and Hillary Clinton are traitors, and they are probably bribed to the hilt by Iran, but that does not relieve the rest of us from demanding action! We cannot allow for the rise of another Hitler-type regime at this time in world history.

Really, bribed by Iran? How high are you, Larry? Honestly, I don't feel comfortable with you even being in the same state as a nuclear weapon, much less dictating what our military policy should be with them.

There are enough problems that confront us, and we must NOW take drastic measures to remove these vile and evil Islamic terrorists from the face of the earth, if for no other reason than to allow us to deal with other matters and get on with business.

Remember folks, according to Larry the best way to deal with a problem is to nuke it. It's the same approach I take with teaching: if a kid doesn't understand something, I run him over with my car. Hey, if Larry ever gets tired of being an op-ed hack, I think he should try being a marriage counselor. Something tells me he'd be great at it.

So confused

2012-01-13T06:00:00.000-08:00

What kind of bizarre alternate-universe have I stumbled into? Dennis Prager wrote an article for the Jewish Journal explaining why he's not an Orthodox Jew and it actually... makes sense? I feel ill...

given that I believe that the Torah is from God and that the Jews are the Chosen People, and because I have values similar to Orthodox Jews, I am often asked why I am not Orthodox. My standing-on-one-leg response consists of three Hebrew words: Yom Tov Sheni. That’s not my only reason, but it’s shorthand for rabbinic law not changing.

The Torah commands us to observe Passover for seven days — an important number, since seven symbolizes Creation — but the rabbis added a day (Yom Tov Sheni) for Jews living in the Diaspora, because at one time Jews outside of Israel were not certain of the calendar. Though we have been certain for thousands of years, the added day has remained (though there was never a day added to Yom Kippur, which leads one to believe that the calendar was always known).

...we have long been in a period in which rabbinic, that is, man-made, halachah just cannot change. We are told that we are not on the moral or spiritual level of previous generations (I have no idea on what basis this claim can be made — the generation that was present at Sinai was on a considerably lower level than many Jews today) and that there is no halachic authority that would be able to change halachah (which simply restates the problem).

My God, I actually... agree with Dennis Prager. Someone take my temperature, I must have caught some terrible disease from my students! One of the bad ones, no doubt, like Brain Leprosy.

But surely there's got to be some explanation, some assurance that the world still makes sense? Let's see, here's a recent article he wrote for WND...

Only a fool believes that all those with whom he differs are bad people. Moreover, just about all of us live the reality – often within our own family – of knowing good and loving people with whom we strongly differ on political, religious, social and economic issues.

That said, I have come to believe that the more committed one is to leftism, the more likely one is to become meaner.

Hey look everyone, Dennis is back!

Thank Gob, Dennis is still a twit and still believes that you can yell about people being mean and making huge generalizations one minute, and then use one or two examples to make sweeping generalizations about people the next... and that this is all logically consistent.

leftism fills many of its adherents with contempt and hatred. It takes a person of great character and self-control to continually imbibe and mouth the mantras of the left – that everyone on the right is sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist and bigoted – and not become a meaner human being. If I believed just about everyone with left-wing views was despicable, I would be meaner, too.

In a previous column, I wrote about Thomas Friedman making one of the classic anti-Semitic libels when he wrote that the reason the Senate and the House gave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu standing ovations was because “that ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”

How does a Jew write an anti-Semitic libel? Because he’s on the left.

It's nice when the universe makes sense...which, of course, means Dennis doesn't.

A Conclusion/Hypothesis: Could it be that Dennis adjusts his op/ed persona to match the forum he's being printed in? So Dennis is slightly more reasonable, for instance, when writing about Jewish pluralism to a Jewish audience, but when writing for political readers, feels free (or required) to let his stupid all hang out? So many questions...

WND suffers from a dangerous irony deficiency

2012-01-12T06:00:00.000-08:00

It's no secret that WND is no fan of the gays and their marriage. And, like all good conservative rags, it considers part of its dedication to honest journalism to be exposing all the evil instances of the gay lobby pushing its agenda on innocent and wholesome American activities, be they school (how dare schools teach about gays!) sports (how dare the Chicago Cubs say they welcome all their fans!) or that most hallowed of American literature, the noble comic book.

Wait, say that last part again?

That's right, WND is up in arms because the "all-American" comic book Archie is having a gay wedding. Not only a gay wedding, a gay, interracial wedding. Also, one is an Iraq war vet. (Wait, how can WND not like this?)

ACLU has praised the Archie move, saying it reflects diversity and stuff. Conservatives are mad because, well, let's listen:

“It’s unfortunate that a comic book series usually seen as depicting innocent, all-American life is now being used to advance the sexual revolution,” Peter Spriggs of the Family Research Council told Fox News. “I think whatever boost in sales might come from the novelty or curiosity factors will be more than offset by the number of both kids and parents who will be turned off by this storyline and its obvious social and political agenda.”

There's no question there's an agenda here, but the reality is that most comics (or books, or movies, or TV shows) have an agenda. If you think Superman or Batman don't have agendas, you're not paying attention.

Also, while it's true that historically this comic tended to be pretty wholesome, I wonder if folks like Spriggs would be choosing it to be a rallying cry for how gays are ruining comics if they knew a little more about Archie's creator, Dan DeCarlo.

DeCarlo had, shall we say, a bit of a compartmentalized personality. Oh sure, he's most famous for Archie and his pals. But before that commercial success, he was known for a slightly different theme in his works...

T&A.

Yes, before his breakthrough with the Riverdale gang, Dan DeCarlo wrote and drew such innocent all-American works as Millie the Model, Sherry the Showgirl, and "America's Darling Dim-wit" My Girl Pearl. He seemed to really have a thing for showing young ladies in various stages of undress.

If you look carefully, I'm sure Archie afficionados will recognize DeCarlo's signature faces at work in his early strips. Why look, this extremely perky nurse is a dead-ringer for that ~~sadistic millionaire-ess~~, I mean, hardworking capitalist Veronica.

And this creepy slobbering kid is clearly Archie's evil identical cousin.

So yes, there may be a point here about the dicey issues of mucking around with an artist's characters after their death (I don't look forward to the inevitable day when Uncle $crooge competes in a break-dancing competition) , but don't act like a gay wedding in Archie is inappropriate because it somehow tarnishes DeCarlo's pure family-friendly vision. Considering that most present-day conservatives finding DeCarlo's old work from the '50s and '60s would want them banned if not burned, they should really just be happy that all the participants in this gay wedding are clothed.

A conversation

2012-01-03T12:00:00.000-08:00

Blog friend Antigonos wrote in:

Dear Friar Yid,

Every time I want to comment, after writing all my profound comments, and clicking "Post", Blogger informs me I can't comment unless I open an account with them. Since I have one already, this is a problem. Moreover, Blogger erases what I've just written!

So I have to write to you directly.

As regards your post about differences in siddurim, there are several reasons for this. Eastern European Jews did not [and do not] all use the same nusach. There are differences between Nusach Sefard [NOT Sephardi] and Nusach Ashkenaz. One of the biggies is in the responses of the Kedusha on Shabbat Shacharit and Musaf, but there are a lot of little ones, which may account for some lines being included and others left out. [Just to complicate things, my local shul davvens Ashkenaz for ordinary Shabbatot, but Sefard for hagim. Why? "That's the way my father did" is the answer. You would think that now that there is an official Nusach Israel, we'd use it, but no]

The "savri" introduction to the Birkat Hamazon is used when three adult males are benching together. In fact, the introduction becomes more and more elaborate as the number of men reciting Birkat Hamazon increases. The Artscroll siddur explains this, although not why it is so. In fact, the Artscroll siddur is a good reference work for comparison study, with standard Orthodox explanations and many of the halachot associated with davvening. [The use of "Hashem" for God drives me crazy after a while, but I think that's because one of Israel's loonier pop groups used the term in a rock song] The Birkat Hamazon, btw, also has variant lines between the nusachim, in this case between the Mizrachi and Ashkenaz versions.

As to the Song of Songs, the rabbis had a tough time deciding whether to put such an obviously erotic book into the Tanach at all. They weren't alone in insisting that it was an allegory: the Catholic Church insists that it is a dialogue between Christ as bridegroom and the Church as bride, and religious orders such as the Carmelites who tend to mysticism use it a great deal to symbolize the relationship of the soul to Christ. Yes, to us it all seems rather absurd. I'm sure that, at bottom, the rabbis knew the real meaning of the book: after all, it is recited on Friday nights when married couples perform the mitzvah of having relations if they can.

I LIKE the Artscroll editions, even when some of the rabbinical commentary verges on the absurd. I hear the new Koren prayerbooks, with translations and commentary by the British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, are very good. The classic Orthodox approach has got to be the benchmark by which all the other streams of Judaism are measured. I think I've written this before. I can remember when my mother, who was an on-again, off-again Reform synagogue member, "discovered" Havdala in an adult education course. She'd never ever even heard of it. This is one of the big reasons I have relatively little time for Reform: reinterpreting Havdala, yes -- even writing a modern version, but not junking it altogether. The function of Havdala is marking the boundary between sacred and profane time, just as lighting Sabbath candles does. The Reform does seem to see that they have been throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and are backtracking on this, to a point, by reintroducing "quaint" customs--but after 3 or 4 generations grew up without the slightest idea of them, it is a struggle.

Do you know the Yiddish meaning of "friar" [freier]? It means "a sucker". Did you intend your soubriquet to give that impression? I don't think you are one.

-Antigonos

Hi Antigonos,

First of all, thanks so much for your comments! I appreciate you sharing your thoughts.

Regarding Blogger and its mysterious ways, I must admit I'm a little stumped. When I comment in Blogger, I get a window that looks like this:

If I'm logged in under a different account (like my home email), I always just click on the Name/URL option and it lets me write my e-handle in manually. Some readers like Conservative Apikoros also use the "Anonymous" option and then sign their replies with their name. Do you get a different window?

Thanks for your notes about siddurim and the Birkat. I understand some of the rationale but I guess I'm still just slightly irked that the Conservative movement dropped the ball on this one. I have an old Artscroll siddur lying around and it's a good idea to grab it for some comparison study; if it's got anything, it's got commentary.

Ah, the Song of Songs. Yes, while I'm sympathetic to the inclination to try to improve on the pshat by adding some extra levels of meaning, at a certain point I think the rabbis doth protest too much-- and Artscroll's "translation" has that in spades.

I have heard good things about Koren, too. My dilemma is that since our Hebrew reading is still in baby step mode, I'm having a hard time justifying getting a siddur that neither Mrs. Yid nor I will be able to use. Hopefully at some point down the line we won't need transliteration, but that day isn't here yet.

I agree with you that throwing babies out with bathwater is generally a pretty terrible idea; but given that it's now several generations since Reform struck out on its own and has been steadily making its way back to some form of ritual awareness, if not strictly observance, it's hard for me to bash them too hard. All the Reform services I've been to have seemed to take Havdalah pretty seriously and everyone there seemed to know what it was. I think that though specific liturgy may still be hazy, the general knowledge level about ritual has gone up since the heydays of High Reform. Obviously it's not perfect, but it's better than it used to be. (Mrs. Yid and I tend to prefer fairly traditional services, albeit in egalitarian settings.)

I've heard the Freier=sucker line before, but my understanding is that that's the Israeli gloss on it. The Yiddish meaning, as I originally read it in Robert Eisenberg's Boychicks in the Hood (one of the first books on Judaism I found as a teenager) was "an uninvolved Jew," that is, not Reform, not Conservative, just "free," unaffiliated. In fact the precursor to this blog was a series of mini-essays I wrote in college (most of which never saw the light of day) that I had some grand plan of self-publishing as "Letters from a Freier Yid" about why so many Jews, especially young folks, were staying unaffiliated in the Twenty-First century. As I became interested in blogging, I also decided to change the spelling to be a little less jarring on the eyes. And, wouldn't you know it, there was already an English version for me to co-opt.

Though it's been over ten years since I first read Boychicks (agh! time!), I'm still unaffiliated with any particular movement, and, from an Orthodox POV, still "frei," in both the sense that I am not particularly observent by Orthodox standards, and that I don't consider myself to be specifically "obligated" by halacha. I see it as more of a cultural inheritance to be accessed as the want or need arises.

Ironically, in the Israeli context in which a freier is someone that stands in line, follows rules and generally does what they're told, yes, I would be considered a freier. For me the 614th mitzvah is "thou shalt not be a jerk in public." One more strike against aliyah, I suppose.

My own dose of Mussar

2012-01-02T17:18:00.000-08:00

I've been blogging for almost six years now, and no one knows more than I do that the quality and focus (and schedule!) of the writing tends to be rather uneven. It's always nice to see comments because it shows that some people out there are actually reading. There are tricky things about blogging into the abyss, as it were, because it's hard to tell who's coming to visit and what people are interested in reading. There are days where I get page views but am unsure what people are looking at. And for a while, there's been a strange quirk in Blogger that causes automatic back-links to me whenever I (or a reader) clicks on a post from my blogroll, which unfortunately (and to my continuing embarrassment) causes it to look like I'm spamming people randomly when really I'm just reading their posts. (Anyone who can help me disable this will get many karma points from me. Pleasepleaseplease.)

Once in a blue moon I'll get a lot of visitors over a few days, and that's fun. And sometimes comments I leave on other blogs help cultivate a slightly wider readership. (Remember that winter I guest posted on Dovbear? Yeah, I'm not surprised). Over the years, I've gradually started to find my voice as less of a political blogger, and more of a muser/raconteur. I appreciate the loyal readers I have because I know exactly how eclectic my writings are, seeing as how they rocket back and forth between history, politics, and increasingly, Judaism-- not just "Jewishness" but actual Torah. If big boys like Dovbear and FailedMessiah are the Kings of the Judeosphere I see myself as a member of the extremely petty nobility.

But lest I ever get too full of myself, I have the trusty Blogger stats system to keep my big head in check. For instance, did you know Blogger can track all your referring URLs? My top ten referrals were:

1- Dovbear, who will do just fine without another backlink
4- A martial arts forum discussing the ancient art of Abir, Warrior Fraud
5- Jackb, from back when he still had a blogroll

And the rest appear to be spam sites. Go team!

Hang on, there's more! There's an Audience section, too. Sweet. Now I can see where my adoring public comes from.

Apparently I'm slightly big in Brazil. No clue why.

Ok, now according to Blogger, my top audience country is the US (no surprise), followed by the UK, Germany, Canada, and... Japan?

Then the Netherlands...

Then Russia...

And then Israel?

*Scowl*

Hey Israel, get with the program! I read your blogs! What happened to mutually beneficial agreements?

Seriously, this past month I got more visitors from Pakistan than I did from Israel.

That sound you hear is my head exploding.

How is that even possible? The only post I ever wrote on Pakistan was about how ridiculous its government acted after "discovering" that Bin Laden had been hanging out there for ten years. I've been complaining about Israel off and on since I started this silly thing. When I first started blogging, the majority of my posts were about Israel. (Remember the time I made fun of your currency, Israel? Why no love?)

Whatever, that's fine. Let's finish by looking at the top keywords that bring people to my corner of the internet. What pearls of wisdom are you, my great audience, seeking that you only seem to be able to find here?

That stupid wrinkly dog picture gets more interest than me.

Lame.

Fun with the Wife

2012-01-02T06:00:00.000-08:00

Continuing our ongoing efforts to be crowned Leitzhanei Ha-Dor, Mrs. Yid and I have recently been reading some Artscroll books. Well, to be more precise, books about Artscroll. Yep, all two of them.

While paging through these (and getting plenty of chuckles along with groans), I decided that for our Shabbat study session this week, Mrs. Yid and I should take a look at Song of Songs.

"The one with all the sex?" she asked.

"Not according to Artscroll!" I said.

"Oh Lord."

Yes, for those who don't know, Artscroll's approach to the Song of Songs is somewhat unique. You see, the Song of Songs is, for the Tanakh, somewhat graphic. And there's a longstanding Jewish tradition that it's meant to be read allegorically as a love poem between God and Israel, not two lovers. Fair enough, I can understand that approach. But what Artscroll does really takes the cake. Rather than argue for why it should be read allegorically, they treat it as an accepted fact.

To both the Sages of the Talmud and the classic commentators, it was clear that Song of Songs is an allegory... Its verses are so saturated with meaning that every commentator finds new themes in its beautiful and cryptic words. All agree, however, that the truth of the Song is to be found only in its allegory. That is why, in the interest of accuracy, our translation of the Song is different from that of any other Artscroll translation of Scripture. Although we provide the literal meaning as part of the commentary, we translate the Song according to Rashi's allegorical translation.

At this point Mrs. Yid actually got mad. "Artscroll! What are you doing? How can... how can they even pretend to have any intellectual honesty anymore?"

I read through some of their translation, and it was pretty entertaining. I particularly like the part where "my nard gave forth its fragrance" becomes "my malodorous deed gave forth its scent as my Golden Calf defiled the covenant." Another good one is when the line about breasts gets glossed as being about the Ark of the Covenant: "The long staves of the Ark pressed against the curtain that separated it... in the Tabernacle, causing breastlike protrusions on the other side..."

I think the whole thing is funny, but Mrs. Yid was quite bothered by the sheer force of double-speak. She says she may have to consider an Artscroll boycott in our house. (But then how will our kids learn good middos?)

Liturgical grumbles

2012-01-01T19:01:00.000-08:00

Mrs. Yid and I spent a week over the winter holidays (and I have to say, now that we don't have cable it's quite nice not to have to hear about people going into conniptions over the term). The first few nights of Hanukkah coincided with our trip and the in-laws decided they wanted us to feel welcome, so there was some interesting cross-cultural stuff happening. Habakkuk originally wanted to make me a wooden menorah but that fell through, so we wound up making a "beer-norah" out of old bottles and filling them with oil.

Anyway, the point of all this was that since I wanted to be inclusive too, I decided it was time to order more benchers, those little prayer/song books Mrs. Yid and I have come to rely on over the years to help us through Shabbat. USY's B'Kol Echad has been our go-to for a long time, and when I went online to get some more, I was pleasantly surprised to see that after 20-plus years, they had come out with a new edition. I ordered some and have been going through them since they got here. Here's a review:

Pros: The text is clearer and crisper, both in Hebrew and English. There also seems to have been a real effort to consolidate or re-order certain prayers to limit the amount of page-flipping required when you're during the middle of a prayer. Some of the transliteration also seems to have been updated to contemporary standards. The biggest structural change is that Havdalah has been moved to the back of the book, I guess in keeping with the idea that you're going to progress through the book linearly. I was expecting it at the front where it used to be, but it's not a big deal, especially now that I've started using my favorite book accessories to find my place. I like the color of the new cover, but Mrs. Yid doesn't care for the artwork, which she says makes her think of a piano workbook.

Cons: I think the biggest overall issue I have with B'Kol Echad 2.0 is that it isn't sure what it wants to be or who its audience is. The USY director says in his introduction that "For a number of years we knew that BKE was in need of revision. Many of the songs we sing today were not in the original edition, while others were rarely used." That may be true, but all the things that irritated me had to do with prayers, not songs. I think the BKE editors couldn't decide whether they were trying to be more traditional or more accessible, and speaking for myself, the end-result is more frustrating than anything else. Here are some low-lights:

Adding bits to Kiddush

2.0's Kiddush now has stage directions: First there's "Vayehi erev vayehi vo-ker," which it faithfully translates as "There was morning, and there was evening." And that's fine. But then further down they have "Savri maranan" popping up repeatedly-- with no translation and no explanation! I had to go onto AskMoses.com just to figure out what this is. (Of course, in typical Chabad fashion, their link, while interesting, did not actually answer my question about what the words meant.)

This brings up two issues: First, if you're going to have something on the page, why not translate it? What's the point of having it there if people don't know what it means, even if it's a short snippet? Why not err on the side of being more rather than less accessible?

Second, I can understand liberal Jews taking things out, but what's the rationale behind Conservative Jews putting things in? I assume this is the "more traditional" version of the prayer, so this makes me wonder: had Conservative Jews taken these bits back in the 80s and their re-inclusion is a way of being more frum? Or were they always saying it but the original editors neglected to write the directions in, so this is meant to be more a more explicit for prayer leaders? Was this meant to be a solution to a specific problem, or was it a stylistic choice? There's lots of questions here and zero answers.

Deleting bits from Havdalah

This was actually was the catalyst for this post: Mrs. Yid and I were doing havdalah using BKE 2.0 and we got to the end. In my 1.0, there is one last line before Shavua Tov:

"Yom pana k'tzeil tomer, ekra la-Eil alai gomer, Amar shomeir, Atah voker v'gam laila."

And in 2.0, this line is gone. No explanation, no nothing. I've been doing it one way since college and now 2.0 has harshed my havdalah buzz. After havdalah, I compared editions and realized that in 1.0, the line was there, but again, with NO translation! (A similar screw-up had been in 1.0's version of Bashana Haba'A-- three stanzas in Hebrew, four in English.) Then, I did some googling and discovered that this extra line isn't actually in the formal Havdalah prayer at all! AGH!

After looking around the web for a while I finally found the translation and the reference, but still had no idea why it had been tacked onto Havdalah (other than it being about night-time), and whether this was a Conservative thing, a recent thing, etc.-- to say nothing about why the 2.0 committee had decided to take it out. More research led me to discover that the line is actually part of a medieval hymn, Hamavdil, that's traditionally sung after Havdalah, but I don't know why the 1.0 editors opted to just take one verse from that hymn and sandwich it into the actual prayer.

Some things haven't changed-- and not for the better

As in BKE 1.0, there are both a complete and abridged version of Birkat HaMazon. However, as in 1.0, there is still no explanation of what you're skipping when you opt for the abridged over the original. Since they've kept the odd narrative convention of sticking in "some people add" in various places, I don't understand why they didn't take the whole Grace After Meals and just indicate which parts are, per their interpretation, optional.

Regarding most of my critiques, the editors would probably say that most Conservative Jews are familiar enough with these prayers that they don't need extensive explanations, or even everything to be translated. They've got a standard minhag and this fits in with that. Fair enough, but given that the national trend is for Jews to be less Jewishly educated, and that the bencher (like the new Conservative machzor) is supposed to be totally transliterated-- at least partially, one would assume, to help reach out to a wider audience-- I don't understand the logic behind going with less, rather than more, information. If I'm trying to use your books as a resource, I'd much rather you make it easier for me to use and know what I'm doing.

Final thoughts

Thinking it over, I guess I've been spoiled by my newest Judaica, particularly Siddur Eit Ratzon, which assumes that its audience is curious but not necessarily super-knowledgable about liturgy, and therefore has lots of information explaining the prayers and the editor's decisions. The assorted liberal chumashim I've been using for parsha study, particularly the RA's Etz Hayim, have also been pretty good with that. For lack of a better term, they feel very "open source."

I think there's an growing interest about liturgy among engaged American Jews, which is at least partially why there's an increased demand for transliterated materials (again, see the Conservative machzor). It's not just about being able to "follow along," but also to engage with the text. I compare it to an engineer wanting to take a machine apart to see how it works. Ironically there seems to be some awareness of this trend in 2.0 through its use of citations showing where various prayers or quotations come from-- but this seems to misunderstand what people actually want or need. I'm much less interested in the precise textual citation for the blessing over children than I am in knowing what I'm saying and why when I say Kiddush, Havdalah, or Birkat HaMazon. This is like if instead of letting me open the machine to see the insides you point out the label that says it was made in Taiwan. Not helpful. When the RA published its machzor-- at the same time as this bencher, incidentally-- it went to great pains to say that they were trying to reach a wider audience. It's disappointing that its new bencher seems to be missing that vision and is structured as if its only readers are going to be kids at Camp Ramah.

On the one hand, it's nice to be familiar(ish) enough with Hebrew liturgy that this is even an issue for me, considering how foreign and inaccessible Hebrew prayer was when I first started going to shul. But now that I know enough to be curious about Shabbat prayers and want to learn more about them, I'm struggling with finding tools that will let me open the liturgy up to better understand it. I don't think I want to go with "the most traditional version" of something every time but if my only other options are to skip things entirely (Reform) or abridge things without really knowing what I'm doing or why (Conservative), I don't see how I'm ever supposed to become educated enough to make my own decisions about prayer. BKE 2.0 is fine, but the more I notice various inconsistencies, the more I suspect I may need to look for some better benchers.

How about it, readers? Any book suggestions? Am I over-thinking this too much?

Cultural Ambassadoring is Hard

2011-12-21T19:43:00.000-08:00

Mrs. Yid and I are in the South hanging out with her family and relatives. Tonight we celebrated Hanukkah. Afterwards, my father-in-law, Habakkuk, and brother-in-law, Be'or, took me aside.

Habakkuk: You know, Friar, next time you explain something like this, it would be really nice if you didn't...

Me: Have so much detail?

Habakkuk: Make so many cynical side comments. Like about the oil miracle probably not happening.

Be'or: It's sort of like someone explaining Christmas to you and then immediately telling you there's no Santa Claus.

Touché, boys.

Mistaken Identity

2011-12-14T06:00:00.000-08:00

Perusing Shmuley's blog to check out his parsha insights led me to yet another post from him about Toldot. Not surprisingly, Shmuley takes the traditional line about Jacob being Mr. Fantastic and runs with it, going so far as to use him for a model for all people brave enough to stand up and confront evil in the world.

There was Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, and Aaron, to name but a few. However, only Jacob was given a second name by God himself, which was the name “Israel.”

Um, why don't "Abraham" or "Sarah" count? Hello?

Jacob was the first to directly engage the forces of evil and to dwell in the midst of imperfect, immoral societies, in an effort to elevate them from their degraded way of life.

Wow. Sorry to butt in, but I have to say, when I look at Toldot, Jacob's behavior doesn't exactly strike me as the "elevating" type.

Our initial insight into this characteristic that would define his entire life, is seen from his actions regarding the first born blessing that his father Isaac had intended for Esau, Jacob’s wicked older brother. Here there was a great dilemma facing Jacob. Would he be willing to secretly dress himself in his sibling’s best garments, place sheep’s wool on his arms and neck to appear hairy like his brother, and try to convince his blind father that he was Esau, all in order to receive this unique blessing? Or would he sit back, let his corrupt brother be blessed with even more power, and rationalize to himself that it was really in God’s hands what would occur?

The spin here is really quite impressive. Let's imagine this a different way: "Would he be honest enough, upstanding enough, and frankly, bad-ass enough, to beat up a nun and steal her clothes in order to steal her paycheck from the Pope? Most people draw the line at nun-beating... but when evil's involved... all bets are off!"

Sorry, where were we? Oh right, Shmuley's ode to lying, thieving Jacob. Back to you, Shmoo.

Jacob had to make a potentially life threatening choice. If things went wrong, he risked being struck by a potentially unstoppable curse from a powerfully spiritual prophet, namely his father Isaac, who was not aware of the true character of Esau. Jacob also risked having this emotionally unstable, bloodthirsty brother walk in on him after having just finished a hunt, with sword and bow still in hand. Jacob knew that even if he left from his father’s presence that day unharmed, he would likely be pursued with a lifelong hatred from his now enraged, humiliated brother. Furthermore, Jacob’s plan of action would involve morally questionable activities, that when applied correctly could be justified, but when used for the wrong purposes, constituted the antithesis of God’s will. He would have to deceive his father, to tell him untruths, and to steal a blessing meant for his own brother. The easiest course would have been for Jacob to take the path of pacifism. “I will sit back, I will not act, and I will not risk any action that could compromise my present status as a moral being.” But Jacob chose the opposite. He went down a path that is not clearly defined and that is morally ambiguous. One that might invoke condemnation from his peers, and that required finely nuanced deliberations that not everyone would be privy to. It was this moral courage that Jacob summoned that made him great.

HUH. Not really sure what to say here. Are we sure we're reading the same book?

From here things get really fun as Shmuley compares Jacob to Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill and Harry Truman. Because why not, really.

It's not that Shmuley has no leg to stand on, it's just that his approach really rubs me the wrong way. As much as I've been bashing Jacob, I definitely think, as with the other patriarchs, that there's great lessons to be learned in his character and story. But whereas my approach is to look for flaws in the Torah's characters, which reflect the flaws and doubts of real people not only living right now, but also back then, Shmuley, as many traditionalists tend to do, takes the complex and extremely human characters of the Torah and buffs and shines them until you can barely recognize them as human at all. Shmuley's gloss on Jacob comes from a place of profound certainty and rectitude, whereas I claim him as an example for the rest of us-- of how an incredibly imperfect man can grow.

