Fanatics, Madoff: The worst of the Jewish community

We as a people, are as noble as the greatest tsadik, as low as the worst of our villains. (I remember my mother always breathing a sigh of relief when she knew for sure that a criminal was not, in fact, Jewish.) Between goniffs like Bernard Madoff and anti-Israel pro-Messianic religious fanatics in Hebron are we losing the legitimacy of our claim that we hold the moral high ground?
Madoff, whose Ponzi scheme cost Yeshiva University $110 million; Hadassah $90 million; the endowment fund of the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington more than $10 million; the Jewish Funds for Justice $3.9 million; the Forward (that other Jewish newspaper) a mere $355,000. If you’ve been doing your arithmetic you’ll see I’ve accounted for less than 10% of the $50 billion he’s reputed to have embezzled (or vaporized as far as anyone can tell). When I read in the Times last Week of a rich man, one of Madoff’s Judas goats who brought him clients, and then followed Max Bialystock’s guiding principle until Bernie’s scheme bankrupted even him, I didn’t cry. Schadenfreude is one of my minor sins. But cheating Hadassah? Yeshiva University?
If all that weren’t bad enough, he’s also handed a loaded shotgun to those who already despise us and want to see us dead. Here’s a sample from a blog with the innocuous sounding name, “The Truth will set you free”:

“Madoff was elected chairman of the board of [Yeshiva Universty’s] Syms School of Business in 2000…Does the ‘Jewish tradition’ taught at Yeshiva U. support giant ‘Ponzi’ schemes like the one run by their chairman? Is this the kind of business they teach the students at Syms? Cheat the ‘goyim,’ i.e. non-Jews, and steal their money? That is exactly what the Talmud teaches, make no mistake about it. It is the main reason that Jews have been despised and expelled from so many nations throughout history. Anyone familiar with the teachings of the Talmud, i.e. ‘Jewish tradition,’ will know that such anti-Christian schemes are at the heart of such an ‘education.’ This is why so many of the financial criminals involved in the current Zionist-produced ‘credit crisis’ are Jewish Zionists who have been indoctrinated in such ‘Jewish traditions.’ The Zionist criminals involved in 9-11 and the cover-up of the truth are all tied to the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, which is a similar Zionist institution.”

Thanks, Bernie, for letting slip the dogs of anti-Semitism; if this is the first step towards welcoming back the Middle Ages, to accusations of us using Christian blood to make our matzah, you can look to Bernie for inspiring it. Fascists of all stripes who would destroy the Jews are out there. Read further for another example.
Have your read Josephus’ The Jewish War, his history of the struggle between Jews and Romans that reached its crescendo with the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE and the suicides at Massada two years later? According to him, the slaughter of Jews in Jerusalem was by the Jewish zealots who objected to those Jews who would live amicably (if warily) with the Romans.
Earlier this month the Israeli Supreme Court ordered a disputed property in Hebron vacated until it could decide ownership. The army moved in, expelled the 200 or so zealots in occupation and then the fanatics went on a rampage—against Arabs. Their policy is called “Price Tag.” If the government wants to be conciliatory to Arabs, the price is these pogroms (not my term, nor the term of the Arab press, but one used by the Prime Minister of Israel). The hooligans shot Arab civilians, set fire to their homes, destroyed their crops and terrorized them. The Premier’s terminology sounds about right. He might also have called it an intifada.
Further to fan the flames of backlash, Baruch Marzel and Itamar Ben-Gvir, two of the Ayatollahs who urge the young on their destructive rampage and then attempt to justify it, threatened to march with their troops bearing 100 Israeli flags through the Arab city of Umm al-Fahm near Haifa. Their group? It has the evocative name of “The Jewish National Front,” a name which immediately brings to mind fascists in France, Britain and the United States who call themselves the National Front and want to impose racist policies on their reluctant homelands.
Were not the fascists of Europe enough for the world? Have we learned nothing? Lord, what fools these mortals be.

Nous sommes tous Chabad de Mumbai!

Nous sommes tous Américains!” Thus the headline on September 12, 2001, Le Monde’s declaration of French solidarity with America in its time of wrenching agony. Our civilians had been hijacked, forced to become part of inhuman missiles. The World Trade Center had been converted into two dusty tombs for thousands of innocents and 10 demented mass murderers; the Pentagon was hit a glancing blow and brave passengers died having revolted in the air attempting to re-take a fourth pirated plane.

The comparisons to events in Mumbai are overt. Here parallel towers, there parallel hotels; here the financial capital of the United States, there the financial capital of India; here warnings were ignored, there warnings from us were ignored; here they flew in from the sky, there they sailed in on boats; here they were well organized Arabs, there they were (it would seem) well organized Pakistanis; here our response was poorly organized—and so was theirs; here president Bush’s term was beginning, now it is ending, bookending tragedy; here there was shock and anger, there there was shock and anger.

But there is one substantial difference. Jews. In the New York tragedy the murders let it be thought that the whole thing was an Israeli plot. Jews didn’t report to work that day, because they had been tipped off. Only the deliberately stupid believed the calumny. This time Jews were a target, perhaps for all we know the target, the other assaults mere diversions. Chabad Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg, 29, and his 28-year-old pregnant wife, Rivka, were killed, though the couple's son, Moshe survived after his nanny, Sandra Samuel escaped with him 10 hours after the hostage incident started. There is intense pressure to declare Miss Samuel a “righteous among the gentiles”. No less significant, though often over looked are 50-year-old Norma Shvarzblat Rabinovich of Mexico, Yocheved Orpaz, 60, who was traveling in India, Bentzion Chroman, 28, and 38-year-old Leibish Teitelbaum who were all killed as well—not in the cross fire, not with a spray of machine gun fire, but tortured to death in ways I cannot describe because I cannot know them. First the Indian coroner and later Israeli Zaka (Orthodox Jews who help to collect body parts after terrorist attacks in Israel) felt compelled to leave the room where the bodies were found, appalled by what they saw. As I write, two other Jews are in critical condition.

At about 2:00 on that pleasant Thanksgiving Day, Chabad rabbi Joshua Laufer called. He was trying to organize a prayer service for the hostages. I asked “What time?” and he said “4:40.” Our company was due at 4:30. But I said that we’d pray at home. As family and our guests sat at our groaning table, I distributed yarmulkes and asked my son, a fifth year cantorial student, to lead us in a prayer for hostages. He chanted Psalm 130 in Hebrew and then translated it: a truncated version follows:

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord!
Oh Lord, hear my cry!
Let Your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy!
It is He who will redeem Israel from all their iniquities.

But while I heard those words of supplication, I was thinking others about the Deccan Mujahideen or Lashkar-e-Taiba or whoever it was that decided to slaughter innocent men, women, and children. It’s from another Psalm, number 94, not one of my favorites, normally, but parts of it seemed more than appropriate at the time: “God of retribution, Lord, God of retribution, appear! Rise up, judge of the earth, give the arrogant their deserts! How long shall the wicked exult, shall they utter insolent speech, shall all evildoers vaunt themselves? They crush your people, O Lord, they afflict Your very own; they kill the widow and the stranger; they murder the fatherless, thinking, ‘The Lord does not see it, the God of Jacob does not pay heed.’ Take heed, you most brutish people; fools—when will you get wisdom? Shall He who implants the ear not hear, He who forms the eye not see?”

The previous Shabbat the young Mumbai rabbi had been talking about the humane slaughter of animals Jewish law demands. The irony? Jews slaughter animals humanely, but the animals of the Deccan Mujahideen slaughter Jewish human beings by torturing them to death. “God of retribution, Lord, God of retribution, appear! Rise up, Judge of the earth, give the arrogant their deserts!”

Nous sommes tous Chabad de Mumbai!

A History Lesson: One we hope won't be repeated

Last Shabbat I was reminded of how American and how Jewish I am. In schul we read of the death of Sarah, first of the matriarchs. We also commemorated the 45th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Ask any person of a certain age (my age) if they remember where they were and you will get a stream of reminiscence. I was just coming out of an art history exam, thinking about going home for Thanksgiving; I overheard a couple of other students talking about presidents elected in years ending in zero dying in office and wondered why they were bandying about that old chestnut. Moments later I knew.

In my lifetime’s memory, I can’t think of a better, certainly not a more inspiring president than JFK whose words were eloquent, whose public actions were on the mark, whose wife added grace and charm to the stodginess of Washington. If things work out as we hope they will, now my children will have the experience of a Kennedy-like president in the White House—a man whose words are eloquent, whose public actions are on the mark, whose wife will add grace and charm to the stodginess of Washington.

At our house we commemorate the mournful event in Dallas as we always do, with song and quotation. We began with a toast made over Jameson Irish whisky, and sang,

“Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling
From glen to glen, and down the mountain side
The summer's gone, and all the flowers are dying
'Tis you, 'tis you must go and I must abide.

One guest rose to recite a line from Edward Everett, the other speaker at the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery and now inscribed on the Rhode Island World War II monument. “No lapse of time, no distance of space, shall cause you to be forgotten.” Then, unbidden lines from a poem I’d memorized in 7th grade came to mind. It’s from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Decoration Day” a stanza of which seemed appropriate. From Jameson affected mind to quivering lips it passed, including this stanza:

Rest, comrade, rest and sleep!
The thoughts of men shall be,
As sentinels to keep
Your rest, from danger, free.

I don’t know if this will resonate with many, but two historical events, I hope not precedents, intrude into my mind with nightmare vividness. Briefly in 1618 there was a king and queen of Bohemia, Frederick and his English wife Elizabeth who were of the same lofty plane as the Kennedys and the Obamas. So gracious were they, so open to the arts and sciences that this so-called Winter King—for so brief was his reign—was a foretaste of last century’s Prague Spring. But as in 1968, so in 1619 the forces of repressive reaction drove them from Prague and restored unimaginative conformity, while simultaneously ushering in the Thirty Years’ War. Another historical model: The Gracchi, two brothers in second century BCE Rome, children of wealth and privilege who objected to the outsourcing of jobs (importation of slaves) and importing of cheap products (grain which came virtually free into Rome from conquered provinces) and the displacement of the small farmers who could not compete, their lands snatched up by wealthy aristocrats for a song to grow not wheat but olives and grapes—and then when there was no Italian grain the price of the imported stuff went sky high. The Gracchi sought to curb these abuses by, yes, by spreading the wealth, by limiting the size of the great estates and restoring to the displaced farmers new lands confiscated from those who had taken advantage of their poverty in the first place. Naturally the forces of law and order (yes, Virginia, I am being sarcastic) took matters into their own hands and both brothers in their turn were brutally assassinated. John and Bobby were their modern day counterparts. Those who know me know that I don’t actually pray. Usually. But this I do pray—that the Secret Service does its job. The brothers Gracchi and Kennedy were sacrifices enough.

