How Do You Use Your Judaism?

There’s probably nobody I admire more than my friend (he’s never had a parking ticket!) and the other day he was discussing a bargaining position.
I interrupted: “I love how you use your Judaism.”
I’d said the same sort of thing to him before and he never liked it, which I always found amusing. My friend, who’s far more intelligent, normal, moral, empathic and socially well adjusted than myself, hates the airing of group differences (such as that there tend to be a lot of Jewish and Indian names in Wall Street scandals). This time he exploded at me in front of our friends, accusing me of “deeply anti-Semitic behavior.”
At first, I thought he was kidding.
Luke: “It’s anti-Semitic to say that Jews are good at bargaining?”
Friend: “Yes. You mean it in an anti-Semitic way.”
Luke: “I mean it in the way that I grew up in a type of Protestantism where it was considered vulgar to bargain and to talk about money [and that Judaism makes much more peace with the natural passions such as making money, and therefore Jews have an edge because their religion and culture are more based in reality].”
Friend: “You are the worst kind of anti-Semite. You go around wearing a yarmulke and you say these horrible things about Jews.”
Luke: “That Jews tend to be good at business?”
Friend: “You mean it in a bad way.”
Luke: “Listen you, goy. Why don’t you go study Torah with your lesbian rabbi! I study Talmud every day.”
I’ve got a smile on my face while I say this because I find it impossible to believe that my friend is truly upset, because I know I’m a convert, that he was born Jewish, that he knows more Hebrew than me, that he is smarter and saner and more successful than me and so how could he ever be offended by me. In social status, I am gum beneath his shoe. But I have misread the situation. My friend is out of his mind with rage.
He starts ranting that I desecrated everything Judaism considered holy.
Luke: “Which mitzvah am I violating by saying that Jews are good at bargaining?”
Friend: “Mitzvah doesn’t mean law.”
Luke: “Yes, it does. What do you think it means?”
Friend: “It means good deed. And you are engaging in evil speech. Lashon hara.”
He then goes on to list off all the most embarrassing and vulnerable things I’ve ever revealed and by the time he was done, I think we were all convinced that I was worse than Hitler because at least Hitler was honest, and that I should be utterly destroyed like Amalek.
I was stunned that this guy who I’ve always regarded as such a mentch has no limits when he loses his temper. Everything comes spilling out that could make me look like a worm and all forms of retaliation to destroy me for my perfidy seemed to be on the table for him.
I was raised to fight fair. I’ve never ranted like this against anyone. To win an argument, I’ve never recited publicly what people have confided to me confidentially. In my life, I’ve never gone to the teacher to tattle on another student or gone to the boss to tattle on another employee or gone to the rabbi to tattle on another congregant, so I’m speechless when my friend threatens every connection I hold sacred. I always thought of this kind of tattling as bitch moves. I understand that girls tend not to fight fair when they’re mad because they didn’t grow up getting smacked in the mouth for fighting dirty. On this day, not knowing what to say, and faced with an unfathomable volcano of Ashkenazi rage, I end up apologizing for misreading him and the situation and making inappropriate jokes.

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Rabbi Shlomo Schwartz Z’tl

The rabbi I most looked forward to meeting when I moved to Los Angeles in March of 1994 was Rabbi Shlomo Schwartz of the Chai Center, formerly of the Westwood Chabad synagogue that served UCLA.

In his lectures, on his radio show, and in real life, Dennis Prager had all these wonderful things to say about Schwartzie and I couldn’t wait to see if this guy lived up to his billing.

He did and he turned out to be one of those remarkable people who inspired my conversion to Orthodox Judaism. Most of the people I most admire are Orthodox Jews. There’s something in that stark difficult tradition that speaks to the deepest parts of my soul. There’s something in Orthodoxy that just helps life and the universe make sense. There’s something in the mesora (tradition) that touches the divine.

In my first weeks in town, I saw Schwartzie at various Jewish events and I ran up to him and introduced myself and bubbled over with my naive enthusiasm for Judaism. I found Schwartzie accessible, warm and funny. Many, perhaps most Orthodox Jews, have an understandable skepticism about would-be converts. It seems like for every 10,000 goyim who want to convert, only about one or two make it through the conversion process and then still keep Shabbat five years later. But Schwartzie never displayed that ambivalence or skepticism with me. Perhaps he saw that I was serious. Perhaps he just liked me. Perhaps I amused him.

