But the summer I turned 38, I freaked out about the approaching Four Zero — which was old even for the nonreligious world — so I went to Israel, where I had lived in my 20s, to visit old friends and figure out where my life had gone wrong. On my last day there I ran into the mother and father of my best friend from high school. Without prompting, my friend’s mother insisted I go see the rabbi she’d entrusted with such weighty matters.
“He told me exactly when both my daughters would get married,” she gushed, writing down the phone number on my newspaper. “He also saved my husband from death,” she added, gesturing at him.
As she told me the story of how doctors had given her husband only days to live until the rabbi prayed and cured him, the man himself — 60-something and in seemingly good health — stood next to her, rolling his eyes and literally snorting in disbelief.
He was like many Modern Orthodox people who consider themselves to be very grounded and rational (aside from the whole Creationism thing, the Moses-Parting-the-Red-Sea thing, and the God-Giving-the-Ten-Commandments-on-a-Mountain thing). They don’t believe in anything bordering on the alternative, like kabbalah, especially rabbis with supernatural powers.
I might have stopped being Orthodox, but its indoctrination had left me with the sense that nearly anything — God, spiritualists, healers, psychics and witches — might be equally possible. Thus I found myself in an airless Jerusalem classroom with this old rabbi, who had a white beard so long I couldn’t see his mouth and glasses so thick I couldn’t see his eyes.
Friday, December 17, 2010 Radio Show
H1: Another Miracle Drug Withdrawn
Prager H1: FDA has withdrawn the breast cancer drug Avastin from the US market. They don’t believe it’s effective. But thousands of women with breast cancer and their doctors disagree… California now has its own cap and trade system, 3000 pages of new job killing, Byzantine regulations. Think this will help create jobs?
Friday, December 17, 2010 Radio Show
H2: Happiness Hour: Blame Game
Prager H2: It’s time to stop blaming your parents for your unhappiness.
Friday, December 17, 2010 Radio Show
H3: Open Lines
Prager H3: Per usual, callers set the agenda. Issues raised include: is it okay to play video games; why do ex-catholics resent the church so much; and a teenager calls in to ask… how can i learn to think rationally.
Chaim Amalek writes: I miss Christmas, and we never even celebrated. Goyim have it easy.
Re your latest venture, come one, what sort of Jew are you, engaging in retail tertiary economic activity when you should be wholesale, selling something to the goyim. Why not (I know why not “I don’t have the energy”) establish an institution for instructing goyim on how to live as proper Noahide gentiles? No doubt you could make money at that. No doubt at all. In a city where people pay big money to attend seminars sponsored by Landmark Forum and Scientology, why not you teaching them to be ethical gentiles with a place in heaven waiting for them?
But you won’t. You will just age in place and die where you are, one day to be discovered by a curious landlord wondering about the unpleasant odor and missed rent checks.
KHUNRUM EMAILS: Luke:
What the hell are you doing living a hardscrabble existence, living in a shoe box, when you could be a country squire on sis’s mango farm?. That’s where I’d be. Naturally we’ll miss you but there’s always the Internet. I picture you married to a plump Aussie country gal. Corn fed as it were. And when she’s busy picking fruit you could nip off to see your old pal Wayne Cherry. What are you waiting for?
P.s. Your Dad looks to be in better health than you.
Fred emails: Luke–I read somewhere that 7th Day Adventists don’t believe in evolution. Were you raised to disbelieve evolution?
Chaim emails: Why pick on 7DA? Torah Jews (see Luke’s Monday evening chats) do not believe in evolution; Baptists don’t believe in evolution; Sarah Palin’s church does not believe in evolution; the Jihadis don’t believe in evolution, etc.
In other news, I saw a story today somewhere on the web that reports that scientists, by which I mean hard scientists, not social scientist who likely would skew things further, are overwhelmingly Democrats, with maybe 7% belonging to the Creationism friendly Republican Party. Now there’s a social divide we need to discuss further. Is the Republican Party to be the Party of God, and the Democratic Party the Party of Science?
Fred, on which side are America’s patent lawyers?