The best example of where Shmuley and I part ways is when Shmuley starts talking about visiting South Africa:

When I was visiting South Africa with my wife a number of years back, I sat in an audience of 400 people listening to a talk given on Robbins Island, by a panel discussing the topic of apartheid and reconciliation. One of the men who spoke was a former white police officer, who said that during apartheid, he had once been sent to a black township to quell a riot that had broken out. He described how he took a completely innocent mother and her children, put them in a house in view of everyone, and burned all ten of them alive. This ended the riot. Afterward, the South African justice system at that time sentenced him to seventeen years in jail for those murders. When apartheid ended, Nobel Prize winner Bishop Tutu organized a system that allowed some of those imprisoned to confess their crimes, express remorse, and be free to go. This white police officer obviously took up this offer. After being released from jail early, he now had decided to spend his time speaking and trying to encourage reconciliation between blacks and whites in South Africa. At the end of his speech, the 400 people in the audience filled the room with thunderous applause. Actually, it was 398 people applauding, for my wife and I sat there silent. When the noise had died down, I stood up, pointed at the speaker, and declared before everyone there, “You sir are a murderer!” I went on to blast this perversion of justice whereby a person could merely apologize, verbally, and thus be exculpated from spilling innocent blood, especially that of children. At that time one of the speakers in attendance replied that I must be saying this because I was Jewish, and that the Jewish religion didn’t have a well defined concept of forgiveness. I responded to him that he was very mistaken, and that the Jewish religion has at its center the concept of forgiveness and indeed three separate words for forgiveness, selicha, mechila, and kaparah. But forgiveness must be earned, and no person has the right to absolve someone of an injustice on behalf of another person. How would they feel if someone who murdered their family was released from prison because he said he was sorry? This idea of unregulated pacifism and forgiveness, even to those who commit the most heinous of crimes, is not what the bible aims to teach us.

The irony here is striking. Could not the very same type of accusations be leveled at Jacob? Could not Esau be held up as a classic example of a wronged victim whom others have been more than willing to shove aside in the name of "forgiveness?" Yes, Esau eventually forgives Jacob in the Torah, but his story and voice are mostly silent, and rather than considering events from his point of view, the lion's share of classic Jewish tradition has spent its energies exhaustively cataloguing (or outright inventing) various reasons to "explain" why Jacob was really good and Esau really evil. Over the centuries, have the sages not perhaps been a little too eager to forgive Jacob on behalf of Esau, without necessarily caring about whether Esau was truly given full recompense by his brother? No one dares point the finger at Jacob, calling out with full righteous indignation, "You are a liar and a thief!"

Shmuley is convinced that Jacob is the ideal archetype for being a prophet for truth and righteousness:

our forefather Jacob taught us that only by challenging evil and standing up for what is good, can peace be brought to the world. Abraham and Isaac worked diligently to disseminate the knowledge of God, and yet to a large degree they still lived apart from the uncivilized masses. Once he arrived in Canaan, Abraham spent a brief time in Egypt and the territory of the Philistines. Yet overall he kept his distance from the corrupting outside culture. He would pray for Sodom and Gomorrah from afar, but would not dare live there. Isaac, even more so, secluded himself from the outside impure world. In fact he never left the borders of the future land of Israel his entire life. It was only Jacob who was required to leave Canaan and live in a foreign land for an extended period of time. First he dwelt in Aram Naharaim with his wicked uncle Laban for twenty years. He then returned and chose to dwell in the fields of Shechem adjacent to the natives in the land. And finally, he lived the last seventeen years of his life in Egypt. Jacob’s consistent willingness to put everything on the line for the future welfare of the Jewish nation, and his very direct confrontation with evil, gave him the privilege of God’s chosen nation being named after him.

The problem with this, for me, is that it misunderstands Jacob's fundamental character and utility-- he is not a prophet, he is a wanderer. He is not a missionary so confident in himself that he has nothing better to do but lecture others on how to live (does he ever do that in the Torah?); he is a physically and emotionally wounded man struggling with his doubts, demons and past. Jacob's primary lessons are not directed outward, like a prophet's, but rather inward, as a model for personal teshuvah and improvement.

For me, the value in Jacob's story lies not in the fact that he is so great (he's not), but that he comes from such a dark place and through continued struggle is able to better himself. Rather than mis-casting him as an example for great leadership, I think he is better seen as a model for honesty and open assessment of one's own faults and shortcomings.

Of course, that would require admitting that the Patriarchs are far from perfect-- and that the point of having these details be in the text is not for us to rationalize or justify them, but learn from them.

That time I wrote that paper about Jews

2011-12-13T06:00:00.000-08:00

When discussing Toldot I mentioned an old college paper I wrote about Jacob and Esau in the Midrash and Zohar. Just for chuckles I went traipsing through the dark digital wastelands of my hard drive to bring back this priceless jewel from my student days. Here are some of the choicer tidbits:

Fun with Sefirot:

Isaac is identified with Din, but Rebekah is identified with Shekhinah, “softened” with Hesed (Love), Abraham’s Sefirah. Isaac is “severe Judgment”, but Rebekkah is described as tempering him: “Rebekah issues from the side of severe Judgment, but she withdrew from among them and joined Isaac; for although she issues from… severe Judgment, she is mild Judgment.” (Zohar) The last line of the page is particularly significant: “If she had not been mild, the world could not have endured the severe Judgment of Isaac.”The implication here is fascinating; it seems that without Rebekah’s moderating influence, Isaac could have become as bad, or even worse, than Esau.

...within the Zoharic cosmological system of the ten Sefirot, Isaac is symbolized by the Sefirah Din, Severe Judgment, whose color association is red. Similarly, Esau is always identified with red in rabbinic literature. The Midrash uses the following description: "He was red, his food red, his land red, his warriors were red, their garments were red, his avenger will be red, clad in red." (Midrash Rabbah)

Here is where we begin to see the violent de-legitimization of Esau. The Midrash associates the color red with war, and connects Esau’s redness with his violent behavior... [In Kabbalistic commentaries on the Zohar,] Esau, identified with the liver, is actually accused of needing to sustain himself with blood, both spiritually, as a violent warrior, as well as, apparently, in terms of physical nutrition. Esau is thus turned into a cannibalistic and vampiric figure; he is, literally, demonized.

Discussing the womb-fight:

...[There is a variant midrash stating] that the brothers’ dispute [in the womb] involved proxy fighters, their respective guardian angels. Esau was allied with Samael, and Jacob with Michael (who, incidentally, was responsible for saving his father Isaac as a boy, by substituting a ram for Abraham’s sacrifice). The tradition goes on to say that Samael went so far as to attempt to kill Jacob, and it was eventually necessary to for God to convene a heavenly court to arbitrate the dispute between the angels (we are not told who won).

...[Here] we see a direct Midrashic association of Esau with Samael (showing that the connection was not something invented by the Zohar). This relationship is teased out even further through Midrash relating to the twins being born with their respective “signs”. Jacob is described as having been born circumcised, a sign that he was particularly special and holy (some other Biblical figures with the same distinction include Adam, Seth, Enoch, Noah, Shem, Joseph, Moses, Samuel and David). Esau, on the other hand, in addition to being born hairy (including a full-grown beard), with all his teeth, and being “blood-red, a sign of his future sanguinary nature”, is born with the mark of a serpent, “the symbol of all that is wicket and hated of God.” (Ginzberg)

At the end of the day, Jews just don't like hunters:

Both the Zohar and the Midrash identify Esau as a hunter on multiple levels. One Midrash commentary associates the term as having a spiritual dimension: “Both [brothers] were hunters of men, Esau tried to capture them in order to turn them away from God, and Jacob, to turn them toward God.” (Ginzberg) Esau is portrayed as hunting men in various ways- through physical violence, as he does with Nimrod; through the spiritual component, by trying to “hunt” men’s souls, and, lastly, through intellectual deceit. Esau deceives his father into thinking him pious, and there is even a Midrash that, in an interesting twist on the verse, “Isaac loved Esau because he had a taste for hunted game” (Gen. 25:28), says that he actually serves his father non-kosher dog-meat. We see hunting and trapping going from mere physical descriptions to immoral activities, which can in turn be plugged into the Sefirotic system, emblematic of the seduction and deception of the “left side”.

Oh, for the days when I had that much free time.

Parsha Post: Toldot

2011-12-12T19:01:00.000-08:00

(Question to the readers- I'm experimenting with a new style on this second Parsha post. More of a thematic riff and less point-by-point of things I think are weird. Let me know if you think one works more than the other. Or maybe you don't care about any of this and think I'm wasting my time. That's fine to say, too. Never let it be said I'm not open to criticism.)

Toldot

I'm very biased when it comes to Toldot. For a college class on Jewish Mysticism I wrote a paper analyzing historical attitudes toward the brothers Ben-Isaac and, well, suffice it to say midrash and the Zohar are not very kind to ol' Esau. As always, I have very mixed feelings when it comes to midrash. On the one hand it can be a wonderful way of digging deeper into something, but on the other hand it often comes across as commentators bending over backwards to justify or rationalize pre-existing attitudes or conceptions. This gets particularly loaded once Jacob becomes an analogue for the Jewish people, and Esau becomes similarly identified as a stand-in for Rome, or Gentiles in general. The more symbolic the two brothers are, the more justification needs to be provided to explain why Jacob is seen as so good and Esau so bad.

The Birthright

Artscroll cites the Talmud saying that the birthright episode occurs in the context of Abraham's death and that Jacob's lentils are intended as a mourner's meal for Isaac. Artscroll says, "On that very day, Esau's sinfulness became public knowledge." It does not explicitly explain what that sinfulness was but suggests that Esau was not mourning his grandfather as he should have been. "Esau went about his evil business as usual, uninvolved in his family's bereavement." This would be more convincing if there was anything remotely hinting at him being sinful in the text. Hertz's apologetics are a little more extensive: "In primitive times, the head of the clan or the firstborn acted as the priest. Esau's general behavior hardly accorded with what was due from one who was supposed to serve the Supreme God; and Jacob suspected that his brother did not value the dignity and privilege of being the firstborn as they should be valued." Hertz goes on to call Esau "a true sensualist," noting that "the spiritual inheritance of Abraham... was not worth to him as much as a dish of pottage." By contrast, EH quotes R. Soloveitchik, who attempts to locate some justification for Esau's inability to value his birthright. Soloveitchik suggests two possible reasons for Esau's behavior: his physical hunger may be so overwhelming that he cannot think in religious terms, or the hunger may also be an indication that he "lacks a sustaining faith to give meaning to his life," particularly at moments of struggle or hardship. "He is weary of the pointlessness of life and the inevitability of death." This is a clever way of linking back to Esau's role as a hunter. As opposed to the "traditional" gloss which sees Esau's hunting as proof that he has a violent or bloody personality, Soloveitchik wonders whether a continual exposure to death may have been detrimental to Esau's spiritual development (or, possibly, whether a lack of faith from an early age coupled with regular killing may have led to the ancient equivalent of spiritual depression).

The Blessing

While the birthright episode shows Esau as kind of dumb and Jacob as resourceful, the blessing is the point where Jacob (and his mother Rebecca) explicitly conspire to steal from Esau. It's a pretty uncomfortable moment, and I've never been able to swallow much of the rationalizations explaining why Esau was so awful he didn't deserve the birthright, or why despite the fact that Jacob is a thieving jerk he's really Mr. Fantastic.

Artscroll and Hertz both lay the responsibility for Jacob's theft on his mother Rebecca, noting that she had been given prophecy that "the elder shall seve the younger." Hertz says, "Knowing how attached Isaac was to the elder son, she must have felt that it would be useless to try and dissuade her husband from his intention [to bless him]. She, therefore, in desperation, decided to circumvent him." Artscroll adds, "[because of the prophecy that one would be superior,] any plan Isaac might have to enlist them in joint service of God could not succeed-- but he had not been authorized to convey this to Isaac. Her only alternative was to deceive Isaac into blessing Jacob." This reeks of bending over backwards to me; it's more honest to say (as the EH and TMC do) that Rebecca and Isaac each had favorite sons, and that Rebecca was backing her favorite, not throwing in this totally extra-textual bit about how God swore Rebecca to secrecy so she's incapable of talking to Isaac about how Esau is a jerk and Jacob is the best think since sliced lentils. Artscroll continues to lay things on quite thick by calling Jacob's theft "his personal Akedah... because, as the Sages derive from Scripture, Jacob personified truth and the blessings would be ratified by God... But his mother was commanding him to secure those blessings by deceiving his father! For Jacob to do so was totally against his nature." Really? Because the only other episode the text mentions of him before this is him ripping off his brother, so I'm not sure where you're getting this. Various critics have gone so far as to identify Jacob as an explicit "trickster" character, something the text alludes to in Esau's wordplay when he curses his brother.

I have to say, within the confines of the text, Esau doesn't seem all that bad to me. He reads as self-centered and perhaps impulsive, but I just don't see the evidence to support all the interpretations that make him out to be sacriligeous, violent, or downright evil. If anything, these strike me as retroactive attempts to justify Jacob's repeated thefts from Esau, which can only really be explained (much less made defensible) if one argues that Esau was somehow unworthy of his birthright or his father's blessing. In the parsha, however, Esau reads as more clueless than malevolent, and Jacob comes across to me as not noble but a bit of a schemer, trying to exploit his brother's and father's weakness for his own benefit.

What's wrong with Isaac?

Until I actually started reading the chumash regularly, I never realized just how minor a character Isaac was. I had some awareness that I didn't know much about him, but since I knew he was a patriarch, I assumed that he did, well... something. But it turns out, no, not so much. His role, compared to his father and grandfather, is strangely muted. Mostly he just retreads old ground. Some commentators, particularly among traditionalists have read this as a positive, demonstrating Isaac's fealty to his father's traditions and value as a "link in the chain" between the generations (also in the process, IMO, seeing themselves as Isaac's modern-day descendants). But while following your father's traditions is well and good, the fact that Isaac is so passive, particularly when compared to his father, does beg some explanation. The EH comments on Isaac's "blindness," saying that various classical commentators saw this as a reference to the lack of clarity he showed in his treatment of his two sons. "Because his loved and envied Esau, he was blind to Esau's faults." (Thought: by the same token, he was perhaps blind to Jacob's good points?) One midrash says "Isaac's judgment is clouded by Esau bringing him his favorite foods." Another connects Isaac's blindness to the Akedah years earlier when he glimpsed "the light of heaven... Isaac was never able to see events on earth clearly after that." The EH glosses this as saying that after seeing heaven, "Isaac was naively blind to lying and deceit on earth. He could no more recognize the transparent lies of Jacob than he could recognize the unworthiness of Esau."

The TMC attempts a psychological view, noting that Isaac's parents were extremely strong personalities and that he was born in the midst of their old age, and notes that Isaac's wife Rebecca is explicitly used as a replacement for his mother. Isaac is always dominated by more aggressive personalities around him. However the TMC also claims that "Isaac is old, but not senile... throughout the episode he is subconsciously aware of Jacob's identity. However since he is unable to admit this knowledge, he pretends to be deceived... he wants to be misled, in his heart he has long known that Esau cannot carry the burden of Abraham... Weak and indecisive man and father that he is, Isaac does not have the courage to face Esau with the truth. His own blindness and the ruse of Rebecca come literally as a godsend... Note that Isaac does not reprimand Jacob, for how can he, who has deceived himself be angry at deceit? In a sense, no one, not even Esau, is deceived, for he too knows that Jacob and not he is the chosen one." This is an interesting explanation but still leaves us with the problem of Jacob's theft, which the TMC, to its credit, notes: "the problem of Jacob's morality remains the same, for Jacob believes that he is deceiving his father and he acts on this belief."

None of the liberal commentaries mention it, but I also have to wonder whether the Akedah could have had a profound influence on Isaac's personality in another way, too-- rather than "glimpsing Heaven," Isaac might have glimpsed the possibility of his own terrifying death-- at the hands of both the Earthly and Heavenly fathers who were supposed to love and protect him. Perhaps the "blindness" Isaac experiences is a result of trauma. Perhaps Isaac is passive because he is a broken, or at least very meek, personality, and this helps explain his attraction and tendency to defer to people with stronger wills than his own.

Why do we like Jacob, again?

Looking at just the text, I find it very hard to find anything very positive about Jacob here. As a character, he's coming off as fairly contemptible. There may be all sorts of nefarious things Esau has been doing in his free time, but the Torah doesn't tell us about any of them, and so while Esau may not be the ideal person to carry on the family business of being the Chosen People, at best the whole scenario comes off as incredibly dysfunctional. There's also the problem that if Jacob is supposed to be so awesome, he should theoretically have some more skills at his disposal than merely jerking his brother around. Maybe call a family meeting? Try an intervention? For all of Jacob's allegedly great attributes, he seems to mostly be good at taking advantage of others. He doesn't even try to explain himself to his brother, instead he runs away. While there may be some self-preservation logic to this, it comes off as rather cowardly, and particularly low when the dispute is with his own twin brother. Jacob is not acting like someone wise, pious, or, I have to say, all that trusting in God.

Maybe I'm a bit of a softy (or too much of a contrarian), but when I read the part about Esau crying for Isaac to bless him too, my heart hurts a little. It's a masterful bit of storytelling that provides some fascinating insight into the Torah's views on human relations. We may be forced to accept (for whatever reason) that Esau was somehow unworthy of his birthright (another hint of democratic or meritocratic leanings in a time when birth order was extremely important to social standing), but unlike Ishmael, who is always presented at a distance, the Torah is not afraid of showing us Esau's pain, and of forcing us to sit with it. The fact that he may be imperfect or the wrong son to inherit the blessing does not negate his suffering. It's not really what we would think the Torah would choose to do with a typical "bad guy," and reminds me more of tragic King Saul than say, an outright villain like Moses' Pharaoh.

I'm not the only one with strong feelings about Toldot. Even Shmuley got into this one.

Was Jacob Guilty of Deceiving His Father?

Spoiler: Shmuley claims no, even while actually admitting yes. Way to be, Shmoo. (Actually, the whole thing is quite similar to the TMC essay glossed above, though in typical Shmuley style it goes on several rambling trips into pop culture, and of course, a good book plug.)

Next time: I dig up that old Zohar paper and a good chuckle is had by all (at either my brilliant insights or painful academic writing, take your pick).

*(Sources: Five Books of Moses, by Prof. Everett Fox, Five Books of Moses, by Prof. Robert Alter, Torah: A Modern Commentary, by URJ, Etz Hayim, by JTS, Soncino Pentateuch & Haftorahs, by R. Hertz, and the Artscroll Tanach, by R. Nosson Scherman.)*

Tis the season to be pissy

2011-12-11T15:31:00.001-08:00

Am I the only one that doesn't take my culture war punditry cues from the post office?

Dateline 2009: A youthful Obama was still being accused of being a foreign-born Communist Jihadi sleeper agent. Nancy Pelosi was enjoying her term as Majority Speaker of the House, and Lady Gaga and Katy Perry had yet to go completely crazy.

And somewhere, in some distant corner of the internet, a conservative crank named Samuel Blumenfeld was getting his undies in a bunch over offensive postage stamps. And by offensive, I mean that they weren't Christian.

They've issued stamps for Secular Humanists, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, two Islamic holidays and, lastly, Christmas. Sorry, Buddhists, no stamps for you, at least not yet. Back in the old days, the Christmas stamp was the only stamp issued for Christmas, the joyous festival that celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ all over the globe.

According to Dr. Sam, postage stamps were one of THE definitive markers of how amorphous and degenerated American society had become. And while he was irked that so many non-Christian holidays had gotten in on the stamp action, he was magnanimous enough to permit Hanukkah stamps. (Given that Blumenfeld is a Jewish convert to Christianity as well as a writer for the John Birch society, I suppose that's rather big of him.)

Now, of course, Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights, just happens to coincide with the Christmas season, so the Hanukkah stamp pictured with a menorah seems appropriate. After all, Jesus was Jewish.

Big sigh of relief, right? Well, not according to Tzvi Fishman, who seems determined to give Blumenfeld a run for his money in the big crank contest this year.

Hoop hoop hurray! America and Canada are putting out postal stamps for Hanukah! Hoop hoop hurray! What a proud day for the Jewish People! What a great achievement! How proud we all should be that our gentile masters have allowed us a miniature stamp commemorating Hanukah!

...In the tsunami of impurity and spiritual pollution that is Christmas, the Jews have been given a tiny little stamp, much like a rich landlord tosses a scrap of food to his dog. This December, in the sea of Christian symbols, Christian mangers, Christian Santas, Christian bell ringers, Christian advertisements, Christian store windows, Christian floor displays, Christian commercials, Christian TV shows, Christian office parties, and Christian messages of Christian saviors and goodwill to men, the Jews will have a stamp commemorating Hanukah. Halleluyah!

...Wake up, my friends. You may say that all the unholy decorations and stories of Jesus don’t bother you, but it isn’t true – their messages seep in like deadly poisons, reducing Hanukah and the GIANT ETERNAL TRUTHS OF TORAH into a tiny stamp. That’s right, my friends. In the incessant bombardment of Christian culture, Diaspora Judaism is reduced to stamp-size Judaism.

So, the Christian Jew is mad because the multicultural stamps show how dramatically Christmas is being pushed out of American culture. And the Jewy Jew is annoyed because there's so much Christmas in American culture that any dinky Hanukkah stamp is a tiny drop in the bucket.

I love it when crazy conservatives collide.

Parsha Post: B'reishit through Chayei Sarah

2011-12-02T06:00:00.000-08:00

Who is Wise?

Not me, but here are some interesting tidbits I've come across since Simchat Torah.

(Sources: Five Books of Moses, by Prof. Everett Fox, Five Books of Moses, by Prof. Robert Alter, Torah: A Modern Commentary, by URJ, Etz Hayim, by JTS, Soncino Pentateuch & Haftorahs, by R. Hertz, and the Artscroll Tanach, by R. Nosson Scherman.)

B'reishit

Song of Lamech (Gen. 4:23-24): "I have slain a man for wounding me/ And a boy for bruising me./ If Cain is avenged sevenfold/ Then Lamech seventy-sevenfold."

Alter reads this as a poetic fragment from a now-lost part of Hebrew oral tradition that the Torah's audience would have been familiar with. He notes that it sounds rather like a "warrior's triumphal song, cast as a boast to his wives." He suggests that Lamech "is saying (quite barbarically) that not only has he killed a man for wounding him, he has not hesitated to kill a mere boy for hurting him." EH takes the song less literally, seeing in it more of the kind of gladiatorial boasting from warriors or champions about to engage in combat. Lamech brags "that he does not need divine protection because he can defend himself with the new iron weapons of war. He places his faith in the power of technology." Per this view, Lamech is not a bully, but a mighty warrior whose skill is such that whereas his opponents can only bruise him, the same blows from him result in death. Somewhat similarly, Hertz sees it as a triumphant ode to industrialization and the creation of weaponry, "as mentioned in the previous verse." (This would make more sense except that the previous verse is talking about Tubal-Cain being the father of iron weapons, not Lamech.) As part of this gloss, Hertz connects Lamech's superiority in arms to the Cain reference, as well: "If Cain, though unarmed, was promised a sevenfold vengeance on a foe, I, equipped with the weapons invented by Tubal-Cain, will be able to exact a vengeance very much greater!" Artscroll, ever ready with the hard-to-swallow midrash, offers up the old "blind Lamech shot Cain" story from Rashi. In this interpretation, Lamech's song is a plea for forgiveness from his wives: "If the punishment of Cain, an intentional murderer, was delayed until the seventh generation, surely my punishment will be deferred many times seven because I killed accidentally!" I have to say, it's fascinating to watch the meanings of a few lines of text be interpreted so drastically differently. (While I don't buy Rashi's explanation at all, I am intrigued by the similarities between a blind Lamech shooting an arrow and killing Cain and the Norse story of Balder and Hoder. Cross-cultural exchange?)

Nephilim & B'nei ha-Eloheim (Gen. 6:1-4): Fallen angels and demi-gods? Now we're talking! Alter suggests they could be left-overs from pre- or un-Hebraic pantheons. Hertz gives an entirely different gloss by reading the Nephilim and "Sons of God" as being a reference to the godly descendants of Seth interacting with the "Sons of Men," that corrupted, descendants of Cain (or perhaps the "Sons of Men/Mighty" being rich and powerful nobles taking wives from common people). Both interpretations, Hertz says, indicate the failing morality of the time and necessitating the Flood. Artscroll follows the interpretation of B'nei Elohim as being nobles, citing Rashi as the source.

Lech Lecha

Abram's Rambo Moment (Gen. 14): Alter notes the shift of Abram going from being an important figure in his own story to suddenly becoming a "major player" on an international political and military stage-- something which is essentially confined to this single chapter, after which the narrative shifts back to Abram's personal story and that of his relationships with God and his family. Could this be an attempt to expand the scope of Abram's story? Alter notes that several of the kings mentioned in this section match up with historical records, so that element of the story has at least some basis in fact. Artscroll says this chapter shows Abram's "physical courage in battle" and EH notes that he is a "decisive, courageous and skilled battle commander"; perhaps this is an attempt to make him more well-rounded? While it's cool to think of Abraham as a macho man, I also have to wonder whether a wandering shepherd would really be all that likely to know about battle tactics. Hertz has nothing particularly noteworthy to say about Gen.14 other than to make a swipe at his favorite target, Bible critics: "This chapter does not fit in with any of the so-called 'sources' of the Bible critics; hence their determined attacks on its veracity." That's showing them, Rav!

Who is Melchizedek's God? (Gen. 14:18-20): We know he is the king of Salem (Jerusalem), but details are sketchy. He gives a prayer to El Elyon, who could either be referring to the Hebrew God, or El, one of the Canaanite Sky Gods. The text doesn't say, so people have interpreted it both ways. Hertz says "the Ras Shamra tablets show that it was quite a familiar appellation of Deity in pre-Mosaic Canaan," which he uses to conclude that "Melchizedek was evidently a convert of Abraham's." Not sure how you made that leap, but ok. Artscroll says that "The Sages" (I love them!) identified Melchizedek as Noah's son, Shem, Abraham's 9th-great-grandfather. (Chronology: who needs it!) Artscroll adds that Ramban said that Melchizedek was called "a priest of God, the Most High because unlike priests of the other nations who served angels, Melchizedek served Hashem." Again, possible but definitely not provable. R. Kook cites a midrash saying that Melchizedek (Shem) was God's original intended priest but that when he blessed Abraham before God, he lost his mandate (is someone insecure?). Kook extrapolates this midrash to focus on character traits of the two men:

Shem was called Malkhi-tzedek, literally, "the just king." He stressed the trait of tzedek — justice and worthiness. Abraham, on the hand, excelled in chesed and kindness. He sought to reach out to others, to influence and help them even beyond what they deserved.

Kook argues that Shem and Abraham offer two different models of God and religion. Shem's vision of God is beyond human accessibility, hence the need for a priestly intermediary. Abraham's view of religion is that all people are made in God's image, and therefore have the ability to access God already. The only need for a priest is to purify and atone for the people's transgressions. In other words, Abraham's priests have to do a little leg work but the end goal is still individuals interacting with God, whereas Shem's model is more Catholic in focus: all emphasis is on the priest with none on the people. (I'd be more convinced by this if there was any justification for it in the text.) EH admits that no one has any idea who this Melchizedek guy is, which is honest if not particularly enlightening. Alter notes that by borrowing the phrase in his address to the king of Sodom, Abram "elegantly co-opts" Melchizedek for Hebrew monotheism. (It wasn't just Abram; over the generations, ol' Melchi has gotten co-opted multiple times over, by the rabbis, the Essenes, the Kabbalists, the Christians, and even the Mormons. Lucky him.) The biggest surprise here is from the Reform TMC, which "adopts the interpretation which is also favored by Jewish tradition: Melchizedek and Abram worship the same God." I suppose they're entitled, but this seems like a pretty odd place to just take something on random faith based on no good evidence. Have you guys been reading Artscroll again?

Who was Hagar? (Gen. 16):

Hagar's title is usually translated as maidservant or concubine, but EH and Alter note that Hagar is Sarai's property, plain and simple. This is interesting both in terms of showing more of the social dynamics within Abram's household (which raises some questions about the nature of all those "servants" we've been hearing about), as well as for the notable fact that this is one of the only times in the Torah (AFAIK) that a subservient or underclass character is given agency as well as narrative power. The focus of the chapter is mostly confined to Hagar, and it is through her perspective, not Sarai's, that we hear about the women's quarrel, Hagar's flight, and her experience with God's angel as well as God himself, who she gives a new name, El-Roi, which could be read as "God who sees Me". Compare this with, say, Abram's servent Eliezer, who gets such little screen time that his most famous moment in the Torah may not actually even involve him. It's easy to see how Sarai might be feeling pushed out of her rightful position as the matriarch of Abram's household; at this point in the text, Hagar certainly seems like she's being placed on equal footing with Sarai-- a point Alter underscores by pointing out that the critical word in verse three, usually translated as: "gave [Hagar] to her husband Abram as concubine" is not actually the Hebrew word for concubine, pilegesh, but 'ishah, woman-- "the same term that identifies Sarai at the beginning of the verse." Do I detect a tiny seed of Liberation Theology here? Is the text suggesting that humanity and dignity remain the same regardless of social status? It's certainly an interesting coincidence that the primary struggle of the chapter is Sarai trying to enforce her superiority over Hagar-- a superiority undermined by the text itself! (Also look back to Hagar's name for God- he sees her, even though she's someone's slave. Neat stuff.)

The text doesn't offer very much background on Hagar, though some of the chumashim do try. EH and TMC both note the similarity between Hagar and the Arabic word hajara, meaning "flee" or "emigrate," suggesting both a different origin for Hagar as well as a hint to how she wound up in Canaan. Artscroll takes a different tack, going with a midrash attributed to Rashi claiming that she was the daughter of Pharaoh: "After seeing the miracles that were wrought on Sarah's behalf when she was abducted and taken to his palace, he gave Hagar to Sarah, saying, 'Better that she be a servant in their house than a princess in someone else's.'..." The midrash strikes me as a little silly (I notice Pharaoh didn't offer to become Abram's slave along with his daughter) but does offer another interesting add-on to the idea of doubles and inversions: Hagar is Sarai's slave, but she in her own way, she is also a princess-- not unlike Sarai/Sarah, whose name means "my princess"/"the princess."

