Clarity Creates Energy And Strength

I receive many outreach calls from my various 12-step programs, but I have to be careful of my time and my energy because most calls I get are from people who want to share the mess, not the message, and after a few minutes, I find them draining. They want to go on and on about their problems, and then make a perfunctory inquiry about my life, but they don’t want to work the program. Work means freedom, but they aren’t working the 12 Steps and so they’re not free. They’re just a whirlpool going down and they’ll take me with them if I let them.

I got a ton of clarity from tackling various step one work sheets. When I wrote out my answers to dozens of questions about how my addictions had hurt my life, I saw things like never before. I could see my compulsions hovering over me like eagles ready to strike. When I then shared my answers with my sponsor, I got even more clarity because his presence and his questions helped me to see things I couldn’t see on my own. We excavated so we could renovate and build me a new life.

Clarity for me came well before the strength of character to live out my truth. I sometimes see things I need to do, people I need to block from my life, well before I have the inner resources to act.

Still, despite my frailties, the more clear I am, the more decisively I tend to act, and to let people know quickly that I’m available to talk about the message but not the mess.

The more clarity I have, the more energy I have. The more recovery I have, the more clarity I have. The more clarity, energy and recovery I have, the less I have to agonize about things. People are less of a mystery to me. If I don’t understand someone, I know the odds are that they are either lying to me or manipulating me (often unconsciously).

When you have clarity, you naturally tend to cut through life like a hot knife through warm butter. Clarity naturally leads to productivity and away from dissolution. Clarity doesn’t make you good but it sure helps you accomplish your goals. Clarity may not make you strong, but it sure feels that way. Your life feels like you are skating on ice. Swoosh! You get up every day and you launch and things come much easier than when you were muddled.

I love watching the way successful people walk and talk. I love watching how they keep their desks. Because they have clarity and strength, they tend to give a quick yes or no or I’ll get back to you later. They don’t get sucked into other people’s problems where they have no control. They don’t get distracted from their vision. The more intelligent they are, the more clearly they see the future and the more focused they are on putting first things first.

My desire to be nice often hinders me from living my vision. I have clarity but lack the strength of character to always live my clarity. I often see that I want to avoid a person but lack the balls to tell them bluntly that I can’t help. About half the people I encounter are toxic and just like you don’t want to put toxic food in your cupboard, you don’t want to allow toxic people into your life. Sometimes they are unavoidable, but when I am clear about my vision, I can smile at everyone and keep moving away from trouble and towards my goals. Clarity is energy. Vision is energy. Humility equals living in reality. Humiliation is being caught avoiding reality. Upset is what happens when I deny some aspect of reality. Resentment blocks me off from the sunlight of the spirit.

If you are an addict like me, you know there’s a sword dangling above your head at all times, and it is only through developing your spiritual life, your transcendent purpose of service to others, that you can avoid the catastrophes that come from untreated compulsions. On the other hand, if you are working your program, there’s no place you can’t go so long as you have a good reason for being there.

Posted in Addiction, Personal | Comments Off on Clarity Creates Energy And Strength

Forward: ‘Laura Loomer Is The Jewish Voice Of The Far Right. Can She Tame Jew Haters?’

Ari Feldman writes:

Loomer’s performance was another notch on the belt in a budding career of far-right provocation. It earned her a spot on Hannity, instant “alt-right” cachet online and the admiration of her arresting officers. (She was charged with misdemeanor trespassing and disorderly conduct. Loomer reported that at the station the officers told her that her mugshot was “the nicest mugshot they’ve ever seen.”)

“Most people don’t really have the balls to get onstage and protest,” said Loomer, who is 24. “But the fact that I’m a conservative, and I’m a woman, and I’m nonviolent, and I’m just a New York resident, it makes a statement.”

Loomer is one of the few women — and one of only a handful of Jews — in the far right’s cast of characters. She is styling herself as a media voice that trumpets Jewish causes in one breath and decries “Muslim “refugee” predators” in the next. Just don’t slot her into the “alt-right,” the catch-all term for far-right Trump supporters steeped in internet culture. She’s part of a Twitter-savvy crew of Trump fans that are trying to use the tactics of the “alt-right” — memes, social media targeting and aggressive misinformation — to purge the far right of pervasive anti-Semitism while upholding the sanctity of white European culture.

In the backlash to the protest, people on Twitter from both the far left and the far right attacked Loomer on the basis of her Jewish identity. David Duke, former leader of the Klu Klux Klan, called her “classic controlled opposition.”