Fred emails: America’s patent lawyers have engineering and/or science backgrounds, so by and large I doubt one would find many creationist patent lawyers.
I suppose the Republican party has started to become the party of religion and anti-science, while the democratic party is more science friendly.
This does not bode well for America.
KHUNRUM EMAILS: I read something a few weeks ago. A study that indicated there is job scarcity everywhere but the trades. Welding, machine shop, plumbing etc. etc. etc. Kids don’t want to enter these jobs because you’ll get dirty and they aren’t glamorous (although well paying). And there is a perception that being a welder isn’t cool. A job for dummies as it were.
BOB EMAILS: This whole No Child Left Behind stuff assumes all kids will go to college. I always say a lot of plumbers make more than my principal. I salute a good tradesman. Now a blogger …….Why won’t the US govt. subsidize bloggers? Is that not valued by society more than mig welding and such?
CHAIM EMAILS: If they had had blogs during the Great Depression, no doubt the WPA would have subsidized some of them.
By the way, how do we know that today’s days of the week correspond to the days of the week of ancient times? Might there not have been slip-ups along the way such that we can not be certain that Jews and 7da are really celebrating the sabbath on the correct day?
BOB EMAILS: With your beard and graying hair you could score some easy money at Macy’s as a substitute Santa. Would your shul approve?
LUKE: NO. Orthodox Jews would not accept such work.
FRED: If Luke were a Santa or an elf, what sort of presents would he be giving the little kiddies? An autographed copy of one of his books?
CHAIM EMAILS: Start thinking like a Jew for Torah’s sake! Cranking out these things at fifty cents a pop is not even what a Mexican’s Mexican’s Mexican would accept these days.
Why not:
1. Offer yourself as a (non-sexual) escort on Craigslist?
2. Move in with Rabbs to save money?
3. Sell sperm to a suitably specialized sperm bank?
4. Inch back into **** journalism.
5. Marry an angry woman who will beat you into financial health.
If I had the option of living on a sibling’s mango farm, I’d jump on it. I like mangos. Chicks dig guys who can give them mangos.
The only explanation I can think of is that Luke is still traumatized by memories of that incident with the Abos back when he was a kid.
I go through phases where 90% of what I post on here is original content. And then I go through phases where 70% of what I post is duplicate content from other sites that I cut and paste from and link to.
Much of this depends on my mood. I know that I often make a lot of strange posts and then I feel like I don’t want my strange posts to be the first thing that people see when they come on my site, so I go look for some stories to feature and I excerpt from them.
My favorite sources are DennisPrager.com, TorahMusings.com, FrumSatire.net and JewishPress.com.
Over the past 15 months, when my Alexander Technique teacher training has been in session, I’ve been too tired to blog much beyond my narrow obsession with Dennis Prager.
I made a commitment to myself in December 1997 to chronicle Prager. Since I first heard him on KABC radio in August 1988, he’s been my favorite thinker. I’ve been a little obsessed with hearing everything he has to say. I then like to write about it. I don’t feel like I’ve really got it until I blog it.
There are a lot of other people I could’ve chosen to chronicle. I selected Prager. I only have limited energy and time, so on many days, he’s about the only thing I write about. I’m OK with that. Much of the time, I find him consistently more interesting than any other thinker. And much of the time I feel like he is just recycling through things I’ve already heard a thousand times.
Still, I’ve made a commitment. Unless I commit to a project through thick and thin, it is rare that I accomplish anything. So I throw in my lot and soldier on in the things I am committed to — Judaism, writing, Alexander Technique, family, friends, Dennis Prager.
I do have an authentic self. I like to act out a lot but I do have a core. It is usually centered between conflicting impulses. For instance, I’ve spent most of my life in a traditional religious community (Seventh-Day Adventist in my childhood, Orthodox Judaism in my adulthood), but always felt a tug towards freedom and away from complete integration. I am willing to give up some community for some freedom and I am willing to give up some freedom for some community. If I abandoned my freedom completely to absorb myself within a Torah community, I would not be authentic to who I am. If I abandoned Judaism to do what I like, I would not be authentic to who I am.