Sarai's treatment of Hagar (Gen. 16:1-9):

Many of my chumashim mention Ramban's commentary that "Sarai our Mother acted sinfully in ill-treating Hagar, and also Abram in permitting it; therefore God heard her affliction and gave her a son who became the ancestor of a ferocious race that was destined to deal harshly with their descendants." I like that Ramban recognizes that Sarai committed a sin in how she treated Hagar, though it strikes me as odd that rather than ending her suffering, God explicitly tells her to go back and submit to Sarai's abuse, the implication being that her "reward" for this will be Ishmael's own mighty line. Ramban's drash is also impressive in noting that Abram was also responsible for the deteriorating relationship between his wife and concubine. Abram is criticized by Sarai in not standing up for her, and rather than comfort her, or speak to Hagar, he essentially says, "Do what you want, keep me out of it"-- which not only reads as a bit cowardly, but also a cop-out, particularly since he is the focal point of the love/status triangle! (This comes up again in Va-Yera, when Sarai kicks Ishmael out and Abraham feels bad but does nothing.)

Both the EH and TMC have some interesting linguistic insights. EH says the Hebrew verb used in the text "implies that Sarai subjected Hagar to physical and psychological abuse." TMC also calls Sarai's treatment of Hagar "abuse," with the deliberate goal of driving her out of the household, and notes that "the term for afflicting Hagar... is also used for Pharaoh's afflicting Israel in Egypt." There's only one problem: EH and TMC don't agree on what the verb is! (EH: va-t'anneha, TMC: inah). Help from Hebrew speakers, please?

Hertz stops short of calling Sarai's treatment abusive, saying merely that she "probably imposed harsh tasks on Hagar," and adds that most women would have had similar frustrations if their servant had been "disrespectful and ungrateful." It may be my 21st century anti-slavery bias here, but it's hard for me to feel all that sympathetic to Sarai.

Artscroll has nothing more to say about Hagar here. That brilliant princess midrash took up too much space on the page. Yeah, that was worth it.

Chayei Sarah

Getting the band back together (Gen. 25:9): "[Abraham's] sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah..."

Just like that, Ishmael's back in town? Seems like there's some story missing here...

TMC says that "the two brothers seem to live in harmony" after their parents' deaths. EH goes further into psychological territory, citing the Talmud's claim that "Ishmael changed his ways as he matured... he seems to have forgiven Abraham for having been a less-than-perfect father. Isaac too seems to have come to terms with his father's nearly killing him on Mount Moriah. Might these reconciliations have occurred in Abraham's lifetime and be the reason for the Torah's describing him as 'contented' in his old age?" The EH asks some interesting questions, but they seem to be reaching a little on this one, particularly with where they go next: "Can we see this as a model for family reconciliations, forgiving old hurts? And can it be a model for the descendants of Ishmael and Isaac, contemporary Arabs and Israeli Jews, to find grounds for forgiveness and reconciliation?" Ok, guys, seriously... it's ONE sentence, without ANY detailed description. Calm down. I thought you were supposed to belong to the historical school or something.

Hertz is the most conservative with his interpretation: "At the graveside of their father, the half-brothers were reconciled." Surprise, surprise, I like his best.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for happy endings in the Torah... particularly given some of the Jerry Springer back-stabbing going on in the last few parshot... but let's try to rein ourselves in a little bit, please. The liberal chumashim need to stop trying to out-Artscroll Artscroll.

Tomorrow: Toldot.

Doug Giles gets things wrong-- world is shocked!

2011-11-29T12:00:00.000-08:00

In related news, gravity still makes things fall down.

First off, a disclaimer: I am about the biggest non-activist you are likely to find. I can't stand rallies, dislike crowds in general, and generally prefer a calm conversation to shouting slogans any day of the week. I also am rather skeptical about Occupy Wall Street-- not because its general principles are necessarily wrong, but simply that I don't think drum circles really accomplish anything. Capitalism may have some major problems, but it's what we've got to work with, and I'd much rather see passionate young people working to help others than yelling about how we need to tear it all down, man.

That said, as part of a silly attempt to mock the OWS protestors, Doug Giles inadvertently winds up making their points for them.

from an earth angle, you are truly the fortunate ones and have hit the lifestyle lotto. Trust me, there are stacks of people from developing countries who would love to have what you ingrates whine about. Just ask an illegal alien.

Giles' whole article can be boiled down to: you live in America, hippies! You have clean water, working toilets, electricity, and food. Most of the world would kill to be in your shoes!

To a large degree, he's right, of course-- however that entirely sidesteps the point that OWS is making. The issue is not that the OWS are Christ-like refugees, it's about the comparative power and wealth inequality that exists in America. It's about pointing out that within the same country, there are some pretty major disparities. That's what the 99/1% mantra refers to. Saying, "to the rest of the world, the 99% is like the 1%" doesn't change the disparity; all it does it show that in a world where millions of people don't have clean water or toilets, the fact that corrupt business executives have bidets made of solid gold or go into convulsions when someone threatens to tax them for buying a new yacht or private jet is beyond gauche, it's downright obscene. You think you're scoring a point against OWS, Doug, but what you're really demonstrating is that the richest 1% and their defenders in the US really have no leg to stand on when it comes to complaining-- about pretty much anything.

Yes, I feel lucky to live in this country. I'd much rather live here than, say, Chad. But there are some serious issues happening right now with American society and culture, and the economy is a huge part of it. I was raised upper middle-class and went to private schools my whole life. I'm educated, my family is reasonably wealthy, etc. Since graduating, I've been stuck in a go-nowhere job for four years. I have friends who are in their late 20s-- privileged, educated, hardworking people-- who are still living in their parents' basements. They're being turned away from jobs they apply to because they're vastly overqualified for them. We are perfect examples of how the American economy continues to squeeze the middle-class into oblivion. At this rate, I'm probably not going to be middle-class. I'm probably going to be working poor. I've come to accept that-- but if someone with my education and background is facing the prospect of living poor, imagine what people who didn't have my privileges are going through.

An entire generation of Americans are finishing school, trying to join the work force, and getting the door slammed in their collective face-- and all the while, we keep hearing the super-rich screech about how unappreciated they are anytime someone talks about regulating the business sector or raising taxes on the only people that seem to be able to afford it. I'm not saying I want a Communist state, but clearly something isn't working here.

Sorry Doug, pointing out that other countries and other people have it worse is not an argument, it's a distraction. And it's a bad one, at that.

Bibliogestions: Godwrestling

2011-11-29T06:00:00.000-08:00

Godwrestling was a bit of a head-trip for me. Part memoir, part midrash, part quasi-history of 60s and 70s social activism and the havurah movement, it's got a lot packed in there. Arthur Waskow is a good writer whose greatest strength-- and at time, challenge-- is his almost naive enthusiasm and passion in applying religious ideals to the contemporary stage. Sometimes this seems to border on the nutty, like when he gets involved in trying to apply the biblical concept of "Jubilee" to the American economy as a way of promoting economic justice. Still, if the worst thing you can say about a liberal rabbi is that they take Judaism too seriously, that can't be too bad.

While the memoir parts were interesting (and some were definitely more topical and relevant to today than others), for me the real draw was more Waskow's perceptive take on Torah characters and midrash. Waskow has a way of articulating, and meditating on, the real human dilemmas that come up in the biblical text, problems that pose genuine problems for modern Jews who want to take Torah seriously but can't check their brains or consciences at the door of the Beit Midrash. I particularly enjoyed his take on the rebels of Genesis-- not the celebrated rebels, like Jacob, but the scorned ones: Cain, Hagar, Ishmael, Esau. When Waskow writes about these characters, people who really suffer and who we do not have happy endings for, you get a real sense that he takes these stories seriously-- that he is troubled by these accounts and that he is unwilling to either ignore them in favor of prettier ones, or create silly apologetics to justify them.

Within this process, I think, lies the real magic of twentieth and twenty-first century Judaism, particularly of the non-Orthodox variety. Waskow and his havurah companions show a model in which people from a whole range of backgrounds can take Judaism seriously, and ask deep, difficult questions about the tradition-- even becoming angry or confrontational with it-- without throwing up their hands and walking away from the whole glorious mess. (One intriguing section documents Waskow's community, Fabrengen, reacting to the cultural shift, among Jews and non-Jews, towards long-term relationships as opposed to marriages. Rather than bemoan it or excuse it, they proceed to examine various relationship frameworks within halacha and how they may be adapted to the present-day, to formalize, if not sanctify, relationships that were previously unknown in Jewish law.) Considering the "hippy-dippy", anything-goes reputation that Jewish Renewal sometimes has among other denominations, it was refreshing to read such thoughtful-- and sincere-- engagement with Jewish tradition from some of its major thinkers.

While Waskow's work and ideas are thought-provoking and inspiring, they're also instructive in demonstrating some of the weaknesses of the Jewish counter-culture of the time, and to a degree, Jewish Renewal itself. One gets the sense that in their incredible optimism about changing the world, Waskow and his compatriots let their hearts soar beyond where their heads-- or feet-- could keep up. Most of Waskow's circle, including himself, come across as dreamers, not necessarily doers. (The parts of Waskow's narrative that traipse into weird touchy-feely psychological areas don't help.) Principles are great, but it takes an incredible amount of work and dedication to create something that can perpetuate itself. To a degree, a lot of the havurah crowd come off more as self-centered dabblers trying to find themselves than people who have the discipline to make their convictions work in the real world.

In some ways, I suppose this echoes my larger bias/issue with Jewish Renewal as a movement: it seems very hard to nail down exactly what it is about, as well as what it actually does as part of implementing its program. It all seems to come down to creating good vibes and participating in some ephemeral "mystic"-ness. Even if some of that may feel appealing, at the end of the day I want a Judaism that touches me intellectually as well as emotionally, and my impression, at least, is that Renewal seems to swing too far over on the pendulum.

Despite my criticisms, I found myself happy for people like Waskow and his friends at Fabrengen. While their movement may not be my cup of tea, I admire their passion for Judaism and desire to engage with it in modern, even controversial, contexts. At its best, when it's working, liberal Judaism can, and in some regards, should, have a radical edge-- though I think it's to Renewal's benefit that it has had a few decades to help its founders mature and develop (and to help them better and their ideas and create some stable institutions to spread their message).

Whatever faults Waskow may have had at the time, it's clear that he was-- and still does-- take his Judaism seriously. Regardless of whether you agree with him 100% ideologically, in a time of great Jewish alienation, people needed men like him-- and still do.

What makes a good Bar Mitzvah gift?

2011-11-28T12:00:00.000-08:00

Help me out, readers. I have three b'nai mitzvot happening in the next few months. All are Reform relatives, and all boys. I would like to straddle the line between "something with at least some Jewish content" and "something they might actually like." To date, the only gift I have found that seemed to even approach this golden mean was this book-- which I've already given to cousins on one side of the family so I can't really get away with it again.

Any suggestions?

Shop Jewish?

2011-11-28T06:00:00.000-08:00

I got an email a while ago from an online Judaica shop (for the record, they were sending me email as early as Halloween telling me to make sure I got started on my Hanukkah shopping early!) encouraging me to "Shop Jewish" this Hanukkah season.

This year, especially, where you shop matters.

If you are buying gifts this year: please shop your synagogue shops, corner Judaica stores, Judaica shuks, and online at [X]. We are small businesses, enhancing the Jewish experience in meaningful ways.

If you shop this Hanukkah: Shop Jewish.

I must admit to being a little taken aback by this. I'm familiar with the value of trying to help a fellow Jew make a living, but there's also something a little uncomfortably ethnocentric (to say nothing of chutzpahdik) about encouraging someone to patronize your business because you're both from the same ethnic group. (To their credit, they also suggested going to other Jewish businesses. Looks like I'm going to have to google my closest Judaica shuk.)

Apparently this one shop is not alone in doing this. There's also a related version of this being run as an attempt to counter anti-Israel boycott campaigns, too.

Although there have been other so-called “buy-cott” campaigns to counter BDS efforts, organizers believe this will be the largest recent effort to promote Israeli goods - and one they hope will be repeated and expanded in years to come.

“The promotion of Israel products isn’t just economical, it’s psychological and political,” Zelazny said.

“People see that Israel isn’t isolated; you see the breadth of creativity, the range of products from food to high-tech. People don’t think of Israel in that sense. There are really some amazing food and consumer items.

“Instead of buying excellent Chilean wine, they can buy wine from Israel. We want people to next time not buy shoes made in Italy, but in Israel."

I think the Buy Israel campaign makes more sense if you have lots of money to blow on luxury items and you're trying to decide between status symbols that are basically interchangeable (should I get shoes from Italy or Israel? Wine from Chile, or Israel?). It doesn't really work if you tend to buy specialized items. (Example: I have terrible feet and the only orthotic shoes that work for me are made in China. It doesn't matter how nice Israeli shoes are; unless they can do what my Chinese ones do, I'm not switching. By the same token, since my Chinese shoes are really expensive, I am not in a position to buy wine from either Israel or Chile.)

I'm not sure how I feel about the Shop Jewish concept. As a young and semi-idealistic consumer, I certainly understand trying to be thoughtful about where your dollars go and who you give your business to (if Jeff Bezos ever becomes a jerk it will be a big challenge to stop using Amazon), but while I can relate to shopping your values, "buying Jewish" is not in itself a value that I share. I suppose I agree with the general principle that if you're buying a Jewish ritual object, it's probably nice if you can buy it from a Jewish manufacturer/seller. But honestly, these days so much commerce happens through a computer screen that the idea of making a purchasing decision based on the seller, as opposed to the item, is a challenging, and somewhat foreign, concept.

It also contrasts with a vaguely democratic consumer ethic that I inherited from my parents. Generally, the principle was that you decided what you want, and then you went wherever you had to to get the item. The biggest priorities were whether they had what you wanted and if it was a good price. We didn't boycott certain stores or exclusively privilege other stores; we went to whoever had what we wanted at a price which was reasonable. Basic free-market.

Now that I'm older and looking at the past twenty years (particularly in light of the present economy), it's becoming clearer that availability and price are not and should not be the only things to pay attention to. If the only bottom line is getting your stuff, then smaller business can't compete, and then you wind up losing all your local small businesses and are stuck with major chains. (Again, this is easier with face-to-face transactions, like groceries, but harder with "pleasure" items, such as books.)

That said, it's still difficult for me to shift my growing economic awareness to accept the idea that if I'm buying someone a gift for a Jewish holiday, my priority should stretch even further and privilege a Jew over a non-Jew. I think part of that is that while I can appreciate making selective economic decisions to support businesses you agree with, "Buy Jewish" suggests that the priority is making sure that a Jew-- any Jew, potentially-- gets my money rather than giving it to a Gentile. That's not how I operate. Inasmuch as ethics play a role in my consumerism, it's in trying to give my money to the least evil groups around with the lowest amount of financial sacrifice from me. Whether or not they're Jewish doesn't enter into it.

The "Shop Jewish" mantra particularly fails for me because of where I live (we have three Judaica shops in the city that aren't shul gift shops-- one is at the JCC, one is at Chabad, and only one which seems to actually have any potential) and what I choose to buy. When it comes to myself, my Jewish tastes (usually book-focused) are extremely eclectic-- to the point that a standard Judaica store usually either doesn't have things I'm looking for or only has them at cost-prohibitive prices. By contrast, when buying for other people (except for Mrs. Yid), I tend to almost never buy anything with Jewish content, because most of my friends and family aren't interested in that. Adding "Shop Jewish" to the list of priorities (along with "decent price", "right item" and "not an evil company") starts making the whole process a lot more complicated. Am I supposed to order my comic books through Eichlers? Should I buy my brother a new camera from B&H in New York and spend twice as much rather than get it on Amazon?

As mentioned before, I also feel that putting the emphasis on the seller and not the products is largely contrary to the present economic model put in place via the internet. It seems more suited to the age of the general or department store than online sellers. In an era where most commerce is not face-to-face, it's hard to encourage people to only buy from a certain group of people. (Even if you decide you do want to shop Jewish; how am I supposed to tell which sellers are Jewish and which aren't?) By contrast, if your starting position is, "I must Shop Jewish this Hanukkah," and you only look at Jewish websites, then I suppose you have more control... but you're also putting a lot of limitations on yourself and taking a big risk of not getting what you're actually looking for-- and there are lots of smaller merchants (Jewish and non-Jewish) that probably won't get your business because you're starting with the bigger names.

While I understand the impulse behind the "Buy Jewish" or "Buy Israel" campaigns, I think, as always, the devil is in the details. The concept might be decent, but I think there needs to be more clarification to get me on board. If it's about trying to find companies that share your values, fine. If it's about trying to support Jewish businesses during Jewish holidays, ok. But just telling me to "Buy Jewish" because Jews should give their money to Jews... that one doesn't work for me.

Bibliogestions: Maimon's Autobiography

2011-11-27T13:33:00.001-08:00

I just finished reading the autobiography of Solomon Maimon this past week and while it had some interesting bits, I wouldn't say it left me all that satisfied. This may be due to the fact that reading about a philosopher instead of reading his philosophy may already be a potentially flawed exercise, and that I am not particularly interested in philosophy per se. Despite those misgivings, I was eager to read about Maimon's life if only to get a better sense of what 18th century Jewish Europe was like. Unfortunately Maimon kept butting in, and not really for the better.

The most interesting elements in the book were Maimon describing his family and early life. Since Maimon had such a contrarian personality, reading about rural Jewish life through his very modern and rationalistic lens makes for an interesting historical travelogue-- with an informed but distant guide. (The section on Maimon dabbling with secret Kabbalistic societies, as well as him attempting to explain the Hasidim/Mitnagdim disputes for an outside audience, are pretty entertaining) While Maimon is clearly not neutral about his childhood or community (I've seen quotes from this book offered up on antisemitic websites as "proof" about how corrupt or illogical traditional Jewish life was), I do think it's a useful counterpoint to the nostalgic rose-colored glasses that still seem to get applied to traditional Jewish shtetl life in some circles. Reading Maimon reminded me of something Abbot Yid said years ago about reading Barbara Tuchman: "Until I read A Distant Mirror, I had always thought it would be cool to live in the Middle Ages. Once I found out what it was really like, I was glad I hadn't been there!" Reading about all the struggles, sacrifices, and hardship that Maimon and his friends went through just to say, learn German, or study the natural world, makes me incredibly appreciative that I was not born a few hundred years ago in a traditional Jewish community, where, I have no doubt, I either would have been pretty bored or run out of town. (Also fascinating were the snippets demonstrating just how powerless the people-- Jews, peasants, etc, were against the gentry and nobles of the period. These guys could literally act with impunity-- and did.)

The central dilemma of Maimon's life and the book is that he is a person with rather modern opinions and interests but who is not living in a modern time: he does not have either the intellectual or social freedom to do what he would like, and so his whole life is a series of struggles trying to find the best environment to try to live the way he wants to. Once Maimon decides he can't confine his mind to Talmud study and concludes it's against his principles to lie about his beliefs, he basically removes any possibility of him being able to life peacefully in any religious Jewish community.

One thing that came up for me reading about Maimon's childhood was, again, how the traditional Jewish emphasis on education created a sort of double-edged sword. On the one hand, it encouraged intellectual accomplishment and provided an avenue for precocious or intelligent young men to become socially successful and esteemed. On the other, it was basically crossing its fingers that, once having exposed its youngsters to the world of the mind, that they would be content to remain within the confines of what was acceptable to think, study, or explore. Over and over again, throughout Jewish history, we have cases where some of our best and brightest wind up not being contained by "mere" Judaism, and so they leave in search of something more. It was happening back in Talmudic times with Elisha ben Abuyah, it happened with the Yiddish modernists like Sholom Aleichem and H. Levick, and it happened with Maimon, too. For some people, the intellect can be a Pandora's box.

While at some times Maimon is reasonable and clear-headed, he has a tendency to come across as obnoxious, particularly when describing his interpersonal relationships. He can never let anything go, has a terrible time getting along with people, and seems very focused on issues of status and propriety. There are many sections of the book, particularly in the more cultured cities of Western Europe, where he continually gets entangled in various intrigues and feuds among the intellectuals and philosophes. Between his spats with the Jewish community, the intellectuals, and his continuous poverty, it's very easy to feel sorry for Maimon. At the same time, though, it's clear that he is an active agent in mucking up his life (the concept of learning a trade or earning a living never seems to occur to him), and any sympathy quickly dies in light of how he treats his wife and children, whom he essentially abandons in Poland once he decides to undertake the life of a philosopher. If Maimon was living in poverty in Berlin, we can only imagine how difficult things must have been for his wife (an agunah) and kids, whom he does nothing to help support. In the end Maimon comes across as a tragic but also deeply selfish figure.

One thing the book left me contemplating was how lonely Maimon seemed to be (at one point he even comes close to suicide). While people can-- and have, and will-- debate the pros and cons of various movements or sects all day long, it seems that one of their primary purposes, and benefits, is that they offer community to fellow travelers. Reading about Maimon's life in an age before there were heterodox movements in Judaism, before the "cafeteria" was open for business, really helps me appreciate that today the Jewish landscape is much more diverse and varied, and that whatever faults may lie in these modern movements, at least they give people the option to find like-minded friends and support-- something Maimon never really had.

Condensed Stupid

2011-11-27T12:43:00.001-08:00

According to my many hypothetical readers, the only thing more irksome than reading longwinded stupid commentary on the internet is reading my longwinded commentary on the longwinded stupid commentary. I aim to please, so here's some silliness I read recently, now in fun bite-sized form:

1- Dennis Prager wants you to know that the best way to become an educated human is to listen to conservative talk radio:

The intellectual input [a full-time mother] can find is likely to be greater than most women (or men) find working outside the home. There is a reason that about half the audience of my national radio show is female – they listen to talk radio for hours a day and broaden their knowledge considerably...

I am syndicated by the Salem Radio Network. My colleagues are Bill Bennett, Mike Gallagher, Michael Medved and Hugh Hewitt. Two of us attended Harvard, one Yale and one Columbia. One of us taught at Harvard, another at the City University of New York. And a third teaches constitutional law at a law school.

In addition to reviewing the news and discussing our own views, we all routinely interview authors and experts – left and right – in almost every field. The woman who listens to us regularly will know more about economics, politics, current events, world affairs, American history and religion than the great majority of men and women who work full-time outside of the house.

Wow, with such an impressive collection of minds, it sounds like Salem Radio is the one who should be creating their own private university, not ol' Dean Beck.

2. In the course of continuing to pimp his "so awesome people refuse to pay money for it" novel about how the Diaspora is terrible, Tzvi reminds us of that fun bit in the Zohar about reincarnation and rolling through tunnels.

“Come and see, it has been established that all of the dead of the Land of Israel will be the first to rise to resurrection, because the Holy One Blessed Be He will shed upon them the spirit of life from Above and grant them renewed existence. Regarding them it is written: “Your dead shall live” (Isaiah, 26:19). This refers to the dead of Eretz Yisrael who will rise to life first.

“In contrast, what follows in the verse, “My dead shall arise” (Ibid,) refers to the dead of the others lands. Of them it is not written that they “shall live” – rather they “shall arise.” The spirit of life will only enter their bodies in the Holy Land of Israel, and for that reason, regarding those who die in the Diaspora, it is not written “shall live,” but “shall arise.” Therefore the dead of the Diaspora will arise without the spirit of life, and then they will be made to roll in underground tunnels all the way to the Land of Israel, and only there will they receive their souls, and not while they are in the Diaspora where the impure rule of the Sitra Achra (Other Side) holds sway, so that they will be resurrected only in Israel in the fitting manner” (Zohar 131A).

Now, Tzvi, if you were writing about interesting things like that in your books, instead of putting in weird stuff about the Baba Elazar (sorry, "Saba Yosef") using his magic powers ( the "wireless Google Earth" in his head) to peek in on the narrator's wife sleeping with their neighbors, maybe I might actually read one.

3. Chief Sephardic Rabbi Shlomo Amar, faced with some hard questions about the state of the rabbinate, conversions, and marriages in Israel, decides that the best tactic to take is to pretend that he lives in fantasy land. For instance, the rabbinate is apparently super-duper awesome:

"Beautiful work is being done with conversions; there are no unnecessary stringencies and no unnecessary leniency, and there also is beautiful work being done in both the army and in the civilian sphere. It is getting better and better, toward the positive side. And the Rabbinate is gaining even more strength.

...I will say outright, and you have my word on this, that the Rabbinate is excellent, and the religious court judiciary is excellent, much better than what was the case many years ago. It is getting better and better, including also the way in which it relates to the public.

"We have a very strong disciplinary religious court and when there are complaints, that is where they are referred. In the religious courts, of course, there is an ombudsman who is impartial, who does not favor anyone. Things are going very well there, and every complaint is handled very seriously by the religious court judges, believe it or not. Everything has changed. The secular male lawyers and the female lawyers admit that the work in the religious courts now bears no resemblance to what used to be the case.

...every person who loves Israel and who loves our people wants to see a settled and secure people: He wants to see security placed in the hands of the security people - not in the hands of private people; medical services offered in an organized manner, and also the Rabbinate and the services of the Rabbinate organized in a proper, official way.

...There is an organized Rabbinate, there are organized religious courts that are well arranged. They now set the pace for the religious courts outside Israel. There are a great deal of obstacles. There is no doubt there are many people who are hurt. Sometimes there are injured parties from this side who cannot accept the realization that they did not take the right path ..."

By contrast, anyone that says the rabbinate is a bureaucratic, politicized mess is either misinformed, power-hungry or a troublemaker:

"...there are people who want to run the world themselves. It is hard for them to come to terms with the fact that they are not running the world. There are people who make their living from there being X number of women who are refused a divorce."

...Ever since Moses our teacher there were those who disagreed with him, and it is written: 'The sons of Korah died not' [Numbers 26:11]. Korah died, but he's got descendants. There will always be disagreements. And no one who comes to disagree says that he wants the kingdom. He says that everyone in the entire community is a saint, why are you being arrogant, why not give them good service? If they come, they'll check it out, they'll bring their allegations, and they'll see that, thank God, the religious courts give excellent service. The same is the case for the Rabbinate, and if there are any 'instances,' we are prepared and we will take care of them. We have proved ourselves."

The opinion of the chief rabbi did not change at all when he was asked to comment on a completely different group, that of the rabbis of the Tzohar organization, who still highly regard state religious authority and are not prepared to break away from the Chief Rabbinate. Regarding them, as well, Amar said that they are the descendants of Korah, filled with "an inclination to argue."

Got that, anyone who's ever had a bad experience with the state rabbinate? You're all crazy. Or descended from Korah. Take your pick.

Glimpsing the End

2011-11-11T06:51:00.001-08:00

Growing up I knew my grandparents were different from other kids'. The grandparents I saw on TV were friendly and spoiled their grandkids. They were always around for family occasions and holidays. Grandpas told their grandkids stories or helped them build things or play while Grandma plied everyone with assorted baked goods.

I came into the world already two grandparents short. The one who were left had suffered plenty of damage long before I was born. Zayde was a ghost and Bubbe was... well, she sure wasn't a TV grandma. She was definitely into crafts but what had started as a pretty normal "knit sweaters and socks" kick eventually morphed into crocheting ladies' hats from supermarket bags and making bookmarks out of cardboard and her old pantyhose. I guess when you're an artsy type and you live through a Depression it becomes hard to throw stuff away.

Bubbe had never been a good cook, either. She spent most of her adult life with severe GI problems which it took several decades to realize were caused by a gluten allergy. By the time I was born she had been living on her own (and only cooking for herself) for about ten years. Any possible culinary skills were long gone. The most complicated thing I ever saw her eat was a tuna fish sandwich on rice cakes.

Bubbe is neither particularly warm nor open, particularly when it comes to family matters. Predictably, this has led to a fair amount of tension over the years as I've continued to be interested in the family history of both her and my grandfather, a man and period she was never too keen to talk about.

Still, despite all her crotchetiness, a part of me did always believe Mama Yid when she'd sigh, shake her head and say, "I bet she'll outlive us all."

In the past few months, that white lie has been proven false. Bubbe has gone from being almost entirely self-sufficient in her Florida apartment to suffering significant brain damage, and is now living in a full-time nursing facility in LA. She can't walk; she's lost dexterity in her hands; she can't even go to the bathroom on her own. According to relatives on the ground her recurring mantra has become "I just want to die." The last few weeks have seen even more deterioration: apparently now she's attacking the staff and screaming that they're trying to hurt her.

We've gone from imagining her living well into her 90s into wondering whether she'll make it another few months to her last grandchild's Bar Mitzvah.

Mrs. Yid's father Habakkuk works in end of life care, so he and her have some strong opinions about this sort of thing-- opinions which I, for the most part, share. If Bubbe is suffering and has no real chance of "recovering," much less having any kind of quality of life she wants, I think it's appropriate to start considering palliative options or even hospice. Of course, this is made more complicated by the fact that there are four siblings-- plus an extra few in-laws all trying to talk, coordinate and convince each other of what the right thing to do is. This is not helped by the fact that none of the siblings like each other all that much-- to say nothing of their feelings towards Bubbe.

