Once you’ve read a few books on kings and queens, Donald Trump doesn’t seem so strange.
For example, let us take King John of Magna Carta fame. Peter Ackroyd notes: “[H]e fined York and Newcastle for not affording him an appropriately grand reception.”
00:30 Katie Hobbs, “What have you learned…from the Latino community?”
05:00 The religionization of the American state
08:00 The Champions Of Chastity: I love reading stories about those great souls who put the realm of the spirit first.
58:00 Tudor Dixon vs Gretchen Whitmer
1:11:30 Drag queen story hour
1:24:50 Putin says Russians aren’t white
1:48:40 The Rise of Reform and the Rabbinic Response (Part 23) || Dr. Marc Shapiro
I love reading stories about those great souls who put the realm of the spirit first.
Peter Ackroyd writes in his 2013 book Foundation: The History of England from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Tudors:
At a convent, near Watton in the East Riding of Yorkshire, in the 1160s, one nun had lost her virginity to a young priest; when her condition became obvious, the nuns interrogated her about the offending man. When she revealed his identity, the nuns captured him. They took him to the cell of the pregnant nun. She was given a knife and forced to castrate her lover; whereupon the nuns stuffed his genitals into her mouth. She was then flogged, and bound with chains in a prison cell. In an age when the call of heaven was direct and unequivocal – and when the spiritual world was pre-eminent – a general indifference was maintained to the fate or the sufferings of the physical body. When one English king was asked if he regretted the thousands of soldiers he sent into slaughter, he remarked that they would thank him when they were in heaven. The chronicler, after telling the story of the savage nuns, exclaimed, ‘What zeal was burning in these champions of chastity, these persecutors of uncleanness, who loved Christ above all things!’
These stories of physical cruelty would have been familiar to all the people of England in a period when violence was tolerated to a surprising degree. Village justice could be savage and peremptory, largely going unreported. The violence of lord against villein does not often appear in the historical record. In this society men and women took weapons with them; even small children possessed knives. William Palfrey, aged eleven, stabbed and killed the nine-year-old William Geyser outside the village of Whittlesford in Cambridgeshire. There was in any case what would now be called a culture of violence. Children were educated with severe physical discipline. Corporal punishment was familiar and usual in all elements of society. Public whipping, for a variety of offences from adultery to slander, was commonplace.
A genuine pleasure was also derived from bitter disputation, denunciation and vilification. This was a culture of rhetoric and the spoken word. A wide vocabulary of scatological abuse could be employed, while sexual misdemeanours were commonly and loudly publicized. In a society of intense hierarchy, a preoccupation with good name and standing is only to be expected. Disputes were sometimes settled by ritualized fights in the churchyard. Slights and insults were the occasion of bloody disputes. The smallest incident could provoke a violent fracas. One man came into a hostelry, where strangers were drinking. ‘Who are these people?’ he enquired, for which question he was stabbed to death. An element of gratuitous cruelty could also be introduced, as in the case of one man who was dragged to a local tavern and there obliged to drink a cocktail of beer and his own blood.
To enter the dance of Yiddishkeit is to enter a mystery that takes you over. You might feel like you have yourself together, you’re all tucked in, you’re choosing your level of involvement, but before you know it, you are caught in the gears of connection and are pulled along into a life that goes back thousands of years.
It might be the warmth of your rebbe’s smile, it might be the Friday night invite, it might be the power of morning minyan, but you are quickly entangled in something greater than yourself. I’ve never encountered anything like Orthodox Judaism for binding people together. Some people do pull themselves out, but it usually comes at enormous cost. People who leave Orthodox Judaism frequently strike me as deformed by the experience (Mormons say the same thing about ex-Mormons).
In 1988 at UCLA, I first became interested in Judaism through listening to Dennis Prager on the radio. I liked his presentation of Judaism as a rational system of ethical monotheism. Then I moved to Los Angeles in 1994, and the mystical social non-rational community of traditional Judaism spoke to a part of my soul that I didn’t know existed.
Book Two of Evelyn’s Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited is called “A Twitch Upon the Thread”:
Father Brown said something like ‘I caught him’ (the thief) ‘with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.’”
Poet Haim Nahman Bialik grew up Orthodox and then left it. His Torah teacher is reputed to have said to him that due to his upbringing, he’ll never be able to enjoy his sins.
On the other hand, I notice that to participate in social distancing is to open up a whole host of possibilities that all tend to reduce religious observance. Many people’s habits were disrupted by Covid and have not returned. Once you get out of the habit of davening and communal Torah study, it’s hard to resume it.
One step leads to another. One mitzvah leads to another mitzvah and one sin leads to another sin.
If you wanted an example of a great congregational rabbi, you couldn’t do any better than Rabbi Elazar Muskin of Young Israel of Century City (YICC). Forty years into his job, he still exudes purpose, passion and astonishing IQ. He’d be the ideal Jew to write a Judaic version of Rick Warren’s classic, The Purpose Driven Church: Every Church Is Big in God’s Eyes. Warren’s books have shaped how many rabbis, including Orthodox rabbis, run their congregations.
Even though I haven’t seen the rabbi in years, if he entered my vision, I would immediately straighten up and fly straight. For example, I’d be ashamed to walk past him on Shabbos not wearing a suit. I couldn’t tell a dirty joke for at least an hour afterward. Everybody transmits a force field, but Rabbi Muskin’s force field pulses at 50,000 watts. He lives in LA, but you might feel him in Chico at night if there aren’t too many clouds.
If R. Muskin hadn’t become a rabbi like his father and grandfather, he may have ended up as a professor of history or literature.
As he wraps up one chapter of his life (rabbi of YICC), I wonder what he’ll do next?