I’ve always been willing to keep silent at times to preserve friendships but I am never willing long to stifle myself to preserve them. During my first three years in Los Angeles, I stifled a little more of myself than I normally like to be part of Dennis Prager’s world and to feel some sense of family and community at Stephen S. Wise’s Mountaintop Minyan. Then I had enough of my self-containment and took to the web to write my mind and suffered the inevitable exclusion that comes from failing to conform to expected norms.
When I wrote on specific genres of the entertainment industry, I was the same person as I am now writing on specific genres of Judaism. I love a good story and I am willing to follow one wherever it takes.
Since I was a kid, I’ve wanted to devote myself to writing. Along the way, I felt fine that there were years when I did not write much so I could pay my bills and pursue other interests. Whether I was in construction or acting, I felt like the time would deepen my writing.
I love being in an intimate relationship with a woman, but there always comes a time when it seems like I have to choose between the relationship and my integrity. If I am not willing to risk the relationship to be true to my values, the relationship will inevitably deteriorate as I squash myself.
The WikiLeaks revelations, if it is not sacrilegious to suggest, were a godsend to the Jewish state. They demolished the mantra of Israel’s critics, President Obama conspicuous among them, who have incessantly proclaimed that the cornerstone of peace in the Middle East is a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Documents released by Wikileaker Julian Assange reveal, beyond the shadow of doubt, how marginal the Palestinian-Israeli conflict really is to Arab leaders. Israeli “occupation” and Jewish settlements on “Palestinian” land do not seem to agitate them. Indeed, they clearly understand that the key to peace in the Middle East, to say nothing of the security of their royal thrones, lies elsewhere.
As Wiki documents indicate, Arab potentates firmly believe that neighborhood peace hinges on the eradication of Iran’s nuclear threat. No one said it more bluntly than King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who pleaded with American government officials two years ago to “cut off the head of the snake.” The “snake,” of course, was Iran, not Israel.
As left-wing journalist Ari Shavit recently conceded in Haaretz, Assange “placed a giant mirror in front of all of us and proved the extent to which we had been duped.”
Who is “we”? For a start: President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton and the State Department, Senator John Kerry, The New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian, Time, The New York Review of Books – and, to be sure, Haaretz and its approving leftist readers. This chorus of critics has incessantly reiterated Israeli culpability, while relentlessly blaming Jewish settlers, for Middle Eastern instability. What their ideological blinders prevented them from seeing was that by far the most ominous threat to peace comes from Tehran, not Hebron; from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, not Benjamin Netanyahu or Avigdor Lieberman.
Surely the most dangerous perpetrator of the myth of Israel as the key to peace has been President Obama. His determination to curry Arab favor was evident from the outset of his administration, when he gratuitously bowed to the king of Saudi Arabia. In his Cairo speech two months later, he blamed Middle Eastern turmoil on colonialism and the West. Pledging that the United States “is not – and never will be – at war with Islam,” he ignored the war that jihadi Islamists had launched against the United States on 9/11. Repeated terrorist attacks by Muslims against American targets did not change Obama’s mind.
In his dealings with Prime Minister Netanyahu, Obama made clear his misguided notion that “peace with the Palestinians – between the Palestinians and the Israelis strengthens our hand in the international community in dealing with a potential Iranian threat.” In fact, as Arab leaders indicated, it made little difference. But it was easier for Obama to pressure Israel than to confront Iran.
In recent days, one of the most important domestic controversies in Israel has revolved around rabbinic opinions. The media are representing this as a great debate over “racism.” In reality, it is a great debate over freedom of speech and the rights of Israelis to express opinions disliked by its increasingly anti-democratic Left.
The ruckus began when a few dozen Israeli rabbis issued a call for Israeli Jews not rent or sell real estate to Arabs in predominantly Jewish neighborhoods. The background to their call had to do with growing tensions and even violence in several towns, such as Carmiel and Safed, where significant numbers of Arabs have moved into predominantly Jewish neighborhoods.
By and large, the rabbis who signed the statement were not prominent or well-known halachic authorities. Their statement carried neither the weight of civic law nor the authority of a religious decree. The rabbis essentially were expressing an opinion. It might be an opinion you find objectionable, but in democracies people are supposed to be free to say objectionable things.