“They’ll say, ‘Oh, this stupid kike who stormed the stage of ‘Julius Caesar,’ ‘Oh, the Jews are always up to dirty tricks,’” Loomer said. “The only reason they’re attacking me is because I’m Jewish.”

Though the “alt-right” has never claimed unity, anti-Semitism has frequently proved a divisive issue for its biggest personalities, who have clashed numerous times over allegations of anti-Semitism and counter-allegations of philo-Semitism. In December, the meme wiz known on the internet as Baked Alaska was barred from the DeploraBall, a far-right inauguration party, for his history of anti-Semitic tweets. More recently, Loomer and a friend backed out of appearances at an “alt-right” rally in Washington in June, after Richard Spencer, the white nationalist icon and lover of Nazi salutes, was added to the list of speakers.

Loomer and the friend, the conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, organized a counter-rally at the exact same time in front of the White House. Many saw the dueling rallies as a sign that the “alt-right” as it was once known is now dead.

“They’re allowed to think the way they do,” Loomer said of Spencer and Baked Alaska. “I respected their right to say what they want to say, even if it’s anti-Jewish. But I’m not going to participate in it.”

Since June, people in Loomer’s circle — which includes Posobiec, the “meme mastermind” Mike Cernovich and the White House Press Corps “troll” Lucian Wintrich — have tried to rebrand in order to distance themselves from the “alt-right.” Loomer personally favors “New Right,” a term suggested by Cernovich.

Spencer said that the divide between the “alt-right” and Loomer’s so-called “New Right” is “a very serious divide that is ideological and political” — and nothing new.

“This divide was probably masked in 2016 because we were all on the Trump train,” Spencer said. “After the campaign ended,this very stark division has emerged.”

Posted in Alt Right, Jews | Comments Off on Forward: ‘Laura Loomer Is The Jewish Voice Of The Far Right. Can She Tame Jew Haters?’

“The People vs. O.J. Simpson”

Steve Sailer writes: “One theme of the series is spelled out in a derisive comment by Marcia Clark, who points out that the prosecution’s secret weapon is that all the alpha male egos on the Dream Team will cause the defense to implode.

Like virtually every single thing Marcia says in the show, this sounds reasonable and intelligent under the current conventional wisdom (after all, diversity is our strength, and whoever has heard of a team of highly competitive males ever sorting out their differences, establishing a functional hierarchy, and buckling down to win anything?), but turns out to be wrong. The seemingly chaotic defense team managed, if barely, to battle out their differences and adjust to circumstances, most notably in the internal coup in which Cochran replaced Shapiro at the top. In contrast, the more hierarchical prosecution was doomed by boss lady Marcia’s self-confidence in her own bad judgment, most notably about blacks, women, and, especially, black women.”

Comments at Steve Sailer’s blog:

* The Juice answered the age-old question: “Who do I have to kill to avoid traffic on the 405?”

* Marcia Clark was raped at the age of 17 while visiting Israel:

When Clark was 17 years old, she was raped on a trip to Eilat, Israel.[9] She has said it was an experience she did not deal with until much later, and that it informed much of why she became a prosecutor.[9]”

However, the show has her say that the rape happened in Italy:

“Maybe you have to have something inside you already when you get here, something that you have to make right. Something you have to avenge. When I was 17, I was raped. I was raped in Italy by a waiter and I buried it. I didn’t forget it… I just sort of stuffed it. When I had my first rape case, what happened to me, of course, came flying out from whatever rock I’d jammed it under and I had to deal with it. It was hell all over again, in a way. But it made something very, very clear to me. I have something, this thing in me, that wants vengeance. Vengeance for victims. That’s what justice is to me. And I’ve always, always had faith that when I look at a jury, we have that in common. Everyone wants justice for victims, right? I never doubted that. Until this.”

* At the time, Marcia Clark’s jewishness was never fully front and center, say, in the way it was for Robert Shapiro and Barry Shreck. (Or the Ron Goldman family). Now that it’s been made into a mini-series, it’s not hard to see why a personal anecdote is moved to a European nation rather than Israel.

* Only a feminist could be so stupid. Men do have ego battles, of course, but male-only groups will, if given enough time, coalesce into a hierarchy, and will follow along with that hierarchy to achieve a group goal. The length of the entire O.J. ordeal gave the defense team enough time to sort out who was top dog and who was going to run the show, and then attack the prosecution full force.

Clark, being a feminazi, had no concept of how men actually behaved, since her delusional feminist religion didn’t allow her to think it. If she’d been smart, she’d have pushed very hard for a quick trial, to keep the men from consolidating, or maybe done some open whining to the press about how the O.J. team wasn’t “diverse” because it had no women, thereby getting a token female lawyer on board with O.J.’s squad and having her presence cause trouble (the presence of women, even unattractive ones, has long been noted to reduce male-group cohesion, since men invariably either seek to protect her or dismiss her, causing male conflict).