As you read this, Thanksgiving will have been and gone. I hope it, the quintessential New England holiday, the holiday that doesn’t exclude Jews was a joyous one. Already we are being bombarded with Christmas music and decorations, but with the economy so bad and getting worse, who can blame retailers for rushing the season. So, in that spirit, though to me as I write this it’s not even Thanksgiving yet, Happy Hannukah to all, and to all a good 2009.

The Party

On Tuesday we woke early hoping to beat the crowd at the Francis J. Varieur Elementary School where we vote. By the time I arrived it was necessary to stand beyond the outer door—on a beautiful autumn morning, chatting companionably with neighbors and strangers. Promptly at 7:00 we were allowed into the gym; I stood on the R-Z line, took my ballot, walked to an open booth and completed broken arrows with a felt-tipped pen. I voted for the Irish guy—O’Bama, (I was number 37 that morning to cast my vote) and left the building at 7:15. Feeling patriotically uplifted I drove to school where the pro-McCain people were dourly looking at the latest polls, wondering if they could hold the states W. took in ’04 while the pro-Barack throng nervously asked of each other, “How will they steal it from us this time?”

The rest of the day dragged on and on and on and on. Finally it was time to go home to the hopefully celebratory party we’d arranged for some friends, fifteen of us, armed with polling statistics and as each state was reported we checked to see if it was expected for this candidate or that. We ate and swigged and ate some more, occasionally engorging something recognizable as part of a legitimate food group other than chazerie. Swing states were coming in remarkably slowly. Finally Pennsylvania was awarded to Barack, greeted by whoops and a hollers and shouts of “That’s it, that’s it,” to which others said, nervously, “No, not yet, let’s not put a kenyna hura on this.” But then Ohio was reported solidly in Barack’s camp! By the time the networks proclaimed the winner, shortly after 11:00, we had just heard that Virginia, where my son Sam had been working on the campaign since the summer, had come in for Obama.

We cheered, popped the corks off bottles of champagne, and spontaneously burst into song—first “God Bless America/Land that I love/Stand beside her, and guide her/Thru the night with a light from above./From the mountains, to the prairies/To the oceans, white with foam…../God bless America/My home sweet home” and then a modified version of a song that had been going through my head all day—“We have overcome/We have overcome/We have overcome, today/Oh, deep in my heart/I did believe/We would overcome, someday.” We drank to our healths, and to Obama’s, and to the health of the United States. We felt as though America had done something good and noble that day. Tears flowed as freely as the bubbly. I called Sam and shouted into his voicemail, “You did it, you did it, you did it!” My wife and three others in the room took credit for New Hampshire, the swing state they drove up to last weekend to knock on doors and speak to undecideds. It was a wonderful night. Those of us who proudly call ourselves liberals know that we’ll face our comeupance in some future election, but tonight was ours and we savored the feeling of triumph.

McCain made a graciouis and conciliatory concession speech, but I was bothered by two things—while the Democrats had planned their victory party out in the park and open to all, the Republicans met in an exclusive hotel (I’ve seen it; it’s gorgeous) by invitation only. (Someone at my house commented that this was a microcosm of the difference between the parties.) The other grouse was in his reflection that “This is an historic election, and I recognize the special significance it has for African-Americans and for the special pride that must be theirs tonight.” But as I heard these words I immediately thought, “and white people too.” Without an overwhelming number of people of European descent voting for Obama, this political miracle could not have taken place. It was a multi-racial victory, a victory for America, not a victory for black people only. We did this thing also. My pro-McCain students are proud to have been alive when America broke the color barrier—they just wish the black man had different policies. I’m glad he doesn’t.

And so, we enter a new era. Both McCain and Obama made the same point. It’s time to put the bitterness behind and to work together instead to solve the myriad problems that confront the nation. In a way, winning the election was the easy part; now comes the tough work of reconstructing a viable economy and finding Osama bin Laden, hidden in his cave, so long ignored.

Election is not a choice between good and evil

In a few days we will have a choice between young and old; Keynesian trickle up, and supply side/trickle down; between a Harvard Law Magna Cum Laude and a Naval Academy legacy who graduated 894th out of a class of 899. One wants to discontinue the war in Iraq, the other wants to fight on (and on and on) until victory. Both men are honorable at their cores; this is not a Zoroastrian contest between good and evil; each has erred and is willing to admit it.

We have the opportunity, 45 years after Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech to put a black man in the White House. Just think of that. In August 1963 Dr. King referred to Negroes as victims of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality, their bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, not being able to gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. Their basic mobility could be only from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. Their children were stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating “For Whites Only”. “We will not be satisfied,” he thundered magisterially, “until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

That time is almost here. America now treats its African American citizens with the dignity they deserve. Hillary Clinton’s supporters were convinced that it was a woman’s turn to be president, and they were almost right. The representative of the other oppressed group won the day this time. There will be a woman president elected; it is a consummation devoutly to be wished—but apparently it’s the black man’s turn first. I can’t explain it; I don’t justify it, but it is. We cannot turn away from the opportunity to elevate America, to make King’s dream and ours, a reality.

Anticipating losing, McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin or their surrogates have begun to hurl charges at Obama. “He’s a Socialist!” In fact, he’s not, nor is it illegal. I’ve just checked the Constitution. “He’s a Muslim!” In fact, he’s not, and it’s not illegal. I’ve just checked the Constitution, again. “He attended Jeremiah Wright’s church for 20+ years!” Yes, that’s true, but it’s neither illegal nor relevant. McCain deserted his wife for his paramour 20 years ago. It doesn’t matter. What matters is the approach to the economy; what matters is inspiring hope in a forlorn nation. John McCain, for all his service to the nation, is of the past; he would have made a terrific candidate in 2000 but of the four candidates running, surely it will be he to whom America first tearfully bids heartfelt thanks for his life and career. And then we’d get Sarah Palin. She wasn’t McCane’s first choice; Lieberman was, but the party bosses reined in their maverick and so he picked Palin, a woman with whom he’d had a total of three hours of conversation. When he was forced to give in and accept the inevitable “he was furious,” according to one of his advisors as quoted in the October 27th New Yorker. “He was pissed. It wasn’t what he wanted.” It’s not what any reasonable person wants—just ask conservative columnists David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer and George Will, all of whom have rejected her as presidential. And yet if the old man wins and dies, she’s who we get.

McCain suffers from Stockholm Syndrome. In 1973 hostages taken in an aborted bank robbery, held captive for six days, actually tried to help the robbers when the police finally broke in and afterwards refused to testify against them. Back in 2000 McCain was running for the Republican Party’s nomination against Governor George Bush. After losing badly in Iowa he beat him in New Hampshire and Carl Rove’s gloves came off. The people of South Carolina were bombarded with innuendo and out-right lies that McCain had fathered an illegitimate black baby. Illogically enough he was simultaneously branded a “fag” in flyers sent to churches. In South Carolina, remember! He went down to defeat then, and what is he doing now? Adopting the techniques of his captors. Lies and innuendos, the same sort of thing that cost him 2000. A McCain rally in North Carolina began with this introduction—not by the candidate himself—“Liberals hate real Americans that work and accomplish and achieve and believe in God.” People in Ohio were told that Obama didn’t go to Hawaii to be with his ailing grandmother but to destroy evidence that he’s not really an American citizen. It’s a pity; McCain’s not a bad man; he’s just a man behaving badly. Desperation will do that to some people.

No-no's for nice Jewish boys

There are several things not suitable for nice Jewish boys. Somewhere on that list will be found becoming a tyrant, but even higher up is believing that the earth is the center of the universe because for thousands of years that’s what people knew to be true.

Take the first no-no. Americans (I use my students as exemplars) often conflate the words “tyrant” and “dictator,” an easy mistake as both are loathsome. But like so many things the terms (which go back to the ancient world) mean two very different things. Tyrant is the older term. In Ancient Athens, for example, democracy led to chaos. Parties could not agree, law and order broke down, the economy was in a state of collapse. Into this chaos emerged a man with the unfortunate name of Pisistratus (you can only begin to imagine how my students have mangled that moniker on their essay exams). He said, in effect, give me all power and I will resolve the crisis. No more duly elected officials. I will hold power indefinitely and promise that in return for you liberties I will restore law and order and improve the economy. And he came through. After seizing the reins of government he ordered building on a massive scale which beautified the city and employed the workers. His police enforced the law. Everybody was happy. Until they weren’t, and he was overthrown. But then, not content to retire to his estates, he hired a beautiful statuesque woman who rode into town on a magnificent chariot declaring herself to be the goddess Athena and demanded that Pisistratus be restored to power. Sigh; he was; the gullible were overawed, as often is the case.

A dictator does not seize power unlawfully, not in ancient Rome, anyway. There, when things were darkest, when the enemy was at the gates or the people were riotous, the Senate could appoint one person, called a dictator, to have all power for six months to resolve the crisis, at the end of which he would surrender his extraordinary power, be tried and either rewarded or punished. (In answer to your unstated question, yes, towards the end, dictators didn’t surrender their power and the Republic collapsed.)

In New York City, of which your faithful correspondent is a native son, the people voted for term limits a few years ago. Mayors could be elected twice, then no more. Now Mayor Michael Bloomberg has announced that he will propose that the law be amended to allow current incumbents (not future ones) to seek a third term. After all, the City and the nation are in economic crises. Who better than he, financial genius that he undoubtedly is, to resolve matters? But there’s that pesky term limits law. So… Change the rules! In this way tyrants are born. Not Bloomberg, but those who follow his example. Amazingly (to me) the liberal leaning Times, the conservative Daily News and the reactionary Post support the power grab. It’s as though the goddess Athena had descended on their board rooms and told them what to write.