Prime Minister Netanyahu denounced the rabbis who signed the statement. But unlike most of the Israeli Left, he did not demand they be stripped of their freedom of speech. Among others who spoke out against those rabbis were three of Israel’s most respected haredi rabbis – Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv, Rabbi Aharon Leib Shteinman and Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. They were joined in their opposition by other leading haredi rabbis and even by rabbis living in the West Bank. Following Rabbi Elyashiv’s criticism, at least five of the signatories withdrew their support from the statement.
But Israel’s anti-democratic Left did not limit itself to expressing disagreement with or condemnation of the opinions contained in the statement of the rabbis. The Israeli Left was almost unanimous in insisting the rabbis be stripped of their rights to express controversial opinions altogether. Arabs and far leftists in Israel can cheer on Arab terrorists who murder Jews and can demand Israel’s obliteration; that is protected speech. Tenured radicals at the universities can call for Israel to be annihilated and can support worldwide anti-Israel boycotts; that, too, is protected speech. But in the Left’s worldview, rabbis expressing an opinion with which most Israelis probably disagree are not entitled to the same freedom of expression.
Several representatives of the far-left Meretz Party petitioned the attorney general to indict the rabbis as criminals. They were joined in that call by a number of Israeli leftist academics, journalists, and public figures.
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) – which has never missed a chance to overlook infringements of the freedom of expression of non-leftists in Israel – denounced the rabbis who signed the statement and called on the prime minister to take punitive action against them. Israel’s minority affairs minister, Avishay Braverman, asked the justice minister to begin the process of immediate suspension of one of the signers, Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, from his post as municipal rabbi of Safed. (Earlier this year, Braverman demanded that Jews spend Yom Kippur atoning for their “oppression” of Arabs.)
Rabbi Rabbs says I was much more gentle with Tamara than I was with him on our first interview. He accuses me of having an interest in Tamara that is not strictly journalistic. He accuses me of having thoughts on matters other than Torah while I talk to her.
* The central event of Christianity happened to one man on a cross. The central event of Judaism is the exodus from Egypt and it happened to an entire people. The individual is the focus in Protestant Christianity (individual salvation) while the people is the focus of Judaism.
* Does it matter whether or not the Exodus occurred as the Bible describes it?
* In Exodus, the Israelites are like a new creation. The creation of the universe began in Genesis. This is a new start for humanity. The words used for the Israelites multiplying and spreading out are the same words used in the beginning of Genesis.
According to Artscroll chumash: “In the context of resisting the corruptive atmosphere of Egypt and preserving the moral and spiritual grandeur of Jacob’s family, his sons were equal to the task. Because they kept the nation on the high level set for it by Jacob, the slavery did not begin as long as they were alive. His grandchildren…their merit was great enough to prevent the onset of the enslavement as long as they were alive.”
Do you buy this? I don’t. It was the religious Jews who were the most likely to die in Europe during the Shoah. The least religious were the most likely to get the hell out of Europe and consequently were the least likely to go up in chimneys. The gadolim of Europe, such as the Chofetz Chaim and Elchonon Wasserman, told the Jews not to leave Europe for America. Consequently, millions of them died needlessly, thanks to the sage advice of the gadolim.
* The Torah says a new king arose on Egypt. He was a tyrant. Can a nation be a tyranny without its consent? Russia, Germany, China, Egypt. Arab world. All governed by tyrants. Jews are the ultimate enemy of the blood nation, because they assimilate a bit and yet keep their own distinctive culture. Evil can’t be done by a Pharoah or Hitler or Stalin alone. They need the help of the people.
* There are two Hebrew words for nation — goy and am. Am is a nation based on blood ties. Goy not necessarily blood ties. A nation based on blood is never going to accept outsiders.
* Frightening parallels between the Shoah and the slavery in Egypt. According to the Ramban, the Pharoah’s goal was the extermination of Israel. (AS, 1:14)
* Pharoah told his people that the Jews had gotten rich off of them. (AS)
* The Israelites had been in Egypt for over a hundred years. In America, they’d be considered Americans, not outsiders.