But then again, if Clark’d been smart, she would have recused herself when she realized she was over her head.

* It’s really strange that a prosecutor would make the decision to move a case to where acquittal was almost certain. Was he taking orders from higher up that this case had to be lost (a second riot in LA in three years could not be contemplated), or someone would see to it that his career would be ruined?

* The black preachers, politicians, activists told the mayor and DA Garcetti that if Simpson was not acquitted they would riot again..

The venue was moved from the court district where the murder was committed and the defendant lived to the big courthouse downtown. That courthouse district had the biggest percentage of blacks in the city.

Clark and every other White woman who worked or works with black women knows all to well the hatred of black woman.

Had it been any other case Judge Ito would have been censored by the judicial council for the way he ran his courtroom.

Clark was an excellent prosecutor with a great win record. She lost but got a big reward. She and a ghostwriter got a book out soon after the trial. She got a 3 million dollar advance, quit the DA’s office, bought a million dollar home and settled down to enjoy mothering her boys.

The entire thing was arranged well in advance by the black leadership, the mayor and DA Garcetti. The black jurors got rid of a White and a Hispanic juror with charges of racism.

The king riots and the OJ trial were the last hurrah of Los Angeles blacks. Decisions were made at the highest level, the business, community, not politicians to blast the blacks out of Los Angeles with Hispanics.

* Before the murders, the walls were filled with photos of OJ and his famous friends, nearly all of them rich white men and beautiful white women. On the nightstand by his bed he had a framed nude photo of the latest Playboy slut he was dating, Paula Barbieri. Practically the only black person in any of the photos was OJ. But after Cochran got done, all the white people were gone, replaced with pictures of his family members, black kids helped by some of his fundraising efforts, etc. The nude photo of his white girlfriend beside his bed was swapped out for a picture of his mother (hopefully fully clothed). Portraits of people like MLK were put up, African art was moved in, and to top it all off, a huge print of Norman Rockwell’s The Problem We All Live With, the painting of the little black girl surrounded by federal marshals as she enters a formerly all-white school in 1960. Behind her, “the N word” has been sprayed on a wall, and a tomato has splattered, clearly meant for her. The painting dominated the room, and sent the jury a clear message that OJ was a true Race Man.

No competent judge would ever allowed such a thing to occur. Lance Ito was a starstruck buffoon, and let the defense get away will all sorts of outrageous behavior.

* Ever thought about the possibility that black women now loved him because he killed his white wife?

* DA Garcetti wanted the jury to have lots of blacks on it. He could have held the trial in Santa Monica. Going by where the murders took place, and where the suspect lived, it should’ve been held there. Garcetti came up with all kinds of excuses for moving the trial downtown, but everyone knows he did so because a Santa Monica jury would’ve been overwhelmingly white, while a downtown jury was going to have very few whites and lots of blacks. Being just two years after the riots of the beating of the Rev. Dr. Rodney Luther King, Garcetti was afraid that if a white jury convicted a black supercelebrity of murder, all hell would break loose.

In her book, Marcia Clark defends her idiotic feminist (and clearly racist) idea that she should gets lots of black women on the jury because black women suffer lots of domestic violence and would sympathize with Nicole. However, she says at several points in the book that it didn’t matter who wound up getting picked, a downtown jury was never going to convict OJ Simpson. In the section of her book describing the jury selection process, at the end, she says she then knew that this jury was never going to find Simpson, and that the case was doomed the moment Garcetti moved it from Santa Monica to downtown.

White men are producers and breadwinners, and few can afford to spend months on a jury with no income. The white men who are successful enough that they could afford to so don’t want to – they’ve got stuff to do, and sitting on a jury for months listening to lawyers isn’t one of them. Plus, defense lawyers know that normal white Gentile males are the prosecution’s best friend,and they will do whatever it takes to keep as many as they can off the jury.

* One of OJ’s defense attorneys, Carl Douglas, in the 30 for 30 documentary from last year: “If we had had a Latin jury, we would have had a picture of him in a sombrero! There would have been a mariachi band out front! We would have had a piñata at the top of the staircase!”

* It wasn’t just that Marcia Clark “misunderestimated” the loyalty black women would have in standing by their man, but just as importantly, California law at the time would only allow DNA evidence if the party presenting it actually first proved its scientific merits to the jury.

