This week’s Torah portion tells us the story of Esau and Jacob.
I am joined by Vivian Veritas, Dennis Dale and the Professor.
* How old was Rebecca when she married Isaac? According to Rashi and other medieval rabbis, she was three (because she required a wet nurse when she traveled to meet Isaac), but Isaac waited until she was an adult before he had relations with her. Others say Rebecca was ten, possibly 13.
Early-teen marriage was possible in Judaism. In Judaism girls reach adulthood at 12 and boys at 13. According to the Talmud, a father is commanded not to let his his daughter marry anyone until she grows up and says, “I want this one”.[73] A marriage that takes place without the consent of the girl is not an effective legal marriage.[74]
Despite the young threshold for marriage, a large age gap between the spouses was opposed,[75] and, in particular, marrying one’s young daughter to an old man was declared as reprehensible as forcing her into prostitution.[76]
A ketannah (literally meaning “little [one]”) was any girl between the age of 3 years and that of 12 years plus one day;[77] he could arrange a marriage for her in her best interests.[77] However, after reaching the age of maturity, she would have to agree to the marriage to be considered as married. If the father was dead or missing, the brothers of the ketannah, collectively, had the ability , as had her mother.[77] In these situations, a ketannah would always have the right to annul her marriage, even if it was the first.
* According to Torah and to the Talmud, an uncle can marry his niece in Judaism, but this ceased to be the practice when Jews moved to Europe. Why? Because the rabbis decreed that Jews could not do anything that made them look morally inferior to the gentiles around them. So while polygamy continued among Sephardic Jews until the 20th Century, it was forbidden to Ashkenazi Jews by Rabbi Gershon around 1000 CE.
* Abraham is the only Biblical character described as dying “content.”
* Gen. 25:23: God said to Rebecca: “Two nations are in your womb.”
Artscroll: “The Sages teach that the two of them will never be mighty simultaneously; when one falls; the other will rise. History has demonstrated this prophecy in practice.”
The realist approach to foreign policy says that power determines how far a nation will rise. As one nation grows stronger, other nations around it become comparatively weaker. As one group within a nation grow stronger, other groups become comparatively weaker. Life is a competition over scarce resources between various forms of life.
* Gen. 26:4: God tells Isaac: “All the nations of the earth shall bless themselves by your offspring.” Is that true? Is that real? Is that your experience?
* Gen. 26:6:
So Isaac stayed in Gerar.
7 When the men of that place asked him about his wife, he said, “She is my sister,” because he was afraid to say, “She is my wife.” He thought, “The men of this place might kill me on account of Rebekah, because she is beautiful.”
8 When Isaac had been there a long time, Abimelek king of the Philistines looked down from a window and saw Isaac caressing his wife Rebekah. 9 So Abimelek summoned Isaac and said, “She is really your wife! Why did you say, ‘She is my sister’?”
Isaac answered him, “Because I thought I might lose my life on account of her.”
10 Then Abimelek said, “What is this you have done to us? One of the men might well have slept with your wife, and you would have brought guilt upon us.”
11 So Abimelek gave orders to all the people: “Anyone who harms this man or his wife shall surely be put to death.”
* Gen. 26:14:
…the Philistines envied him. 15 So all the wells that his father’s servants had dug in the time of his father Abraham, the Philistines stopped up, filling them with earth.
16 Then Abimelek said to Isaac, “Move away from us; you have become too powerful for us.”
So why do goyim hate Jews? Because we’re excellent.
* The survival of the Jewish people depended upon Jacob getting the birthright, so whatever he does to nab this is then ok? Why did Jacob fear Esau? Because he knew that he stole the birthright from him. Why do we fear people? Because we know we’ve harmed them and thus created an incentive for them to get revenge on us. If we go around harming people, we will develop a worldview that everyone is out to get us. For example, Harvey Weinstein hired ex-Mossad agents to go after his accusers.
* Optics. Are you gents dressed in a way that makes the white cause look good?
* NYT: Louis C.K. Is Accused by 5 Women of Sexual Misconduct
In 2002, a Chicago comedy duo, Dana Min Goodman and Julia Wolov, landed their big break: a chance to perform at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colo. When Louis C.K. invited them to hang out in his hotel room for a nightcap after their late-night show, they did not think twice. The bars were closed and they wanted to celebrate. He was a comedian they admired. The women would be together. His intentions seemed collegial.
As soon as they sat down in his room, still wrapped in their winter jackets and hats, Louis C.K. asked if he could take out his penis, the women said.
They thought it was a joke and laughed it off. “And then he really did it,” Ms. Goodman said in an interview with The New York Times. “He proceeded to take all of his clothes off, and get completely naked, and started masturbating.”
* Does society have an interest in slut shaming? Friend: “Basically this: some men use their power and fame and wealth to gain access to sex with beautiful women, and that’s bad. But also, some beautiful women use their sexuality to gain access to power and fame and wealth. And that’s also bad. Put another way: is prostitution a sin? Or is it only a sin to solicit a prostitute, but not to be one?”