* The Israelites had no plans to unite with an invader to get rid of the Egyptians. This is pure paranoia.
* Much of the purpose of the work was to humiliate the Israelites. Just as most Jews died naked in the Holocaust. A key point was to humiliate them.
This is kinda akin to the male desire to get women naked and humiliate them physically.
* Why is the traditional interpretation that the midwives are Hebrews? They are clearly not. Why would the Pharoah ask Hebrew midwives to murder their own people’s kids? The Torah says the reason the midwives do not murder is that they feared God. “Fear of God” is the formula for the righteousness of non-Jew in the Torah. When Abraham is afraid of how his wife will be treated, he says, there is no fear of God in this place. The midwives talk about the Hebrews in third person.
* Why didn’t Pharoah murder the midwives? They disobey him and then nothing. German who refused to participate in the Holocaust were not killed.
* Do you fear God and if so, for what? I fear God in particular for things I can apparently get away with.
* Midwives rewarded for their fear of God. Not often that occurs.
* AS on 1:15-22: “the savior of the Jews.” Oy, Christian language. Did Moses save the Jews? I don’t feel like Moses saved us. God saved us, perhaps. We saved ourselves, inspired by God and Moses, to take control of our lives and to leave Egypt and to live by the Torah. This notion of salvation comes from above, we are but dust and ashes, is more pagan than Jewish.
* Moses is a reluctant hero. Like the Mel Gibson character in The Patriot and Russell Crow in Gladiator.
* If the Torah was a human creation, it would be much more pro-Jewish than it is.
* People didn’t name their children upon birth in the ancient world because too many of them died. They didn’t name their kids until they had been weaned.
* Have you ever met anyone named Puah? Why not? Yet Shifrah is a common Jewish name.
* Nothing miraculous about the birth of Moses. He’s not divine. He’s not born of a virgin. God is the central character, the main mover, of the Exodus.
* According to Rashi, Moses’s mom Jochebed gave birth to him when she 130. Do you buy this? How would Rashi know?
* Ex. 2:2 “She saw that he was good.”
Artscroll: “The entire house became filled with light upon his birth.”
The same thing happened when I was born. Angels came down singing softly and I was born circumcised and I began immediately speaking in perfect Hebrew and a disco ball dropped from the ceiling and the Bee Gees started singing “Staying Alive” even though they hadn’t met yet. Perhaps I too am destined to save the Jews?
* All this talk of miracles is really for the dumbies right who need to believe in such things?
* Moses crying in his ark is the only instance of a baby crying in the Bible.
* Artscroll: Ex. 2:7 Moses refused to nurse from Egyptian women, because God said, “Shall the mouth that will converse with the Divine Presence drink unclean milk? Shall an Egyptian woman boast, “I fed the mouth that converses with the Divine Presence?”
Is there anything wrong with a Jew suckling from a non-Jew? Are non-Jews unclean? What if they shower? Is their breast milk unclean?
* If God had asked me to save the Jewish people, I would’ve been thrilled. But Moses isn’t.
* Could Moses have led the people if he had grown up as a slave like his fellows?
* When you hear God praising the land of Israel (Ex. 2:8), how do you feel? You hated Israel.
* I was watching Caligula Saturday night. Reminds me a bit of the Pharoah.
* Ex: 2:11 When Moses killed the Egyptian: Was it an impetuous act of youth? I say no. The Hebrew verb is the same for what the Egyptian was going to the Hebrew slave and what Moses did to the Egyptian.
* Ex. 2:12. Another ridiculous Artscroll commentary.
* Ex: 2:14. Hebrews give Moses some lip.
* In one instance, Moses kills. Another time, he speaks. Later, he simply stands up. Those are the three ways you stop evil. Moses is a model. These weren’t sins. Sometimes you kill, sometimes you speak, sometimes you just stand up.
* Ex. 2:18 The man is used to his daughters being bullied every day. How much bullying and evil do we take for granted? We’re used to locking our doors and using security and not going to certain places, particularly at night. We used to be able to walk straight on to our plane.
* Judaism asks us to never make peace with evil and with bullying.