Clark’s mistake in allowing so many black women on the jury was compounded by the fact that they found the testimony of scientific experts boring and largely irrelevant. The jurors just flat out didn’t have the intelligence to comprehend what they were being told or what relevance it may have had for determining OJ’s innocence or guilt.

It is impossible to overstate how stupid black people are. White people literally can’t fathom it because they are so much smarter.

* The part of the OJ saga that sticks in my head is when the verdict was read: Robert Kardashian, sitting at the defense table, has this unmistakable gut-punched-sick-to-his-stomach, I-can’t-believe-he-got-away-with-it expression on his face and accompanying body language. Check out the video; it’s obvious he’s in real distress. Kardashian clearly knew that OJ was stone guilty; it’s highly plausible that OJ confessed to him early on before Shapiro came on board, when it seemed that Simpson was going to give up or possibly even commit suicide.

* Race trumps gender. Clark still doesn’t get that fact about human nature, and probably would’ve done the same thing if faced with the same decision today.

For her to have won the case, she would’ve had to

1. NOT agree to move the case downtown, but keep it in West LA.
2. NOT agree to a jury composed largely of black women
3. Attempt to stack the jury with mostly middle class white men
4. Step down from leading the prosecution and bring in an A-list prosecutor from out of town.

Still don’t fully understand the reasoning behind “Let’s move the trial from where the crime occurred to downtown”. Makes no sense whatsoever. With that reasoning, why not move it to Cupertino? Makes no sense. That ace in her hand was thrown away, she didn’t have to agree to that at all. The crime didn’t occur downtown, duh.

* My spotty recollection of the trial is that the case swung strongly to O.J.’s favor when tapes of “racist cop” Mark Fuhrman spouting the n-word were played in court. Suddenly all the police-gathered evidence implicating O.J.’s guilt lost credibility in the eyes of the black jurors. The story got reframed as racist cops wanting to bring down a too successful black man.

* The miniseries version of Clark may be depicted as advancing reasonable-sounding but doomed strategies, but in real life Clark seemed unreasonable even at the time. The prosecution had a mock trial in Arizona and the mock jurors who were being monitored hated Clark in real life – in particular the black women. Their reactions to her were quite negative – “Bitch. White bitch. Jew bitch.” She was totally unshaken. She blew it all off and insisted that black women would identify with a blonde woman who had been abused and then murdered by a black man. Nothing Darden or anyone said could get her to rethink that.

Clark was a liberal Jewish divorcee with a messy background and weird ideas about men due to her own bad experience. Her ex-husband was a sleazy backgammon shark and sometime chess shark, I think maybe Israeli, who ended up dead in suspicious circumstances. She thought all women thought the way she did about controlling, abusive husbands. Johnnie Cochran was only too happy to help Clark pack the jury with black women.

Even at the end of the trial Clark had no idea how badly she had whiffed. Her closing statement ended by replaying Nicole’s old 911 call from when OJ was beating on her. She thought she had won the war or something. The jury just sat there stonefaced.

Clark and her colleagues were indeed way out of their depth. They’re the sort of people who end up working in the prosecutors office while others like Cochran and Bailey are earning seven-figure fees. As I recall Darden’s annual salary was $40,000.

The reality is that it would have been almost impossible for even a competent prosecution to succeed any better than earning a hung jury. Once DA Gil Garcetti moved the trial from Brentwood to downtown it became impossible to get a prosecution jury. The best they could have done was mixed, but Clark blew that. Garcetti was so scared of another riot he threw away any realistic chance of a conviction for peace at any price.

* The most striking thing for me was that immediately after the acquittal, one of the black female jurors, as she left the courthouse, made a sweeping motion with her hand over her head:

“All that DNA stuff? Right over my head.” Completely dismissing hundreds of hours of DNA evidence.

Stacking a jury with LOW IQ scientifically illiterate black women was also catastrophic for the prosecution, especially when there was so much circumstantial evidence.

* In a culture where racism isn’t the summum mallum think what a compelling story the life of Mark Fuhrman could have been. Literally the only cop that took Nicole’s domestic abuses accusations seriously who then becomes a focal point of the OJ murderer trial with a final denouement of his solving that Kennedy cousin murder cold case.

Clearly the guy is a little bit off but that is an interesting life arch and I think the series- which I thought was great- would have benefitted from a rounder depiction of him. Marcia Clarke presents herself as Nicole’s avenger, but really the only person who tried to avert the tragedy as it unfolded was Fuhrman.

* I saw the series when it aired last year and then read the book by Jeffrey Toobin.

The mini series script closely follows that book. Toobin, a young recent Harvard Law graduate at the time gave up law and became a journalist. He was working for the New Yorker magazine during the time of the OJ trial and was assigned to cover the trial.