As to the Jew who declares that the earth is the center of the universe and defends this by pointing to all the scientific texts and philosophers who ever since Aristotle have maintained the obvious truth of this, I must confess, I made him up. I do have a colleague, however, who has made the same sort of assertion about prayer. Those who know me know that I don’t pray, exactly; I go to schul and sometimes sing, and I begin Friday nights by saying Kiddush after my wife has lit candles, but prayer? No. I figure HaShem isn’t into hypocrisy and so those who don’t believe in the efficacy of prayer shouldn’t actually pray. But my colleague insists that in the High Holy Days season is a moment for prayer (OK, no problem there) but then he continues that we can be sure of this “because our forebears told us so.” Whoa! This is proof? He also contends that prayer matters. “How can we be sure…? Again, there is a simple answer: The Torah tell us so. God… taught us how to pray for repentance and forgiveness.” Very interesting. Athena taught the Athenians how to govern themselves. Do we believe that? Aristotle and all the wise men taught us that the sun revolves around the earth. Do we believe that? Hinduism is at least as old as Judaism and in the Bhagaved Gita (ca. 500 BCE) Krishna taught Arjuna (and by extension all of us) that reincarnation and caste are the ways of the gods. Do we believe that just because it’s in the ancient holy books and taught by the Brahmins?

Let us pray: “Dear Lord, give us wisdom and not reliance.”

On Bailing out Fat Cats and other atrocities

• Golly Gee Willikers, haverim, the investment bankers who have received such tax largesse from the Bush administration, who have misdirected our economy from one that’s productive into one service-based now need us little-folk to bail them out. If we don’t we are threatened with depression on world-wide scale. $700,000,000,000. For openers—and Congress can’t ask who is to get how much? This is supposed to save their hides after they’ve flayed ours. And the money is somehow going to trickle down to those of us who had nothing to do with the melt-down but are its victims. What a country!

•The Red Sox have the second highest payroll in Major League Baseball; no wonder they ended up second in the A.L. East. Ah, but the odd thing is that the team that wound up in first has the lowest payroll in the Majors. I root for the Red Sox with more fervor than for anything else secular, but as long as the team made the playoffs I’m not unhappy that the Rays finished first. It’s a tale out of a child’s morality story. If the Old Town Team doesn’t make it to the top, I’m rooting for them—and there are two Rhode Islanders on the team. (Jews? I’m thinking not, but maybe…)

• Seven-hundred-billion-dollars? For openers?

• How come when we have a leader whose poll numbers are lower than his shoe size, who gets us embroiled in a war-of-choice which is a no-winner, and racked with scandal, we can’t just get rid of him the way Israel disposed of Olmert. Oh, I remember, our founding fathers, the same bewigged, knickers-wearing elitists who allowed slavery to continue, who created equal senators for each state (California with its population in excess of thirty-six and a half million, and Wyoming—with its population of hardly anyone, each gets two) prevented that. They were a tad afraid of democracy, you see.

• Remember the halcyon days (pre-GWB) when we wondered how best to use the trillion or so that was a surplus in the treasury?

• In its time of crises, Britain had Churchill to rally the people. In my parents’ time of economic disaster the nation had Roosevelt to inspire it. In those days there was greatness. Who do we get? Bush? What did we do that was so wrong? Why are we being punished with such blatant mediocrity?

• Oh, and then there was GWB’s plan to privatize Social Security by allowing us to invest our portion of it in the stock market? Wow, whataguy!

• It’s Yom Kippur time again. If the postal service is on the ball you will receive this on the Sabbath of Repentance. We are told that on Rosh Hashanah God inscribes the names of those to be saved and that on Yom Kippur the book is sealed. We are enjoined to ask for forgiveness of sins. Every year I make a deal with Him. I pretend that I’ll really, really, really try to be a better person, and He pretends to believe me. At least that’s the way it’s been for the past several decades and if it’s OK with Him to continue the charade, it’s OK by me too.

• Not that I don’t think government intervention is necessary. Hey, if Republicans want to transform market driven Wall Street into a People’s Republic, I’ll just sit back and enjoy the spectacle. It’s that we’ve been rushed into things before by these guys. We must invade Iraq to get to the weapons of mass destruction! We must pass the Patriot Act! We must invest 700 billion dollars! The sky is falling, the sky is falling! (Oh? Democrats want to put a cap on CEO’s salaries? Why, that’s just class warfare!) The villain here? It’s not GWB; he’s merely the current marionette. The problem goes back to the handlers of Ronnie Reagan. Government isn’t the solution, government is the problem. We have to untie the fetters that bind capitalism! We must deregulate. Well, folks, how’s that working out, exactly?

• Each year on Yom Kippur I pray in my own fashion for two things—life and health for family, friends and myself, and for belief in prayer. So far, He has granted the former and spared me the latter, and if I’m lucky, He’ll spare me again.

• The purpose of these columns over the year has been to stimulate thought and to provoke discussion. If I’ve offended I apologize; it was never my intention, though it may have been my result. Please forgive. I’ll make my amends to Him on Thursday.

Kristallnacht, then and now

Seventy years ago calamity befell us. No, I wasn’t born yet, but still I include as part of “us” myself and my children and all who are Jewish; all who believe in the glories of Western Civilization, and all who advocate for human rights.

On November 7, 1938 a Jewish student, outraged by Nazi treatment of his parents held in a freezing no-man’s land between Germany and Poland, expelled by the former, rejected by the latter, hungry, deprived of sanitary facilities and hope, took it upon himself to seek revenge. He went to the German embassy in Paris, asked to speak to the Ambassador, was allowed to see a minor functionary named Ernst vom Rath and shot him. Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbles, who had long advocated one final devastating pogrom against the remaining Jews of Germany, seized this opportunity and suddenly vom Rath achieved the status of an Aryan hero. German newspapers and radio blared forth the news that the assassination attempt, so close in time to the 21st anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia was part of the international Judeo-Communist plot to take over the world. If vom Rath died, the Nazis warned, the Jews of Germany would pay a heavy price.

The world waited as surgeons tried to save the man’s life. When the announcement came, on November 9, that vom Rath had succumbed to his wounds, the stage was set for what has become known as Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, the night of November 9-10 when the full savagery of Nazi furor was unleashed onto defenseless Jewish communities in Germany and Austria.

The Jews of Germany had achieved what Jews in America also had, an equality of status, if not of complete opportunity. They had served during the Great War; some had become internationally known scientists, physicians, businessmen and cultural leaders in music, literature, drama. They had built synagogues of great beauty and size; they lived in homes of middle class comfort; they were like us here, now; only they were them, there and then.

That night over 200 synagogues were destroyed by fire; Jewish homes were invaded and looted; whatever commercial property was still in Jewish ownership was attacked. Jews were beaten; some were arrested. Only synagogues immediately abutting “Aryan” property were spared. It was the Jewish community’s September 11, the day their world changed forever. And further indignities ensued. The following day German insurance companies approached Nazi officials and asked permission not to pay the Jews for the damage to their property and lives. Too smart for that the Nazis said, no, you must pay, but then we’ll fine the Jews, because the attack on them was their fault because of the attack on vom Rath, and we’ll return the money to you.

Seventy years ago. Three generations ago, and yet the memory lingers, the pain endures. Here in Providence a remarkable event is being planned. On November 9 at the Veteran’s Memorial Auditorium in Providence, eight adult choirs, four children’s choirs, four cantorial soloists, 40 members of the Rhode Island Philharmonic, in total about 320 people, will present a musical commemoration of Ashkenazi Jews on the anniversary of the Kristallnacht, but it will be about more than just the one horrifying event. In fact, the program’s driving force, cantor Brian Mayer of Temple Emanu-El emphasizes that it is not a holocaust program. It is not only to be a story about burning buildings and smashed glass but an attempt to bring to light the great culture the Nazis tried to eradicate and to honor the new realities in our world 70 years later—that with the rise of Eretz Yisrael Jews need no longer live in fear the way they did 70 years ago; that we in America have come a long way towards a much more tolerant society for Jews, and for people of color, though there is still a long way to go. “But look how far we’ve come since 1963, from Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a Dream’ speech to today, when Barack Obama is the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party. This is why the program has 5 scenes about the great Ashkenazi Jewish culture that developed over 1000 years before the kristallnacht. The sixth pays due homage to the events—kristallnacht and the holocaust; but the seventh emphasizes Psalm 133—‘How good & pleasant for brothers and sisters to dwell together in harmony.’ It is an historic concert of memory and hope.” On stage for that final number there will be as many Gentile as Jewish performers.

The narration, tying the 1000 years together, will be read by Leonard Nimoy. (Full disclosure: I am the principal author of the narration.)

Meating (and disagreeing) minds

One of the nice things about writing a column such as this is receiving feedback. Last issue’s column on Agriprocessors is an example. Below are two responses, one from a Christian reader, the other from a Jewish one:

“Loved your ‘Ethical Table’ article … I believe your points about ethical struggles and the tension between righteousness and recklessness can be applied in a variety of situations. Thanks for sharing your valuable insights.”

The second is less complimentary:

“After reading your recent article in the Jewish Voice & Herald, I was wondering what you would wear to work when school started. Since most of the clothes we buy are made
overseas in sweatshops where people earn a minimum amount, should we be buying and wearing these clothes? I challenge you to find clothing made in the United States by workers earning a fair wage. In protest maybe you should go to Roger Williams in the nude.

“I'm not saying the owner's of Agriprocessors are mensches. But from what I have read they are cleaning up their act and trying to do the right thing. They are hiring workers at better wages and improving the working conditions. They are to be commended for that, not boycotted.

What about all the Jewish businessmen that import or manufacturer goods overseas in sweatshops?

“I think its unfair to pick on these people in this industry alone. We are in a global economy and we all benefit from sweatshops overseas. Why are prices so low in Walmart? Imagine what our standard of living would be like if everything we purchased was manufactured in the United States at fair or even minimum wage?

“Best wishes for a good and healthy new year.”