* Ex. 2:19. Daughters say of Moses, “An Egyptian helped us.” Moses looked Egyptian?
* Ex. 2:23 Hebrews “groaned” because of their work. No stiff upper lip stoicism from the Jews.
* Ex. 2:25 What does it mean “God saw”? He didn’t know about the Israelites suffering or He didn’t care?
* Remembering is a big deal in Judaism. Even God remembers. In Torah talk, “remember” means to be able to do something. Not just a thought, but also action.
* Ibn Ezra says that if Moses had grown up with the Hebrews, they would not have respected him as much. Moses did not suffer from a slave mentality, unlike Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and most American black leaders who are obsessed with white racism rather than with internal problems in the black community.
* The burning bush. How come none of these miracles occur when CNN is there to document it?
* What makes the ground holy is the presence of God. Without God, one spot of land is not holier than another.
* We all see the equivalent of burning bushes. Do we stop to look? Do we see the divine? Do we choose to live as believers or as atheists? You can’t live as an agnostic. God can’t talk to you if you are not ready to hear from Him. You’re less likely to sense God at a Dodger game or a disco than at a church or synagogue or holy place. You have to open up your channels to God through prayer, study, meditation, and the like.
* Jews don’t like leaders. We’re not followers. We’re too fragmented to united being somebody.
* Ex. 3:19. God knows that Pharoah won’t let the Israelites go, so God says he will strike Egypt with much suffering. What’s going on here? Why the request for a three day journey into the desert when the Israelites were never going to come back? Why the request to ask for valuables from their Egyptian neighbors?
* Artscroll commentary on 4:3-9. Moses punished for doubting the Israelites?
Larry King will host his last edition of “Larry King Live” on CNN next week, and the Monitor can only say Good Riddance. King built a reputation and made a fortune as the master of the soft toss interview, which was fine for doing Frank Sinatra retrospectives but made for cringe-inducing television whenever the subject at hand required a tad more seriousness.
Back in 2000, King perfectly described the airy, passionless approach he brought to his job to Tucker Carlson, a young colleague at CNN who would go on to co-host the network’s “Crossfire” program.
“Let me tell you something about this business,” King told Carlson. “The trick is to care, but not too much. Give a [expletive] – but not really.”
One of the Monitor’s favorite examples of King’s unparalleled insipidness is the following exchange he had in January 2002 with the famously iconoclastic comedian Bill Maher…
A major university official told me about how unpleasant it was to deal with Desmond Tutu. Out of the dozens of big-name speakers she worked with, he ranked as among the most obnoxious.
He didn’t want to take questions but it was pointed out to him it was part of his speech contract. So he took a couple of questions and then said, “Have I sung for my supper?”
Centrist talkshow host Ronn Owens notes that people on the right (including Patrick Buchanan) are invariably more pleasant to deal with while people on the left (Ralph Nader et al) think so much about society, that they don’t care about individuals.
An old saying has it that “liberalism is always being surprised.” That is the only possible explanation of Jewish expressions of “surprise” and “shock” that Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu in late October urged the South African Opera troupe to cancel its engagement to perform “Porgy and Bess” in Israel.
Turning a blind eye to Tutu’s disparagement of Israel and indeed of Jews generally is, to be sure, not exclusively a Jewish failing. Just a few months ago, on the occasion of the Anglican clergyman’s 79th birthday, President Obama lauded him as “a moral titan – a voice of principle, an unrelenting champion of justice, and a dedicated peacemaker.”
In this year alone Tutu has demonstrated his dedication to peace, justice, and principle in the Middle East in particular by speaking up for Hamas and supporting the “Freedom Flotilla” of Islamist jihadists and “internationalist” do-gooders (people who confuse doing good with feeling good about what they are doing) who last spring tried to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza.
He has also repeatedly endorsed the activities of the BDS (Boycott/Divest/Sanction) movement. This reincarnation of the Nazis’ “Kauf nicht beim Juden” campaign of the 1930s constantly invokes Tutu’s “authoritative” condemnation of Israel (where Arabs and Jews use the same buses, beaches, clinics, cafes, and soccer fields, and attend the same universities) as an “apartheid” state.