We had these wide-ranging conversations. I’m sure I said stupid things, I’m sure I opined on matters I knew little about, I’m sure I was off-balance and off-kilter, but he enjoyed my hunger for learning Torah.

Over the years, I went to dozens of his Jewish events. I enjoyed a Shabbat meal in his home. I was always inspired by his love for his people.

The world seems like a colder, darker place without him.

Luckily, we still have Chabad. The Lubavitch movement is Schwartzie written across seven continents.

David Suissa writes:

Everybody had a Schwartzie story.

I would be someplace halfway around the world and tell someone I’m from Los Angeles, and they would ask, “Do you know Schwartzie?” I would respond, “Are you kidding? Schwartzie’s my brother.” And then I’d hear back something like, “Well, he married us.”

Everybody had a Schwartzie story.

I have a simple theory for that — he was everywhere.

Schwartzie, Rabbi Shlomo Schwartz, who passed away this morning after a long illness, was a Los Angeles Jewish landmark. You’d see his red beard at all kinds of Jewish events, no matter the cause or denomination.

A few years ago, as I was attending a special memorial for Rabbi Harold Shulweis at Valley Beth Shalom, I scoured the huge crowd and wondered why I couldn’t see any Orthodox rabbis. Then I saw his greying, reddish beard. He was limping with a cane, walking slowly down the main aisle as people were taking their seats. I caught his eye and said “Schwartzie, I have a seat for you!” He looked at me and said, “Hey, holy brother. Good to see you.”

After we sat down, all I remember him saying was, “I really loved that man,” referring to Rabbi Shulweis.

Loving Jews was somewhat of a Schwartzie obsession. He was a Chabad-Lubavitcher who internalized his Rebbe’s message to find the “pintele yid” in every Jew. He took the unconditional love he had for his own family and found a way to channel it to his collective Jewish family. For him, this was a natural move. I know, it sounds corny, schmaltzy, tribal, but that’s who he was– a great, unapologetic lover of Jews.

That didn’t mean he was naïve or didn’t know the ways of the world. How could he not know? Over the years, he consulted with thousands of Jews who needed help—parents who needed help with their children, children who needed help with their parents, spouses who needed help with each other. You name the problem, he was there. He saw it all. Maybe that just deepened his love for his people— he saw how needed he was.

He was especially needed on Friday nights at his home in Mar Vista, where for decades he hosted, with his beloved wife and spiritual partner, Olivia, “Shabbat for 30 strangers.” Or 40, or 50 or 60. These weekly gatherings had one unabashed objective: Get more Jews to meet and marry each other. He was a one-man Jewish continuity machine. Is it any wonder I would meet Jews around the world who would say, “Oh yeah, he married us”?

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Taking Offense

I’ve never been offended in my life so I’m always amused when I meet smart successful people who take offense at the noting of obvious truths.

If I say, “Wow, blacks run really fast!”, people I’ve known will get angry and accuse me of stereotyping because “Not all blacks run really fast.”

If I say, “Blacks tend to be more out-going and more in the moment and more skilled at improvisation than other groups”, people I’ve known will warn me that that kind of talk leads to genocide.

At college, I said to this asian girl next to me on the first day of class, “You look smart”, she got offended. “So you think all asians are smart, do you?” she replied and wouldn’t talk to me the rest of the semester.

Other times, I’ve said, “Seventh-Day Adventists waste a lot of energy and burn up a lot of friendships arguing about theology”, and that offends Christians who regard theology as the most important calling on earth.

I had a Jewish girlfriend who told me she encountered anti-Semitism constantly.

“Could you give me an example?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I worked for this woman and one day she said to me, ‘You people are good at business.'”
“So this person saying that Jews tend to be good at business felt anti-Semitic?”
“Yes.”

Perhaps the thing I’m happiest about over the past five years is that I have entirely avoided feuds. I am no longer at war with anyone I know. I live at peace with people. I stand up for my values, but somehow I’ve learned to do this while getting along with others. I carry no resentment. It will flare up for an hour or two, or occasionally as long as a day, but it never lasts longer than that.