Which are you hoping is from the Jewish reader? You would be wrong. The Christian got the point, the Jew missed it. Jews! We are supposed to be a lamp onto the nations, not followers of trends. To be of the chosen people is to be ethical, not to shop for bargains at the expense of others. It’s the workers who give value to a product. Cotton on the plant is valueless—pick it, comb it, spin it, weave it, cut it and sew it and you have a shirt. All those readers out there who think it appropriate to treat the laborers who covert the plant into the shirt as though they were not the most important part of the process raise your hands? OK, so don’t believe me. Read Adam Smith, the great champion of capitalism. Treating workers like dirt for greater profits is inexcusable for anyone; but for Orthodox Jews? It’s a shanda.

My correspondent asks “What about all the Jewish businessmen that import or manufacturer goods overseas in sweatshops?” to which I respond what are they going to be thinking when on Yom Kippur Isaiah asks “Is this the fast I have chosen [merely to afflict the body]?... No, says the prophet in God’s name. “This is my chosen fast: to loosen all the bonds that bind men unfairly, to let the oppressed go free, to break every yoke.”

I don’t know what my correspondent has been reading when he says that Agriprocessors is “cleaning up their act and trying to do the right thing.” I read that after the illegal workers were rounded up they recruited American labor promising them rent subsidies for the first two months of employment which were not forthcoming. They did not receive any wages, instead their money was placed into a bank account which charged them $5.00 to withdraw funds. And the recruiters were paid from these same bank accounts. The workers were promised furnished apartments and found mattresses on the floor. I’m not sure this counts as cleaning up their act.

And then there’s the Walmart observation. “Why are prices so low in Walmart? Imagine what our standard of living would be like if everything we purchased was manufactured in the United States at fair or even minimum wage?” I don’t shop at Walmart because of its reputation as an exploiter of its labor force (and because I don’t like to shop in big box stores—Walmart, agoraphobia, I think it’s called). What would life be like if we treated our workers fairly and paid them a decent wage? The word is honorable. It’s what being a Jew is about, no? Or so I had thought.

As to the interesting sartorial suggestion, there may be something in my contract that prohibits teaching in the nude. I’ll look.

Setting an ethical table

As I was reading yet another chapter in the on-going exposé of business as it’s conducted by the holier-than-thou crowd which runs Agriprocessors, the largest kosher meat slaughtering and packing institution in the country, I engaged in a thought experiment. If I had the choice of eating a steak produced by people who flaunt the laws of society, exploit first one group of workers, and then their replacements, or a pork chop produced by a packing plant that treated its workers with respect, paid them an honest wage and treated the animals humanely even in bringing them death, which would I chose? The kosher steak or the traif pork? On the one hand the steak from Agriprocessors is from a kosher animal which rabbis have certified was slaughtered according to halacha, Jewish religious ritual. On the other hand, the pork is chazer, but the people who bring it to my table aren’t. Thus the dilemma. The obvious solution, of course, is to go vegetarian. But that avoids the issue.

I’ve addressed this sort of thing before. Back in October 2006 I wrote about Conservative rabbis whose law committee voted against (yes against!) requiring Conservative Jewish employers paying their employees a living wage. There’s nothing in halacha that requires it, they complained; Jews would be at an economic disadvantage, they moaned as they washed their hands of the question. Now Conservative rabbis are taking the other position arguing that there is more to kashrut than the process by which kosher animals are slaughtered and prepared. There is an ethical component as well. It’s nice that the Movement is on the right side of an ethical issue this time.

Rabbi David Lincoln, emeritus of New York’s Park Avenue (Conservative) Synagogue is quoted in the Forward as saying “I think there’s a general feeling that in the Orthodox community, in many Orthodox communities, and especially in the more Haredi, more extreme Orthodox communities, there’s more concern for the strict rules of halacha, for how you cut the animal’s throat and how you examine the lungs. They’re not really concerned about whether you’re stealing, or whatever, or going into court and perjuring themselves.”

Harsh words. But some Orthodox rabbis agree. Shmuel Herzfeld, an Orthodox rabbi from Washington, DC wrote an op ed piece in the Times condemning the hypocrisy Agriprocessors and those who defend its practices, calling it a desecration of God’s name. He was roundly condemned in his turn by the Orthodox Union which certifies Agriprocessors. One Orthodox group, Uri L’Tzedek, describes itself as the Orthodox Social Justice Movement. Its website says that its purpose is “to develop the new, growing discourse among traditional Jewish communities making the connection between God, Torah, and social issues in America, and to help translate that discourse into action.” It has come out against the abuses at Agriprocessors but again, defenders of the see no evil, discuss no evil camp of the Orthodox attack it and its leaders.

So, must ethical people chose between pork and vegitarianism? Or can American Jews apply to ourselves the standards we hold dear when discussing America. Many of us abhore the policies of the current administration. It is our right. Is it an obligation to go public with our complaints? Of course. Are there those Jews to whom the administration is doing the right thing? Of course. Is it their right to defend? Certainly. Is either less American for doing so? Is one group demonstrably more patriotic than the other? P’shaw, of course not. Is America embarressed by the public outcry? I hope so. Should the public scrutiny cease? Not until a determination is made. It’s the same with the Agriprocessors scandal. Those of us who maintain a kosher household must weigh what we read and decide. To eat meat or to go parev. Hiding the truth, denying the truth is an abandonment of ethical principles. Knowing what I right is no secret. Read Micah. We know what God requires, what Judaism has always advocated—to do justice, to love goodness and to walk modestly with our God. Exploiting our workers for the purpose of greater profits, ignoring the prophets in the process cannot be defended. I won’t eat the pork, but meat produced by Agriprocessors is off my table.

The Bard and Barack

It’s summer time and the livin’, as Ira Gershwin wrote, is easy. The world has no fewer problems but the tendency is to put the serious stuff on the back burner until after the World Series. But people can go too far.

I have in mind Edward Achorn in Tuesday’s August 5 Providence Journal: “Was the Bard a secret Catholic?” is the question asked, and it will come as no surprise that the answer is a definitive “could be.” Achorn relies on Joseph Pearce’s The Quest for Shakespeare: The Bard of Avon and the Church of Rome. You may remember Pearce. He was a member of the British National Front, a neo-fascist society dedicated to race purity. Twice he served time for militant racism, but then he found the Catholic Church and reformed. Currently he is a professor of literature at the right-wing Catholic Ave Maria University.

The evidence Achorn selects from Pearce’s tome is interesting, but it’s the kind that people present when they want to make the case that Columbus was Jewish—as circumstantial as it is irrelevant. Achorn concludes his article with a graphic you-really-don’t-want-to-have-to-read-this-stuff-while-sipping-your-morning-coffee description of being drawn and quartered, a punishment meted out to Catholics in Elizabeth’s persecutions of them. This is followed by, “His works remain universal. But that Shakespeare might have been a hidden Catholic lends undeniable piquancy to the themes of power, honor and strained loyalty running so strongly through his work.”

If Catholics want to claim Shakespeare, it’s fine with me. But what is objectionable is that while Achorn uses as his source a (pseudo) academic and quotes a legitimate one—Anthony Esolen who contends that Pearce’s case is “meticulous, reasonable and convincing” he without cause or justification maligns academics in general. Hey! What’d I do?

“All this of course, [that Shakespeare was devout crypto-Catholic] must seem anathema to academics who wish to embrace Shakespeare as the spokesman of secular modernity. The popular creed of our day is that godless Man is all, and that elites, using Machiavellian means to advance themselves, should have as much power as possible to work their superior will over less enlightened human beings. In the view of some, Shakespeare had nothing specific to say about morality or religion, other than to question the legitimacy of both.”

Let’s parse this. To begin with there is no such thing as “academics”. We are, if anything, anarchists. No one of us speaks for another, and often enough, not even for ourselves. We are ready to admit that we favored something until we opposed it. We are a punching bag for conservatives who see our malign presence in the classroom as undermining everything they believe in, but the punching bag is never the aggressor; it’s the innocent bystander.

Is there really a stampede of academics embracing Shakespeare as the spokesman of secular modernity? Is secular modernity so immoral as Achorn assumes? I know conservatives who are atheists, liberals who believe in God and neither camp advocates immorality.

Now we get to the core. We secular modernist academics are elitists! And we don’t trust the common man to make decisions for themselves! And we are inappropriately co-opting Shakespeare, that moral Roman Catholic. I know you know, this, dear reader, but when conservatives use the word “elite” they are not talking about Noble Prize winners, nor even of Congressional Medal of Honor recipients. They are talking about liberals, especially liberal Democrats, and, now-a-days more particularly Barack Obama. It’s the cry of the right-wing haves who want to wrest the poor and the lower middle class away from the Democrats who have been their champions at least since the days of FDR.

Oh, and lest it goes unsaid. Poor Shakespeare was a crypto-Catholic because he feared torture and death at the hands of rabid Protestants? This is why he “revered justice, detested bullies, and fully understood the sinfulness and frailty of his fellow men and women”? Elizabeth’s predecessor, her half-sister Mary, burned Protestants at the stake and Guy Fawkes, a Catholic, tried to blow up Parliament. In Spain the Inquisition’s auto de fes were consuming Protestants, Moors and, need I remind you, Jews. Galileo was threatened with the same punishment for the same crime as Giordano Bruno who had been burned at the stake for teaching the Copernican theory. Let’s face it, Catholics at that time held no monopoly on being persecuted. Belief in God does not equate with moral behavior; secularists can be just as moral—or immoral—as religious folk.

Obama's flip-flops are growing worrisome

I’m worried about Obama. It’s not the usual right-wing bombast (he’s an anti-Israeli-crypto-Muslim). In fact, my problems are the opposite of theirs. Now that the nomination is surely his, he’s taken some “centrist” positions in a vain hope to win over moderate Republican support.

First it was agreeing with the Supreme Court’s gun decision. That strict constructionalists failed to notice the words referring to the maintaince of a well regulated militia as the raison d’être of the Second Amendment’s very limited acquiescence to individuals bearing arms amazes. In 1973 the Court said, “Let the slaughter intensify, legally” and it did. Now the Justices are saying it again, and it will. And Obama supports them. Narrowly the case was about whether people in Washington, DC had the right to a loaded gun in their house for self defense and a rifle for hunting, but the chuckleheads who constitute the NRA are going to take this as the opening shot to bring home an alleged right for anyone not yet convicted of a crime to pack a rod.