I agree about Cuba Gooding not resembling OJ but his likable on screen presence helps suspend disbelief after a while.

OJ’s Bronco was a perk of his Hertz job. By that time he was a sort of brand ambassador for hertz, playing golf and doing meet and greets for Hertz. The trip to Chicago after the murders was related to that.

Travolta was instrumental in putting the mini-series together; it was something of a vanity project for him. That explains his inflated role. He overacts but is still quite good. The actors playing Marcia Clarke and Darden are also very good with the portrayal of Darden being the highlight of the film.

Toobin’s book lays much of the blame for the verdict on Marcia Clarke and her notion that black women would be angry about domestic violence. He also makes the point that Gil Garcetti, the LA DA at the time, was the one who really sealed the deal for a not guilty verdict: He moved the venue from Brentwood/Santa Monica to downtown LA guaranteeing a majority AA jury. Acting under political pressure and worried about riots Garcetti also took the death penalty off the table from the very beginning. Toobin implies that Garcetti and LA politicians were quite willing to let OJ get away with it as long as they could avoid a repeat of the 92 riots.

* Judge Ito also let OJ “make a statement” to the court without being on the witness stand. This was unbelievably outrageous. If a defendant wants to “make a statement” he can go under oath and answer the questions his lawyers designed to send whatever message he wants. But the prosecution also gets to ask questions, and from what I understand, once a defendant answers a single question about a crime, he has waived his 5A privilege against self-incrimination. You can’t answer some questions, but not others. But Ito essentially let Simpson testify to his innocence without losing his right not to have to answer questions about the crime.

* The thing that has surprised me these years is why O.J. wasn’t the subject of a revenge-killing by someone in the victims’ families. I mean it in all seriousness – it isn’t exactly like O.J. has been laying low these years. I think the temptation to get even and dare a jury to convict me would be significant. But perhaps the Goldmans and Browns are not exactly the McCoys.

* I was running a derivatives desk in Sodom on Hudson at that time. We were therefore in a trading room with TV’s all over the place.

When it was announced that a decision had been made the room filled up with all the affirmative action hires.

Without exception every black in the room cheered.

Many relationships were irredeemably changed that day as white people realised the amount of racial hatred that blacks they worked with every day harbored for them.

* I remember some wag saying, as the OJ jury began its deliberations, “Los Angeles authorities are bracing for rioting by Jews and suburban white women in the event of an acquittal.”

* Whites psychology–open, cooperative, altruistic–is highly beneficial. In fact, it’s the outcome of the great social achievement of the West–breaking down primitive tribalism and building “one people/one nation” societies with trust-at-scale, allowing the great nations and achievements of the West, and the incredible peace and prosperity we have today.

However, this open, trusting, altruism makes it pathetically easy for tribal peoples to roll trusting Westerners. And doubly, triply–an order of magnitude easier–after the West politically empowered women.

