A pagan and an atheist on religion re: Klinghoffer

Those of you who know me know the depths of my piety. So rigorous is my observance of the laws of Judaism that I constantly search for a six-hundred-fourteenth commandment to obey. Until recently, no luck. So it might come as a surprise that four times a year, around my oval table, I entertain two old friends, Paulie (“Poopidingus”) Pearlman, and Artie (“the Dodger”) Alston. Poopidingus is a practicing pagan; Artie, a devout atheist. This despite the fact that both were born to Jewish mothers; I attended their bar mitzvahs.

Over the years we've worked out a pattern. I say kiddish over the wine, Paulie the motzi, and Artie leads birkat. In unison, looking at our respective wives we stutter along through the interminable list of their virtues cited alphabetically in the Eishet Chayil. Why a pagan and an atheist would engage in these Jewish rituals I'm not sure. I, for instance don't sacrifice goats in Poopidingus's backyard. Just to make things kosher in their eyes we end the evening by singing the “Internationale,” for Artie, and “Diana” for Paulie (“I'm so young and you're so old/This, my darling I've been told/I don't care just what they say/'Cause forever I will pray/You and I will be as free/As the birds up in the trees/Oh, please, stay by me, Diana”) which is the closest to a pagan hymn he can find in English.

But this time Paulie arrived madder than Zeus with a toothache. “Did you see Klinghoffer in the April 20th Forward?” As we hadn't, he pulled out his copy and showed it to us. “It's titled 'Defend your Faith when it's Blasphemed.' My goddess (remind me to hit you up for another chai—we're having a building campaign to reconstruct Temple Beth Artemis which burned down a few years ago). Remember the Danish cartoon riots? It's headlines like Klinghoffer's that are the feces that launched a thousand Shiites.

“What is his problem?” he continued, his agitation mounting. “I don't get upset when people deny the existence of Zeus or Hera; Klinghoffer's the atheist to Christians who believe in the divinity of Jesus and the Holy Trinity. He's mad because Richard Dawkins says that the God of the Hebrew bible is 'arguably the most unpleasant character in fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully' doesn't make it true. But Klinghoffer's outrage doesn't make it false, either.” He was just getting warmed up. “I was at a couple of friends' daughter's bat mitzvahs recently and read of the death of Aaron's sons and of the death of the poor chap who was trying to prevent your holy arc from falling to the ground and smashing to smithereens. You do seem to have an arbitrary god there. Homer, at least, gives us the occasional reason for the displeasure of the gods. Your god just kills somebody and then, apparently, demands silence as a response. Some god!”

Artie chimed in. “Have you guys seen reviews of Hitchens's 'God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything'? I can't wait to read Klinghoffer on that.” Skimming the article, he continued: “I see here that he also objects to universities teaching that Tanach is just a collection of stories stitched together, and that the Zohar is not a second century book of mysticism but a 13th century hoax! Can you imagine? A religious hoax? Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism, whom he slams, once defended his academic endeavors by saying the “Nonsense is nonsense, but the study of nonsense is scholarship!” I've always loved that line. That the sun revolves around the earth, that'll be Klinghoffer's next claim.”

Sadly, we lamented the decline of the Age of the Enlightenment. It had a good run while it lasted, but the fundamentalists are back in force—Muslims in their madrass schools, Christians at Liberty University, and Klinghoffer at the Forward. “Religion's all made up by man,” said Poopidingus; “still, it's an occasionally amusing story, if you don't take it seriously,” chimed in Artie. Sighing, Paulie in his “Zeus Lives!” tee-shirt, Artie sporting his “Vote Atheist” button, peered deeply into the depths of their Manischewitz Concord Grape wine and wondered where humanity had gone wrong. I, on the other had, had discovered my six-hundred-fourteenth mitzvah! To comfort rationalists as the darkness descends.

A comparison between US and Israel when poor leaders are in charge.

I love America And Israel. (And France and Italy and Britain and Canada, but let's not complicate things too much.) I love the things we share and the things that distinguish us as separate. We practice different forms of democracy—ours based on principles of separation of powers, theirs a hodgepodge of forms including elements that would be familiar in France (multiple parties and separate elections for the legislature and head of government); the Netherlands (proportional representation); British (virtually independent cabinet ministers and an unwritten constitution). We both have trouble controlling our borders, and each has a dominant religion, though we both practice forms of religious pluralism. We both have incompetent leaders who got us into lost/losing unnecessary wars. (It is an historical truism that if you are going to get your country involved in a war of choice, you may as well win.)

And the differences? In America we pretend that religion has no place in secular society despite “In God we trust” and “one nation under God” and crèches on public property and menorah lightings in state houses; Israel pretends to be a secular society independent of its official religion until the rabbinical authorities assert their control over everyday life (see Alison Golub's occasional columns on the perils and pitfalls of trying to prove you are Jewish enough to get married in a theocracy).

But a key difference is in the way we can or cannot control the executive power. In America, regardless of how George W. Bush-like the president is, it's almost impossible to get rid of him before his term expires. Yes, congress controls the purse strings (when it wants to) and yes, the president can be impeached and convicted of high crimes and misdemeanors—whatever that means but in fact, unless one rises (sinks?) to the level of Richard Nixon, there's no effective way to remove a president—and even if there were, in our current case we would just be exchanging the puppet for the puppeteer. Congress can override a presidential veto, but the president can run roughshod over the will of 2/3 (minus one) of either house and have his veto sustained. Israel, which is working with an independently elected prime minister avoids the Italian imbroglio of constantly falling governments, but there can be pressure placed on the prime minister to resign even without a formal vote of no-confidence as required in England, for instance.

Which inevitably brings us to the two commissions. In America an independent commission of senior legislative, executive and judicial retirees, all of great distinction, from both political parties, studied the origins of the Iraq war and made suggestions as to what to do now. These boiled down to “incompetence” (the generous reading) and “withdraw” respectively. Not wanting to influence the 2006 mid-term elections, the commission withheld its final report until after the polls were closed and the votes were counted and it became obvious to all that the president's policy of imposing democracy in Iraq by bullet was throughly repudiated by the democratic process by ballot. So, what has the president decided to do? Ignore. First he called for a surge of troops (the immediate result of which was the huge increase in civilian and GI deaths) and then he vetoed a congressional spending bill which called for gradual then total withdrawal of American troops. If you read this on May 11 there will still be 610 more days of this administration to endure.

In Israel where a similarly constituted commission, this on the origins and conduct of the war in Lebanon this summer reported that “There are very serious failings in these decisions and the way they were made. We impose the primary responsibility for these failures on the prime minister, the minister of defense and the [outgoing] chief of staff.” By the time you read this the Olmert premiership may already be over. It is a consummation devoutly to be wished. Being an accidental premier can work, but not this time. The man who managed to defeat the sainted Teddy Kollek back in 1993. was and is the wrong man at the wrong time who did the wrong thing. His time may already have come and gone, or perhaps he's still hanging on, but at least in Eretz Yisrael it's possible to change course, to get rid of incompetence and try something new. Here in America, we wait, and wait, and wait and wait. 610 and counting.