Then it was his advocacy of federal funds going to faith-based groups. That sound you hear is Thomas Jefferson rolling over in his grave, or maybe it’s the wall of separation between church and state cracking. Or both. Have we learned nothing from the Jim Jones fiasco? You remember Jim. He established Jonesville in the jungles of Guyana after first conning such luminaries as Vice President Walter Mondale and First Lady Rosalynn Carter, and then when his frauds were becoming public he had an investigating congressman and his entourage murdered and then ordered the mass suicide of his 900 Kool-Aid-drinking-faith-based-community. And now in his swing to the right Obama wants to give money to people who on the one hand say “We will use it wisely” and on the other object to government scrutiny of how they spend money—based on their constitutional right of separation of church from state.

Not that Obama isn’t getting pilloried from those with whom he is trying to make friends on the right. He is. When he spoke of giving federal funds to religious groups he hedged. “First, if you get a federal grant, you can’t use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help, and you can’t discriminate against them—or against the people you hire—on the basis of their religion.” Bill Donohue (I wrote about him in the December 8, 2006 edition of the Voice & Herald, you may recall) shouted “Fraud!” Donohue, who fronts the “Catholic League,” fulminated: “What Obama wants is to secularize the religious workplace.” He argues that Obama’s position is “a body blow to religious groups that apply for federal funds.”

And in this Donohue may be right (I hate to write that). Obama, who billed himself in this specious speech as “someone who used to teach constitutional law” ought to know better. Part of the reason for the separation of church and state is actually to protect religion from the state. If government can impose a requirement that religious institutions can not insist that people hired share their religious convictions and sensibilities than government would, in effect, be delivering the body blow of which Donohue protests. Oh what a tangled web Obama weaves when first he practices to, to what? To deceive? Maybe.

And has he changed his position on bringing the troops back from Iraq within 16 months of his taking the oath of office? I don’t know. He says “yes” and explains “no.” He challenges those such as me who hold him to our standards. I’ve been saying these things all along, he says; we weren’t listening. Ah, the fault dear reader is not in the man but in ourselves, for we were so desperate for change that we failed to pay attention. Is that what Obama is saying?

Not that John McCain has won my support. He is a Republican. George W. Bush is a Republican. Under Bush, though warned, we were attacked, we’ve fought the wrong enemy, spending trillions of dollars and thousands of lives while the price of fuel has skyrocketed, tens of thousands of jobs have been lost, the stock market is in free fall and the Taliban is on the rise. McCain is trying to put as much distance between himself and Bush as he can, but he’s still a Republican and while someday that emblem may not be a stigma, it is today. Just ask former Senator Lincoln Chaffee.

Morgan the Flying Dog

The Voice & Herald is on vacation. So this is a shabbatshalomagram message I sent out. Enjoy.

July 18, 2008

Shabbat Shalom, Haverim:

On Sunday last Penney watered the hanging geraniums we keep in flower boxes outside our bedroom and Sam’s. She filled the watering can, raised the window then the screen in Sam’s room and watered and she lowered the screen and the window. She went and re-loaded the can and came to our room where she raised the window and the screen and watered and lowered the screen and then we drove to Tanglewood (Hayden, Bach, intermission, Mozart, Schubert) where we rendezvous-ed with some friends. (I wonder if any of you were there as well? We saw some other people from Rhode Island; we always do, but I bet at least one other person on this list was there on the vast lawn or in the shed who we missed.)

We chatted, read, picnicked, looked up at the uncertain sky which serially sent forth sun, cloud, drizzle, sun, cloud, sun, drizzle, sun, and enjoyed. We drove home, stopping to eat at a pizzeria we like and arrived here at about 8:00. The odd thing is that the key didn’t open the door directly. The bolt, it turned out, had also been locked. Strange, I’m pretty sure I left the house last; I’m positive I didn’t lock the bolt. Ah, well. Morgan the Wonder Dog greeted us excitedly, complaining about the lack of fresh air, exercise, and toilet facilities, so we leashed her and took her out for a stroll around the block. There are two beagles in the neighborhood who compete for the honor of shrillest howlers as Morgan sachets past their homes. One lives to the West of the public tennis courts we walk around, the other directly opposite on the Eastern side. Sometimes their barking is in stereo. We smile condescendingly—stupid dogs, poor owners—and Morgan often turns her back to one or the other (as they are scrapping against glass windows barking and barking and barking) and squats, sticks her tail out vertically, and poops. “Take that you pesky Beagle,” she seems to be saying. We dutifully scoop and continue on.

As we returned to the house, conversation was on how one of us could have bolted the door and forgotten that he (or she—my choice) had. But as we got home I noticed that the flower basket was resting on the yew bush. It’s not supposed to be there; it’s supposed to be hanging in front of our bedroom window. I looked up and—voila! It wasn’t there. I pointed this out to Penney and realized that our across the street neighbor Rick has a key to the house and that he often turns the bolt when we’ve asked him to come in and feed the dog or whatever. “Rick must have bolted the door,” I said. “But why, she asked?” The window box has something to do with it,” I Sherlocked.

So when we got in, I called Rick. Yes he had been in the house. The dog had been out. “Huh?” I asked in my most unsherlockian tone. “Well, Andy from next door rang my bell this afternoon and he had Morgan by the collar and asked what we should do with her. I said I had the key so I’d bring her back. I did, then I checked to see that all the doors and windows were closed on the first floor; they were, so I left bolting the door behind me,” he reported.

Even though it was only 8:30 at night, the dawn was breaking. Penney went upstairs to our bedroom and invoked the deity. “The screen, it’s gone and there’s the impression of a dog in the bush below!”

It was all clear to us now. Morgan, upstairs (rummaging through the wastebasket, I’m sure—this is how she punishes us) had heard one of her (many) enemies walking in front of the house. She charged towards the window, went through the screen, knocking over the flower box in the process and either flew (in a manner of speaking) or plummeted (same result) onto the bush, apparently unscathed. At some point later one across the street neighbor collared her and the other brought her home, checked the doors and windows and left confused, wondering how she could have gotten out, bolting the door behind him.

That night, as we went to bed, Penney had a thought. “I wonder what the person who was walking by the house thought as he saw first the screen, then the flower box then the dog fly from the second floor window. I imagine that he picked up his dog and ran like hell. I would have.” “Me, too,” I laughed, and so did she.

So that was our Sunday. Nu? What was yours like?

As always I wish you all a week filled with love and joy, peace and prosperity, good health and the wonder of discovery. Be strong and resolute, Haverim.

Again, Shabbat Shalom.

I send you all my love,

Josh

On things French (and Hasidic)

Ha! And you thought the recent Obama v. Clinton rivalry was hot, that the upcoming Obama v. McCain tussle will be rough and ready. Pshaw! You’ve not been paying attention if you think these political struggles are the most virulent around. Try the recent contest for Chief Rabbi of France. Now there, mon Dieu, is a struggle of epic proportions fought in hit-below-the-belt ferocity. I grant that it doesn’t sink quite to the level of the recent Zimbabwe debacle, but still…

The incumbent was Joseph Sitruk a 63-year-old Sephardic rabbi originally from Tunisia known for his common touch. The challenger was 56-year-old Gilles Bernheim, an Ashkenazi philosopher from Alsace who is the rabbi of Paris’ largest synagogue. As in Israel, Sephardi Jews had felt under appreciated and sought a greater voice in communal affairs. This was achieved in 1987 when Sitruk was elected Chief Rabbi. Bernheim challenged his reelection in 1994 (the post is for seven years) and lost in the usual “Ho-hum-the-communal-leaders-are-choosing-another-figure-head” election. Now, however, the gloves are off. Blame the internet. Martine Cohen, an expert on French Judaism at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris does. She argues that “This is the first time such an election draws so much attention…The new technology allows many more people to ‘connect’ and to have rumors spread on the Internet.” Fortunately that sort of thing never happens here.

Someone calling himself “an indignant rabbi” posted what was purported to be Bernheim’s candidacy announcement in which he appeared to be making disparaging remarks about Sitruk. But it was a fake, a French swiftboating. Another charge floating around was that Bernheim was spending too much time with Catholics. In France this is hard not to do. But then the accusatory piece went further, seeming to justify the crucifixion of Jesus. Gevalt. Catholics took note and were displeased. The election, which took place on June 22, is not a democratic one. Three hundred rabbis and local communal leaders from around the country meet in conclave. It’s not quite a white smoke affair, but it’s along the same lines. (So that the suspense won’t kill you, Bernheim won the election 184 to 99.)

Rabbinical infighting takes place in America, too, but in a localized fashion. In Brooklyn, amongst the Hassidim there are two on-going disputes. In the Satmir community two brothers vied to succeed their father as grand rabbi and even brought their conflicting claims to the American legal system. The Chabad movement is split over whether the late Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson is or is not the messiah. The group that controls the basement synagogue of the iconic 770 Eastern Parkway headquarters, argues that he is, the group that controls the upper floors vehemently argues that he’s not.

Last week French President Nicolas Sarkozy was in Israel. He was greeted warmly as a friend by all factions. In his speech before the Knesset he said all the right things:

Israel and France share deep friendship that has stood test of time
French ties with the Jewish people has enriched France’s culture
French people will always stand by Israel when it is threatened
France is committed to the struggle against terrorism
France will stop anyone who calls for Israel’s destruction
Israel is not alone in its battle against Iran’s nuclear ambitions
France is ready to aid in efforts to free abducted IDF soldiers

On some other points, there can be disagreement:

Palestinians have a right to a viable state of their own
Peace is not possible without the immediate end to Israeli settlement activity
There can be no peace without a solution to problem of Palestinian refugees
Jerusalem must be recognized as the capital of two states as a condition for peace

Jerusalem as a dual capital is a suggestion whose practicality I question. The Palestinian refugee problem is a thorn. These poor people have been living in a virtual no-man’s land ever since 1948. Is it Israel’s fault that their Arab brethren didn’t absorb them the way Jewish refugees were absorbed into Israel? Whether they left the territory that became Israel voluntarily or by force, it is impossible to repatriate them without Israel losing the essential nature of its mission. Arabs claim a right of return. It’s not going to happen in any but a symbolic way. That Sarkozy chose to bring this issue up is unfortunate, but placed within the context of his overall message, that France stands with Israel, Zionists can be reassured of France’s position.

tribute to a friend

Each morning I wake up and throw a stone. An early first century rabbi suggested this and as his advice was generally humane, I follow it. Being as I am without sin (except possibly of hubris) I keep my record clean by aiming at an inanimate object, often a photo of a politician or a terrorist. Duty done I retrieve the stone, not wanting to be accused of the sin of untidiness and go forth onto the world at large.