I think it is obvious that different groups have different gifts. I see nothing wrong with noting that high verbal IQ and a propensity for verbal aggression makes Jews great lawyers. Jews, on average, don’t tend to be as good as blacks at basketball and football and rap and other things that put a premium on improvisation. Yet, for many smart people I know, people far more highly accomplished than myself, these remarks are highly offensive and anti-Semitic.

The first time I went to synagogue, I was struck by how most of the Ashkenazi Jews there were shorter than the people I knew and heavier. That first experience corresponds with my general experience in this regard. I’ve read that diminished height among many Ashkenazi Jews is a result of centuries of living in the ghetto. When I say this aloud, however, I’m told that the observation is anti-Semitic.

No group only has beautiful traits. No group has members who are not below average in some things. No group dominates every category. No group is objectively marked out by the universe as superior. These points to me are elementary and yet they offend.

I also don’t get how behaving differently in different contexts makes one a “liar.” Such a charged term and yet so freely thrown around. I feel like a different person with everyone I talk to at any depth. I’m affected by those around me. They bring out different sides of me, they encourage different perspectives and opinions and behaviors. Perhaps I lack a core?

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Babylonian Talmud is now free online in English and Modern Hebrew translation

Talmud link here.

Tabletmag.com:

One of the most accessible Hebrew and English translations of the Babylonian Talmud is going open source. Today, Sefaria, an online nonprofit bringing traditional Jewish texts to the internet, announced that it will be posting the entire compendium with the crisp bilingual translation of Jerusalem polymath Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz Even-Yisrael.

A multi-decade scholarly effort first published in Israel, the Hebrew Steinsaltz Talmud has long been a print staple of the beit midrash, while the English edition has been distributed by Random House and Koren Publishers. Now, however, both translations will be available to anyone with an internet connection, thanks to a grant from the William Davidson Foundation.

Sefaria has already posted the Talmud’s first 22 tractates in English; the rest, along with the modern Hebrew translations, will be rolling out through 2017. Unlike previous attempts at translating the ancient Jewish legal-literary corpus like the Soncino Talmud, the Steinsaltz edition is prized for its clarity and accessibility, making it ideal for public and not just academic consumption.

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How can a race realist support school vouchers?

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* How can a race realist support school vouchers? It means blacks and Latinos get to attend white parochial schools for free. Having money is what separates Whites from the rabble… do you really want to forfeit that advantage? My Catholic school was great precisely because blacks and lower class Latinos were priced out.

Vouchers do nothing but pile the ineducable and unruly into better schools…for which I’m already being reamed thousands of dollars per year in real estate taxes.

All they can contribute is the disorder, stupidity, and criminality they bring with them, which was the cause of their former schools being latrines.

If teachers could remove the disruptive from their classrooms, where would they go?

All you’d end up with is formerly good schools and the same set of problems we have now. And a bazillion more expensive dolt-wrangling Programs.

We need to attack this entire problem from its supply side: r-strategy reproduction, low-IQ reproduction, and immigration from low-IQ nations/peoples.

Humanity does not evolve and thrive where the worst are full of passionate intensity (so to speak) and the best lack all conviction.

* I have a different theory to explain why conservatives support school choice. It’s because, in politics, you have to have a solution to offer. It doesn’t have to be a practical solution, just plausible enough so you have to have a response when the question comes up.

Q: Education?
A: School choice!

You can’t very well expect an American politician to respond, “Our schools aren’t ‘broken.’ Blacks are doing about as well as can be expected considering their lower IQ and lack of impulse control.”

This was illustrated in the 2012 campaign by Obama. He had proposed a jobs program–Stimulus 2.0–that was so unpalatable that Harry Reid wouldn’t even support it. However, what was important was that when Obama was campaigning, and a reporter asked what he was going to do about unemployment, he could say, “I’ve put forth a jobs bill but the Republican congress won’t even consider it, so you should ask them.”

The jobs bill performed its only actual intended function, providing Obama with a way to answer the unemployment question.

* The City Journal article was utterly silent on the Somali black versus American black versus Mexican problem. From other accounts of school violence in the Twin Cities, a lot of the trouble stems from intra-NAM race war. You get some American brutha who hits on some Somali sista and all hell will break loose when the young Somali males react.