I want to be there with her-- but at the same time, I don't. I'm worried I'll regret not going to see her, but the idea of going is also pretty frightening.

The whole thing is very sad. I know that nothing I do is going to change the outcome-- Bubbe might go soon, or she might live on like this for several more years. It's hard to figure out what would be optimal. I suppose that if the way she is now is the best she's going to be then, as uncomfortable as it is to contemplate, I suppose, for her sake, I'd rather she go quickly.

But I have to confess that I'm a little scared about how I'll feel when she does.

Despite everything, she's the only real grandparent I've ever had. Though we aren't super close (no one in my family really is), it's scary to contemplate how things will feel without her-- how we'll all deal with it, and how we'll honor and remember her.

Celebrating Superficiality

2011-11-04T07:43:00.000-07:00

As a liberal Jew in his late twenties who grew up in California, I am contractually and culturally obligated to be non-judgmental when it comes to anyone else, particularly anyone else's religious practices, and particularly anyone else who is a Jew, and particularly anyone else who is Jewish and more liberal than me.

That said... there are a couple of stories, both from the Forward, that have come across my e-desk that strike me as just plain 'off'.

The first one was back in July when a female artist wrote an ode to her new creative business enterprise, which combined her love of gluing random bits of broken pottery with her talent for making people uncomfortable. Presenting the Mosaic Urn.

Yup.

For years, I’ve been designing mosaic art objects in the French style known as pique assiette, nipping dishes into tiny shards and combining them to create one-of-a-kind tables, vases, picture frames and candlestick holders. Some months ago, I turned this into an online business. While working, I watch cable news, so my background noise is a parade of political scandals, financial frauds, and national health care and unemployment crises.

In the early 1970s, I became a comedy writer. I was now inspired to use mosaic to express political satire, finding red, white and blue plates with flag images for what I called my Breaking News Series. I assembled pictures of my bêtes noires — Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, John Edwards and John Ensign, Kenneth Lay and Bernie Madoff, the National Debt Clock and corporate logos. To add bite, I’d set the mosaics on cremation urns.

I submitted one such urn to an edgy Brooklyn art show. At the opening party, I watched guests studying the piece, identifying the right-wingers to one another as if it were a party game. Photos and text inserted into the mosaic made a cutting political statement, but I began to consider whether the aesthetic might have a wider — and more functional — application. With this process, I could animate an urn for actual usage that would visually tell the story of a life. It would be highly personal and have a celebratory quality.

A few months ago, as I was setting the table for dinner, I surprised myself by blurting out: “You’ll be most affected by this, Nick. Would you prefer that we be buried or cremated?”

He shot me a puzzled look. “Uh, any reason you’re asking?”

“How about I make urns for Dad and me? I can cover them with fun photos — family vacations, birthday parties, graduations,” I said.

He didn’t answer immediately.

“They’ll be pretty and about life!” I urged. “I’ll use our dishes. It’ll remind you of the dinner table.”

It felt like forever before Nick said, “Sounds good.” Martin remained silent, which I interpreted as enthusiasm.

And now she's selling them online and somehow convinced someone at the Forward to let her write one big advertisement for her kooky home business based on the premise of being Jewishly edgy, or something. Also I like how this started as personal art, morphed into sneering political "satire" (Get it? It's Sarah Palin on an urn!) and now has transcended its humble beginnings into being creepy, inappropriate burial accoutrements. Bra-va, I guess?

Here's the thing: I respect that this lady has made a choice in a way that feels meaningful to her. At the same time, her attitude about the whole thing, "Check out this cool thing I came up with to hold your ashes! Ain't it cool!" to be quite off-putting. My father has mentioned he will probably want to be cremated, and while it isn't my cup of tea, I know that I'm much happier with the idea of scattering someone's ashes than keeping them in an urn that looks like a kindergartener's collage project. Maybe I'm just a fuddy-duddy, but to me it feels really inappropriate to try to make someone's urn "pretty" or "remind you of the dinner table."

Some who believe that death requires a somber approach question my upbeat spin. I explain I hope a beautiful urn that honors memories of a loved one can take some of the sting out of death.

Here we have a critical point: for me the idea of trying to "spin" death does not remove the sting. Death is supposed to have a sting. That's part of it. It doesn't mean you need to go into full on ashes and sackcloth, but I don't think "upbeat" is the way to go, either. It's not about being "somber" specifically, but it's about taking the moment seriously.

So that was July. Now this week we have this woman, who wrote an article high-fiving herself for only going to shul to get free food.

I’m one of those synagogue goers who arrive pretty much just in time for the “Amen!” as we raise our mini plastic cups of wine before elbowing our way — er, gently sauntering over — to the food. My timing is never quite exact, of course, so there are days when I get there and my fellow congregants are still singing “Adon Olam,” the last song of the service. I’m happy to sing along — in fact, I like it if I’m in time for Kaddish and the announcements; makes me feel very much a part of things. But for shallow, antsy and kind-of-cheap me, going to synagogue means going to lunch with friends, there, in the social hall.

And how important is the quality of that lunch? Let’s just say that a tray of hummus and carrot sticks makes my spiritual aura shrink to the size of a store-bought gefilte fish ball. You could pierce my soul with a toothpick. But a glistening mound of bar mitzvah lox — the Holy Grail, as it were, of Kiddushes — maketh me skip through the Valley of Death and cartwheel over to the scallion cream cheese. It restoreth my soul and maketh my kids a lot happier about my bringing them along, too. In fact, it getteth them psyched to come again, the way a random shower of slot machine nickels getteth bubbe back to Atlantic City. And I know that I am not the only congregant who peruses the synagogue calendar to see who has a great big spread — er, great big simcha — coming up, and precisely which Saturday we are talking about.

My worry, of course, is that the Divine One is probably not thrilled with the attendee who arrives when the audience is filing out of the theater. Come to think of it, the rabbi probably isn’t, either. But I do believe there is something more than just lip service (and Tam Tams) being offered when a congregant arrives in time only to eat and shmooze. And, I am glad to say, some folks agree with me.

The writer then goes on to quote various people who have written various things about kiddush. No introspection, no thoughts on other ways she expresses her Jewish identity, other approaches she could use to get something out of the service, nothing. She's a Bagel and Lox Jew by self-definition, and she's proud of it, thanks very much.

I understand that this is this lady's reality and I... suppose I admire her willingness to be honest about it? And while I don't think she necessarily should be embarrassed about this, I really don't understand the mentality which says this is something to celebrate, rather than wrestles with. I don't understand the thinking that says, "Yeah, I fully admit I just show up to get free food, and these are the values I'm passing on to my kids. That food is awesome." To say nothing of the fact that the writer's behavior-- both barging in late, as well as adopting a "schnorer" attitude to her fellow congregants-- strikes me as just plain rude.

It's one thing to acknowledge one's imperfections in a public forum as a way of calling attention to things you have to work on and areas where you can grow. It's another to use them as a platform for advertising how awesome, enlightened, or creative you are and suggesting that people should follow your example.

Sometimes I just don't get people.

Can someone please buy this man a clue?

2011-10-31T06:00:00.000-07:00

Tzvi wants all his readers to know they're giant jerks- but that he forgives them. The rationale behind him knowing we're jerks is just as strange as his solution to it:

Our Sages teach that if a person understood the great value of abuse, he would wake up each morning and beg G-d to send someone to abuse him that day. A person who is abused and doesn’t answer in return is forgiven of his sins.

...I’m not referring to the abuse I regularly receive from talkbackers who get angry at me for pointing out the disgrace of living in gentile lands when they could be living in Israel. That abuse is part of being a blog writer. It comes with the job. I am talking about an abuse much more painful – the fact that very few of my readers, even the most faithful amongst them, have purchased my books, so easily available at Amazon Books.

Thought: If people don't buy your books, perhaps it is not a sign of "abuse" but rather that they think you are not a particularly good writer.

As I have mentioned before, I am a novelist at heart. Blogs are blogs, but a good novel is something entirely different. And here, after I spent literally thousands of hours writing blogs, free of charge, in order to enlighten my beloved brothers and sisters in the exile of the darkness which surrounds them, and the very real dangers they face, when I present them with an opportunity to experience true Jewish literature that has the power to revolutionize their lives, they turn their backs as if it had no value.

Yes, how dare we have opinions about what we want to read? What nerve of us.

Yes, I understand that books cost a few bucks, and that most Internet readers can’t get past a homepage, let alone tackle a 500 page saga like “Tevye in the Promised Land”, but, even if they don’t want to read my novels, they could give them away as gifts.

Come on guys! I'm not asking you to read the darn things, just buy them! You can use them as coasters if you want! With a little tape and origami skills, the new paperback edition can make a nifty Breslov-style kippa! They're multi-taskers!

Young people love my stories. Old people too.

Question: If everyone loves your stories, why are you complaining that no one is buying them? How can both these things be true? Is there some sort of devious Napster-style black market thing going on with seniors making illegal Fishman copies and surreptitiously passing them along to the ever-hungry youth market? Are you supposed to be the Jewish Lars Ulrich?

And yes, I realize that my writing is confrontational, dealing with uncomfortable things like G-d, emunah, tshuva, and aliyah, subjects that the majority of people would rather avoid. And I am perfectly aware that until the goyim declare that Fishman is a great novelist, the Jews won’t consider my writing as being of any worth. Yes, I know all of these things, but still, after all of the years that I have invested in my writing, with all of my heart, the apathy which I encounter is painful indeed.

Did I mention my incredible modesty, as well? I must say, dear readers, it pains me that despite me being so darn fantastic, until I am voted Best Jew Alive, I apparently am doomed to a life of only partial recognition of my supreme awesomeness. If it weren't for my great piety, I'd probably compare myself to Jesus right now. (Is it my imagination, or is Tzvi channeling Ellis Washington?)

Gee Tzvi, when you put it like that, I can't imagine why I haven't been wasting my time and money looking for your boring, didactic, self-important drivel masquerading as fiction before. Just what have I been doing with my life?

And lest you think my motivation is money, on some books my royalties are 20 cents. On others 30 cents. On one or two titles, I earn a buck. That’s the reality of digital ebooks. So I am not in it for the money.

Got it. You're just in it for the ego trip. Good to know.

I have decided to take a hiatus from blog writing, and to use this column to serialize my novels, chapter by chapter, day after day, to let people read, free of charge, in short, non-overwhelming installments, my fictional works, which I have written for the Sake of Heaven, for the enlightenment of Am Yisrael.

So here we go, for all of my hundreds of thousands of readers who have plastered my face with dry digital saliva by ignoring my books...

That's right, Tzvi. By reading your blog instead of your fiction, we have offended you. What heartless bastards we are. How lucky that you know what we really should be reading.

To review: Tzvi has a semi-popular blog. Tzvi is mad no one wants to read his uninteresting books. Therefore, he decides to force all his blog readers to read his books by turning his blog into an Internet throwback to the Daily Forverts.

Either Tzvi's just shot himself in the e-foot, or we're about to see the Amazing Hand of the Free MarketTM do something interesting.

Stay tuned...

Family History vs. Family Facts

2011-10-30T06:00:00.000-07:00

When it comes to genealogy, I have something of a personalitysplit that pops up from time to time. On the one hand, as a researcher andhistorian, I try to be very cautious about what information I consider reliableand pass along to others. At the same time, as a writer and storyteller, I lovethe family yarns and narratives, and it's very hard to avoid speculating and"putting pieces together," even when they may not all be there.

An example: When I first started tracing the tree, one ofthe stories that kept coming up from my great-aunts about their mother's familywas that their grandmother had been in a Tsarist prison. As I interviewed eachone in turn, I kept getting more pieces of the puzzle. The story is that thegrandfather was making his own liquor in their shtetl, that someone informed onhim, and that when the police came to arrest him, he wasn't there-- and so hiswife took the blame and went to prison for several years. Depending on thechronology, this may have precipitated-- or happened during-- the family'simmigration to America. Now, despite there being zero documentation for this,it is one of my favorite bits of family lore, and I have repeated it to variouscousins and relatives whenever I get the chance-- though always clearlyidentifying it as a story.

Given this background, I'm somewhat sympathetic-- thoughmaybe the word "almost" is more appropriate-- to Sen. Marco Rubio'srecent debacle with his family history. Rubio, whose star in the GOP has beensteadily rising (at least according to the national news media) since hiselection to Senate in 2010, has made his parents' story of immigration fromCuba a major talking-point of his campaigns and political narrative. Accordingto Rubio, his parents "fled" Cuba after Fidel Castro's coup and he was raised as a son of exiles in Florida. The story is compelling, powerful,and resonates with a lot of people-- both in the Cuban community and beyond it.It's a classic tale of coming to the United States to escape persecution, andit has the additional benefits of the"pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps" narrative, as well as a chanceto emphasize how Cuban Communism under the Castros utterly failed, which areundoubtedly major reasons Rubio's story appealed to GOP voters.

There's only one problem with all of this: it's not,strictly speaking, true.

Researchers have found documents showing that the Rubioscame to the US in 1956. At the time, Castro was not even in Cuba. He wouldn'ttake over for another three and a half years. Rubio's parents left Cuba notbecause of political repression but simply to make a better life.

Rubio has tried a few different tactics to defend his storyin light of the newly revealed facts. The first thing he's done is to say thatit's not his fault he didn't know this stuff:

In a brief interview Thursday, Rubio said his accounts havebeen based on family lore. “I’m going off the oral history of my family,” hesaid. “All of these documents and passports are not things that I carriedaround with me.”

So... it doesn't matter that I said things that weren't truebecause I never bothered to verify if they were true? Not the defense I'd gowith. A much better version of this argument would be, "I'm as shocked asyou are. I was always told, by this relative, that relative, and this otherrelative, that my parents came here in 1959. " That makes it sound likeyou actually care about the facts, as opposed to being involved in a tug-of-warbetween your parents' own documents and the fantastic universe you've createdin your head where your Dad led his own anti-Castro militia group (Rubio'sRebels?) through the Cuban highlands, set Fidel's beard on fire, and then beat ahasty but heroic retreat to fight another day (or spawn a kid who would getelected into public office, whatever).

The other approach has been to claim that none of this matters anyway, because details are stupid:

"...It’s not like they discovered my parents were from Canada. My story isessentially the same one. My parents came to this country in search for abetter life. They were prepared to live here permanently but always wished theycould go back to Cuba," he said.

Again, nice try. There's a world of difference between goingback for a visit when you're already established somewhere else and deciding,"Nah, I'll stick with Miami," and suffering actual politicalrepression, to say nothing of the trauma of being a legitimate refugee havingto flee a country with nothing and having to start entirely from scratch.

I'mnot saying the Rubios had it easy. In a lot of ways their story is quitesimilar to many of my ancestors' stories. There's nothing wrong with yourstandard immigrant tale. At the same time, I would never identify my ancestorsas political exiles or refugees. Of course, most of them were trying to escapeincreasingly tyrannical and discriminatory governments, but the vast majority'sprimary motivations seem to have been economic.

My take? Beware of politicians selling personal narrativesas a way to appeal to a broader constituency-- their primary goal is not simplyto tell a story but to make a connection, which also means that they may notcare that much about the details. Rubio has clearly used the narrative of hisparents being political exiles as a foundation-stone for his politicalidentity, despite the fact that they were not. The fact that he's claiming thischanges "nothing" only reinforces how he's much more concerned withprotecting the image he was able to develop based on that story than the actualfamily history he pretends has shaped him so significantly. Not only is this acase of a politician not respecting his audience, but sadly also an instance ofsomeone exploiting their family history in bad faith.

I can relate. Aunt Bozette has invented more than a fewoff-kilter theories about our family over the years, usually with preciselyzero evidence. Among the best ones were that since one of her grandmothers wasHungarian, clearly her grandfather had to also have been Hungarian, and thatthis must have been how they met. Never mind that I had documents going backone hundred years showing that his family had been living in Czestochowa andthat he and all his siblings had been born there, too. Aunt Bozette was"convinced," because, among other things, she clearly thought beingHungarian was sexier than being Polish. When I clearly wasn't budging, sheaccused the records of being unreliable because they spelled the family namedifferently than the American relatives did. (When I pointed out that name spellingsvaried in Poland, that many Jews of that period could not read Polish, and thatmembers of our own family had been illiterate, she went into an e-rage, sputtering that we had "always" been very educated-- and offered, as proof, that her father and uncle had both gotten degrees from NYU.)

The reverse has also happened: there have been severaloccaisons when long-standing family stories have wound up being not exactlytrue. When this came up, my reaction was not defensiveness or anger, butexcitement-- now we could find out the real story! There's nothing wrong withcorrecting the record or amending the stories. (Was I disappointed when I foundout that great-great-uncle Nathan wasn't shell-shocked in World War One? Sure-- butthen I got to find out about his actual record as a Marine stationed in Cubaduring the Banana Wars.) There's also nothing wrong with qualifying the storiesas stories-- which exist in their own right as a family commentary or gloss on theactual events. It's not "bad," they're just different kinds of data.Where you get into trouble is when you start giving the stories preference overthe available, documented, evidence, because you think the truth isn't asinteresting, scandalous, or beneficial to the greater narrative you want totell. That's when you cross the line into being dishonest and verging onsleazy.

It's not necessarily Rubio's fault that, absent hard facts,that he made some embellishments (or repeated the embellishments of others)--though given that he clearly was interested in his family history, I find itstrange that he never bothered to ask for an actual date-- but everything hedoes as a response to it is all on him. So far, I'm unimpressed.

Being a Good/Serious Jew... with a non-Jewish Spouse

2011-10-27T05:50:00.000-07:00

Longtime Failed Messiah commenter Dave asked an interesting question:

I am divorced, no kids, 53 years old. I was married briefly in 2004 to a beautiful Jewish girl, who turned out to be a paranoid schizophrenic. Both she and her family hid this "nugget of information" from me.

I am now becoming more religious/ observant, partly to console myself for probably never having kids. I am attending an Orthodox synagogue.

I am hoping to marry a Chinese girl. In my opinion, they are way more beautiful than Caucasian women. Just my opinion.

I do not expect to be able to meet any woman, Jewish or Chinese or whatever, who is interested in either having a child with me, or adopting a child with me.

I am certainly hoping that my future wife, if not Jewish, will become Jewish. I will certainly try to gently persuade her.

I have a theoretical question- if (SADLY) for whatever reason a Jew or Jewess marries a goya/ goy knowing IN ADVANCE that (SADLY) there is no question of having kids with them- does it make a difference to the tzibbur whether or not the goya/ goy converts to Judaism, given the fact that there are not going to be any kids from that marriage??

When I asked for clarification, he added this:

I am asking

1) what is your personal opinion about my marrying a woman who is non-Jewish and may never convert, GIVEN THAT (SADLY) there will be no children in the marriage, (SINCE I cannot find a woman who wants to marry me who wants to have or adopt children with me)??

2) what do you think is the view of Orthodox Judaism (Modern Orthodoxy, not Haredi nor Chassidic) about my marrying a woman who is non-Jewish and may never convert, GIVEN THAT (SADLY) there will be no children in the marriage, (SINCE I cannot find a woman who wants to marry me who wants to have or adopt children with me) ??

He threw it out to all us schmucks and schmuckettes who hang around FM all day, and by the time I finished writing back to him I realized that it had become a blog post unto itself. Hence, me throwing it up here.

Dear Dave:

As regards most things with personalpractice, my opinion is that if it's not a big deal to you, it's not a bigdeal. While there may be some halachic issues with having a "mixed" marriage, my impression is that, for the most part, it is possible to be a practicing or observant Jew (particularly ifno spawn are involved) without your partner being Jewish, too. What isnecessary, to borrow from Dan Savage, is that your partner be "game."They need to at least be ok with what you're doing-- and, ideally, be willingto go along and play at least some role with you (particularly if you arefairly religious and want to keep that standard up in your household oncemarried or living together).

While I don't think it's ethical to demand a partner convert, I think it isreasonable to communicate what your priorities and values are from thebeginning-- just as, no doubt, they will be. I'd be very clear withprospective partners that you want to have a Jewish household-- however youdefine it. Presumably if you're committed enough to each other to getmarried, any potential partners will at least be willing to accomodate you, ifnot be actively interested in participating themselves in various ways.

My practice is not all that halachic, but since you mentioned you leanOrthodox, I think you may want to examine some of the nitty gritty issues ofyour personal practice and values, particularly how some of it might need tochange or adapt if you had a non-Jewish partner. (Are there particular mitzvotyou wouldn't be able to do that you want to? Are there potential work-arounds?)

I also think it's helpful to establish an intellectual framework in terms ofwhat mental status you would want to use for your wife-- is she a giyoret-in-process? Is she a straight-up gentile? Is she a full-blown Jew except for thepaperwork? That will help you figure out what lines of thinking you want to usein your personal practice in cases which involve your wife. For instance, wouldyou want your wife to observe Shabbat with you, or would you want her to stillbe able to perform forbidden work? Would you want her to light candles, orwould you? In our case, I treat my wife as if she were fully Jewish and inviteher to do whatever Jewish stuff as she wants. The only "status" differencebetween us is not over halacha, but knowledge-- and these days, there are a few areas where she's more knowledgable than me.

Ourmodel is definitely more participatory than obligatory, but it works for us. Inthe early days when we were dating there was a lot of explaining, lots ofquestions, lots of re-explaining, and lots of me asking my friends (and theinternet) additional questions. Now, my wife reads books on Jewish sociology,follows Orthodox blogs, is slowly studying Hebrew with me, and so on. The pointI'm trying to make is not that you need to search out someone that's going tobe a rabba-in-training, but rather that it's better if your spouse has aninterest in what you're doing, or at least isn't hostile to it.

Obviously, some of these issues may be is far off, but it's a useful exercisenonetheless. I think the biggest decision you need to make is-- will YOU careif your wife isn't Jewish? If not, then you should think about why not, andalso start considering how you might integrate those ideas and conclusions intoyour practice-- either now, or when you find who you're looking for.

Over the six years we've been together, my wife has shul-hopped and davenned withme, celebrated Shabbat with me, fasted on Yom Kippur with me, lit menorahs withme, helped me lead seders, hang mezuzot, studied chumash and commentaries withme, and most importantly, explained and defended our eclectic practice to herChristian relatives (as well as to my secular ones who accused me ofbrainwashing her). She has even been experimenting with covering her hair sincewe got married (totally unprompted by me, for the record).

I would much rather have an engaged partner who is interested in participatingin Judaism than a partner with "the right" status who could careless.

Just my POV. Feel free to comment or email me if you'd like to chat more.

Readers, what say thee? I realize I have kind of copped out on what ModernOrthodoxy might have to say about this (though, given that I'm not MO and don'treally hang out with MOs, I feel that anything I could say would only be arandom guess). Feel free to leave comments for me or Dave.

Those Who Should Know Better

2011-10-26T06:00:00.000-07:00

Nazi comparisons have always bugged me. Since the time Istarted researching my family and found dozens upon dozens of names of the deadand missing, I intuitively understood that to compare someone to a Nazi was toabandon any pretense of intellectual consideration in exchange for scoring acheap emotional shot. In my experience, when people invoke Nazism and theHolocaust to comment on modern issues (with the exception of those actuallyinvolving genocide), they almost always do so in a way that cheapens pastevents (and victims) as well as the contemporary ones they are trying to bringattention to.

I am used to seeing this kind of non-thought from a wholeswath of people. I saw it from young liberals in High School and college duringthe Bush years. I see it often from conservatives in media punditry today. But,while I found that kind of rhetoric frustrating, upsetting and even disturbing,there was a part of me that also understood the mentality behind it-- simplyput, these people usually had very little knowledge about the Holocaust orNazism, and so for them it was an almost entirely rhetorical concept. Someonewas bad, the Nazis were bad, therefore the guy that cut you off, the mall copgiving you a hard time, the politician you disagreed with-- they were allNazis. Simple. It was stupid and enraging, but marginally understandable.

However there is one particular group that I never expectedto hear violating Godwin's Law. That would be Holocaust survivors themselves.

There is a story making very small circles in theJblogosphere. It is written by Ynet, which is known for having a pretty solidanti-religious bias, so I am aware that there may be someexaggeration or misinformation in it. However if the thrust of the article isin any way accurate, it reflects a troubling low point in Jewish discourse.

According to the article, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, who lostmuch of his family to the Nazis and spent his childhood as the youngest inmatein Buchenwald, said the following, to a group of high school students, no less:

"Marrying gentiles is like playing into the hands ofthe Nazis," Yad Vashem Council Chairman and former Chief Rabbi YisraelMeir Lau has been quoted as saying to students from Ramat Gan's Ohel Shem HighSchool. According to the students, the rabbi made the remark duringa lecture on the Holocaust and on his personal memories as a survivor of theBuchenwald concentration camp which he delivered to teenagers who had returnedfrom a trip to Poland. Lau's remark and the nature of his lecture caused several12th graders to walk out of the auditorium during the lecture, the studentssaid. One of the teens who left the room explained, "As faras I understood, the lecture's point was that marrying non-Jews is forbidden,and according to Rabbi Lau, marrying gentiles is 'playing into the hands of theNazis.'

I think it's important to stop here and think about this. The Nazis murdered most of R. Lau's family. Not "theoretically" murdered, not "spiritually" murdered. Murdered, murdered. I understand how intermarriage, particularly the sort that was extremely popular a generation ago when the Jewish partner usually wound up raising their children Christian, if not converting themselves, can be seen as troubling, if not downright painful to Jews from religious backgrounds. But as someone who actually suffered under the Nazis, it frankly boggles the mind how an intelligent person like Lau could actually make this comparison in any serious way, much less repeat it to young students. It also reflects an extremely binary viewpoint, which is also quite surprising coming from Lau, who historically has tended to bring a fair bit of nuance to his public speaking. To compare intermarriage to the Holocaust, or suggest that it is some sort of Nazi-esque tactic, ignores the fact that intermarriage exists in a very long continuum, all the way from raising children with no Jewish content or identity whatsoever, all the way to, well, this lady:

I run into you over and over at many of the parallel events of our lives, pick-up times of our school-aged children, brisen, chasunas, Shabbos lunches. Baruch Hashem, Baruch Hashem. You have heard it by now from your friends, children’s teachers, rabbis, rooftops. My husband is not Jewish. We have been married eleven years. Our kids attend an Orthodox day school; we maintain a kosher home and we keep Shabbos. I make kiddush in our house, one day my oldest son might take over. Or not. Not your typical intermarried family with the predictable outcome of a forbidden union but it makes you uncomfortable all the same. I failed the ultimate test.

By every standard of logic, attitudes like the one allegedly shared by Lau (I have too much respect for him to accept this as fact without a little more confirmation) consistently fail. On a moral level, people who intermarry are certainly not comparable to Nazis. They are individuals who love each other and their children and, presumably, try to raise them as well as they know how. On the issue of Jewish continuity and education, intermarried families, again, run the gamut. While some parents may decide not to educate their children about their (partial) heritage, others do-- sending their kids to Hebrew school, to Jewish camp, to day schools, volunteering at their shuls, sitting on boards, donating time and money, etc. And, for that matter, there are in-married Jewish couples who do none of those things-- and yet they are not accused of "playing into the hands of the Nazis," though doing nothing does just as much to further assimilation along.

The only area where R. Lau is partially correct is regarding the issue of whether intermarried couples are making babies with halakhic status. Obviously, in a case where the mother is not Jewish or has not converted, according to Orthodox halakha (AOH), the child is not Jewish by Orthodox standards. However, focusing on this single issue ignores two important caveats:

1- The fact that someone is born not Jewish (AOH) does not mean they may not at some point decide to become Jewish (AOH). I'm obviously biased but I would assume that I would be much more inclined to consider converting to a religion or formally joining a community where I had been welcomed, not insulted, deemed defective, or, of course, been accused of being the offspring of an evil Nazi-esque tactic.

2- Not being born (or not "turning out" a certain way) is not the same thing as actively being killed. It sounds obvious but there you go. I understand that in traditional Judaism this issue is sometimes muddied (hence the controversiality of birth control, among other things), but, really, let's be clear on this. The fact that one has a non-Jewish (AOH) child is not remotely the same as having a Jewish child who is then killed. One is a tragedy, an unspeakable crime, a horrendous trauma that will permeate and affect the rest of your life. While the other may not be some people's ideal for themselves or their family, it is profoundly NOT the same thing as having a child being murdered. A child is a wonderful blessing. They are filled with endless potential. They can be or accomplish amazing things, they can be kind and wonderful human beings. They may even, shock of shocks, do things that help or positively impact Jews without being one! (Say, a doctor, or a teacher, or a police officer, or a politician, or anything else under the sun!) When people say things like "If my child turned out to be gay/not Jewish/not religious, it would be like they were dead," what they really mean is that either they're incredibly narrow-minded, or that they're just not thinking.

If people really want to test this analogy, have them go talk to Leiby Kletsky's parents. These people actually had their son violently murdered. They have actually lived through the hell that this causes. Do you think they would consider a living, breathing Leiby with questionable halakhic status to be no different from the mutilated body they buried a few months ago? Do you think they wouldn't trade one for the other in a heartbeat?