It’s not that I don’t confess sin; I do that annually. But those confessions are mumbled sotto voce. The problem is that I haven’t actually committed any of them and some I would never think to commit. Nevertheless, based on the theory that someone somewhere did these things I repent of them, beating my breast with the strings of my tallis wrapped around my fingers.

I mention this because of a discussion in my schul last week. My rabbi, Alvan Kaunfer, is retiring from the pulpit (again—he’s done this once before to head up the Schechter School, but this time I fear it’s for real). In his penultimate d’var torah he led a discussion: “When someone commits any wrong toward a fellow, thus breaking faith with the Lord, and that person realizes his guilt, they shall confess the wrong that they have done and shall make restitution” (Numbers 5:6-7).

He then presented three commentaries. Maimonides says this confession must be in words spoken to the offended party accompanied by a promise not to commit such an offense again. A contemporary went one step further explaining that with the oral confession the person “will become careful not to do the same thing again; and as a result, becomes reconciled with his Creator.” In fact, says a still earlier commentary, “If a person is guilty of a transgression, and makes a confession but does not change his behavior…it is to no avail.”

The question Rabbi Kaunfer posed to the assembled was, “How important is confessing/admitting to wrong, in the process of changing one’s behavior? How important is it to do this verbally?” Hands flew up (but under the circumstances not mine, of course). We talked about sins against God and sins against people and debated the different means of obtaining absolution, or even if absolution was possible. One congregant whose professional life puts him in contact with violent criminals, people who have been convicted of rape, murder, armed robbery, etc. said that in such circumstances restitution is impossible; the only way to atone is to show publicly one’s genuine remorse. But I wondered at the relevance of this. I’m pretty sure that most of the people in my congregation do not commit, nor would they think to commit, such heinous sins. We promise something and forget to deliver; or we add a dubious deduction onto our tax return and if challenged will pay up; I know a fellow who took a pen home from the supply cabinet at work; and a pad of paper as well. These are the sins I imagine most people in that room capable of committing. Murder? I think not.

Then someone suggested what I’d been thinking. Maybe we do more harm by confessing than by keeping quiet. If against all odds I sinned against someone and they don’t know about it (which was the premise of the Torah statement) why tell them? A silent vow not to repeat accomplishes the same object without injuring again, though differently, the party sinned against. Back and forth the ideas flew. As they did, I remembered the 2004 presidential election. Mr. Bush was asked if he had made any mistakes in his first term. He essentially responded, “no.” He was asked if he’d ever made a mistake and replied certainly in letting Sammy Sosa get away when he’d owned the Texas Rangers and possibly in some of his sub-cabinet appointments, but he didn’t say whom. Apparently George Bush believes that if he did it there’s nothing to atone for. I’m not so sure.

Last Sunday there was a festive gathering to honor Rabbi Kaunfer, in case this really is his final departure from Temple Emanu-El. By count 613 people came to hear his praises sung and to concur in the encomiums. He will be missed; thought provoking discussions such as we had last Shabbat are but a small reason. If ever someone deserved the honorific “mensch” it’s Alvan Kaunfer, my friend, who never lets an opportunity to do good pass.

Selling our Soul

Yehezkel Dror is the founding president of the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, a professor emeritus of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a recipient of the Israel Prize and a member of the Winograd commission of inquiry into Israel’s war with Hezbollah in 2006. He’s also the man who ruined my day a week ago. That latter is the least of his sins.

In a Forward column of May 23 he opines that “when the survival of the Jewish people conflicts with the morals of the Jewish people, is existence worthwhile or even possible?” And then he answers his own question: “Physical existence…must come first. No matter how moral a society aspires to be, physical existence must take precedent…realpolitik should be given priority [over morality]…Regrettably, human history refutes the idealistic claim that in order to exist for long, a state, society or people has to be moral…The calculus of realpolitik gives primacy to existence, leaving limited room for ethical considerations.”

Realpolitik is a term coined by Otto von Bismarck. It is best exemplified in a speech he made to the Prussian Landtag (parliament) in September 1862, shortly after his appointment as Chancellor. The king wanted to make Prussia a military state; the Landtag objected. Bismarck, soon to be known as the Iron Chancellor (he spoke metaphorically of his iron fist inside a velvet glove) told a parliamentary committee that “The position of Prussia in Germany will not be determined by its liberalism but by its power … Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be decided…but by blood and iron.” And Bismarck was true to his word. He fabricated a war against Denmark, and another against Austria and a third against France and the blood flowed and the iron ripped into bellies and Germany was united under Prussian militarism. And then it brought about the First World War and then the Second World War. The Germans have finally learned that when you abandon morality for realpolitik you get neither.

Dror continues: “Let us leave aside reliance on transcendental arguments, biblical commands and sayings of the sages…” To which I ask, “And still be Jews?” Is such possible? Without morality, we, the weakest people on the planet would be doomed to wander, eking our way through history without contributing anything to world culture. Israel surviving without morality as its life’s blood would be a Jewish Golem, an artificial body without a soul; it would be as a hollow tree, surviving until the axe-man comes for firewood. This is what we want?

Dror continues by offering what philosophers call a reduction ad absurdum; a false choice that we must chose morality or survival. I don’t know if the Jewish people are unique in this, but one thing that’s maintained our status as a lamp unto the nations is that historically (maybe because there’s been so little choice) Jews have opted for the moral high ground that Dror so facilely would have us surrender.

One more point: “But at the end of the day,” Dror tells us, “there is no way around the tough and painful practical implications of prioritizing existence as an overriding moral norm over being moral in other respects. When important for existence, violating the rights of others should be accepted, with regret but with determination.” I imagine that these very words are the ones muttered by Ahmed as he straps the plastique onto the torso of Abdul whose assignment is to go to the local pizzeria in Tel Aviv.

Enough of Dror. The same issue of the Forward has an article by Gideon Levy of Haaretz. He wants Americans to stay out of Israel’s politics. He especially wants rich Americans such as Morris Talansky not to bribe Israeli politicians such as Ehud Olmert. “Leave us alone. Take your hands off Israel. Stop using your money to buy influence in Israel. Stop contributing to advance your interests and views, some of which are at times delusionary and extremely dangerous to the future of the country you’re supposedly trying to protect.” In other words, Israel is capable of taking the high ground; the realpolitik of the politician who contaminates the morality of the State and his foreign investor is, or will be, the ruin of the nation. Good for Levy.

Is there a local angle here? You bet there is. Our Jewish Federation, the organization that publishes this newspaper, has made a grievous error. We have squandered the high moral ground for $30,000. We have taken the advice of Dror and rejected the wisdom of Levy. I refer, of course, to our recent participation with the Reverend John Hagee, the selfsame who declared that the Holocaust was God’s way of removing the Jews from Europe and resettling the survivors in Palestine. The same Reverend John Hagee who calls the Catholic Church the Great Whore which has thirsted for Jewish blood throughout history. The same Reverend Hagee who announced that he knew that Katrina struck New Orleans when it did with such devastating force because there was a scheduled gay pride march which the hurricane prevented. When John McCain learned of the God works through Hitler blasphemy he renounced Hagee’s endorsement and in the process stood to lose 2,000,000 potential votes, for thus is the impact of Mr. Hagee. We went to an event in Seekonk where at an Evangelical church (I know nothing of the politics of this church or its minister) we received a check for $30,000 made out to a hospital in Jerusalem which we immediately gave to Rabbi Jonathan Hausman of Stoughton, Massachusetts who will forward it to Alyn Hospital. What were we doing there? Didn’t we know the money was tainted by Hagee’s presence? For $30,000 we gave the man credibility at the cost of our own? As Gideon Levy would say, “Leave us alone. Take your hands off Israel. Stop using your money to buy influence in Israel. Stop contributing to advance your interests and views, some of which are at times delusionary and extremely dangerous to the future of the country you’re supposedly trying to protect.” To which I say, Amen.

Religious World Thhrough an Athesitic Prism

I’ve just finished reading Christopher Hitchens’ god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. His thesis is two-fold—religion is the work of man, not of divine origin (and it’s used to exploit the fearful) and, as the subtitle suggests, it has no redeeming value; in fact it’s poison. Nu? So what do I think? The first part of the thesis is obviously true on the face of things. Of course religion is the work of man (which should not be read as a denial of the existence of God). People have known this since time immemorial or at least since the Greeks began to think about things. Xenophanes of Colophon (570-480 BCE) noticed that the gods of the “Ethiopians are black and snub-nosed, those of the Thracians have blue eyes and red hair.” The second part of the thesis is more problematic. “Everything” includes a lot of things. Can religion really poison them all? Well, Pope Alexander VI is a well known example of someone who did, in fact, use poison, but Hitchens doesn’t even bother to mention him, though he does include in his rogues’ gallery of examples such icons as Mother Teresa and Mohandas Gandhi.

What are we, the religious people of the world, to make of this? The simple answer is to point out all the errors of fact that mar Hitchens’ work. At some point I started to take account. My dozen examples may be his only gaffs, or the tip of the iceberg; in any event his credibility is undermined. (Examples: William Jennings Bryan was three times—not twice the Democratic candidate for president; scholars believe Jesus was born in 4 BCE, not 4 CE.) We could point to the ethics religions (whether man-made or divine in origin) provide to help guide lives honestly and productively. But he has an answer to that, two in fact. One is the obvious rejoinder that you don’t need religion to have ethics. Atheists and agnostics are potentially as ethical as religious people (and have never burned the religious at the stake). They believe in a natural law perhaps, not a revealed one. And secondly, he asks, are religious people all that ethical? Some are, but remember Alexander VI, and the recent Catholic priests’ sexual abuse scandal, and the Orthodox rabbi who cheated old people in his nursing home. Need I go on?