But his fulminations against Jews have a long history, so well-documented that one wonders how the “surprised” Jewish leaders or President Obama can possibly be ignorant of it, especially now that the latter has a “director of the Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism” named Hannah Rosenthal, who has shown herself adept even at spotting that evanescent phenomenon called “Islamophobia” at a distance of ten miles.
Here are just a few examples of the “moral titan” Tutu on the Jewish question:
On the day after Christmas 1989, Tutu, standing before the memorial at Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem to the millions of Jews murdered by the Nazis, prayed for the murderers and scolded the descendants of their victims. “We pray for those who made it happen, help us to forgive them and help us so that we in our turn will not make others suffer.” This, he said, was his “message” to the Israeli children and grandchildren of the dead.
Moral obtuseness, mean spite, and monstrous arrogance do not make for sound ethics and theology. Neither Tutu nor the Israelis he lectured can “forgive” the Nazi murderers. Representatives of an injured group are not licensed (even by the most sanctimonious of preachers) to forgive on behalf of the whole group; in fact, forgiveness issues from God alone. The forgiveness Tutu offers the Nazis is truly pitiless because it forgets the victims, blurs over suffering, and obliterates the past.
Tutu is always far less moved by the actuality of what the Nazis did (“the gas chambers,” he once said, “made for a neater death” than apartheid resettlement policies) than by the hypothetical potentiality of what, in his jaundiced view, Israelis might do. His speeches against apartheid returned obsessively to gross, licentious equations between the former South African system and Jewish practices, biblical and modern.
“The Jews,” Tutu declared in 1984, “thought they had a monopoly on God” and “Jesus was angry that they could shut out other human beings.” Tutu has been an avid supporter of the Goebbels-like equation of Zionism with racism. He has alleged that “Jews think they have cornered the market on suffering” and that Jews are “quick to yell ‘anti-Semitism’ ” because of “an arrogance of power – because Jews have such a strong lobby in the United States.”
Jewish power in America is, in fact, a favorite Tutu theme. In late April 2002 he praised his own courage in resisting it. “People are scared in [America] to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful, very powerful. Well, so what? Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust.”
One of my favorite talkshow hosts of all time is Ronn Owens of KGO radio in San Francisco. In 2004, he published this book. It’s mediocre. I don’t think it will stand the test of time. But I find his comments here important:
I have found that arch-conservative Republicans have a great deal of concern for the individual, but don’t seem to care about the group. One on one, they come across as caring, decent, even fun people, even as they support issues that either take away our rights or otherwise work to the disadvantage of large bodies of people.
A typical right-wing Republican sees a poor little Black kid panhandling in front of the Capitol. He’s likely to stop, pull out his wallet, hand the kid a buck…then promptly vote against a bill that would fund a Head Start program or affordable housing for minorities.
Radical liberal Democrats, on the other hand, are very passionate when it comes to the group, but can’t be bothered with the individual.
Senator Orrin Hatch is about as right-wing as you can possibly get. I watch this man whenever I talk to him, and I’m always impressed by how he deals with others and the genuine attention he pays to what you have to say. He is one of the nicest people you ever want to meet.
On the far left side, Representative Barney Frank comes off like someone who really cares about the group as a whole… Yet when you try to talk to him on a personal level, when you sit and watch him get ready to be interviewed, he comes across as really arrogant. He’s pompous, he screams at people, he’s just unpleasant to be around.
Pat Buchanan is another classic extreme… And yet on a personal level, he’s terrific. You sit down for an interview…you joke and shmooze…
Ralph Nader…is the quintessential champion of the underdog. And yet when you first sit down with him one on one, it’s as if he doesn’t even know you exist.
By and large, extreme conservative Republicans are more pleasant to be around.
Jane writes: “Ronn Owens is dead-on in that quote. Back when my child was an infant and I (wrongfully) lost my job, had to resort to welfare for awhile. Interestingly enough, it was a group of arch-conservative Christians who befriended me and helped me out, while my former artsy liberal friends scattered to the wind and were nowhere to be found.”
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