A disturbing analogy? I agree. But anyone who doesn't realize that this kind of insane-- and incorrect-- logic is ultimately where the "assimilation/intermarriage = Holocaust" analogy leads needs to start paying attention.

As someone who saw children (and teenagers, and adults, and elders) be murdered, really murdered, by sadistic, evil monsters, I can only hope that R. Lau is too wise-- and sensitive-- to have really said this. (Though the fact that his office admits that he mentioned intermarriage and "generations of Israel's enemies" makes me concerned that something similar may have been said.)

Hat-tip: Failed Messiah.

Caution: Blowhards at work

2011-10-21T06:00:00.000-07:00

I present a befuddlement in three acts:

Act One- A "post" from Shmuley Boteach's blog pops up in my news feed. I use the term loosely, because rather than his usual lazy pattern of just reposting his op-ed columns, this time Shmuley opted to plug a book signing at a Barnes and Noble where he will be whoring his latest book and reminding everyone how great he is (in three weeks, no less, just in case you wanted to put it on your calendar). I notice that in said book signing plug Shmuley chose to call himself "America's Rabbi."

Act Two- I rage at Mrs. Yid for a good minute about what kind of arrogant doofus has the chutzpah to call himself "America's Rabbi"-- because like Highlander, there can be only one-- and that someone should really find some way to legally prohibit him from doing this anymore.

Act Three- I get a tingling sensation in the "idiocy storage" center of my brain. I wonder where I've heard such an egocentric, grandiose title used before. I do a little poking around my bookmarks and find this guy-- John Hagee's pet Jew, Aryeh Spero, who calls himself, what else, "America's Rabbi."

Epilogue: I cross my fingers that Shmuley and Spero hear about each other and decide to solve their copyright dispute in one of two ways: A, a giant lawsuit that exposes both to be giant gasbags to the public and financially compromises them so they can't spend as much of their resources being bozos, or B, they challenge each other to a charity Krav Maga match (or for those purists of you out there, Abir).

Hey, I wonder if one of them can pass for Sephardic. Then we could follow Israel's example and have two Chief American Rabbis. To the victor goes the silly turban!

Rejoice, O Readers

2011-10-18T06:00:00.000-07:00

Enjoy a new post over at yon other blog. Verily.

Spoilers: The High Holidays happened. We observed them. It totally did not suck. It turns out knowing what's going on makes a big difference. Who knew?

Baby Steps toward Shabbat

2011-10-12T12:00:00.000-07:00

Mrs. Yid and I are, if not "huge" comic nerds,then at least seasoned readers. Our college was lucky enough to have along-established comic book reading room and we both spent many pleasant hoursthere reading whatever caught our fancy (in fact I think one of our firstawkward conversations happened there. If memory serves I was attempting to askher what she was going to be doing over the summer. Not surprisingly, she wasmore interested in reading her book). In the five years post-college, we'vediligently acquired a small collection of favorites that proudly adorn twolarge shelves on our biggest bookcase (titles upon request).

The reason I bring this up is that while comics often giveme food for thought, rarely do they inspire me towards an act of religious observance.

Mrs. Yid recently bought and started re-readingTransmetropolitan, an excellently-written series about a foul-mouthed reporternamed Spider Jerusalem living in a semi-distant future that's, well, it sureain't Star Trek, for starters. While the future has technological wondersranging from matter synthesizers to clones to androids to amazing medicine, theCity, where Jerusalem lives (a dig at the fact that every large city thinks it's the onlycity in the country) is for the most part a teeming mass of greed, filth, andsleaze. Despite having brilliant technology, the bulk of people's time seems tostill be focused on the same old issues of violence, drugs, sex, and mindless TV.(It really is a great read, although I'd classify the language and themes asNSFShul.)

One thing I had been thinking of the last week whilethumbing through Transmet is that while Warren Ellis' future is clearlyexaggerated for effect, in the 15 years since he originally started the series,we have continued to have incredible leaps forward in technology. We may nothave machines that give you food out of thin air or surgical procedures totransfer someone's consciousness into a cloud of nanites (read the books!) butin terms of where technology is and where it's going, it's clear that we'rewhizzing right along. One area where this is readily apparent is in the sphereof entertainment. It is possible to be completely plugged in 24/7-- and whilethere's nothing inherently wrong with that, for me, anyway, the fact thattechnology makes so much media available also means that I need to make surethat I'm making some active choices about what I will and won't spend my timeon.

This is part of the reason why though Abbot and Deacon Yidhave been nudging me to get a smart phone (they ordered theirs last week), Ikeep resisting. I have structured my life in a way where I don't particularlyrequire a smart phone. My commute is a 25-minute walk each way. My job requiresme to be "on" for 8 hours a day with three 20-minute breaks. Once I'm home, I have access to the internet if I need it. That'sit. That's my day. There's almost no down time, which can be a little tiring, but it also means I don't really spend any time sitting around "bored" and needing to be entertained by a smart phone. And really, I rather like that.

Here's where things segue into Shabbat.

Shortly before Rosh Hashanah, Mrs. Yid and I decided it wastime to finally start actually doing some text study together. So we orderedsome bibles. Or rather, in our typical overly-academic way, we ordered sixbibles. For the past two Friday nights, after dinner and candles and kiddush,we have sat down with our six bibles, and we've studied the weekly parsha. It'sinteresting, it's stimulating, and it's fun. Last week we went for three hours.

So we've got the very early germinations of some text study,and that's good. But we've been discussing another piece, still in itsembryonic stage. Namely, how should liberal Jews treat Shabbat as a day ofrest?

One piece we discussed was the halacha. We don't really holdby halacha, but it's always good to have the background. A really importantelement that came up was the fact that in order to not have to cook on Shabbat,you have to have a significant amount of preparation beforehand-- which, whilefollowing the letter of the law, struck us as being a little odd-- work a tonon Thursday and Friday because you're not allowed to work on Shabbat. Notexactly restful. So we decided that "no fire or electricity" is notgoing to be our main focus, because that would inherently create more work, notless.

However, we were intrigued by the concept of making Shabbatspecial and distinct. I had recently read a HuffPo article advocating an electronic "day of rest." (I was actually surprised by how muchbacklash it generated.) As we discussed it further, we discovered that the idea oflimiting electronic entertainment on Shabbat was actually somewhat appealing. Itried it on Rosh Hashanah afternoon after shul, and while it was a bit of atemptation, I also enjoyed spending sometime doing non-screen related activities. So I think we're going to try thisfor a while-- no TV, no computers, basically no glowy-boxes. And we'll seewhere it goes.

I like the idea of carving some time out for human-to-humancontact. I like making a space for slowing things down-- maybe not to the pointof Heschel's Cathedral in Time, but at least a bit of a change from 24/7infotainment explosion. I like the idea of spending time with my wife orfriends and keeping my focus on them. And I think Mrs. Yid and I both like theidea of starting something that we can continue to develop when we have spawnrunning around.

There are plenty of things we are going to keep in place asis. Unfortunately, at this stage given our scheduling differences, it isn't quite possible to rule out running random errands on Saturdays, so inthat respect it still will involve a certain degree of "work." Wealso won't be turning off our (non-smart) phones. Being able to stay in touch with peoplein case of an emergency is important, and given time zone differences, it wouldbe impractical to demand that Mrs. Yid's parents only call us on Sundays. Rather than a firm ban on phones, Ithink we'll just try to limit phone use to what's necessary-- most likely, answering calls from friends or relatives. I also won't rule out leisureactivities that might involve a TV-- say, getting together with friends to seea movie. We're not interested in having this become a barrier to spending timewith people that are important to us. This is supposed to be about helping usbe more thoughtful and present, not blowing people off.

After thinking it through, I've decided I'm not that interested in having an Orthodox-style Shabbat, strictly speaking. ButI also think that unplugging your brain once a week is probably a good thing.

Here's to a more mindful future.

Quote-time:

Mrs. Yid: "You were reading Transmetropolitan and it made you think about observing Shabbat?"

Me: "Yes."

Mrs. Yid: "I don't think anyone's ever said that. Ever."

Questionable Logic

2011-10-12T06:00:00.000-07:00

Tzvi's got a lot of issues. There's his "Diaspora equals spiritual death" issue, his "everything is about masturbation" issue, and of course his "I shouldn't be left unsupervised with young people" issue.

But it turns out that all these pale in comparison to Tzvi's latest issue: Not knowing what to do in the bathroom.

During the short afternoon break in our Yom Kippur prayers, I went to the bathroom, but my head was so filled with thoughts of G-d, I didn’t know what to do. You can’t think about G-d in the bathroom. So I tried to think about work, but I didn’t want to think about work on Yom Kippur and Shabbat, so I had a sudden flash to think about something unholy like baseball. But my mind went blank. I don’t know anything about baseball anymore, thank G-d.

Um, really? Your personality has become so utterly anemic since becoming frum that the only things you can recall in that large, bearded, uber-creative brain of yours are about God? Wow, I really can't wait to read that book of yours now.

Tzvi sees his sports ignorance as a fantastic badge of honor indicating how awesome a BT he has become:

I used to love baseball as a normal American sports fan, and I still remember names like Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron, Ted Williams, Warren Spahn, Willy Mays, Duke Snider, SANDY KOUFAX, Yogi Berra, Pee Wee Reese, and Jackie Robinson, but since I became a baal t’shuva and moved to Israel, I don’t follow American sports at all. Zero. Not the World Series, and not the Super Bowl. I couldn’t care less. It’s all a waste of time. We have a Jewish country to rebuild, and millions of Jews to re-educate – who has time for stupid nonsense like American sports? Exercise is a mitzvah, and kids should be encouraged to engage in sports, but following baseball players and Major League standings of the goyim – why pollute our holy Jewish minds and waste precious time?

Hey Tzvi, before your arm shrivels up and dies from patting yourself on the back so much, you may want to consider these points:

1- My grandfather became a BT when he was in his sixties. Up until that time he was a fairly middle-of-the-road Conservative Jew. He grew up in the home of secular, Yiddish-speaking Communists.

2- From his earliest memories to the day he died, Zayde never gave two craps about sports.

3- Abbot Yid inherited his father's utter disinterest of sports.

4- Abbot Yid has yet to experience his "Road to Jerusalem" moment.

5- I also don't care about sports, and all this without making aliyah, becoming a B'aal Teshuvah, or spending so much time on my digital high horse that I suffer altitude poisoning.

Just saying.

... Honestly, this reminds me of the time Tzvi told the internet how proud he was that his kids were totally ignorant about world history. Um, go you?

But wait, there's more. Tzvi's got a double-whammy for us today. Continuing his long-running "Make aliyah or you're a jerk" theme, Tzvi has decided to write an inspiring ode about a great rabbi, a tribute to a towering Hasidic master, a man who recognized the importance of aliyah and whose life we can all use as a powerful role model to inspire us to follow in his footsteps:

The famous Hasidic master, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, teaches that true prayer and faith is only possible in Eretz Yisrael. He states, “To be a true member of the Jewish People is to always move to higher and higher levels, and this is impossible without the holiness of Eretz Yisrael. The same is true of prayer. The ascent of prayer comes about on the Land of Israel."

...Rabbi Nachman writes that only when a Jew attains the level of Eretz Yisrael, is he worthy of being called “a man of strength and valor.” Only when he has gone through this battle successfully, rising to the heights of holiness, and triumphing over all the obstacles that are set in his way, can he be called “a hero of war.”

Um, wait a minute. You're using Rebbe Nachman? Rebbe Nachman of Breslov? The guy who moved to Israel, spent a whopping six months there (according to one Breslov story, he said was ready to leave as soon as he set foot on Israeli soil), and promptly left to go back to the Diaspora? Who established his court in that special part of Northern Israel called Ukraine, and who stipulated in his will that he hated the exile so very much that he wanted his followers to come visit him there every year?

Unless we're supposed to see this as the best example ever of "Do as I say, not as I do," I don't get it.

Fun Moments in Hyperbole- Rosh Hashanah Edition

2011-10-11T17:18:00.000-07:00

Ah, the High Holidays. That special time where professional Jewish pundits come together and make comparisons that show they have no idea what they're talking about:

- Shmuley Boteach: Deficits in America's economy, culture, and politics make us a bunch of zombies, or possibly vampires.

In this coming year let us be a nation of innovation, creativity, and imagination, as Henry David Thoreau said, one that ‘suck[s] out all the marrow of life,’ rather than a nation of the undead that sucks the last few drops of blood out of an exhausted and burned out economy.

Yes, that's Shmuley Boteach, self-appointed Chief Rabbi of the United States and who apparently can't tell the difference between Rosh Hashanah and Halloween.

- Avi Shafran: Doing teshuva is like "having a time machine."

An act of eating of non-kosher meat years ago can be “accessed and edited” into the equivalent of consuming matzah on Pesach. We can travel back in time and change the past.

In related news, Dreamworks has tapped R. Shafran to write the screenplay for their new movie, Time Machine 2: In 3-D. Under Avi's talented pen, I'm sure we can expect that one to be just as brilliant and entertaining as its predecessor.

Let's all give him a hand... or at least a finger

2011-10-02T06:00:00.000-07:00

Am I the only one unimpressed by this story?

Just two weeks ago, former New York Mayor Ed Koch was telling city voters to elect a Republican to Congress, to "send a huge message to President Obama that we're not happy with how he's dealing with Israel."

Now, one speech to the United Nations and a one-on-one chat later, Koch is an enthusiastic backer of the same president's reelection.

The one-time Democrat tells his supporters that it's all water under the Ed Koch Queensborough Bridge.

"I'm now on board the Obama Reelection Express," he says in an email to supporters.

Bob Turner, elected on Sept. 13 to fill the seat once held by Democratic Anthony Weiner, had made an issue in his campaign of Obama's position that Israel's borders before the 1967 Mideast war should be the baseline for peace talks, leaving unmentioned the caveat that there should be mutually agreed land swaps that would take into account the new realities on the ground.

That earned the endorsement of Koch, who in a recorded phone message to voters in the Jewish-heavy district said that signaling dissatisfaction with Obama's position was the "most important" reason to back Turner.

Koch now says he thinks Turner's win had the desired effect, pushing the U.S. to come out against a vote for Palestinian statehood at the United Nations and to return to direct negotiations with Israel.

In a subsequent interview with the New York Times, Koch says that "whatever rift existed before -- and there was one -- that's gone," and that he's ready to convince Jewish voters that Obama's the best candidate.

"His speech at the U.N. in support of Israel was extraordinary. I couldn't have made a better one myself," he told WNBC-TV in New York. "I have shoes and will travel to Florida or any place they want to go."

Shorter version: Ed Koch is a flip-flopping hack.

It was bad enough that he pushed the idea that the 9th district election should be a "referendum" on Obama's Middle East policies, but now one good speech later and he's trying to sell himself as in Obama's corner again? Do us all a favor and just stay out of it, Ed.

Seriously, I know it's become a supposedly great badge of honor when a person sticks to their principles and is willing to work with people from both parties to advance those principles, but every time I hear about Ed Koch it sounds like he's screwing someone over. I don't think people should be slaves to political parties, but if you're going to have a political change of heart and become a neocon, do it like Reagan or Perry did and stick to your guns. Actually become a Republican or ideological conservative-- don't pull this pseudo-independent, wishy-washy, "I campaigned against you a mere three weeks ago, but now I've totally got your back" crap. Why should anyone trust a word that comes out of his mouth, Democrats or Republicans?

Honestly, if Ed Koch's opinion still carries weight with any voters, Jewish or otherwise, it's just more proof that some people shouldn't be allowed to vote.

The Joys of Recycling

2011-10-01T12:44:00.000-07:00

We've talked about Lazer recycling his posts before, most notably in 2009 when he wrote a post called "Hashem's Signature," which it turned out was a word-for-word repeat of something he had written back in 2005 under the name "The Creator's Autograph."

Well, whether due to High Holiday busy-ness or just general laziness on the Emunah Rebbe's part, he's done it again. Remember his 2008 post about not ignoring dents? In which Lazer counseled a young woman named Suzanne that the reason she kept getting into minor car accidents was that she wasn't covering her hair?

Well either Lazer's run out of ideas or Suzanne has a creepy identical twin sister who suffers the same tznius problems as she does (and drives the same car), because a scant three years later, we get to read about the exact same story, only this time, the lady's name is Ricki.

Interestingly, if you try to find the original "Don't Ignore the Dent" story from 2008, it is now unavailable via Lazer's blog. Thanks to the almighty power of Google-caching, however, we can see that it was still there as recently as last August, shining in all its now-plagiarized glory.

Seriously, the only things changed are the woman's name and the date she's writing to him. (Apparently October 30, 2008 doesn't have the same poignant ring as September 11, 2011. Classy, Lazer.)

I wouldn't mind if Lazer just rehashed a post about why tznius is important (setting aside the ridiculous magical thinking of dissecting a complete stranger's letter about how she's a bad driver to guess at random personality failings), but I don't understand why he rips off his own writing and presents it as totally new material, without even bothering to change the title!

When this happened with Creator's Autograph, I didn't really care. It was silly, but that was about it. This is a little more serious, though, because this post is purporting to be a real letter from a real reader asking for help and advice-- and clearly, it's been fabricated. There is no way this "Ricki" person could be for real. Not that I was taking anything Lazer says as gospel to begin with, but it's sad to be faced with the real possibility that some of the stuff he posts that people have "supposedly" written to him are made up. What's even sadder is that he thought no one would notice.

For a guy who claims to be trying to reach out to the whole world as his audience, Lazer sure doesn't think very highly of his readers.

How big of you

2011-09-30T12:00:00.000-07:00

In keeping with my long tradition of being annoyed by silly Tzvi Fishman, I must announce a totally unsurprising update: he's at it again.

Tzvi starts off being pissy because only 35 Jews protested at the UN against a Palestinian state. He then uses this as a springboard to wax idiotic about how this demonstrates a complete lack of Jewish identity in the US. (Because we all know that Jewish identity is predicated on protesting at the UN. That's totally the 614th commandment- I don't care what that fancy-pants philosopher guy said.)

From there, we go deeper into the stupid pool. In case you're not convinced about the protesting-as-Jewish-litmus-test thing, fear not, Tzvi's got another test that's even more fool-~~ish~~proof.

to spread the message of aliyah, I recently started to make friends on Facebook. There, I discovered a very noteworthy thing. As everyone knows, Facebook lovers can write all about themselves and their interests on their “walls.” (How very different that wall is from ours.) There, they can tell all of their friends about their favorite books and movies and television shows, music and philosophy. Now here is the interesting thing. All of my new Facebook friends tend to be avid supporters of Israel and obviously proud to be Jews. They post all kinds of news stories, and blogs, and Youtube clips about Israel with great devotion and passion. But by and large, when you glance at their preferences in movies and music and books, they like all of the American garbage that the goyim love – the stupid celebrities and rock stars, and idiot TV shows, and sci-fi movies, and trash thrillers – all kinds of names, and groups, and books, and movies that I’ve never heard of, thank G-d.

Oh my God, he's right! How dare Jews enjoy things? Our holy ancestors didn't have any fun and look how great they turned out. Why do you think they invented things like gefilte fish and Slivovitz? To make them extra-dour, of course. And don't think the ban on fun is just in Israel. American Jews are doing their best to quash it here in the states, too. When it comes to working hard to not enjoy themselves, the couple from American Gothic has nothing on us.

But hang on, it gets better. After crapping all over US Jews for having the temerity to like TV, movies, and crappy books, Tzvi's next column announced that he was offering a fantastic prize to his millionth reader (not that he cares about silly worldly matters like popularity or anything). Can you guess what it is?

I am pleased to announce that the prize will be a copy of what may be the greatest Jewish novel ever written, “Tevye in the Promised Land,” for which I won the Israel Ministry of Education Award for Creativity and Jewish Culture.

That's right, pathetic Diaspora exiles, make sure to burn all the crap you actually like, because if you're lucky enough, you just might get a free copy of Tzvi's kick-ass book. (Just thinking about leafing through its pages makes me go all squishy inside.)

Forget "Hollywood to the Holy Land." In honor of his millionth hit, I think Tzvi should change his blog name to better reflect his message. How about "Great Balls of Chutzpah?"

Are we talking about the same place?

2011-09-29T19:55:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Rosenblum wrote an article encouraging the mayor of Bet Shemesh to confront the Haredi wingnuts that keep attacking students at a Modern Orthodox girls' school because it's too close to their turf and because the girls aren't dressed quite modestly enough for their tastes. As often happens, my issue with Rosenblum is not so much with his main point, but rather the way he goes about arguing it.

Case in point: to illustrate that Haredim can live by their principles of modesty but also avoid becoming major jerks, Rosenblum discusses the fine folks of Kiryat Sanz:

Last week, I found myself davening Mincha in Kiryat Sanz in Netanya, prior to spending a few hours at the separate beach across the road. Kiryat Sanz is a largely self-contained neighborhood of Klausenberger Chassidim, though late Klausenberger Rebbe insisted from the beginning that there be a Sephardi community within Kiryat Sanz. Laniado Hospital, which the Rebbe built, lies at the edge of the neighborhood.

While in Kiryat Sanz, I noticed one or two women in decidedly non-Chassidic dress walking through the neighborhood. No one paid them any attention. Just to make sure that my powers of observation are not waning, I called a doctor friend who lives in the neighborhood, and he told me a story of rabbi who once spent his summer vacation in Kiryat Sanz. After a week, he complained to the Klausenberger Rebbe, of blessed memory, that he was shocked by the presence of immodestly dressed women in Kiryat Sanz. The Rebbe replied, “That’s amazing. I’ve been here over ten years, and I never saw anything like that.”

My friend then told me another story that captures the ahavas Yisrael that the Rebbe made the animating value of his community, along with devotion to Torah study. Once the Rebbe heard that some Chassidim had shouted, “Shabbes,” at seaside bathers. He ordered them to cease and desist forever. “Nobody ever came closer to Torah because someone shouted at them,” he said. “Open your windows and sing Shabbos zemiros at the top of your lungs. That might have a positive effect.”

Many Mazel Tovs to the Klausenberger Hasidim, who apparently follow their rebbe's approach in not sweating the small stuff.

However, it's a little unfortunate that shortly after reading about the tolerant and open-minded people of Kiryat Sanz that I happened to stumble across this piece over at FailedMessiah:

Sanz hasidim are forced submit their mail, the land line phones, their cell phones and computers to censorship that includes banning all computer games for children and having a rabbinic committee certify that all laptops have their Internet capability permently disabled.

Hmm... Well, as long as they're only harassing themselves, I guess we're still cool. Rock on, Klausenberg.

Working Towards a Thoughtful Judaism

2011-09-28T21:45:00.000-07:00

As longtime readers know, I was raised without any formal Jewish education. When I was around twelve, my grandfather died and I felt a deep longing to want to know more about Zayde in particular, my family history in general, and, somewhat out of left field, the religion and culture that so many of them had practiced to varying degrees. Initially I think I just wanted to get a better sense of what my grandfather's values and life would have been like, and learning about Orthodox Judaism, and Hasidim in particular, seemed like a good place to start.

It was a tough start. While initially my parents were on board with my request to have a Bar Mitzvah, that tanked pretty quickly after Abbot Yid got into a fight with a rabbi of one of the big Reform shuls in town (since I was already learning a second language, Abbot wanted to see if there was any possibility of me working with a private tutor and/or skipping some of the nonessentials of Hebrew school leading up to the Bar Mitzvah. The rabbi got offended and said "We don't do quickie Bar Mitzvahs here," which promptly got Abbot Yid offended and led to him storming out and never going back). From there I was basically on my own. I didn't get very far for a while until eighth grade when we happened to read Potok's The Chosen and it was like a fire got lit underneath me. There was something about seeing religious Jews in literature that crystalized Judaism for me in a very dramatic way. I don't know if it was the surprise of realizing that people wrote novels about Jews or the thrill of getting to discuss Jewish history and minutae in class, but it gave me a huge charge. I read the book in three days, and while I've long since grown to appreciate most of Potok's other books as more interesting or better written than The Chosen, it will always have a special place in my heart as the text that sparked my Jewish identity-- an identity which previously had been barely existent.

I started reading whatever I could about Hasidim-- mostly things printed from the internet. In high school, I found the religion section of my school library and started reading books on Judaism. And I found a friend whose family was gracious enough to invite me to High Holidays, which was how I started my first ambivalent forays into participating in Jewish ritual instead of just reading about it.

Which is where this post comes in. In the past sixteen years I have had a lot of spiritual development, but I feel like there's lots of things I still don't know and have yet to really think about when it comes to forging a spiritual path that's both comfortable as well as intellectually consistent with the kind of Jew I'd like to be and the kind of Jewish life and family I'd like to have with Mrs. Yid.

Mrs. Yid and I have some big Jewish goals for the year, one of which is to get back on the Hebrew wagon and another of which is to start studying some Jewish texts and commentary so we start getting a more solid grounding in this big Jew game we supposedly want to play in. I also have another personal spiritual goal for the year, which is to start taking a serious look at the mitzvot and decide which ones speak to me, which ones don't, and which ones I'm interesting in trying out a little more so I can decide. (Similar to how Mrs. Yid has been wearing headscarves for the past 2 months since our wedding, though me being the super observant sleuth I am, I did not make this connection until someone complimented her on her tichel at shul.)

As anyone who knows me (or has been reading me for a while) knows, there are some pretty definite red lines we have already established, so I don't have any expectations that I will be fruming out or that Mrs. Yid will be prepping herself for an Orthodox Bet Din. But at the same time, it seems dishonest for me to talk about the silliness of adhering to unexamined dogma, or advocate the concept of personal choice and autonomy when I haven't bothered to investigate the issues enough to really be in a position to make a judgment about these things one way or the other.

Here's looking forward to a meaningful, thoughtful, and engaged year.

Shana Tova.

A perfect example of what not to do

2011-09-26T22:19:00.000-07:00

Every year Mrs. Yid and I throw a seder for family and friends, in which the vast majority of participants are not Jewish. (We also have a Hanukkah party complete with menorah lighting and many, many fried foods.) As such I have a little background about how to make Jewish ritual accessible to a non-Jewish, or non-religious audience.

Which is exactly why this video pains me so very much.

I'm going to put aside the dicey politics of Chabad mixing Judaism and politics by roping random public officials into self-serving media events, as well as the interesting fact that the mucky-mucks orchestrating this particular Hanukkah photo-op decided to have it during the day. Instead let's talk about the participation dynamics featured here.

Rick Perry, the only non-Jew in the bunch, stands awkwardly in the middle of five Chabad rabbis, as they have him light the shamash candle. From there, the rabbis go into auto-pilot. One of them chants the blessings as Perry looks around and fidgets, having no idea where to look or what to do. Other than firing up the candle, he has zero role whatsoever. There is no translation for him to follow, no transliteration to allow him to participate, he doesn't even get a lousy yarmulke. Instead he gets to be a captive audience, watching the rabbis do their thing and looking somewhere between bored and uncomfortable, not sure whether to look at the rabbis chanting, the flame flickering, or the cameras. He clearly has no idea what's going on and any opportunity of having an actual spiritual connection between him and rabbis is totally gone. From there the rabbis start singing a song in Yiddish, again, something Perry can't do, with none of them even looking at him. He keeps trying to at least help with the chorus (bum, bum, bum-biddy-bum), but since no one has given him the slightest bit of prep ahead of time, he's lost there, too. Finally the rabbis drag Perry into a hora, something which he also seems to be totally unprepared for.

I think maybe the most painful part is when one of the rabbis tries to explain what just happened, giving Perry the most dumbed-down gist of the blessings and meaning of Hanukkah humanly possible. Not surprisingly, Perry procedes to stare at the menorah as if it were a mutant egg-sack from Mars.

I totally understand why some people are so skeptical of "open-source Judaism" advocates like Douglas Rushkoff and R. Niles Goldstein. But looking at this video, seeing a group of educated Jews who have an explicit goal to reach out to non-Jews as a way of building their brand and ostensibly broadening non-Jews' awareness of Orthodox Judaism all but ignore and shut out a non-Jew who seems like he would at least be willing to pretend to care about what's going on if they gave him half a chance and some basic information, I can't help but conclude that top-down Judaism doesn't have all the answers, either.

Granted, Rick Perry is not Jewish, so he is not exactly Chabad's target audience. But seeing his discomfort, seeing how the rabbis speed on ahead totally oblivious to the fact that he cannot-- and has not been invited to-- participate, I can't help but think about how many times this has happened to Jews, as well.

If you're going to spend all your time with people who share your background, culture and education, I suppose things like this don't matter. But if part of your life or mission involves spending time with and reaching out to people from different backgrounds than yourself, it might be a good idea to rethink your approach.

If your idea of "sharing Hanukkah" with someone is "letting them watch while you pray," I don't think most people will be back. No matter how good your doughnuts are.

Hat-tip to Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic.

Letter to a Megalomaniac: Stop Writing Letters

2011-09-09T12:00:00.000-07:00

Remember our old friend Ellis Washington? The guy who wrote a letter to his pastor complaining that he was being persecuted by not being allowed to debate him at church? The guy who compared environmentalists to jihadists, Nazis, and communists?

Well he's got more to talk about. And this time, he's preaching to the youth. As a young-ish adult myself, I personally can't wait. I bet this will be wicked rad.

What's the dilly, Ellis?

Letter to Generation X

Um... you know that no one in generation X actually refers to themselves as generation X, right? Off to a lame start, fogey.