David Klinghoffer in his valedictory column in the Forward defends religion, Judaism specifically. (I really hate to see him go; Noam Neusner, like his famous father, a former Providentian, is the new conservative voice on the op-ed page, but I’d gotten used to Klinghoffer. Who else could be so wrong so often? Young Mr. Neusner has big shoes to fill.) In this final column Klinghoffer manages to equate liberalism with Hitlerism, a form of journalistic legerdemain unmatched since Goebbles defended Germany’s invasion of Yugoslavia with his famous three lie sentence: “Peace loving Germany was viciously attacked by war mongering Yugoslavia.” To Klinghoffer, while Hitler didn’t believe humans could overcome their nature, real Jews do, but Libels don’t, so liberals are like Hitler. I’m really sorry to see him go. Doesn’t he know that liberals are really Commie Pinkos who are secretly trying to undermine the country? Every Rush Limbaugh Conservative knows that. Klinghoffer argues that liberals believe in gay marriage and handing out condoms in schools since gays and students are simply acting according to their nature and their hormones. Ah, but the Jewish sages have for a thousand years taught that to overcome our nature is why God put us on earth. To this Hitchens would ask: The Great Intelligent Designer gave us hormones and instincts only so that we could suppress them? I add—And give untold business to Freud and his?

In a recent New York Times op-ed piece Edward Luttwak discusses apostasy as viewed by Islam. Those who think that as the son of an African Muslim Obama will be in a better position to negotiate with Muslims are sadly mistaken. Because his father was a Muslim, Islam considers him to be a Muslim despite his father’s having renounced the religion, and despite his own conscious decision to become a Christian. The punishment for this backsliding is beheading by a cleric. It’s worse than murder as the victim’s family can forgive the murderer, but God and Islam can never forgive the apostate. Hitchens would ask where, exactly, in this scenario is the benefit of religion to society? I wonder myself.

Uzis at the Ready?

The questions of the day are two. Here’s the first: Who would like to see a viable peace in the Middle East with Arabs and Jews living harmoniously in nations side-by-side? Raise your hands. Let’s see, there’s one, two, ten, a thousand, one hundred million, two hundred million.

Now the second question: How many think this will occur in your lifetime? One, two, three, ten, fifteen, sixteen...seventeen......that’s it? I grant, this is not the most scientific of polls, but is there any evidence at all that Arab leaders really want peace with Israel? Hamas leaders? Hezbollah leaders? Syrian leaders? Has peace been possible since 1948? Yes. Has peace been achieved? No. (Well, “yes” if one counts Jordan and Egypt but “no” once those governments are toppled by Islamic fundamentalists.)

So, Happy Birthday Israel. Keep your Uzis close at hand.

In recent days former president Carter has visited leaders of Hamas and declared that they seek peace. This was immediately contradicted by leaders of Hamas. Love or loathe him, Carter is not stupid. So if he said “yes” and they said “no,” it’s obvious that Hamas set him up for a fall. They betrayed their own advocate. Can we expect them to honor their (former) foe?

Last week there was complaint from Palestinians about President Bush’s up-coming trip to Israel to celebrate its sixtieth birthday. He’s already met with Mahmoud Abbas, president of... (well, I’m not sure what. “The Palestinian Authority” is his official title, but he seems to have only a little authority over Palestinians in the West Bank and none at all in Gaza.) Bush said after the meetings that he “remained confident that talks could produce parameters for a Palestinian state.” (OK, another poll: Raise your hands if you know what that means? Seeing none, we’ll proceed.) The president of the United States went on to say, “I assured the president that a Palestinian state’s a high priority for me and my administration: a viable state, a state that doesn’t look like Swiss cheese, a state that provides hope. I’m confident we can achieve the definition of a state.” Achieve the definition of a state? Can a man whose goals are so nebulous be expected to accomplish anything? Does he even have the vaguest idea of what he hopes to accomplish? And was it necessary to insult Helvetians in the bargain? Abbas (who, as a former top aide of Yassir Arafat must be used to double-talk) responded graciously, praising Mr. Bush for “seeking a true, genuine and lasting peace in the Middle East.”

The two presidents are scheduled to meet again in Sharm el Sheik, Egypt, not in Ramallah, the temporary capital of Greater Palestine (until all of Jerusalem can be liberated). My guess is that this is less an overt insult to the Palestinians than an imperative imposed by the Secret Service. “It’s a slap in the face,” said Dianna Buttu, a former negotiator for Abbas. Bush is “saying to the Palestinians ‘You have no history, and your past does not matter.’ He’s not visiting a refugee camp, he’s not meeting survivors of the forced expulsion.” Mustafa Barghouti, a former Palestinian information minister chimed in: “The lack of sensitivity to this matter is very prominent. Forty-eight was, of course, the date when Israel was created but it’s also a very sad date for Palestinians who were dispossessed from their lands. It’s a very deep scar in Palestinian life.”

Does anybody out there see any hope for peace in any of this? Deep scars of the political and emotional kind do not heal. They get infected when palliative measures are not sought, when those who bear the scars prefer to let them fester to prove a point rather than take steps to heal the wounds. Those refugee camps are still in place because Israel wants them? Bush should go to Israel to honor its
60th birthday and also commiserate with the Palestinians? This makes sense to someone?

How many times could there have been peace in the Middle East? Let me count the ways. After 1948, after 1956, after 1967, after 1973, after Oslo, after Madrid, after Camp David, during the Clinton initiative. Is there anything now, other than a one state solution that would return all of Palestine (from the River to the Sea) to the Palestinians that can bring about peace? A peace devoutly to be wished by anti-Zionists everywhere.

Happy Birthday, Israel. Keep your Uzis at the ready.

Passover thoughts, 2008 (5768)

Passover looms. The dishes and pots and glasses and utensils have been schlepped from storage to cabinet, replacing their everyday equivalents which were simultaneously schlepped from cabinet to storage until the chag is over and we can eat bagels again.

So, it’s time to ask (yet again) what the holiday, the holy day, is all about. It has some unusual rules—what was kosher this week won’t be next week. On the other hand, things permitted during Passover can be done anytime (except for the slouching. My mother never let me slouch at meals. [“Reclining, Mom,” I’d tell her, “I’m reclining, not slouching.] It did me no good.)

To the rabbis of antiquity telling the story of the Exodus speaks of the miracles of God in the liberation of His people. More modern, nearly contemporary secular Jews saw the story as one of liberation only. The miracles? Well, maybe. But the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto who chose Passover, in 1943 to make their last stand were not expecting a miracle; they were hoping for nothing more than that a few escape while the rest died with at least a remnant of dignity.

To me Passover is or ought to be the Jewish equivalent of the first Monday in September or May 1st. It’s Jewish Labor Day, a celebration of the triumph of the downtrodden worker. Oppressed so hard they could not stand, our ancestors overcame to become the role models to Negro slaves in the antebellum South. Both communities, Hebrews and Africans were exploited labor, both sought relief from God or man, whoever arrived first.

But while our tables groan under the weight of the food placed on it; as we drink the final intoxicating drop from the fourth cup of wine; as we open the door for Elijah to join our celebrations, scant attention will be paid to what’s in the dark, beyond that door. Two weeks ago the newspapers reported that 80,000 American jobs had been lost in the month of March, the most in 5 years, the third straight month of losses. Some, I suppose, may be replaced by those whose labor can be purchased at sub-standard wages.

In Israel there is a kibbutz near Eliat which may reflect current practices. The well educated Israelis work up north in business, and give their net salary to the kibbutz which then uses the money in part to employ Tai workers of the fields. Sic transit Gloria tzion. Does the Jew of Israel no longer believe in the nobility of labor? Is the Jew of Israel interested only in the bottom line? Has Thatcherism and Reaganism spread so far? It seems the sad truth. Of whom do Americans who send jobs to China or exploit cheap labor here think when they point to the matzah and pronounce, “This is the bread of our affliction? We were slaves in Egypt…”
When we invite people to our table (“All who are hungry come and eat”) we offer matzah, the bread of affliction, the bread of poverty. It’s what we eat as well so that there is no difference between what we serve ourselves and those in want. We are all equal on Passover, the rich the poor, all of us are descendants from slaves eating the food of slaves on the threshold of liberty.
If we are to think of Passover as though we were in fact slaves, as the Haggadah enjoins, then it’s obvious that Passover is the story of the redemption of oppressed labor. Their burden was heavy, their lives miserable, like the sweatshop workers so many of our grandparents were at the turn of the previous century. At our house we read excepts of the original text of Exodus (something the Rabbis apparently thought unnecessary or distracting, as they didn’t include that in the service) and we sing of liberation—We Shall Overcome, and Battle Hymn of the Republic (though not the “In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea” part); and to the same tune, Solidarity Forever! Always we conclude by singing the song of modern liberation, Hatikvah, to me the hope not only of Zionists to recreate a Jewish homeland, but the hope that Jews will not forget that from which we emerged—an oppressed people yearing to be free, the tired the poor of the age of miracles then of the post-holocaust world now. It was as workers of the field that Jews re-created Israel. Now that’s work for foreigners?

"Lord, what fools these mortals be!"

Lord, what fools these mortals be!
(Puck [Robin Goodfellow] in A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, Act 3, scene 2.)

As if Israeli police don’t have enough problems, there’s a new fracas in the offing. Long ago, even before Sunnis and Shiites started slaughtering each other, Christians were killing other Christians. The cause? A proper understanding of who and/or what Jesus was; a proper understanding of the relationship between the three Persons of the Holy Trinity. This is a series of arguments Jews managed somehow not to have with each other, and I, for one, thought that in the name of sanity that a via media by which each sect agreed not to persecute members of the others had been reached. But Christians can’t agree on things any more than Muslims. Or Jews.