* Friend: “I got banned in /r/history this week for replying to a poster’s question about why there is a third world with a recommendation to check out Rushton’s 1995 book. Banned. I submitted a request to the moderator about why… I wanna talk about this kind of soft/moral censorship of ideas.”
* Some of my friends have problem with positivity. It’s a reaction to wishful thinking. Many of my friends reject the 12-Steps, finding it too hard and the sayings too trite. Many Jews reject belief in an Afterlife because it is too positive. They want to be rational. They don’t want to be like Christians.
* The 2017 movie Detroit shone a light on police murder in 1967 at the Algiers Hotel. Do I prioritize my white interests over Godly principles? It depends on the context. Ethics are both situational and absolute. The situation determines the absolute. Sometimes empathy for out-groups can be a disadvantage to your own people’s survival.
The key moment in the self-destruction of the once great American city of Detroit over the past half century can be dated precisely to July 23, 1967, when blacks began the Detroit Riot. Before 4,700 paratroopers from the U.S. Army’s 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions finally halted the orgy of criminality, African Americans had looted 2,500 stores and burned down 400 buildings in their own neighborhoods.
The next year, 80,000 whites moved out of Detroit. (In 2017, the total population of Detroit is almost a million lower than fifty years ago.)
Of course, today we are instructed to think of these white refugees from black violence not as victims but as perps. Almost nobody is interested in the stories of the millions of Americans whose lives were literally dislocated by the huge surge in black urban crime during the peak years of American liberalism, 1964–75.
For example, the opening text for the new movie Detroit, which opens nationally on Friday, pins the blame for the black riot of 1967 on the economic devastation caused by the 22,000 whites who had presciently left Detroit the year before, apparently taking all the magic dirt with them, leaving only the tragic dirt.
In reality, the Detroit Riot had little to do with economic decline. Instead, it was a classic example of how rising expectations fuel resentment. Detroit in 1967 represented the apogee of working-class prosperity, which Detroit blacks shared in due to United Auto Workers’ leader Walter Reuther’s profound opposition to racial discrimination. Perhaps no black community in the history of the world had yet been as broadly prosperous as Detroit’s in 1967. To blacks across America, Berry Gordy’s Motown record label, named after the glamorous Motor City, represented black affluence. Economist Thomas Sowell observed:
“Before the ghetto riot of 1967, Detroit’s black population had the highest rate of home-ownership of any black urban population in the country, and their unemployment rate was just 3.4 percent. It was not despair that fueled the riot. It was the riot which marked the beginning of the decline of Detroit to its current state of despair.”
Moreover, intensely pro-black white liberals, such as President Lyndon Johnson, Governor George Romney (Mitt’s dad), and Mayor Jerome Cavanagh, were pouring taxpayer money into Detroit’s black neighborhoods.
Following up my Taki’s column on Larry David, “Curb Your Self-Awareness,” here’s a self-aware excerpt from a 2001 interview by Emma Forrest with Rachel Weisz, the lovely Oscar-winning Jewish-British actress:
EMMA: Well, it’s that Jackie Mason joke about how no Jewish woman wants to look Jewish: “‘You think I look maybe a little Italian, I look a little Russian, perhaps I can be Spanish?’ … ‘You look Jewish!’”RACHEL: Hollywood’s run by Jews. I was advised by an American agent when I was about 19 to change my surname. And I said “Why? Jews run Hollywood.” He said “Exactly.” He had a theory that all the executives think acting’s a job for shiksas.
EMMA: Of all the self-loathing Jews in the world, the most self-loathing are the Hollywood Jews. They don’t want to see images of themselves on screen. That’s why Lauren Bacall had to hide her identity, and Winona Ryder changed her name from Horowitz.
RACHEL: In some way acting is prostitution, and Hollywood Jews don’t want their own women to participate. Also, there’s an element of Portnoy’s Complaint — they all fancy Aryan blondes.
Comments at Steve Sailer:
* Although there is a tendency for Jews in the US to market themselves as a ‘race’, when you look at British Jews versus US Jews, the British Jews such as Sascha Baron-Cohen (Borat, Ali G) Sid James, Leslie Howard, Lawrence Harvey, Warren Mitchell (the original model for Archie Bunker), Daniel Day Lewis, Anthony Newley seem to have much more in common with their fellow Brits than with US Jews. As did Harold Abrahams, chairman of the Amateur Athletic Association, and the sprinter whose early life story became Chariots of Fire, a movie whose title is drawn from a phrase in Britain’s second national anthem, William Blake’s Jerusalem.
Growing up in the UK I was aware that certain politicians like Clement Freud, Sir Keith Joseph, or Nigel Lawson, father of the even more famous Nigella, or moguls like Robert Maxwell were Jews, but certainly never thought of them being a different race. We would have thought of Maxwell (born Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch) more as a Czech import than as someone who had sympathies with Israel, although after his death there were some claims that he was an agent of Mossad.
So maybe British Jews are more integrated than US Jews, or is it all an illusion?
* Perhaps its because they aren’t nearly as powerful as US Jews so they behave a bit better.