This is what we see in the West. Clueless Westerners welcoming “refugees” and other immigrants with their “diversity!” addled brains thinking these folks will behave just like Westerners once they are properly taught. While these tribal (non-trusting, non-altruistic, non-cooperative) foreigners are thinking “these folks are suckers” and taking them for everything they are worth.

~~~

The OJ trial with a black jury freeing an obviously guilty man, and blacks everywhere cheering wildly over it, *should* have been a little ‘window into reality’, for white people–a little “wakeup call” about what’s in store.

And indeed it had that effect on some (probably me to some extent). But TPTB made sure that narrative was quickly pulled, and the “story” was Mark Furhman had said “nigger”–the worst crime imaginable. (Not some trivial shit, like slicing a couple of people’s throats.)

* I don’t believe any part of the trial itself was the result of any conspiracy. It played out naturally. The twists and turns weren’t caused by government interference; they were due to the confluence of race, political correctness, incompetence, and other factors.

The idea that it was all a scripted TV production between the media and the government is so idiotic it’s hard to believe anyone could believe it. But more and more right wingers are a fan of the lunatic/con artist Miles Mathis, who says that very thing – the OJ murders were fake, a scripted production between the media and the government. So were the Manson murders. And the John Lennon murder. And the JFK assassination. And the Lincoln assassination. And a whole bunch of other stuff.

* “What it was all about,” of course, is that O.J. was guilty of cutting off his ex-wife’s head and torturing Ron Goldman to death with a butcher knife, guilty not only “beyond a reasonable doubt” but any doubt, so transparently guilty that no honest and rational person could believe, even as a remote possibility, that he was innocent, or even that he wasn’t “proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.” I sure that most of the jurors, even the blacks, knew he was guilty, beyond any doubt.

“What it was all about” is that a jury, dominated by blacks, freed a murderer they knew was guilty beyond any doubt, not so much because he was rich and famous but because he was a black man who murdered and tortured and mutilated two whites; blatant nullification as racial vengeance and tribalism/solidarity, a corruption of justice that is routine but was/is only infamous in this specific case, unavoidably exposed rather than suppressed by the left-liberal MSM, because of Simpson’s fame.

* The infamous Lazer Kaganovitch, had not 2 victim’s families, but hundreds of thousands of victim’s families with ample reason to kill him, Yet he lived well into his nineties in the middle of Moscow with no police protection.

* I am old enough to remember when you could use the fire stairs to walk from floor to floor in an office building if you did not want to wait for the elevator. Now you don’t get out of the stairwell until you get to the ground floor. Wonder why?

Posted in Blacks, Jews, Los Angeles | Comments Off on “The People vs. O.J. Simpson”

Parashas Matot, Masei (Numbers 30-36)

Listen here.

Parasha Matot is Numbers 30:2–32:42, and Masei is Num. 33-36.

* Num. 30:2-17 assumes that all adult women are married. By giving the husband 24 hours to nullify the wife’s vow, it assures him that he is head of the household.

* Num. 31:1. The Lord spoke to Moses: “Avenge the Israelite people on the Midianites, then you shall be gathered to your kin.”

What did God mean by “avenge”? God wants retribution for the Midianites seducing Israel into worshiping Baal-peor while the Israelites want revenge for the devastating plague that followed that worship.

This repeated invocation of “gathered to your kin” indicates that ties of blood are important in the Torah world view.

* Was Balaam a good guy or a bad guy? Num. 31:8 says the Jews slew Balaam. Yet we use his words in the Jewish prayer book.

* Dennis Prager: “What did God command [about Midian]? Retribution. There is no other specific command from God. It is all from Moses. Moses does all the commanding of killing. Did Moses do exactly what God wanted?”

* Num. 31:14 Moses was angry with the officers of the army—the commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds—who returned from the battle.

15 “Have you allowed all the women to live?” he asked them. 16 “They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the Lord in the Peor incident, so that a plague struck the Lord’s people. 17 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, 18 but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.

Dennis: “The ones who caused the problems were the ones who you spared…so that the Lord’s community got the plague… I do not believe that God wanted the children of Midian killed.”

“They [the Israelites] didn’t kill the women and children. Obviously it is Moses interpreting God’s command. The Israelites got the same command. Retribution. Moses relayed it and the Israelites did what they understood as retribution — kill the men. But that’s it.”

“I think Moses did misinterpret [God’s command]. Maybe God wasn’t vague. Maybe the Israelites understood Him perfectly. Or you have to argue that everyone got it wrong except for Moses.”

“Moshe misinterprets God’s command with the rock…and says we will bring forth water from the rock, not God. Moses is old, angry… Moses is over-compensating for his error that Pinchas corrected when in front of Moses, a Midianite woman is seducing an Israelite man and Pinchas slays both of them. It is clear that God thought this was right because it was unbelievably brazen. In front of Moses, they announced they were having sex and worshiping false gods.”

“We do not have a hint that the Jews obeyed Moses’s command. It is clear that his authority has waned. Maybe for humanitarian [reasons] or maybe because they still like Midianite women, it is clear that they didn’t do it because it always adds they did as God commanded. They never leave it up in the air as to whether or not they obeyed.”