Ellis' column is truly bizarre. It's probably the only time I've read a political commentary piece framed as a novelization, complete with prologue, "dialogue" and epilogue headers. In the prologue, Ellis informs us that he's had a "recent correspondence" with "a young protégée." Or, as someone who wasn't pretending they just stepped out of Dead Poet's Society or The Emperor's Club might put it, he sent an email. Way to stay current and hip, Ellis.

Things only get more ridiculous and flowery from there. Apparently Ellis' letter had "an enduring leitmotiv" (that's a theme, for those of us who don't spend our free time rubbing our diplomas in other people's faces) discussing the many stages of slavery that black Americans have suffered through-- including, in Ellis' view, the most recent one of "voluntary slavery."

All of this is just in Ellis' prologue. Bring on the "correspondence," young page!

The email is in response to one from a young black man named Marcus saying he doesn't like the Republican party because it keeps the rich rich and the poor poor, and because he doesn't want to be associated with all the baggage of the GOP so he'd rather be a moderate or independent. Sounds reasonable enough, but the great Ellis will not let things stand:

Thanks for writing me, my friend. … Read my blog and follow up what I write with your own research.

That's right, no correspondence from Ellis would be complete without a gratuitous self-endorsement (still, don't you think mentioning it in your second sentence is a little on the nose?)

To help you, examine this simple syllogism below from the own mouths of the forefathers of communism, a totalitarian, atheistic ideology responsible for the brutal genocide of perhaps 150-200 million people in the twentieth century alone:

...Marx: Democracy is the road to socialism;
Lenin: Democracy is indispensable to socialism. The goal of socialism is communism;
Marx: The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.

Um... I don't get it. Marx and Lenin are saying that in their views, democracy (power by the people) is required to get to an eventual communist state. So? Suggesting that this damns democracy is like saying John Wayne Gacy ruined clowns forever. Besides, as a conservative, isn't it an article of faith for you that Marx and Lenin were full of crap?

Ellis deftly slaps down Marcus' concern about GOP policy regarding poor people, not by referring to any actual facts or policies, but by simply saying that it's a lie. Well played, I guess? And then he brings out the big guns:

Remember the Democratic Party was the party that gave black people 250 years of slavery, followed by the murderous Klu Klux Klan, racial segregation (de jure and de facto), ghettos, endemic poverty, eugenics (selective breeding), forced sterilization and abortion on demand, which kills millions of black babies every year.

This is a silly if culturally interesting argument which is often repeated on the right, particularly among the Fox News bozos. I am personally fascinated by the intellectual position, "Actions then and now don't matter at all; all that matters is the name of the party they're associated with." It's got a certain ridiculous cleverness to it. Never mind that no matter how often people like Ellis repeat the canard about the contemporary Democratic party somehow being responsible for the KKK, there is nothing more profoundly conservative than the slavery, racism and Jim Crow that was endemic in the Old South. It's particularly funny given that the Fox crowd also likes to crow about how it was Republicans who signed the Civil Rights Act into law over opposition from Dixiecrats. Ellis, of course, can't add this to the list of the Democratic party's evils since he considers the Civil Rights Movement part of "voluntary slavery."

This particular letter ends with Ellis wondering (apparently to himself) whether Generation X will be the saviors of our nation:

Can Generation X save America from voluntary slavery, from the madness of Social Darwinism, which is education atheism, from unsustainable debt and deficits, exploding welfare programs and pensions plans that are purposely causing states to shut down and global socialism?

Tune in for our next episode and find out!

Oh wait, there's more! A few weeks later, we had "Letter to Generation Y," and I'm sure this one's even hipper than ever, right? (Not if the format is any indication; we get the same ridiculous prologue, dialogue, epilogue structure as last time. What is this, a play? Let me guess, Greek tragedy?)

This time Ellis is writing to... a middle-aged college professor? Oh, but apparently he's recycling some of the same arguments he used to "rescue" the guy's college freshman son who had fallen in with the wrong crowd. Go for it, Ellis, what's your advice?

The problem with this young generation is that they have no moral code nor intellectual foundation other than hedonism; no knowledge of history or war strategies of the past like those outlined in Sun Tzu's classic treatise "Art of War."

Wow. I can honestly say that of all the things you might blame young people for, this is definitely not how I thought this was going to go.

Perhaps you can have your son do what I ask my college students to do, which is to read my WND articles or my blog and type a 2-3 page summary and opinion essay of each work.

HOLY CRAP, Ellis. Not everything is about you saving everyone's mind from the evils of... everyone else. Please, for the love of God, dial your ego down a bit before it blocks out the sun and all the trees die. Also, you have some balls to complain about schools brainwashing kids when you require your college students to read your blog and write summaries of everything you post. What's next, have them study your grocery lists so they know how a great and disciplined man stays on budget? Maybe they should be examining your Kindergarten finger painting, too? I'm sure there's something useful there.

This intellectual project will achieve several objectives almost instantaneously for your son, namely to:
1-Regularly follow directions from an authority figure;
2-Develop critical thinking and writing skills;
3-Get his intellect, body, soul, spirit ready to re-enter college again and this time to be successful;
4-Improve his writing/typing/computer skills.

You know, it's funny, Ellis, this kid could accomplish any or all of these things without having to read a single thing you've written. If all he needs to do to get back in the college mindset, he could do book reports on the Twilight series or write reviews of Star Trek episodes and it would essentially get him to the exact same place. What is it about your psyche in which you're convinced you're the antidote to a disease no one seems to be suffering from?

Results: By the end of the summer Rashaan will have a folder full of essays on diverse subjects that your son can then take to the dean, university officials and his professors to demonstrate his seriousness to high intellectual pursuits.

Wait, so your plan is to have him write mini-essays based on your random ideas and screeds, and then collate them into a manifesto portfolio, and that's supposed to impress the dean and his professors enough to let him back into class? I mean, I guess there's some merit there, but why on earth would you suggest that he write nothing but responses to your essays? Isn't there some issue of intellectual property involved? What are the professors supposed to make of his response to that time you said your pastor was a jerk because he wouldn't read your books? And again, are you so self-important that you think the only good writing this kid could create would be in response to something you wrote?

My son, Stone Washington, is 14 and will be entering high school this fall. Since he was about 8 I've had him read the great works of literature and book summaries of the classics and write his own summary analyses of those works in addition to reading them to me, correcting his sentence structure, and most importantly making him defend his thesis and arguments.

Three thoughts:

1- You seem like the most overbearing and obnoxious parent in the world.
2- There are "great works" besides your own master oeuvre? Lies, I tell you! I won't believe it!
3- You named your kid Stone? Why, was "Awesome" already taken? What about "Genius?" Then again, given how self-absorbed you are, I'm surprised you didn't name him after your blog.

Ellis says his son just finished writing 100 essays from an anthology of great books (see #1). He says his son needed to know that he needed to have an informed opinion before anyone would take his opinion seriously. True, of course, though again it begs the question of why Ellis only assigns random troubled youth and his college students his stuff to read.

Ellis concludes with a heart-warming anecdote about young Stone:

To demonstrate how knowledge is power and character is destiny, a few months ago when Stone was in the eighth grade he was chosen to be part of a special writing group. When the essays were written and collected, the teacher (Ms. Currier) by chance chose Stone's essay to read to the entire class and was stunned at his level of clarity, sentence structure and intellectual depth. She stated his writing was at the level of a 20-year-old, a college junior.

Overnight Stone's reputation for writing and intellectualism spread across the school campus, including to the principal's office. I told Stone in addition to the bad letters in his file for being repeatedly tardy and bullying that little boy ("Jimmy") in the seventh grade, now you have a good paper in your permanent file to showcase your literary and philosophical side. Stone was visibly proud of this achievement, which made my fighting with him all that time in writing those 100 essays (772 days) worth every word, every sentence … every effort.

Ellis, I think I speak for everyone under 30 when I say, truly, you are the least cool person I know. I'm sure you consider it a compliment.

What to make of this?

2011-09-09T06:00:00.000-07:00

I was filling out a registration form for an upcoming teacher's conference that is focused on social justice and ethnic diversity. Among the questions was, "Ethnic Group/Race". One of the options was, "White/European/Jewish."

Given the classic Jewish penchant for education, it's interesting that there have only been a few teachers in the family tree: my maternal grandfather worked as a bursar at Brooklyn College and occasionally gave lectures in New York history (he was working on his phD when he died of a heart attack); a great-great-uncle taught night school to immigrants until he died in the 1919 flu epidemic, and a distant cousin whose parents left Poland for Cuba put his bilingualism to good use and taught high school Spanish for 30 years.

I know that the liberal Jew going into the trenches of public education to work with minority kids has become a recurring educational trope from the past 100 years, but given that I didn't go to public school and, AFAIK, never had Jewish teachers, it's a little weird for me to run into little nuggets like this that show me that,

1- There really are a lot of Jews in education, and,
2- As much as we may want to claim a minority status, to everyone else, we're still just white.

GOP Debate Reactions

2011-09-08T18:55:00.000-07:00

I haven't had cable in almost a year, so my ability to watch live political theater is usually pretty limited. Last night I didn't have much to do, though, so I caught the debate through a live stream via politico. Here are my (belated) gut reactions, using combined transcripts from NBC and Roll Call.:

Ron Paul: Someone's senile paranoid grandfather has escaped from his spare room over the garage and thinks he's running for President. Quotes:

"With the airlines that are responsible for carrying their cargo and their passengers. I mean, why — why should we assume that a bureaucracy can do better? And look at the monstrosity we have at the airports. These TSA agents are abusive. Sometimes they’re accused of all kinds of sexual activities on the way they maul people at the airport."

So TSA should be abolished because its workers keep molesting people at airports. Wow, no poisoning the well here.

"We’re spending — believe it or not, this blew my mind when I read this — $20 billion a year for air conditioning in Afghanistan and Iraq in the tents over there and all the air conditioning. Cut that $20 billion out, bring in — take $10 off the debt, and put $10 into FEMA or whoever else needs it, child health care or whatever. But I’ll tell you what, if we did that and took the air conditioning out of the Green Zone, our troops would come home, and that would make me happy."

It's rare that a professional politician running for election makes a suggestion so totally divorced from any concept of reality or consequences. Ron Paul strikes me as the kind of guy who would watch The Little Mermaid and suggest that we should all just learn how to breathe underwater.

"I think this fence business is designed and may well be used against us and keep us in...And there's capital controls and there's people control. So, every time you think of fence keeping all those bad people out, think about those fences maybe being used against us, keeping us in."

Spoken like a man with a crazy newsletter, possibly hand-mimeographed.

Newt Gingrich: Football coach who thinks he's the quarterback. Not a good mix. Quotes:

"And if this president had any concern for working Americans, he’d walk in Thursday night and ask us to repeal [Obamacare] because it’s a monstrosity. Every person up here agrees with that."

How dare that bastard not ask us to repeal the legislation he spent most of his term fighting for and which our party keeps attacking via Congress and lawsuits? It must tell you he really hates Americans.

"We should make English the official language of government...We should insist that first-generation immigrants who come here learn American history in order to become citizens. We should also insist that American children learn American history.

And then find a way to deal with folks who are already here, some of whom, frankly, have been here 25 years, are married with kids, live in our local neighborhood, go to our church."

Yeah, we can't deport the illegals we know... that's awkward! Those other guys, though, that's fair game.

Michele Bachmann: Comparable to someone who's already told everyone they're going to be in NASCAR and has ordered a celebration cake without bothering to learn to drive. Quotes:

"I was just last week down in Miami. I was visiting the Bay of Pigs Museum with Cuban-Americans. I was down at the Versailles Cafe. I met with a number of people, and it’s very interesting. The Hispanic-American community wants us to stop giving taxpayer- subsidized benefits to illegal aliens and benefits, and they want us to stop giving taxpayer-subsidized benefits to their children as well."

I like how when it comes to where she ate lunch, she'll give details down to the zip code, but when she starts discussing conversations which totally challenge the conventional wisdom of what the Hispanic community thinks about immigration and benefits, all we get is, "I met a guy." Way to bury the lead.

"But one thing that we do know, our immigration law worked beautifully back in the 1950s, up until the early 1960s, when people had to demonstrate that they had money in their pocket, they had no contagious diseases, they weren’t a felon. They had to agree to learn to speak the English language, they had to learn American history and the Constitution. And the one thing they had to promise is that they would not become a burden on the American taxpayer. That’s what we have to enforce."

Our immigration law worked "beautifully" until the 50s? Wow, how... WASPy of you. I'm going out on a limb and guessing you don't have a lot of Ellis Island connections in your family, Governor. Or, you know, that you don't read history books. One or the other. Incidentally, there's a huge difference between promising to do something (learn US history, for instance), and actually doing it. I say this as a descendant of immigrants-- some of who became Communists, and at least one of whom, yes, became a polygamist. Signing a piece of paper doesn't mean a thing.

Herman Cain: Desperate for someone to notice him, so he keeps squawking about business-themed solutions for everything. Unfortunately, most political issues cannot be solved by simply copying off Chile's playbook. Quote:

"I call it my 9-9-9 economic growth plan.Throw out the current tax code, a 9 percent tax on corporate income, our 9 percent tax on personal income and a 9 percent national sales tax. If 10 percent is good enough for God, 9 percent ought to be good enough for the federal government."

Yeah, let's pick random numbers out of a hat because they sound fun and alliterative and base government policy on them! Even better, let's pretend this makes sense by alluding to tithing. Way to sell the dream, sir. Still, I suppose 9-9-9 is better than 6-6-6-... unless, of course, someone turns your poster upside down. Be careful; this only has to happen once and you'll lose all the evangelicals.

Rick Santorum: Looked pained every time someone asked him a question. He doesn't really want this job, does he? Quote:

"I’ve done things. We’ve brought Democrat and Republicans together."

John Huntsman: Another guy that really, really, wants people to notice him, but has the unfortunate task of trying to make a reasonable, sane person seem exciting in a contest with a bunch of screaming chimps flinging their own poop at each other. It's also precious how he gets pissy at discussing homeland security and foreign policy because he prevents him from talking about jobs. Quote:

"we’ve spent about 15 minutes now on homeland security. The greatest gift we could give this country on the 10th year anniversary, Rick, is a Homeland Security Department... that doesn’t make us all feel like there’s a fortress security mentality that is not American...

I’m guessing there are a whole lot of people tuned in around this country who are saying, why are we spending all this time talking about the smaller issues? We’ve got 14 million people unemployed. We’ve got millions more in this country who are so dispirited they’ve quit looking. This is a human tragedy that we’re talking about, moms and dads and families that completely go without.

...While all these other issues are important, let’s not lose sight, folks, of the bottom line here. We’ve got to get back in the game as a country. We’ve got to make this economy work."

Mitt Romney: A vapid charmer. (He's welcome to use that as a campaign slogan, by the way. It's on the house.) If he was a little more cut-throat he might be able to get the charisma thing going, but as it is, he seems too nice, as in this quote where he had a great opportunity to slam his two biggest potential rivals, Perry and Obama, and winds up complimenting both of them:

"My guess is that Governor Perry would like to do it a different way second time through. ...we’ve each taken a mulligan or two. And — and my guess is that that’s something you’d probably do a little differently the second time. He just said he’d rather do it through legislation second time through... I think his heart was in the right place.

Right now, we have people who on this stage care very deeply about this country. We love America. America is in crisis. We have some differences between us, but we agree that this president’s got to go. This president is a nice guy. He doesn’t have a clue how to get this country working again."

I have to say, I'm a little confused by this. Do Mormons just not know how to snipe at people? Is this another gap in the LDS educational system, along with evolution and archaelogy?

Rick Perry: Charismatic, even while saying crazy things. Kind of a scary combination. Reminds me quite a bit of George W. Bush with Josh Brolin's face (and I'm saying that as someone who never saw W.). I'm calling the nomination now-- I think Perry's it, with Romney as VP. It's going to be hilarious. Quotes:

you can secure the border, but it requires a commitment of the federal government of putting those boots on the ground, the aviation assets in the air.

We think predator drones could be flown, that real-time information coming down to the local and the state and the federal law enforcement. And you can secure the border. And at that particular point in time, then you can have an intellectually appropriate discussion about immigration reform.

So, we can't have a conversation about immigration reform until we've got predator drones buzzing over Texas. Way to push that issue back a few decades.

"The idea that we would put Americans’ economy at — at — at jeopardy based on scientific theory that’s not settled yet, to me, is just — is nonsense. I mean, it — I mean — and I tell somebody, I said, just because you have a group of scientists that have stood up and said here is the fact, Galileo got outvoted for a spell.

But the fact is, to put America’s economic future in jeopardy, asking us to cut back in areas that would have monstrous economic impact on this country is not good economics and I will suggest to you is not necessarily good science. Find out what the science truly is before you start putting the American economy in jeopardy."

So... you refuse to make any change in industry or business until we "find out what the science is"... while at the same time brushing aside scientific consensus on the grounds that scientists have been wrong about stuff before. Way to show some intellectual objectivity there, Governor. We can clearly tell you're just dying to get to the bottom of this great scientific mystery.

Also, double points for saying this while having recently made giant cuts to your education budget. Exactly where are we going to get these scientists to decide these questions? Or are you just betting on the fact that killing the planet will make you rich before it makes you dead?

Bonus- Brian Williams & John Harris: trying way too hard to play "gotcha" games. Sorry guys, it just makes you look like dipshits. Quotes:

"Tell us which one of these people are saying crazy or inane things."

"You yourself have said the party is in danger of becoming anti- science. Who on this stage is anti-science?"

"Just recently in New Hampshire, you said that weekly and even daily scientists are coming forward to question the idea that human activity is behind climate change. Which scientists have you found most credible on this subject?"

Guys, it stopped being cute after the first time. No one's going to answer, they don't even bother to respond or get flustered, so all you're doing is wasting time and looking like twits. That's supposed to be the candidates' job.

I dont get it

2011-09-05T13:23:00.000-07:00

One of the things that continues to confuse me about conservative approaches to politics is the assumption that everything can be solved by emulating the business world, or that government regulations are unnecessary because "the market" can always be trusted to work itself out. Abbot Yid's job requires him to deal with many such "free market fundamentalists," and it's always rather frustrating to talk to people who are as indoctrinated in the idea of the Invisible Hand of the marketplace as any of the sacred cows on the Left that Beck, O'Reilly and Prager like to beat up on.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Presidential elections. Every election cycle, there is always at least one candidate who comes out of nowhere with basically zero political experience, and there are always a bunch of conservatives who think that's just fine and dandy, because they ran a successful business. Which, apparently, we're supposed to believe is the same thing.

Case in point: Little Miss High Horse Chrissy Slatterfield. She goes from bemoaning that her first choice with zero experience, Donald Trump, has bowed out of the race, to championing her new pick with zero political experience, Herman Cain. Why?

Because he's not a politician.

Sorry, I call BS. He's running for the highest office in the country. You don't get to do that and say you're not a politician. It would be more accurate to say he's not an experienced politician. Which, of course, begs the question of why he's qualified...

He is a human being capable of understanding what people want and need.

Of course, a human being! It's so simple; why didn't anyone ever think of getting one of those?

Cain has beaten cancer, and now he'll take on America's sickness, Obama – and I believe he'll be two for two after the 2012 elections.

So wait, now surviving cancer qualifies you to be President? I thought it was having a successful pizza chain. I'm so confused.

Cain said during an interview on Fox, "America is ready for an unconventional candidate. … Whenever people say I don't have a chance because I've never held a public office – well, everybody in D.C. has held public office. How's that working out for you?" Amazingly well said.

What? No it's not! That's like saying we shouldn't pick generals to be Chief of Staff, we should pick kids who are really good at Call of Duty. The fact that Washington is dysfunctional is an example of how screwed up our political system is, not a sign that we need to get politicians out of politics. Politicians are ALWAYS going to be in politics. The better plan is try to have more transparency, more accountability, more youth engagement, more voter turnout, to develop better politicians, not hire random guys off the street.

It's time America had a businessman running this country. If it's not Trump, it might as well be Cain.

Um, we had two of those in the last 20 years, and they were both named Bush. Not, as I recall, the conservative movements' favorite pair. Depending on what kind of livelihood you consider to be a "business", you can throw in Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Polk, Harding, Hoover, Truman, and even Carter. The idea that this is such a fresh and exciting concept is, shall we say, not so true. Read some history.

What I see in Cain is that he won't let politics push him around. This is the same thing I saw in Trump. Neither of these men are willing to compromise their integrity or vision, which is exactly what I want in a president. Cain wants to be more than America's president; he wants to be our leader. He wants to set an example and put America back on track.

All I'm hearing are random oo-rah platitudes, Chrissy; given how energized you supposedly are about your candidate I find it very interesting you're not bothering to articulate a single element of his so-called "vision." What is it about Cain's vision for America that speaks to you versus, say, Rick Perry's, or Mitt Romney's? Why should Cain get someone's vote? Hello?

It won't be an easy campaign for Cain. He's running against some heavyweights that have the experience in government and know how to play the game. But I hope America can see past all of that. Seasoned politicians are old news, and America is looking for real change. As much as I respect Romney and Gingrich, I have to go with my gut on this one, and it's telling me Cain has what it takes to make America great again.

The fantastic irony in all this, of course, is that in enthusiastically supporting a political novice with little experience and dumping "seasoned politicians" in favor of charismatic promises of "change" Chrissy is basically following in the footsteps of the same voters and candidate she's spent the last three years harping on about.

Is this the sound of the universe laughing at its own joke?

The Pot Calling the Kettle a secret-Muslim-sleeper-agent

2011-09-05T06:00:00.000-07:00

Townhall writer Michael Gerson is mad about media dishonesty. And really, who can blame him? He's defending some of the most maligned people of the past couple years: the Tea Party folks. To Gerson, it's gone on far enough.

Now the heroes of the tea party movement, it turns out, are also closet theocrats. "If you want to understand Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry," argues Michelle Goldberg in Newsweek/Daily Beast, "understanding Dominionism isn't optional." A recent New Yorker profile by Ryan Lizza contends that Bachmann has been influenced by a variety of theocratic thinkers who have preached Christian holy war.
As befits a shadowy religious sect, its followers go under a variety of names: Reconstructionists, Theonomists. The New Apostolic Reformation. Republicans. All apparently share a belief, in Goldberg's words, that "Christians have a God-given right to rule all earthly institutions."
The Dominionist goal is the imposition of a Christian version of Shariah law in which adulterers, homosexuals and perhaps recalcitrant children would be subject to capital punishment. It is enough to spoil the sleep of any subscriber to The New Yorker. But there is a problem: Dominionism, though possessing cosmic ambitions, is a movement that could fit in a phone booth. The followers of R.J. Rushdoony produce more books than converts.

Ok, so maybe Gerson has a legitimate point and the kneejerk liberal responses to Dominionism and Evangelical involvement in politics is overstated. No problem there.

But here's where things get really good.

So it becomes necessary to stretch the case a bit. Perry admittedly doesn't attend a Dominionist church, or make Dominionist arguments, but he once allowed himself to be prayed for by some suspicious characters. Bachmann once attended a school that had a law review that said some disturbing things. She assisted a professor who once spoke at a convention that included some alarming people. Her belief that federal tax rates should not be higher than 10 percent, Goldberg explains, is "common in Reconstructionist circles."
The evidence that Bachmann may countenance the death penalty for adulterers? Support for low marginal tax rates.
Bachmann is prone to tea party overstatement and religious right cliches. She opened herself to criticism by recommending a book that features southern Civil War revisionism. But there is no evidence from the careers of Bachmann or Perry that they wish to turn America into a theocratic prison camp.
If this kind of attack sounds familiar, it should. It is not just an argument but a style of argument. Critics of a public figure take a marginal association and turn it into a Gnostic insight -- an interpretive key that opens all doors. Barack Obama was once trained in a community organization that was associated with Saul Alinsky, whose organization was reportedly subject to communist influence. And we all know what that means. Or: Obama's father was a socialist, anti-colonial Luo tribesman, and, well, like father like son. Never mind that that there is no serious evidence of political philosophic influence of father on son.

Forget political philosophic influence of Obama Sr on Obama Jr. How about, say, any of the crazy fringe theories that mainstream conservative pundits and commentators have either said/written themselves about Obama or allowed to go on unchallenged by their friends, colleagues, coworkers, or allies? He's been called a Nazi, a Communist, a Socialist, a fascist, a radical, a jihadist, a Muslim, an African, and a sleeper agent. About the only things people haven't accused him of being are a lesbian, a member of Opus Dei, or a ninja.

Gerson's gripe about people "stretching their case" is particularly laughable given that he's writing in the virtual pages of Townhall, where his compatriots have been given free rein to say dopey things about Obama since he first ran for office. Where was Gerson then?

Are Gerson's points about conspiracy theories and exaggerated fear reasonable? Sure. But there's the sad irony: the same argument was reasonable three years ago, too. Only when Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann were getting the same conspiracy treatment did Gerson feel compelled to say anything. So I'm sorry, Michael, but you won't get much sympathy from me. Yeah, Perry and Bachmann are to dominionism as Obama is to Wahabbism (and Marxism, for the record). If you want to have a giant rally declaring that most politicians aren't actually as evil as their enemies claim they are, I'll be happy to come. Just make sure you invite Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, too.

More from people who think they're things they aren't

2011-09-04T19:00:00.000-07:00

I came across this interesting article by Zev Chafets (longtime admirer of John Hagee and the CUFI crowd) discussing explanations for Glenn Beck's recent semi-sudden realization that he is the would-be political savior that Israel so desperately needs.

Zev's guess? Beck might be jockeying to become the new Pope of the Evangelicals. Which, considering he is a Mormon, would indeed be quite a feat.

Following the Beck train we have a piece from Larry Klayman, a WND writer who tagged along with Glenn-ha-Maggid to show support, and of course, to show that he doesn't understand how identity works:

I am an Israeli

Um, no you're not. You live in Cleveland. Wow, we're just on your title and you're already full of it, Larry. Not a good sign.

Let's be blunt. God gave this land to the Jews and by extension to all Christians. The followers of Jesus Christ were largely His fellow Jews, and we are one as a people. I am a Zionist and so, too, is anyone who takes the Bible and our God seriously. Israel is our land, and we must protect it.

Wait, so Israel belongs to all Jews and Christians worldwide, but not to any of its 1.5 million citizens who are Muslim, Druze or no religion? Yeah, let's be blunt, Larry: what the hell?

With great passion and yes courage, Glenn stood at the base of the Wailing Wall, the only remains of the Jewish temple built by King Solomon – the son of King David– and delivered an address that captivated the world and expressed the feelings of all. In essence, he dared those hostile to Israel and the Jews to "take him first," if their intent was to destroy Israel and the Jewish people. Pastor John Hagee, in an earlier address during the week, also summed it up, using an analogy to President John F. Kennedy's speech in Berlin during the Cold War. Kennedy, declaring that Berliners, with their opposition to the Berlin Wall, stood as the first line of defense against communism, also declared himself a Berliner. Hagee and Beck declared in effect that we are all Israelis in our fight for freedom against radical Islam – and to win this war and pay homage to our Lord, we must protect and cherish Israel.

Sigh. Solidarity is fine, but I'm sorry, I can't get behind this "we're you" thing they keep invoking. It's a nice idea, but it's just not true... and it's particularly dicey given that the theological history has involved many years of preachers explicitly saying, "We're you... and you're not! I don't know who the heck you are, but it's not you, I'll tell you that." After all the silliness Hagee has been associated with over the years dealing with replacement theology, he's really the last person I want to see claiming Israeli identity. Standing with someone is fine. Taking off their nametag and slapping it on yourself is just weird.

Larry leaves us with possibly the best throwaway line from Beck's Silly Summer-Stravaganza:

So it was that Glenn Beck set in motion a tidal wave that will catch fire.

Oh Larry, you silly man. How can a person attend a top university, to law school, work for the Justice Department, run unsuccessfully for Congress and be so desperate for name recognition that he hypes the fact that he was parodied on the West Wing in his official bio and still not know that tidal waves aren't flammable?

One last one for the road: We have Pastor Ken Hutcherson writing for WND. He thinks Blacks, Jews and the Poor do themselves a disservice by so predictably voting for the Democrats, even when, in his opinion, it's against their own interests. Hutcherson isn't the first person to point this out, and while I certainly lean left, I can appreciate the argument that if you pigeonhole yourself as always supporting "your party," there is the potential that they eventually start counting on your support and taking you for granted, as opposed to feeling like they need to work to earn your loyalty, like all the Presidential candidates do every four years when they start pandering to the legions of undecided voters.

As a black man who grew up poor, Hutcherson is certainly qualified to give his opinion about two of his three unfortunate groups-- groups he compares to abused women who keep going back to their husbands for one more slap. When it comes to Jews, however, his credentials are a little sparser. So the pastor decides to talk to a buddy of his.

Who does he choose?

Since I am not Jewish, I am going to depend heavily on the wisdom of my close friend and fellow warrior, Rabbi Daniel Lapin. In his book "America's Real War," Rabbi Lapin states, "Liberalism is the eternal search for 'liberation' from God's seemingly restrictive rules. There are those who will always seek – or if necessary, create the escape hatch through which those who find God's rules too limiting can flee. Liberalism, under many different names, has always found eager converts and is a very strong lure of the devils." Furthermore, Rabbi Lapin believes that Jews tend to be liberal because they have been persecuted for so long they choose to empathize with other downtrodden people. He writes, "They assume liberalism to be a kinder, gentler philosophy than conservatism. This leads to a feeling of moral superiority."