In 326 CE, St. Helen, the mother of the Emperor Constantine the Great, traveled to the Holy land and identified exactly where every event mentioned in the New Testament took place. “The birth was here,” she pronounced pointing to the spot where there arose the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. “Our Lord was crucified here, anointed there and entombed (from which on the third day He emerged) precisely here.” In short order a huge church was built to encompass all three of these latter spots, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Identifying where something took place 300 + years before is difficult, but did not stop the saint from her appointed task. After all, Jesus had to be crucified somewhere and St. Helen’s location is as good as anyone’s. (The last time we were in Israel we wanted to visit this holy shrine but got lost in the backstreets of the Arab shuk. My wife approached a merchant and asked how to get to the church and I knew that our children’s inheritance would be diminished considerably. He showed us; in fact he took us and gave us a mini-tour and then brought us back to his shop. By the time we were able to extricate ourselves… well, she looks lovely in the items we purchased at bargain rates.)

The Christian community has fractured many times over the centuries. There is the split between east and west that became official in 1054. The Orthodox Church has as many branches as there are nations that adhere to it. In the West from 1517 on Protestants divided, subdivided and continue to create new and fascinating versions of the one true holy apostolic church. Whether Mormons are Christian is a debate I choose not to enter.

But back to the Holy Land, which Zionists such as myself call Israel, there is a new feud developing. No one Christian sect controls the church of the Holy Sepulchre. It’s been divided amongst six different forms of Christianity with precise lines of demarcation ever since 1852 when the Turks, in a vain attempt to stop the shouting, divided authority between the sects and left other areas as common (which means that no one controls them, so no one cleans them which creates a terrible odor from the lavatories. No, I’m not making this up.)

To complicate matters, at noon on every Easter eve (I don’t know what that means either) the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, currently Theophilos III, descends into the tomb in which Jesus was briefly buried and receives from God, fire. According to an article in the April 7, 1982 Christian Century, “The event consists of the sending down of fire by God, the bursting forth of flame at the sacred tomb and the lighting of the candle held in the hand of the Greek Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem.” It should be noted that this sort of thing has precedent. Two weeks ago Jews read parsha Sh’mini, about the dedication of the Tabernacle. God sent fire then, too. It is said.)

But for the past couple of years the Greek Patriarch has refused to be accompanied by the Armenian patriarch who is slighted, feeling that the Greeks are treating Armenians as second-class Christians. Fisticuffs have resulted. Israeli authorities arrest the miscreant monks, but then release them. Oh, if you’ve not read about the fights it’s because Christians can’t seem to agree on when precisely to celebrate Easter. In the West this year it was March 23. To the Orthodox it will be April 27. Israeli police are hoping that the only sparks flying will be the divine ones sent from heaven.

Lord, what fools these mortals be/To take religion seriously.

A Purim piece (redux)

Josh Stein is on a research assignment in Greece. He sends this classic piece for the Purim edition.

I remember my first Purim as a groom. It was the last day of our F. Scot and Zelda period. We were in England on a quick exchange. We’d swapped houses with a professor of British colonial history who needed a place to stay in Rhode Island. It was a marriage made in heaven, much like the one upon which I was embarking.

Our plane landed the day before Purim and being young and in love, my wife and I had celebrated the beginning of the holiday by ourselves, drinking to excess in the traditional manner, falling fast asleep on top of the down mattress we had the pleasure of using for those two weeks. The next morning around midnight (according to my biological clock, though it was 6:00 a.m. English time) we heard a pounding on the front door. We both responded with the same articulate grunts, “Huh, wha’ what’s happening?” More pounding. I got up, not knowing where and when my clothes had come off. More pounding. Whoever it was, he or they were certainly persistent. “I can’t go down to the door like this,” I protested. “Here, wear this,” saith the bride. Hurriedly I put on her pink shorty robe. Inside out. Naturally I could not find the buttons and because of an obvious discrepancy between her sveltness and my rotundity I couldn’t properly close the thing. Stumbling out the door of the bedroom, half blindly (my glasses hadn’t been anywhere near my fumbling fingers when I’d shot bolt upright as the pounding began), I found the stairs, and trooped down, half falling, half stumbling, fully confused, head throbbing, eyes bleary, mouth dry, hair a shambles, eyes bloodshot. After an interminable moment I remembered how to unlock the bolt and I threw the portal open to confront an uncaring world.

The man I blearily saw hadn’t shaved that day, nor the day before, apparently. He wore work cloths that hadn’t been washed since the Blitz. He stared at me incredulously. I stared back at him with wonder—as in “I wonder what this fellow is, and what he wants?” He attempted to resolve the issue by saying, screaming at me, really, “DOOSTBINMIN” which did not do a great deal to clarify anything. “What?” I shouted in reply. “DOOSTBINMIN” he said, still louder. “What?” “ROOBISH!” Well, this was not getting us very far.

By now Penney had gotten dressed and sylphlike glided down the stairs. (She’d just abandoned Zelda and entered her Loretta Young phase). She said to me, calmly. “Josh, he’s the dustbin man and he wants to collect our rubbish.” “Oh,” I said sheepishly, glad once again that I’d married a linguist. “Tha’s right, Guv,” said the now smiling dustbinmin, as he lasciviously eyed my pretty bride and waited for me to collect any household garbage we might have. Sadly the owners had left us a spotless home to move into, so there was none Feeling abashed at the lack I found a slipper half chewed by some kind of animal I’m glad to say we never actually saw. This meager object I placed into a plastic bag and proudly presented to our garbage man, who looked at the meager offerings with ill-disguised disdain. “Tha’ it, Guv?” he asked. “Yup,” I said, sheepishly. “Right-o,” he replied. “Hag Purim Sameach!” and off he went.

My mouth agape I tried calling after him. “How’d you know we were Jewish, that this is Purim?” But the words didn’t come out, and as I saw him toss our trash into the back of the big garbage truck I’d somehow failed to notice until this point, he waved enigmatically and that was the last I saw of him on that morning. “A Jewish dustbinmin?” I mumbled snobbishly.

Only later did I find out what really happened that morning. Our dustbin man was, in fact, the rabbi of the local Reform (they call it “Liberal”) synagogue who was a friend of the house’s owner who had told him that Jews were moving in for a couple of weeks. In the spirit of Purim the rabbi had donned the garb of a garbage man and pulled our legs. After all these years (thirty by last count) we still exchange Purim cards and visit each other when we are in the other’s country. An odd way to begin a life-long friendship, but life is strange with its twists and turns. Just ask Queen Esther.

Boomers in the White House (Or: How I guessed wrong)

Caveat Lector. Reader, beware! In 1980 I confidently predicted that President Carter would narrow defeat Ronald Reagan. In 1992 I was sure that President George H.W. Bush would defeat little known Bill Clinton. In 2000 it was obvious that Al Gore would win over George W. Bush. (On that one I was right, except that…well, you know…) So I’ve given up on predicting presidential contests, even primaries. By the time you read this Obama will probably be the prohibitive favorite, or even the nominal nominee of the Democratic Party (whoops, poor Obama, I’ve just made a prediction!). The rules of the game are that I can’t endorse, and I wouldn’t, but I can comment in the comment section of this paper, and so I will.

Those who voted in the Democratic Primary earlier this month were purportedly given a choice between style (Obama) and substance (Clinton). But as Barbara Fields alluded last week, there might be more than that; we were given a choice between my generation and the next, and for those of us in my age-range we can compare to those in our parents’ generation.

My parents’ generation was represented by Kennedy and Nixon, the one the golden boy of change, the other an exemplar of suspicion and trickery; Ford and Carter are of their generation too, both men of honor, neither up to the job; Reagan was a throwback, the front man for those who wanted ever since its inception to undo the New Deal. Then after H.W. Bush it was my generation’s turn to produce presidents. We gave you Clinton and Bush, both draft evaders, the former a womanizer whose indiscretions cost his party its hold of congress and later the presidency. The latter is a failed example of a puppet king who succeeded in doing his masters’ task, lowering their taxes, and then thought he could assume the mantle of leadership by creating an unnecessary war, and in so doing has alienated 70% of the country.

My generation was the product of the sexual revolution (thanks to Hugh Heffner, et al.) and rock and roll—that most mindless of music which has now further degenerated into the non-music of racial slur, misogamy and gangstas. We were babied by our doting parents who had survived the Great Depression and the Second World War, determined that we should have what they had not, and we appreciated it. But if Clinton and Bush are our representative presidents, we have failed to live up to our enormous potential.

Now another Clinton is running for president. At first she seemed to be the prohibitive favorite, the all but anointed champion of her party, the heir presumptive to her husband’s popularity. She was thought of as inevitable. And she was. Until the voters had their say. First in Iowa, then in South Carolina, then not able to eliminate her rival on Super Tuesday she suffered a string of defeats until the March 4th contests which are before me, but by the time you read these words you will know whether she was able to survive as a viable candidate, or not. Yes, she’s strong on policy, but she’s of my generation, and therefore I think that she’ll lose; I think the American public has had enough of us baby-boomers whose time in office was brief (16 years) but perhaps too long.

Obama on the other hand seems to have surmounted the twin trials of being inexperienced and half African. He is reputed to be a Manchurian Candidate, a crypto Muslim who will betray America and Israel. It’s nonsense, of course, but such are the tactics of conservatives who fear that he will defeat whomsoever the Republicans put up—whether it be the aged war hero or the amusing creationist.

As a people we seem at this writing to be at the tipping point. Should we give one more chance to the old discredited generation, or take a blind leap of faith towards the new? Not to belabor the cliché, but it’s the same question voters were asked to resolve in 1960. Nixon the man of experience, who while the same age as Kennedy, seemed a throwback to the old, or take a chance on the less experienced visionary. Then, narrowly, we looked forward. Today? I think we will again. My generation has failed America in its offerings as president. I think America is looking for new hope in a new generation of mixed blood. I may be wrong. It’s happened before.


A correction: Last week quotation marks were inadvertently omitted, making it appear that I had said that I would like to ban the writings of David Duke, etc. but that we don’t do those things in America. While I agree with the sentiment, the words were not mine; I was quoting a colleague, J. S. Friedman of the College of Wooster in Ohio.