Moses was over-compensating for having married a Midianite wife. This was his way of saying that I will not be swayed by my own personal inclination towards Midianite women. His father in law, Jethro, was a Midianite priest who nursed Moses to health and it is to him that Moses goes to for advise.

Earlier in Exodus, Moses was saved by the daughter of the Pharoah. The Torah does not portray the Jews as the good guys and the goyim as bad guys.

* Num. 31:54. A midrash says that the Jews stripped the Midianite women of jewelry, but they did not rape them: “Each of us had gone into the houses of the Midianites, into the bedchambers of their kings. And we desired their daughters, pretty and beautiful, delicate and tender; and we unfastened the garlands, the gold crowns from their heads; rings from their ears, necklaces fro their necks, chainlets from their arms, chains from their hands, signet rings from their fingers, clasps from their breasts. Nevertheless, not one of us was joined with one of them in this world, so as not to be with her in Gehenna in the world to come.”

* Num. 32: 1-30: The Gadites and Reubenites want to help Israel but they don’t want to live there because they can make more money living elsewhere. Sound familiar?

Dennis Prager on Num. 31-33: “The truth is, who has suffered as much as Jews historically? I can’t think of any group who has suffered as long as the Jews have.” Do Jews win the Victimhood Sweepstakes? And what is the prize for that?

“If you let the Canaanites live with you, they will probably seduced you to their values… And then I, God, will dispossess you. It is hard to make a monotheistic world… At least half of the Jews of the world are not God-oriented.”

“If God took the Jews out of Egypt just to free slaves, then God is a racist. Why didn’t He take ever group out?”

“It is not possible for Jews to think they are better than everyone else when they read the Torah because it describes them as worse than everyone else.”

* Numbers 34: God tells the Jews the boundaries for Israel to let them know not to conquer more and not to become an empire.

* Cities of refuge. There are no accidents in Torah. If you sin accidentally, you have to bring a sin offering. If you kill someone accidentally, you have to flee to a city of refuge and stay there until the High Priest dies. You can’t just pay off the family for your killing.

* Suzanne Klingenstein writes for the Jewish Women’s Archive:

Literature Scholars in the United States

At the start of the twenty-first century, women of all classes, races, and ethnicities are so fully integrated into American literary academia that it is astonishing that, as little as a century ago, the idea of a woman professor teaching, for example, the novels of George Eliot or Henry James to a roomful of young men and women was inconceivable. In all highly literate cultures, secular and religious knowledge used to be the domain of men, while women were in charge of the practical side of daily life and, in the upper classes, of certain social matters.

In this regard, Jewish culture is no exception. Despite the premium Judaism places on literacy and learning, which in some instances persuaded fathers to teach their daughters and husbands to instruct their wives, the motto among observant Jews remained until fairly recently, a meydl darf nisht lernen [a girl need not study]. While European gentile culture considered women intellectually inferior to men, Jewish culture argued that God designed woman to be man’s “helper” (Gen. 2:18). Women relieved men of domestic chores, and, in Eastern Europe, women often contributed to the family income.

The disturbing attitudes of gentile culture toward both Jews and women, which have only recently begun to change, are responsible for the late entry of Jewish women into colleges and universities. For those Jewish women who sought admission to institutions of higher learning and became the first female Jewish humanities professors, their struggle against Jewish tradition caused many to turn away from Judaism as the source of an intellectually vibrant and spiritually meaningful life.

The first generation of Jewish women professors, especially those in the field of literature, consisted of militantly secular women from a variety of Jewish social backgrounds (labor, socialist, Yiddishist, Zionist, immigrant, and mercantile). They had two things in common: a love of Western literary culture and an ignorance of the Jewish intellectual tradition, its major texts, authors, and debates. While many Jewish women in literary academia were familiar with the most popular ritual and cultural expressions of Judaism, such as the blessing of candles on Shabbat, or the prohibition against pork and shellfish, none had been educated to locate the specific practices of observance within the framework of an intense and ongoing intellectual discussion spanning two millennia, a discussion carried on, until very recently, exclusively by men.

Ignorance of Judaism’s intellectual underpinnings, coupled with a vague emotional appreciation of certain Jewish customs, ranging from hamantaschen on Purim to latkes on Hanukkah, is the single unifying feature of an otherwise extraordinarily diverse group of individuals—Jewish women in literary academe—whose history as a group this article, paradoxically, attempts to sketch.

Overall, the integration of Jewish women into literary academia is much more closely linked to the history of women than to the history of Jews in American universities. The sequence of integration runs roughly as follows: White Protestant men of Anglo-Saxon descent grudgingly accepted Catholic men before accepting Jewish men as colleagues and instructors of English literature. Jewish men, in particular, were ready to open academe further by hiring women, who in turn agitated for the integration of other minorities, such as African Americans, Hispanics, and gays. The history of Jews in American academia shows a significant gender bias; whereas Jewish men were discriminated against as Jews, Jewish women had difficulties not as Jews but as women. The reason for the difference is that Jewish men and women entered the field in different generations—men during the 1920s and 1930s, women during the 1950s and 1960s.