On the one hand, kudos to Hutcherson for at least recognizing that it's helpful to actually talk to a Jew (or two!) to be able to speak with any kind of authority about Jewish issues (as opposed to imagining, as per Beck & friends, that since he likes Jews or Israelis that that suddenly makes him one). On the other hand, I like how the rabbi he picks to back up his thesis is resident crackpot and pet-Jew of the right, Daniel Lapin. In the past few years, Lapin has never missed an opportunity to suck up to the Christian right at the expense of other Jews. Whether the topic is The Passion, Darwinism or how persecuted America's Christians are, Lapin's villains are always liberal Jews (though, to be fair, considering the kinds of Jews Lapin does like, I have to consider it kind of a compliment). It must be very comforting for Hutcherson to know there's a rabbi out there willing to be brave enough to stand with upstanding Christians and let them know it's all those "other Jews'" fault.

Incidentally, if Hutcherson thinks liberals are the only ones who espouse moral superiority, he should really read some of Lapin's stuff.

Know any good bibles?

2011-09-04T09:59:00.000-07:00

As the new year is on its way, Mrs. Yid and I have been thinking about various personal and professional goals we have that we can try to work on during the coming year. One of the things we discussed was trying to get this Jew-thing more on the front burner. To that end, we're contemplating, among other things, finding a Hebrew tutor/class again (hopefully this time the guy will stay around for more than six weeks before deciding SF is too hard to live in and running back to Crown Heights), trying a new round of shul-hopping on Saturday mornings, and also trying to study a little on Shabbos.

I've been looking at various Chumashim (Bibles) and translations, and am trying to figure out which ones are worth getting, how many do we really need, etc. Here are my top picks below, along with a few others I'm curious about. Comments are welcome and appreciated. Am I missing something good? Are some of these redundant? Silly? Just plain bad? I don't know, so tell me.

The contenders are:

Translations

Five Books of Moses by Everett Fox. Everything I've heard about this guy and his work sounds amazing. Apparently he has retranslated the Tanakh to approximate the "poetic" quality of the original text.

Five Books of Moses by Robert Alter. I've heard of this guy, not too familiar with his work, but he gets good Amazon reviews.

Commentaries

JPS Jewish Study Bible. I've read bits and pieces in college and it seems like a nice resource that's grounded in both solid academic approaches but also in Jewish content and perspectives.

Etz Hayim, by the Conservative movement. The new standard CJ translation and commentary. I've seen it a few times and it would be interesting to contrast it with other commentaries.

The Torah: a Modern Commentary, by the Reform movement. A revised version of their classic commentary from the 80s. Never heard of it until researching Etz Hayim, but I figure it would be nice and fun to have a balance between it and Etz Hayim.

Curious

How to Read the Bible, by James Kugel. Dovbear and other smart people seem to like him.

Chumash/Tanakh Stone edition, by Artscroll. Is it worth getting just to have a counterpoint?

Koren Chumash, by Jonathan Sacks. I would be more interested in this if there was commentary.

I also know I have some commentaries by Nechama Leibowitz and Rav Hirsch somewhere at my folks' house that I should dig up, too...

It's all about stupid

2011-09-01T18:44:00.000-07:00

I wonder what it's like to feel the world actually revolves around you. Well, you and your pet causes.

Lazer's back with more stupid explanations about why the universe is still being mean to people. Which is to say, existing.

For instance, did you know that weather patterns happen? Apparently this is news to Lazer, who is convinced that the only explanation for a Hurricane hitting the Eastern seaboard is that God is mad. About what? We'll let the nutty nougatty goodness speak for itself:

Hashem doesn't do things at random. Why is hurricane Irene advancing toward the good and decent folks of North Carolina? It's simple - North Carolina has its own Jonah:Jonathan Pollard, rotting away in a cell in Butner for the last 26 years when his crime should have incurred no more than an 8-year sentence. Words can't describe the cruel utterly inhuman way that Pollard has been treated, not being allowed to see his dying father or even attend his funeral.
The USA could save itself billions of impending damage and lives as well by freeing Pollard right now. There's no doubt in my mind or heart that Irene will just disappear if Pollard walks out of Butner. There's proof to what I'm saying in the Gemara - see tractate Brachot 59a: When Hashem sees that his children in exile are in anguish, He sheds two tears in the sea. Hashem's two tears because of Pollard could be what's causing Hurricane Irene to be such a threat right now.

(I'm sorry to say that the unfortunate attempt at gematria-esque bolding is in the original.)

Honestly, what can I say about this? Is there even any point in mentioning that the hurricane affected 15 other states (as well as those pesky countries in the Caribbean) besides North Carolina? Or that of the 54 confirmed fatalities, only six occurred there? I mean, if you're going to try to come up with random rationalizations for weather patterns, at least do it after the fact when the numbers can back up your BS. I don't even see how Lazer can hold to his own theory in light of where the damage and deaths were most concentrated. Does God hate New York & New Jersey 2.5 times as much as North Carolina? Why didn't the prayers and mitzvot from all the pious Yidden in Lakewood and Boro Park save them from more of the wrathiness? It seems to me that if we're going to pretend Irene was all about punishing North Carolina then the only options are that either God doesn't know where North Carolina is or he got drunk and was just waving the hurricane wand around willy-nilly. I also like how Lazer believes that not only is God willing to kill a bunch of people (including a Jewish Holocaust survivor, whoopsies) to protest one guy's long prison sentence, but that apparently hurricanes can be turned off at the drop of a hat. On the other hand, as long as we're just making things up, I suppose there's no harm in being consistent in our silliness. Did I mention that volcanic eruptions are not caused by tectonic shifts but rather by giant mutant dolphins ramming head-first into each other like mountain goats, fighting over the hottest females? Look it up.

As painfully mind-warping as Lazer's ideas are, I kind of understand the urge to want to make disasters and natural phenomenon make sense and fit into some sort of plan. Unlike the theodicy crowd, I have spent lots of time recognizing that the world was not terribly concerned about me. I suppose in some ways I was always a little overly concerned with the "big picture." I remember having nightmares as a kid and my parents trying to console me by asking me what was wrong. "I dreamed the universe blew up!" I would wail (this was a recurring dream for several years). Baffled, they couldn't think of anything to say, other than, "Well, it didn't!"

In high school, college, and even occasionally today, I wrestle with the idea that, contrary to what various religions' theology teach, science has shown that the Earth is on a countdown with destiny, that eventually our sun will burn out and our planet will cease to be a place that can support life. Everything we do, everyone we know, all our future children and generations... there will be a time where it's all snuffed out.

That's very hard to take. It's a real challenge to look life in the face and not be a little scared by the recognition that we're all a little doomed, and that nothing will outlast our planet's destruction. That there is a finite end to our time here, and that there will be an end to humanity. It's pretty heavy, no question.

But I would still rather deal with those real dilemmas than make up stupid, offensive, and yes, EXTREMELY SELF-CENTERED reasons for why things happen in the world.

News flash, Lazer: hurricanes aren't Jewish. Volcanoes aren't Jewish. Earthquakes aren't Jewish. They really don't care about US-Israel relations, Jonathan Pollard, or a gay pride parade in holy Yerushelayim.

You may think the Earth cares about the Jews (both good and bad), but I'm pretty sure it's neutral. Just saying.

Edit: Double Theodicy score! Lazer adds R. Moshe Yosef Reichenberg, the Orthodox father of four who died rescuing a child and father from a downed power line to his list of tzaddikim taken away by God to... um, punish us into making teshuvah, I guess? Thanks?

Now, I know I'm not frum, so maybe I'm missing something, but I have to ask: Lazer, as an ostensibly "outreach-focused" rabbi, isn't your job supposed to be encouraging us to, you know, like God? Just wondering.

Small answers for Big questions

2011-08-24T19:22:00.000-07:00

At some point I will finish blogging my European vacation. In the event that I don't get to it for a while, I'd like to mention the fact that while in London we spent a week in a revitalized area of the East End largely populated by Muslim immigrants. While the neighborhood was different from what my parents were used to, we never felt unsafe or even unwelcome. People just seemed to be going about their business and doing their thing.

The fact that we had just spent time in London (in an urban and ethnic neighborhood no less) and had a lovely time meant that it was quite shocking to hear about riots breaking out within a week of us leaving. While we were there we spent time with various relatives of Mama Yid's and so having just left them we spent a lot of time emailing once the riots broke out. While they were concerned they luckily weren't right in the thick of it so they never seemed super worried, but there was definitely a lot of surprise for us realizing that some of the commercial districts we had been walking through just a week prior had since gone up in smoke or been heavily looted.

It's always a challenge to dissect the causes leading to a significant disaster, and I feel like whereas most rational people are capable of reining themselves in when it comes to disasters caused by nature, that restraint seems to be greatly diminished when it comes to human causes and agency. Obviously, events like the London riots need to and should be studied to prevent similar things from happening again, but it's gotten far too easy to predict which talking heads will come popping out of the wordwork linking mob violence and bad behavior to their pet doomsday issues (usually timing it just right to also plug whatever new thing they have to sell).

Pat took the lead and blamed it on multiculturalism.

The West is in decline because the character of its people is in decline. In Europe, Christianity is dead. The moral code it gave men to live righteously is regarded with mockery. The London riots were the work of moral barbarians with no loyalty to the people in whose midst they live and no love for the society to which they give nothing, only take.

...What were the British thinking when they threw open their doors to mass immigration from the Third World?

Over centuries, they had failed to assimilate a few million Irish, who were European Christians. So, having failed to assimilate the Irish, they decided to invite in millions of Hindus and Muslims from South Asia, Arabs from the Middle East, Africans from the sub-Sahara, black folks from the Caribbean.
But with no common faith or culture to hold the nation together, Britain is coming apart.

This, of course, assumes that the rioters,

A- Were primarily ideologically motivated (as opposed to being, you know, jerks and hooligans), and
B- Didn't include anyone white or British.

Also, I'm not sure what Pat would have Britain do at this point... are they supposed to deport three or four generations of British citizens in a family if they decide that they haven't become "British enough?" It's not surprising Pat doesn't like multiculturalism; his articles sound like Kipling's gin-induced fever dreams.

Most commenters focused on values, or lack thereof.

There was Shmuley, who blamed the Church of England for being too nice and not bothering to condemn bad things:

Britain has become a rotting carcass due to the failure of a moribund, stultifying, and amoral religion, more concerned with propriety and causing no offense than simply teaching right from wrong.

I lived in Britain for 11 years where I slowly watched the Church of England and other mainline Christian bodies succumb to PC correctness, refusing to ever condemn immoral behavior... religious leaders failed to ever condemn the narcissistic, selfish, womanizing men who behaved like Neanderthalic inseminators rather than gentlemen.

Contrary to public opinion, values do not come from schools or University professors but from the Ten Commandments.

Shmuley isn't exactly "wrong" in saying that values are worthless if they aren't practiced and taught by role models, but as a secular-oriented person, I think he's off the mark in presenting a biblical framework for his morality and then complaining that Britain doesn't follow his ideas. Well no kidding, Shmuley, considering you just said half the country doesn't believe in God. Sounds like we might need to think of a different way to talk about this then. What's that, that doesn't fit your message? Well, sorry England. Get those butts back in those pews so your pastors (you know, the ones you don't have, don't listen to, or don't preach about anything Shmuley considers worthwhile in the first place) can give you this much-needed dose of moral relevance. I can't picture any way this doesn't work out.

Then there was Dennis, who knows where Shmuley's coming from. In fact, I kind of get the feeling they were sitting too close together when they were writing their respective columns:

There is only one solution to the world's problems, only one prescription for producing a near-heaven on earth.
It is 3,000 years old.
And it is known as the Ten Commandments.

I find it entertaining that Dennis is saying this in the context of being a professional Jew when religious Jews often like to point out that being a good Jew requires following more than the first ten commandments. Incidentally, don't you just love people who proclaim their personal arguments about morality as if they were ironclad facts? Never mind that most people in the world probably don't think that being a moral person is restricted to just following the 10Cs (don't you love finding moments where Orthodox Jews, atheists and Zoroastrians agree?)

Don't believe Dennis? Don't worry, he brought his argument-bag.

1. I am the Lord your God.
There are moral atheists and there are immoral believers, but there is no chance for a good world based on atheism. Ultimately, a godless and religion-free society depends on people's hearts to determine right from wrong, and that is a very weak foundation.
Plenty of people have died in history in the name of God. But many more have been killed, tortured, and deprived of liberty in the name of humanity and progress or some other post-Judeo-Christian value. Religion gave us an Inquisition and gives us suicide terrorists, but the death of God gave us Nazism and Communism, which, in one century alone, slaughtered more than a hundred million people. All the founders of the United States - yes, all - knew that a free society can survive only if its citizens believe themselves to be morally accountable to God.

So, the breakdown on this is... more people have killed in the name of things other than religion than religion itself. Therefore, religion is more moral and the 10Cs are all we need? Also, the founders of the U.S. (ALL of them! Yes, even the ones who were religiously ambivalent) liked God. So, there you go. I guess we got served... somehow?

3. Do not take God's name in vain.
People have misinterpreted this commandment. They think it prohibits saying something like, "Oh, my God, what a home run!" But the Hebrew literally means "do not carry" the name of the Lord in vain.

In other words, we are forbidden from doing evil in God's name. Only when thus understood does the rest of the Commandment make sense -- that God will not "cleanse," or forgive -- the person who does this.

Thus, the Islamist who slits an innocent's throat while shouting "Allahu Akbar" is the perfect example of the individual who carries God's name in vain and who cannot be forgiven. These people not only murder their victims, they murder God's name. For that reason, they do more evil than the atheist who murders.

It's nice that Dennis is at least willing to discuss evil discussed by religious people (though no one over here is surprised by who he chose as its poster-boy) but this exposes the primary reason why this essay is an exercise in masturbation. Just like a committed Socialist always has the out that Socialism and Communism could "totally work in theory," so too Dennis can't really claim that religion makes people ethical and that "people just need to follow the 10Cs," then try to weasel out of religious evil by saying, "Well, yeah, sometimes religious people do bad stuff, but they're not really religious! If people would really be religious and not do terrible things in God's name, stuff would be awesome!" No kidding! Hey, by the same token, as long as we're wishing for stuff, let's just ask for people to stop doing awful things to each other. We wouldn't even need the 10Cs!

The rest of Dennis' stuff follows the same prattle. Just like Shmuley, it's hard to take Dennis' preaching seriously when his first premise is that all wisdom and ethics everyone needs are located in his particular list, and interpretation thereof. Oh, and the various snark-attack cheap shots he takes at, among other things, colleges, pacifism, and "class warfare" in a discussion of ethics (among them the importance of not lying) don't help.

Last was Lord Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the UK. As with Shmuley, I wasn't surprised that a rabbi would say that values are important to not be, you know, a jerk, but the argument that Judeo-Christian values prevent mob violence and that therefore a drop in one leads to a rise in the other doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

Britain is the latest country to pay the price for what happened half a century ago in one of the most radical transformations in the history of the West. In virtually every Western society in the 1960s there was a moral revolution, an abandonment of its entire traditional ethic of self-restraint. All you need, sang the Beatles, is love. The Judeo-Christian moral code was jettisoned. In its place came: whatever works for you. The Ten Commandments were rewritten as the Ten Creative Suggestions. Or as Allan Bloom put it in "The Closing of the American Mind": "I am the Lord Your God: Relax!"

You do not have to be a Victorian sentimentalist to realize that something has gone badly wrong since.

Sorry rabbi, but I'm not convinced that both of these things happening simultaneously (drop in religion and rise in social problems) means that they are causal, or that the reverse will therefore solve all the UK's problems:

In the 1820s, in Britain and America, a similar phenomenon occurred. People were moving from villages to cities. Families were disrupted. Young people were separated from their parents and no longer under their control. Alcohol consumption rose dramatically. So did violence. In the 1820s it was unsafe to walk the streets of London because of pickpockets by day and "unruly ruffians" by night.

What happened over the next 30 years was a massive shift in public opinion. There was an unprecedented growth in charities, friendly societies, working men's institutes, temperance groups, church and synagogue associations, Sunday schools, YMCA buildings and moral campaigns of every shape and size, fighting slavery or child labor or inhuman working conditions. The common factor was their focus on the building of moral character, self-discipline, willpower and personal responsibility. It worked. Within a single generation, crime rates came down and social order was restored. What was achieved was nothing less than the re-moralization of society—much of it driven by religion.

There's only one problem with all of this: it's not quite true. As R. Eliyahu Fink points out, there have been plenty of occasions where so-called religious people committed terrible acts of violence. There are also plenty of people who aren't religious, or don't base their lives around JCVs, who don't commit violence. So it's a little disingenuous to single out a lack of JCVs as the specific cause of the riots and then prescribe more of them as the cure. E-Fink also notes that it is a mistake to assume that none of the rioters consider themselves Christians. Pundits may not consider them as such, but that is an entirely different issue-- and in my opinion, potentially a lot more scary-- than saying the problem is that there aren't enough Christians in England.

A similar argument from a widely different source comes from Christopher Hitchens, who makes two excellent points:

1- Despite its reputation, Britain has hardly been a violence-free society in the last 50-100 years, particularly in urban and poor areas. Think of football hooligans, street gangs, and of course sectarian violence surrounding Protestant/Catholic issues, particularly as they bled into questions about Irish nationalism.

2- That said, it is legitimate to point out that seems to be a new dimension of nihilism, disaffection, and all-around scariness coming from the new youth gangs operating in the UK these days. The fact that the general trend among immigrants seems to be less towards using "multiculturalism" as a way of supporting home culture while also participating and engaging with larger society and more as a tool to encourage separatism and justify xenophobia is also concerning.

I haven't even talked about the various social causes that people have been pointing to contributing to the rioting (among them, high unemployment, low education, bad economy, a perception that the rich are stealing from the people and getting off free, various cuts in social services, and social/cultural alienation). As someone who just visited, I would also venture an extremely cautious guess that the all the Olympics construction and promotion may also have played a role.

There are lots of big issues going on here, with lots of big questions. I freely admit to not having the answers, though I am not so closed-minded as to discount the concept that some of the work that has to be done needs to happen on a values-based, even "spiritual" level. But I don't think I'm alone in saying that, as a young person, as someone who isn't terribly religious, I don't think the way to fix the UK's problems is by shoving religion down everyone's throat.

Big questions need big answers, not small ones.

Hat-tip: E-fink by way of Dovbear.

Family trauma and its ripples

2011-08-18T15:00:00.000-07:00

This past spring my only living grandparent, Abbot Yid's octogenarian mother Bubbe, fell and hit her head. In the last few months, she has been in and out of hospitals and rehab centers. This culminated in her being flown across the country to California to a nursing home near L.A., where Uncle Milt and his family live.

Everyone in the family has been struggling with their feelings about this. On the one hand there are certainly feelings of family obligation. At the same time, Bubbe is just about the least friendly or warm person you'll ever meet. And there's the longstanding baggage of Zayde's craziness and abusiveness towards his kids that Bubbe, by all accounts, never really protected them from. At best, she was oblivious. At worst, she was an enabler. So there's a lot of conflicting emotions going on. (The fact that none of the siblings get along has not been helping things.)

I can sympathize with Abbot Yid and his siblings. I have never felt all that close to my grandmother. I "love" her inasmuch as I know I'm supposed to, and I care about her well-being. But the reality is I have not felt any real feeling of closeness to her (or from her) since I was a small child. Her general pattern has been to shift her attention to each new grandchild in turn, usually getting bored with us as soon as we start developing our own interests or stop being cute. (An example: Bubbe is really into arts and crafts, something I have historically been supremely incompetent at. Guess who hasn't been invited to do anything with Bubbe in 20 years?) Bubbe is just not all that good at reaching out to, or interacting with, people.

For a long time, I found the whole dynamic with Bubbe very frustrating. I tried to interview Bubbe on occasion to find out more about her family, her life with Zayde, etc. She shut me down every time. She wasn't interested in introspection; she claimed she didn't remember any of the things I was curious about. She absolutely refused to discuss any "emotional memories" that I asked about. For a family historian, this was, to put it bluntly, hard to swallow. And there were times where I felt very angry about this. I was trying to connect with her the best way I knew how, and she wasn't interested.

Last year, however, something changed. Bubbe seemed to sense that her memory was going and that if she wanted to tell me anything about the family, it was getting to be now or never time. And one of the things she told me blew my mind:

"I was the oldest, but my sister was born right after me. My mother couldn't handle raising an infant and a young toddler at the same time, so she gave me to my grandmother to raise. I spent most of my time with her, going to the markets, chatting with the older folks. I even took vacations with her to the Catskills when my mother and sister would stay behind in Brooklyn."

I was floored. We all knew that Bubbe's grandmother lived with her three daughters in a 3-story house in Brownsville, but no one had ever known that Bubbe was actually raised by her grandmother, not her mother, for most of her childhood.

This couldn't explain away everything of course. Bubbe and her sister have fundamentally different personalities-- her sister is warm, emotionally engaged, and just generally a positive and fun person to be around (all the things that Bubbe, in general, isn't). But for me, the revelation that Bubbe's mother had not acted like her mother, and consequently had not taught or shown her how to be a mother, was powerful, and I started to process a lot of our interactions and my frustrations through this prism. If Bubbe's emotional connection with her mother had been that bifurcated, maybe that went a long way towards explaining her ambivalence with her children and grandchildren. (To say nothing of what emotional and family models her Old Country grandmother may have passed along to her.)

This model of mothers "abandoning" their children came up again for me recently when I found a new genealogy record online for Mama Yid's Hungarian grandmother dating from 1888, the oldest record we have for the family in the United States. In it, the grandmother and two of her siblings (aged 6, 10 and 3) were being admitted into the Hebrew Orphan Asylum by their mother. Under cause, it said, "Widow, unable to bring up children."

The interesting thing is that we have a 1900 census record for the same family showing them all together, so the mother must have been able to get them out after a while. But still, the fact that Mama Yid's grandmother, a woman she could never feel any attachment to, and who engaged in some fairly dirty tricks with her siblings, in-laws and grandkids, had an extremely traumatic childhood, first losing her father in Hungary (according to family stories, from a farming accident) and then after making it to America, being given up by her mother to an orphanage.

Of course, all these tidbits really amount to is background information. I don't mean to imply that based on these new discoveries that I condemn the mothers who made these hard decisions, or that hard childhoods immunize the daughters from criticism. But it's hard for me to look at either my paternal grandmother, or my maternal great-grandmother, in quite the same way.

Trauma and alienation seem to have a way of repeating themselves. I hope I can do better.

Liking Israel is not the same as Loving Jews

2011-08-18T12:00:00.000-07:00

Since we've been speaking about religious Christian Zionism and how this is, well, kind of awkward, I thought it would be interesting to dissect a few new pieces on this, specifically focusing on Glenn Beck. The Jewish Journal had a point/counterpoint series on Beck's rally and whether it is, to use a cliche, Bad for the Jews. Defending Beck was a former Dennis Prager employee named Sammy Levine:

About a year ago, when the flotilla incident occurred, Beck was out in front, reporting on Israel’s right to self-defense, while so many others in the mainstream media were ambiguous or hostile toward the Jewish state. I decided to watch Keith Olbermann on one of the nights following the incident, and his entire coverage was relegated to a biased interview with one of the “peace activists” on the ship.

Conversely, Beck did two consecutive shows devoted to defending Israel’s actions in the flotilla incident, as well as educating his audience about the creation of Israel, the history of the Jewish people and anti-Semitism. Furthermore, during the last several months, Beck has devoted large segments of his shows to discussing how the tumultuous uprisings in the Middle East will affect Israel’s security. Unlike many in the liberal media who blindly cheer these revolutions, Beck — with the fate of Israel on his mind — is engaging the issue with a healthy dose of skepticism. Beck understands that Egypt, under the ousted President Mubarak, kept peace with Israel for 30 years. Now, the virulently anti-American and anti-Israeli Muslim Brotherhood is poised to take power. In addition, Egyptian presidential candidate Mohamed ElBaradei — the lauded “progressive” among Western leftists — said: “If Israel attacked Gaza, we would declare war against the Zionist regime.” It looks like Beck’s skepticism about the fate of Israel vis-a-vis the Egyptian uprising is well founded.

On his Fox News show, Beck repeatedly stated that Israel is the only country in the Middle East that shares America’s values of freedom and human rights. In March, Beck began the show with the statement, “Tonight I stand with Israel,” and then asked: “Tens of millions of Arabs have suffered atrocities at the hands of their own countries … but Israel is the evil one — that is the obstacle to peace? … How many homosexuals have been stoned to death by the Israelis? … How many terrorists are wearing a yarmulke?”

And here is where Levine loses me. Simply put, just as a stopped clock is right twice a day, I don't disagree that there can be areas where Glenn Beck is (from my perspective) factually and politically correct. Yes, there is a lot of anti-Israel misinformation out in the world. Yes, Israel has a right to defend itself, and yes, it is legitimate to wonder how the Arab Spring toppling various governments will wind up affecting Israel.

However...

Beck is not a historian, nor a journalist. He is not unbiased. He is a cheerleader. And I do not think that Israel needs cheerleaders. What Israel needs is people that give it a fair shake and stand up for it when it is in the right, not pretend it has zero problems or issues of its own. To use just one example from Levine's article: there are, indeed, terrorists who have worn yarmulkes. Their methods, structural organization and victims list is not comparable to terror groups like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, PFLP or Al Aqsa. However, the reality is, yes, there have been (and still are) Jewish terrorists. For Beck to insinuate otherwise is a lie. It signifies that either he doesn't know enough about Israel to know about groups like the Jewish Underground or deranged, hateful individuals like Goldstein, Amir or Natan-Zada, or that he doesn't care because he's busy pushing a narrative.

Israel doesn't need people to lie for it. It needs people to tell the truth about it.

Israel needs people to support it, not at the expense of everyone and anyone else, but in the pursuit of being a protected state at peace with its neighbors. I'm certainly not saying I have the magic solution that will make peace happen. But that is my ultimate goal for Israel and its citizens, and I'm unconvinced that Beck and his cohorts have the same goal. I think, honestly, they want to see Israel annex the territories, expel its Arab citizens, and, in a dream scenario, expand its territory to the boundaries of Greater Israel. They would like to see Netanyahu become an Israeli Ronald Reagan (the conservative, idealized version, of course). And the reality is that this is magical thinking, supported with little to no thought given to the impact on the ground for the real people who actually fight these wars and suffer from terrorism. In the last few years I worked to take a step back from being an armchair Prime Minister because the reality is, I am not the person at risk, the Israelis are. I have opinions, I have things I would like to see happen in Israel, but at the end of the day, it's something they need to sort out.

Here's another sticking point:

On his program during the week of Passover, Beck played the part of a rabbi giving a sermon or a Hebrew school teacher giving a lesson as he spoke beautifully about the seder. In fact, he sat down at his own authentic seder, complete with matzah, gefilte fish, maror, karpas and more.

He then explained why supporting Israel is a moral imperative: “The world wonders why it is that most Americans sympathize with the Israelis in their continual battle with the Palestinians and the Arab world. I don’t think it’s that hard to understand. Israel is a democracy. It’s the closest thing to what we understand as freedom in the entire Middle East. We relate to that. But maybe more importantly, we share common values.”

Beck also compared the story of the Jews leaving Egypt with the story of the Pilgrims coming to America, as they both faced hardships to escape oppression: “The story is the same for America and Israel and all over the world. … With Israel, Americans have a shared culture, shared history and values. We have been close allies since their inception. … There have been occasional bumps in the road with our relationship with Israel, but we have stood by them when no one else would. But now I fear that seems to be changing.”

First of all, I am very uncomfortable with the idea of Beck essentially putting himself in the "role" of a Jew or a Jewish teacher for the purposes of his TV show. There is a difference between educating people about another group of people and playing dress-up, and this is right on the edge of that line. This is not to say that educating people about other cultures is a bad thing. (I say this as someone who hosts seders every year where the majority of participants are not Jewish.) But, to put it bluntly, I don't think Glenn Beck understands Judaism particularly well (certainly not liberal Judaism), and so I'm really not all that keen in him playing the part of "rabbi" to millions of Christians who have never met a Jew before. Glenn Beck is not the person I want representing my identity or religion to others. It's like asking your accountant to fix your refrigerator: not really their area of expertise.

(Edit: looking at the clip all I can see is Beck poking some gefilte fish and talking about the symbolism of matzah. This seems to be more of a case of Levine casting Beck as a rabbi than Beck actually claiming that for himself.)

Second point: if Beck were honestly looking at Israel's and America's history, he would find that while there are lessons and parallels, there are also challenges. Ironically, these challenges are known quite well to American Jews.

For instance, to the question of values, it would be more accurate to say that America and Israel share some common values, as one of Israel's foundational principles is that it is a nation-state, whereas America is not. This is kind of a big difference. Separation of church and state, a major and significant issue in American legal and cultural history, is not even on the radar in Israel. (By the same token, Israel is far more progressive on things like LGBT rights than the US, certainly more than Beck.)