Being hard-line Muslims, Somalis are generally disgusted with the sluttish and sexual behavior of American blacks and more than perhaps anything else wish to have their own hardline Sharia-based schools in the Twin Cities.

Why didn’t City Journal even dip its toe into that stream? Is it incompatible with their pro-immigrant ideology?

* The wisdom of Prussia’s three-class franchise is more apparent than ever.

Wikipedia: The Prussian three-class franchise system (German: Dreiklassenwahlrecht), after the revolutions of 1848 in the German states, was introduced on 30 May 1849 by the government of the Prussian king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, for the election of the lower house of the Prussian parliament. It was completely abolished in 1918. The system was used in Prussia, Brunswick, Waldeck and (until 1909) Saxony.

Those eligible to vote were men over 24, divided by their direct tax revenue into three classes. The three classes were calculated according to how much tax one paid, by dividing the entire range of taxes into thirds. The first class ranged from the highest tax payer on down until one third of total tax revenue was reached; the second was for those with a lower income until another one third of total tax revenue was reached; the third was for the bottom third of tax payers. While the last were generally poor people paying little to no tax individually, it could happen that a rich person living in a particularly rich tax district ended up in the third class, which happened to chancellor Bernhard von Bülow in 1903.

Voting took place in public and was oral; there was no secret ballot. It was also indirect; representatives known as electors (Wahlmänner) were voted for, each class electing a third of all the electors. The classes of course contained widely differing numbers of people even though the number of electors was the same for each one. In 1849, the first class constituted 4.7% of the population, the second class 12.7% and the third class 82.6%. The distribution meant that a first-class vote had 17.5 times the value of a third-class vote. A three-class franchise system was also used for local elections in parts of Prussia, one result of which was that the industrialist Alfred Krupp was the only person able to vote for the electors in the first class in Essen.

Prussia’s controlling position in the German Empire meant that the system was at the heart of debates about reform. Extending suffrage would, however, have meant the downfall of the ruling conservative politicians, elected by the wealthy voters favoured by the three-class system. Thus, despite popular dissatisfaction, the Prussian franchise persisted.

* A Short Story: Victimization as a way of life became institutionalized in the United States in the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. In the intervening decades, more “identity” groups saw the social and economic advantages of victimization and jumped aboard. In the name of justice, calls for affirmative action, equity, and reparations spread across ever larger classes of people. For example, all People of Color became a victim class. Indeed, all females — infants, girls, women, the aged — found themselves defined as a victim class.

Then Hussein Obama, a street pimp from Chicago, sweet talked his way into the White House. Under him, the spreading Cult of Victimization accelerated as national and international policy. In time, up to 70 percent of the population of the United States claimed victim status based on one criterion or another. The infection quickly spread to Europe and the Third World, where entire populations started claiming victimization that could only be addressed by open borders and massive immigration to Western Europe and the United States. The new victims asserted new-found human rights as immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers; they sought redress for the harm done to them.

But victims require victimizers. Who were they? The only non-victim class of candidates left to fill this ideological role were White Males and the patriarchy and Western Civilization they created. Cultural Marxism (a thinly veiled spinoff of classical economic Marxism, a.k.a. Communism) became the ideological glue that held this new-found class warfare … this fetid mess … together.

The global victim classes found commonality and class solidarity in what they called the intersectional oppression they had suffered at the hands of White Males at some time in their personal, cultural, or national histories. But they had to act quickly. The lines were becoming longer and longer as the victimized masses queued up at the pay window to claim redress. At some point, the victim classes realized that Western Civilization would be “cashed out” and there would be nothing left for them. They had to act while there was still time.

* Unfortunately, in a society where public schools are abysmal, all a private school needs to do is be ok in order for it to stay in business and be considered good.

Private school, or a public school in a “good” district, will get your kids away from violence and chaotic classrooms, but the education is unlikely to be excellent, even at the so-called “good” ones.

That’s the problem with generally lowered standards in a society. It has a way of dragging everything down.

I heard a saying once: “If you spend time with cripples, you start to limp.” We’re seeing this in our education system. The bad schools are the cripples, and the good schools are limping along.

I don’t know what the solution is, except to have higher quality people. Enforce law and order, encourage stable two-parent families, outlaw immigration except for geniuses, and maybe within 2 or 3 generations we can turn this around.

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