That’s Rabbi Joseph Telushkin’s advice in his new book A Code of Jewish Ethics.
He mentions Jews campaigning for civil rights for blacks in the 1960s and how groovy it was that some of them wore yarmulkes, which Reform Rabbi William Braude heard blacks refer to as "freedom hats."
Jewish campaigning for black civil rights did not improve the esteem of Jews in the eyes of the goyim. Blacks have never, as a group, felt close to Jews (Jewish success invalidates blacks’ excuses to fail, notes Ernest Van Den Haag), and opponents of desegregation were not brought to philo-semitism either.
Jews who stress their Jewishness when they do good deeds will likely make goyim think of Jews as posturers. Stressing your Jewishness when you give to charity, citing a Talmudic admonition as Rabbi Telushkin suggests, will invoke far more disgust than admiration. How would you as a Jew feel when some Christian gave your battery a jump and then invoked the teachings of Jesus Christ?
Ninety percent of Rabbi Telushkin’s new book is not new. He either recycles his previous writings or repeats the observations of others. During the many times I’ve heard Rabbi Telushkin lecture, I found that almost everything he had to say I had either read or heard previously.
Rabbi Norman Lamm’s grandfather, Rabbi Yehoshua Baumel, a Talmud scholar, said: "When it comes to learning, you have to be an apikores (heretic). One needs to challenge everyone, one needs to be a skeptic." (Pg. 509)
One who follows that advice will become a pariah in almost all Orthodox settings. I hear that admonition all the time in Orthodox life but I don’t know any Orthodox setting that lives it.
In a scale of Orthodox values, love of truth ranks well below love of cholent. For example, see the reactions to scholar Marc B. Shapiro. Few challenge him on truth, but many rabbis challenge whether the truths he unearths should be made public.
Try asking your local Orthodox rabbi about a given sacred text:
* Who wrote this?
* When was it written?
* For whom was it written?
Jane emails:
Chaim is truly a dolt. Islam is not a thinking man’s religion. It will never clear any hurdles in the west where the socratic tradition does not believe in a religion that is based on submission. Read the torah – the jews had just witnessed the splitting of the red sea and days later they are running out of water and they go nuts and ask moses to do something, like they are a bunch of jewish women at nibbler’s complaining that the tuna is too dry. Christianity succeeded because it is the perfect mythos and kicks any mythology ten times over. The idea that god so intervened in human affairs by sacrificing his son is simply so outlandish that anyone would buy it. There is so much wrong with it that it boggles the mind. Jesus had no human father, but his lineage, through the father traces back to King David. What about the people who lived before Jesus, do they have no chance for salvation. The mother of god a virgin who was caravanning on mule through Judea with a carpenter to give birth to Jesus – what the hell is this, the story of a mexican family crossing into san ysidro on foot? Judaism is the thinking man’s religion and the one that has stood the test of time. For all the work of modern psychology to poke fun at its practices, we are the only people in the world today where my children can speak the language spoken by their ancestors more than 3500 years ago while observing the same traditions. Christianity is a joke when it comes to this, a catholic child born today has almost nothing in common with a catholic child from 50 years ago. Gone is the latin mass, the blaming of the jews for the death of christ, and the abstinence.