Should Israel be pilloried for areas where it doesn't "measure up" to the US? I don't think so. Is Israel, on any of these fronts, "as bad" as its neighbors? Not by a long shot. Their situations are different and any examination of these issues needs to start with understanding that premise. However, by pretending that Israel is "just like" the US and that all of their values are the same, Beck is spreading misinformation right as he purportedly works to fight it.

Same thing with talking about the two countries' "special relationship." For the record, America has not always supported Israel, and Israel has not been exclusively helped by America. In fact in the early days of the state it was working with the Soviets. That detail may not make any difference in terms of present-day politics, but Beck's whole approach operates with a disturbing disdain for history and facts. Anything inconvenient (or even just inconclusive) gets minimized in favor of sweeping narrative that focuses on Divinely-inspired exceptionalism.

This is the danger in allowing people like Beck, people more interested in their own agendas than understanding the facts of Judaism and Jewish history, to tell our own stories for us. I would much rather have a conservative like Dennis Prager or an opportunist like Shmuley Boteach, who at least know what they're talking about, represent the conservative and Orthodox perspectives on Judaism or Israel. At least I understand why they're there. For Beck to do it is frankly uncomfortable. (Imagine my surprise to find that there are even some right-wing Israelis who agree with me.)

Back to Levine:

The truth is that if one wants to find consistent pro-Israel coverage, Beck is the person to listen to. The problem is that, for so many liberal Jews, hate of the right overwhelms their love for Israel. As such, they marginalize Beck, even though he is without question the media’s most outspoken supporter of Israel. This is unfortunate, as in this time when Israel is isolated internationally, decried as an apartheid state on college campuses and constantly threatened with annihilation, Beck’s voice is so necessary and precious.

Here we have it in spades: for Levine, what matters is that Beck is pro-Israel. Everything else is secondary. What he doesn't consider is that many Jews are not interested in someone who is "pro-Israel" if they lie or obfuscate to get there. The fact that someone is a propagandist for "the right side" doesn't change the fact that they're making propaganda. When you make propaganda and get caught, it undermines your argument. Israel should not be in the propaganda business.

When Glenn Beck misrepresents Israeli history, he is doing Israel a disservice. When he attacks liberal Jewish rabbis, he is showing he does not respect most Jews' religious beliefs. When he labels Jewish intellectuals and moguls as "the worst people in the world," he shows that he is dramatically opposed to most Jews' political positions. When he promotes antisemitic writers on his show because they share his politics, he is showing his true colors. Not as an antisemite, but as someone who cares about conservative values, not Jewish ones, and whose politics have historically been championed by white Christians whose view of Jews were far from charitable. And he's also showing that in his list of priorities, a person's attitude towards Jews ranks far below their attitude towards liberalism. So forgive me if I don't think Beck understands American Jews very well and that Jewish concerns aren't that important to him.

Glenn Beck supports Israel. Fine. So let him support Israel, let him be a Zionist. But if nothing else, he has to at least recognize that most Jews do not agree with the vast majority of his positions, and vice-versa. If Beck and his cronies are going to ask for a little faith and goodwill from Jews, they might need to start reining in their rhetoric a little. You can't have it both ways. You can't attack the vast majority of us for our values and politics one day and then claim you "love Jews." On behalf of the world's Jews, let me say it right now: please stop loving us. Let's work on being "friends" first. And the first thing you can do to make friends is to stop abusing Godwin's law and accusing rich Jews of running the world. Trust me on this one.

Shopping and Conversation

2011-08-18T06:00:00.001-07:00

Day 12- Last Day in Poland.

Our last day in Krakow was also going to be our last day in Poland so we wanted to make the most of it. We got up early and left before 10. We took a taxi to get to Old Town and saw the ancient clock tower, the last surviving remnant of the original Town Hall built in the 1200s. It was huge!

We went inside Sukiennice ("Cloth Hall"), a large ornate rectangular building. Inside was a giant market with around 80-100 booths. Merchants were selling leather goods, wooden carvings, dolls, boxes, glasswork, Polish clothes, and various tourist items. One booth had replicas of medieval Polish weapons and miniature wooden carved heads of famous Poles that could be hung on a wall. (One of them was clearly modeled on Pilsudski; I made a crack about mounting heads of state on your wall but as Abbot Yid knows nothing about Polish history, my brilliant wit was wasted on him.)

There were also, of course, lots of places to buy jewelry, especially amber. Mama Yid was in Heaven. Abbot Yid and I, not so much. Mama Yid insisted on seeing every booth and was incapable of "scanning," even when the booths were selling things she didn't want. We spent about four hours there, which was about three and a half hours more than Abbot Yid and I needed.

As a way of killing some time, I decided to walk around with my camcorder and film the place. One of the things I noticed, over and over, were the Jewdolls. For a town with not a lot of Jews left there sure were a lot of different kinds of Jew-dolls.

After finally finishing in Sukiennice, we ate lunch by a statue in the square. On the bench next to us a teenage girl sitting with her family decided she was tired of her sandwich and started scattering it to the birds, attracting a large flock of pigeons. Oblivious to our death-glares, she continued feeding them for about fifteen minutes, even laughing and encouraging her sister to take a picture when a few of them hopped into her hand. I wasn't sure if I was looking at a cultural phenomenon or just a moron who didn't know anything about disease transmission: were Polish pigeons not considered rats with wings?

During lunch I discovered my watch had stopped. We left the square, dragging Mama Yid away from the outer ring of shops around Sukiennice (though I did pop into one place to get a pair of pewter shot-glasses for Deacon Yid and me). We walked south through Old Town, marveling at the incredible buildings. Everywhere you looked there were old churches, houses, flats. Interspersed with them were the ugly modern structures (and of course lots of garish signs advertising shops, restaurants, money-changers and the always entertaining ALKOHOLE stores).

Next we headed to Wawel castle. Though I was sad we didn't have time to go inside, my parents were very good sports and consented to a quick walk around the outside wall. Outside I found a model replica of the castle. I wasn't a fan of the silly snow globe with a cartoony dragon inside it that came attached to it, but decided that I'd rather have something to remember the castle than not.

We went back to the flat for a rest and to start packing before taking a break for dinner. At this point my watch started up again, which was a real relief. (It also gave me a wonderful opportunity to tease Mama Yid that shopping with her actually made time stand stil.)

For our last night in Krakow we decided to go back to Kazimierz one more time. On the way we stopped at the Tourist Center to get a few more Jewdolls, angry American ladies be damned. Mama Yid bought for so she could have some fun table settings for Hanukkah. I got a couple as gifts for friends. I thought they were cute but was also disappointed that the sculptors' imaginations were so limited. If you had never met a Jew and all you had to go on was information gleaned from these dolls, you'd think all Jews did was count money, play klezmer or carry giant menorahs and the occasional book around. Since the only available dolls were men (we looked high and low for a lady Jewdoll for Mrs. Yid), one would be forgiven for assuming that Jews produced asexually, too. Or maybe Jews were like Tolkein's dwarves and men and women couldn't be told apart.

We ate dinner at an outdoor restaurant in the small square behind the bookshop and between three of the Kazimierz synagogues. I had cholent again, beef this time, and it was very good, though I think I still preferred the chicken one from the first night. Over dinner and an Israeli wine from the Golan Heights, my parents and I had a very nice conversation.

"I'm glad I came," said Abbot Yid.
"That's high praise coming from you," I said.
"I think my father would have enjoyed this. I think he would have been happy we came here."

This made me think about Mama Yid's father, who had been twenty years older than any of my other grandparents and died when she was only seven years old.

"If you could tell your father anything, what could you say?"
"I'd want to tell him that my sister and I turned out all right, that we both got advanced degrees and that we were successful."
"And is there anything you wish you could ask him?"
"I think just, 'Who were you?' I was so young when he died..."
I nodded. "It's crazy to think that he was born over 100 years ago. How different things are, all the things we have that he didn't. It's interesting to wonder what he would have thought about the world today."

I turned to Abbot Yid. "Is there anything you wish you could ask Zayde?"
He waved the question off. "I would have liked you to have a chance to spend more time with him. You could have asked him all the good questions."
It was a sad but happy moment at the same time.

I was sad to be leaving Poland but very glad we had come. In a way, I would have preferred to go home right then and had time to process everything that had happened. At the same time, how often did we go to Europe? We had been in touch with Mama Yid's British cousins for years and it was important that we finally have a chance to meet in person. I was also hoping London would be a little less intense and stressful than Poland had been. Maybe we could actually have a little bit more of a vacation there and it would give us some time to think and recover post-Poland.

(Trying to) Honor the Past

2011-08-17T14:53:00.000-07:00

Day 11- Auschwitz & Birkenau

The day started off appropriately enough by raining throughout the morning. Since the previous day I'd had such good navigation luck, I decided to chart us a route through the town surface roads again as opposed to the highway. What I hadn't considered was that though both roads were the same distance, cars can drive about twice as fast on the highway. We finally got into Oswiecim around noon.

Polish signage is generally pretty bad as a rule, but something about the lack of signs for the camp seemed particularly strange. I understood why the town may have preferred visitors to come and visit things besides just the camp (there is a synagogue and Jewish museum, for instance, as well as some other interesting historical sights), but who were they kidding? The camp gets 1 million visitors a year. I'm sorry if you'd rather be known for your antiques or the awesomely-named Mieszko Tanglefoot, but let's face some reality, please.

When we finally did find the museum, it was jarring at how sudden the transition was (though we had been fairly creeped out at seeing stone highway barriers with an all-too-familiar curve on the top, complete with barbed wire attached). It wasn't like the town ended and then the camp was off to the left, standing dramatically by itself. The busy road took you right past the camp and if you weren't looking for the wooden guard towers peeking over the walls, you could actually miss it.

The parking lots were absolutely packed, despite it being a Monday and raining. There was a large row of strip-mall-like stres on the outer edge. The visitor enter was in a small mall. There weren't any brochures in English (really, Auschwitz museum? really?) but my parents were hungry so we stopped for a snack at the only restaurant in the building, a bizarre hodge-podge of Polish buffet and half-hearted attempts at American and Italian-American food: Abbot Yid got french fries and Mama Yid got a crepe bolognese. We sat across from a carved wooden pizza chef. On the wall there was a sign informing us that "It is forbidden to bring and consume your own food and drinks." There was something about seeing orders posted on a wall that was a little off-putting here, even over something as banal as outside food. The radio alternated between Polish and American pop music. While my parents were eating I identified two songs: one by the reggae group that was famous for writing "Bad Boys," and that Katy Perry song about having romantic liaisons with an alien.

I wasn't sure what I had been expecting at Auschwitz, but this wasn't it. Instead of experiencing Arendt's banality of evil, so far this was the evil of banality.

We wound up spending almost five hours at Auschwitz and Birkenau altogether. Once we got into the museum proper things started getting surreal. The entrance hall and the busses were absolutely packed with giant, crushing crowds-- to the point of bringing up uncomfortable mental parallels. (We weren't the only ones commenting on this; we heard multiple groups of people discussing the "irony" of packing us in like sardines. One guy wondered if this was intentionally designed as "part of the experience.")

It was hard to connect the physical site of Auschwitz with the cultural image I had approached it with. Auschwitz has been built up in the Western imagination as the archetype of evil, but how can anything live up to that? Compared with its image, Auschwitz seemed not foreign, not evil, enough. Here was a prime example of the banality of evil. On first blush, the place did not read as specifically terrible. It had grass, flowers and birds flying overhead. The bad weather and pervasive gray skies certainly added to the moroseness but it didn't feel different from any other spot.

Areas that did have an emotional impact were ones that emphasized the massive scale of the extermination and destruction that happened there: the piles of hair, glasses, and shoes. A room full of suitcases, covered with carefully printed names and addresses of unsuspecting victims long dead. Standing at one end of Birkenau and not being able to see the other side because of how massive the camp was. These were the things that showed the planning side, the inhuman coldness that allowed people to separate out their immediate tasks from the reality that they were building factories of death.

Being inside the Auschwitz barracks was surreal-- the stone stairs were worn down from so many visitors that they had become curved in the middle and were hard to walk on. It added to the experience of feeling off-balance and that things weren't quite right.

We saw the basements of Block 11-- claustrophobic hallways, tiny cells designed for starvation and sadism. Particularly disturbing were the closet-sized punishment cells, where men were forced to stand for hours at a time without being able to sit. The sheer amount of thought put into being evil for evil's sake felt outrageous and obscene.

There were also some bizarre moments involving other people we were there with. A Portugese man with his family took dozens of flash pictures inside the buildings, oblivious to the signs telling him not to and the UV-protection film over the windows. Every picture he was taking was destroying historical evidence of Nazi atrocities, and helping the case of jackasses the world over who claim that Auschwitz is a manufactured fraud. I could have strangled him. There was also a family from Singapore who kept mugging for each other's snapshots, smiling in front of the train tracks, the execution wall and the iconic sign. It made me feel ill. Yes, I was glad that people from around the world visit this place, but going to Auschwitz is not like seeing the Grand Canyon or the Eiffel Tower. I hope to God that if I ever visit Tuol Seng, someone will stop me if I start grinning like an idiot and taking pictures of myself in front of torture cells. The irony was that the family told us that they had come to see Auschwitz because "we've always heard about it and needed to see it with our own eyes." The impulse was admirable, but it was hard to square that away with how they were acting.

One thing people don't tell you about visiting Auschwitz and Birkenau is how much physical activity is involved: there is a lot of walking around, particularly at Birkenau. The road was composed of dirt and pebbles and was tough to walk on. The final stop is at the Birkenau memorial, surrounded by the ruins of the destroyed crematoria. It was pretty emotional. Abbot Yid cried, and I said Kaddish in memory of the 15 relatives of my mother killed there, the 45 others killed at Treblinka, Buchenwald, Gross-Rosen and others, and the 150 whose fates remain unknown.

We walked back to the gate with our Polish guide, a young woman named Maria. She was from Oswiecim, had gone to University, and then came back. She had been working as a docent at the museum for several years. She seemed proud of her home and mentioned that it dated from the 12th century and had been a large town before the war. We said it must be hard to live so close to the camp and its history.

"Someone has to tell the story," she said. "It's important."

Hearing such a sense of stewardship to a place and its history from a twenty-something was inspiring.

The experience was emotionally and physically draining, though I was glad we had done it-- particularly since we had come not just to experience something in the abstract, but to also see it through personal and specific eyes: this was the place where my mother's cousins had been murdered. We had their names, in some cases we even had their dates and tattoo numbers. This wasn't just about "The Holocaust." It was the grave of these relatives, who had been denied their identities. It felt like going there, saying their names, acknowledging them as individuals, if only in a small way, was a sort of tikkun. A healing.

That night we went back to Kazimierz and the restaurant. I had duck with apples (ok, but not as good as Polish cholent). Mama Yid had tzimmes, which she said reminded her of her grandmother's cooking.

The really interesting part came after the meal, when Mama Yid chatted up two English-speaking women at the table next to us. They were New Yorkers (of course!) and had also visited Auschwitz that day, but with a private guide. The older woman was in her sixties and had taken her 40s-ish daughter to Poland to look for their roots in Northern Poland. They had also had some powerful personal moments, including finding archival records and seeing places in the Old Country their relatives had spoken about for years.

We chatted for a while and then the question of Israel came up. "It's surprising to hear you've been here and not to Israel," the daughter remarked. Her mother started giving her impressions of Auschwitz:

"Our guide was very informative. One of the things that bothered me about the museum, though, is that the point of view is very Polish, everything is about the Poles and not so much about the Jews who died there. Like, they have that cell with the flowers for that Polish Pope who died," she said, referring to a priest, Maximillian Kolbe, who voluntarily submitted to starvation torture to spare a fellow inmate the same fate. "Why do they have a memorial for that Pope and not the Jews?" she asked.

I thought of the plaques and flowers inside the Auschwitz crematorium and the memorial statue at Birkenau. I saw the woman's point; it would be nice to have a personalized experience of some Jewish prisoners with names and faces that visitors could connect with, but at the same time the museum seemed stuck. Anything the museum did would be criticized. There was also the tricky point that most Jews at Auschwitz were killed within hours; the vast majority of the prisoners who were incarcerated there were Poles. I didn't think the Jewish piece should be minimized, but it was challenging to tell both of those stories simultaneously.

"In Israel, at Yad Vashem, the information is much more truthful. At Auschwitz everything is about all the prisoners experienced, but Yad Vashem talks about how little the rest of the world did. How few people helped the Jews. The Holocaust museum in DC is even worse. So politically correct!"

I held back a smirk. Yes, Yad Vashem was probably more unflinching with the details, but the idea that it didn't have a political agenda was either silly or naive. The Israelis had a Holocaust narrative just as firmly as the Americans or the Poles.

The woman continued. "Our guide told us there's still antisemitism around here, too. Like those dolls. Have you seen them?"

We nodded. While they were strange and stereotypical, on average the ones we had seen had tended more towards cute-sy than outrageous. The women shook their heads. "It's terrible," said the daughter. "All the Jewish dolls do is count money. The Poles buy them and give them to their children before they get married as a good luck charm, to help them be successful."

As bizarre and perhaps even cringe-worthy as that may have been, I found it hard to relate to their outrage. In the grand scheme of things I'd much rather see Jewdolls with money than bloody matzah, for example. It wasn't that I didn't think there was zero antisemitism in Poland. Hatred didn't seem to be as big an issue as ignorance and a lack of contact. In order to know about and understand Jews, Poles needed to meet more Jews! Which also meant Jews needed to spend part of their time in Poland meeting with and trying to learn more about Poles, not only focusing on Jewish sites or on things relating to the Holocaust. Two-way streets and all that.

As a counterpoint I told the women about my friend Pavel and his family and our guide Maria and suggested that the younger generation seemed interested in knowing more about and honoring Poland's Jewish heritage. The women nodded politely, as if they weren't sure how to bridge the gap of our very different views of the country and its people.

Walking back to our apartment, I was troubled. I was happy to meet more Jews in Poland but also sad that for so many people, it seemed that their minds were already made up before they got there and that they tended to look for proof to substantiate negative preconceptions. I also realized that for most "connected" American Jews Israel was "advertised" much more than Europe. As the US-Israel relationship has developed and most American Jewish movements have become more Zionist, Israel has been pushed as American Jews' second home, a place that feels familiar and culturally (if not always physically) safe. The irony, of course, was that our immediate ancestors and family had spent far more time in Europe, especially Poland and neighboring countries, than Israel.

Of course Israel had history and tradition and certainly a valuable connection that needed to at least be considered (if not taken) seriously. But at the end of the day a major connector for me was family, personal family history. While we had plenty of cousins in Israel (with interesting stories and history of their own, to be sure), it still felt like a bit of a stretch to claim that Israel was more my ancestors' home than Poland. Yes, our forefathers may have lived in the hills of Judea, but I had found my ancestor's tombstone and touched it with my own hand. That was far more tangible to me than semi-hypothetical connections to Biblical characters.

At some point I am sure I will visit Israel, probably with Mrs. Yid (and perhaps even with my parents). I am sure it will also be a moving and personal experience. But it was frustrating to feel that Poland's Jewish past or direct connection with descendants of Polish Jews had been minimized by a narrative that championed Israel and Zionism as a primary pillar of Jewish identity.

Limited Retrospection

2011-08-17T12:29:00.000-07:00

The 20-year-anniversary for the Crown Heights riots/pogroms (depending on who you talk to) is coming up and it's led to a fair bit of discussion among Jewish media outlets, particularly in New York.

Unfortunately, while the myths that Crown Heights was somehow a riot "between" blacks and Jews (implying that the Jews were out attacking blacks instead of hunkering down in their homes) or that the Jewish political establishment used all its resources to stop violent attacks happening in real-time are finally being exposed and challenged, one central myth not only remains unexamined, but continually perpetuated by people who should know better.

That is, the identity of Yankel Rosenbaum. Even this week, the inaccurate statements about Rosenbaum being a "rabbinical student" or a "rabbinical scholar" are being repeated by major Jewish news outlets. Only problem is, those are lies. Intended as compliments, perhaps, but fictional.

The son of Jews who survived the Holocaust in Poland, Mr. Rosenbaum was a lecturer at the University of Melbourne in Australia. He had done his undergraduate work there and, later, had earned a master's degree. His adviser on his doctoral dissertation, Dr. John Foster, said he was studying small Jewish towns in Poland.

The information is out there. This article was written in 1991, as was this one in 1996. Academics have verified who Rosenbaum was, and wasn't. Friends of Rosenbaum have popped up sporadically on the internet trying to clarify who he was: frum, Jewishly literate, and, while not Hasidic (nor Lubavitch, though his family were), certainly on friendly terms with Chabad.

But that is not the same as rewriting the man's life and identity and turning him into just another yeshiva bochur! Rosenbaum was a passionate young man who had created his own business and was pursuing high-level academic studies in the secular world. He spoke five languages, he had a master's, he was working on his doctorate, and he was a lecturer at the University! These details don't detract from his life or his Jewishness, they add color and texture to them. In a small way, Rosenbaum was a living model of how to successfully, and proudly, live as an Orthodox Jew in an open environment, without needing to cloister oneself in a cultural ghetto. The Orthodox world (heck, even the larger Jewish world) needs more role models like him. If nothing else, that is what is insulting about him being turned into a faceless symbol of the Haredi everyman struck down by antisemitism. It deprives us all of a wonderful learning opportunity.

Yankel Rosenbaum was an Orthodox Jew who chose to live in the non-Jewish world and had been successful at it. But for an accident of random chance (which ironically happened when he was visiting a major Jewish enclave, as opposed to all the times in Australia when he was in part of a small minority), he would likely still be here.

There are lots of lessons we can take from his life, but to do that we first have to be willing to learn about the truth of who he was. Not the myth he was turned into.

Edit-after-the-fact: Every time I write about this, I manage to find more people who knew Rosenbaum personally. (One of the blessings of the Internet!) One of them had this to say:

I actually knew Yankel, A"H. He was a person, not a symbol, and I don't think he would have been upset at the descriptions you're complaining about.

Melbourne even today is a much more diverse community than most places in the US, and lots of people have complicated religious and intellectual backgrounds. Yankel's family wasn't Lubavitch and he wasn't the sort of person you could easily classify, but he certainly associated with Chabad. Yankel went to a Lubavitch school and yeshiva, was a counsellor at Chabad camps, and socialised with people both within and without Melbourne's Lubavitch community. None of this is especially important, but I hope it fleshes him out a bit more.

Here was my response:

I appreciate you sharing the background about your friend more.

As I've gotten interested in Yankel's life just been frustrated by what I see as attempts to put this interesting person into a certain box, when it seems like a lot of what he was about was, as you said, being involved with and interacting with various different communities. I would like to see that spirit honored and remembered when people think of him, as opposed to immediately putting him in a neat category of "martyred Lubavitcher Hasid" and going on their way.

Jewish Disneyland

2011-08-15T16:11:00.000-07:00

Day 10-Krakow

We left Cz and drove to Krakow. I continued in my role of navigator by charting us a path through various towns and castles on the Jura (Jurassic-era plateaus) rather than going via highway routes, which took us farther out of our way. Though it rained quite a bit, it was a fun way to see the countryside and we made excellent time-- apparently Sunday is a great day for driving in rural Poland (Travel tip!)

As per usual, my good luck ran out as soon as we got into the city-- we probably spent about an hour trying to find our apartment thanks to mis-labelled street signs. Thanks to a friendly employee at a Chinese restaurant, we found the building and unloaded.

Abbot Yid found us a nice place right across the river from Kazimierz, the old Jewish section. We wound up going there every day for the three nights we were in Krakow. Our first stop, as always, was the Tourist Center. While exiting this place and waiting for Abbot Yid to finish buying some postcards, Mama Yid and I got to have this delightful conversation with a young Israeli couple:

Him: "Where are you from?"
Me: "San Francisco."
Him: (Smirking) "There's a Jewish community in San Francisco?"

He was sounding more dismissive than humorous. Already I could tell this had potential to quickly delve into jerk territory.

Me: "And where are you from?"
Them: "Israel."
Me: (No duh.) "I meant, where in Israel."

Long stare while they tried to decide if our limited knowledge included geography...

Her: "I'm from the North."
Him: "I'm from the Middle."
Me: (Really? That's cool, we have cousins in Netanya, Eilat, Rehovot, and the Negev. Middle, you say? What a fun place that sounds like.)
Her: "How long are you here?"
Mama Yid: "Another few days and we'll have been here two weeks."

They were dumbfounded. "You've spent two weeks in Krakow?"

Mama Yid poked me to tell them "the story." I was reluctant since I could tell the guy wasn't going to care, but I tried to be a good sport.

"We've been all over. We started in Warsaw where my father's family was from, and we just came from Czestochowa where my mother's family was from."

I purposefully left out the cemetery story as I was close to positive they didn't care. Mama Yid said I had left out the best part and told them about the cemetery. The woman looked slightly interested but the man seemed bored.

Him: "And next, are you going to Israel?"

I had known this was coming. Just like with the nun, I put out a big smile. "Not this trip."

He frowned. "What a shame. All this way and Israel is only three hours away. Have you been to Israel before?"

My smile got even bigger. This guy was going to be a Sabra par excellence. Just roll with it. "Nope."

He looked incredulous. "And you come to Poland before you come to Israel?"

Abbot Yid had just stepped out the door and caught the tail end of the guy's question-- and his tone. I could tell he was getting irked already, but I played dumb. "Well, maybe we'll try next time."

"Well you have family waiting for you when you come," the woman said with a smile. We all nodded politely.

The man still wasn't done. "How's your Hebrew?"
"Nonexistent," said Mama Yid.
"Low," I said.
"So, just prayers and things?" he asked. I couldn't tell if he was fishing for info or confused at how Jews couldn't know Hebrew. I shrugged.
"Well, enjoy your trip," he said.
"You too," I said as we walked away.
"Shmuck," Abbot Yid said under his breath.

And we had had such a wonderful time with Dina and her Israeli high schoolers in Cz! I guess the universe didn't want us to get too far away from cultural stereotypes. (Does this count as reverse-hasbara?)

After that we walked around the neighborhood for a while. We saw some of the old synagogues and popped into an excellent Jewish bookshop where I snapped up a couple of things. (I had operated with total restraint up until this point, I swear. Besides, who could resist a DK-style book on Polish Jewish history?)

From there we went looking for someplace to have dinner. Initially Abbot Yid wanted to eat somewhere that kept kosher (at least we'd know if something had dairy or not), but the first place that had "glatt kosher food" advertised turned out to be the Izaak Synagogue (now run by Chabad) that, in addition to catering, also served meals out of the shul kitchen. Not quite what we had in mind. So we settled for another spot called Noah's Ark.

The food was marvelous- I had my first taste of cholent, and despite the bad rap it seems to get around the Jblogosphere, I found that this recipe, at least, was delicious. Mine was chicken with kasha, seasoned excellently, and the portion wasn't too large. Real comfort food. (Maybe it's just frum cholent that's bad?)

Over dinner we talked about how interesting it was to be in Kazimierz, where Jewish trappings--if not necessarily content-- were so prominently on display. As Abbot Yid put it, "It's like Jewish Disneyland, except without Jews."

Ok, that line is not entirely fair. There are an estimated 1,000 "active" Jews living in Krakow (with at least two active synagogues), and probably another few thousand of partial Jewish descent. I think what we were talking about, however, was how much "Jewishness" is built into the commercial shtick of Kazimierz, more or less divorced from the actual people. The effect is a bit of a cultural dissonance-- kind of like an Egyptian person visiting the Luxor casino. On the one hand a lot of it was fun to see (especially for someone interested in English-language Ashkenazi history, a lot of times my choices are perusing random Orthodox Judaica shops or attempting to find the few Jewish books in the "Eastern Religion" section at large US chain stores). On the other hand, there was certainly a fair amount of stereotyping and ignorance going on. For instance, at our restaurant a lot of the dishes were named after random Biblical characters, ranging from Miriam to Jacob.

The best example of non-Jews marketing Jewish kitsch to Jews were the various "Jewdolls" that we saw everywhere. They ranged from an inch or two to a foot high, always made of wood or clay. All the dolls had beards and large noses, usually with dark clothes, peyot and a hat. Most were counting money though a few held menorahs or books with Stars-of-David on them. I saw a few holding a pillow-shaped object that could have passed for a Torah if you squinted hard enough. I said, "There's something very odd about seeing our culture simplified down to an extreme degree and then made into a commodity to be sold to tourists." I bought a few Jewdolls as gifts (I preferred the clay ones with slightly cartoonish figures; they reminded me of old French and Belgian comic characters and toys I used to have), though it did make me think about old toys and books like Tar Babies and Little Black Sambo.

As we finished up, my parents mentioned that they were happy that Mrs. Yid and I were invested in finding ways to make Judaism and Jewish heritage personally meaningful to us-- and that we invited them to participate without ever making them feel coerced. Abbot Yid even said something surprising:

"You may not believe this, but even though I don't necessarily do Jewish things, I still feel very Jewish and strongly identify as Jewish. As ambivalent as I might feel about Judaism, a long time ago I realized that if I had been around when the Nazis were here, they would have considered me Jewish. It's just who you are. It's like being black. You can't really run away from it."

I appreciated the sentiment, though I couldn't help wondering where this left people like Mrs. Yid.