Until the early 1930s, white Protestant men dominated the study of literature. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, a few white Protestant women, often educated at elite women’s colleges, struggled into the field. They achieved recognition and full professorships in the early years of World War II, as their male colleagues either volunteered for or were drafted into the army. At the same time, a handful of Jewish men were finishing their dissertations in literature. If these Jewish scholars secured jobs at all at top schools during the late 1930s, their appointments were due to special circumstances. Most of them, however, were hired either in the early 1940s to fill vacancies created by America’s entry into the war or right after the war to help satisfy the enormous demand for college teachers created by the GI bill.

Among the soldiers returning from the European and Pacific theaters were Jews who had started college in the late 1930s, became interested in literature, but graduated without much hope of being able to pursue an academic career in the humanities. Drafted into the United States Army or Navy upon graduation, they now returned to American campuses to find that a few Jews had broken through the ethnic barrier to become professors of English and American literature. Encouraged by these appointments and convinced that the equalizing experiences in trenches and on battleships had undermined the prejudices against Jews they had encountered during their college days, they enrolled in graduate English programs. As teachers, they attracted the third generation of male Jewish literary critics entering college in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the first Jewish women were enrolling in graduate literature programs and the first sizable number of young Jewish women were starting college. While the men of that generation, receiving their doctorates in the late 1950s and early 1960s, secured jobs without too much effort, their female colleagues faced many problems, not only as women in academe, but also in the culture at large as women who did not wish to be homemakers.

Posted in Torah | Comments Off on Parashas Matot, Masei (Numbers 30-36)

The Fascism Of Yaakov Moshe Harlap

In his fifth lecture on R. Yaakov Moshe Harlap, Marc Shapiro says: “His stress on the land of Israel…is not just super-Zionism but bordering on fascism. If you tell me that is the Jewish approach, then the Jewish approach is fascist…. Racialism.”

R. Moshe Harlap

Marc: “Rav Harlap comes to this only through Jewish sources. He’s not influenced by Western nationalisms… This is just out of his kabbalistic reading.”

“There will come a time when the world will move beyond nationalism to universalism. There will no longer be any distinctions between non-Jewish nations. There will always be a distinction between Jewish people [and goyim].”

“Rav Harlap completely rejects any desire or need for non-Jewish culture. The people Israel is a holy one who dwells alone and is not counted among the nations. Any drawing from alien sources nullifies its purity and the other nations shall not be able to attain their [repair] except through surrender to the pure and original truth of Israel. If Israel lowers itself by grazing in alien pastures, it will not fulfill its destiny.”

“We cannot attain eretz Yisrael until we abandon the culture of other worlds. We do not need any culture or language or learn from them how to run a government. Everything is written in our Jewish sources. We have to reject the ways of the goyim and just follow the Torah.”

“Even Satmar doesn’t act this way. Satmar only takes the bad from the gentiles.”

“The nations are not able to compare themselves to Israel in any way… The difference between a Jew and a gentile is like the difference between light and darkness.”

“This becomes a standard view among kabbalists and right-wing types in Israel. When Rav Harlap was writing this, it was not the sort of thing public figures were writing about. It’s not the sort of thing you’d want made public.”

“Jewish nationalism is raised beyond this world and the non-Jews can’t connect to it. The non-Jews recognize this and so they are opposed to any attempt by Israel to realize its uniqueness and so they fight against Jewish nationalism.”

Rav Harlap: “Jews have an entire different body… Jews are a different species.”

“When the nations repent, it is only out of fear of punishment.”

“Even the sinners of Israel are not doing it out of fear of punishment but because internally they have a higher purpose because Jews are essentially holy. When Jews sin, it is only a sin on the outside. On the inside, they remain holy. Non-Jews cannot be holy even if they follow the Seven Laws of the Sons of Noah. Non-Jews cannot achieve their tikkun until they recognize the greatness of Israel and they have to follow the Jews’ lead.”

“The non-Jews are within nature. Jews can move beyond nature.”

“Is the typical messianic idea that Jews will rule the entire world and the entire world will see Israel as its ruler? I’m not sure that is the job we want.”

Did Rav Kook create or attract freaky extremists? Attract.

Forward, Dec. 19, 2003:

Charedi Rabbis Rush To Disavow Anti-Gentile Book

Leaders of the country’s most prominent ultra-Orthodox yeshiva are scrambling to distance themselves from a book by one of their disciples, which argues that gentiles are “completely evil” and Jews constitute a separate, genetically superior species.

Written by Rabbi Saadya Grama — an alumnus of Beth Medrash Govoha, the renowned yeshiva in Lakewood, N.J. — the self-published book attempts to employ classical Jewish sources in defense of a race-based theory of Jewish supremacy. Grama’s book, published in Hebrew under the title “Romemut Yisrael Ufarashat Hagalut,” includes flowery endorsements from the most revered religious scholars at the renowned Lakewood yeshiva, including the institution’s foremost religious leader, or rosh yeshiva, Rabbi Aryeh Malkiel Kotler.

Yet, in a statement issued Tuesday in response to queries from the Forward, Kotler rejected Grama’s philosophy and said that he had not carefully reviewed the text prior to endorsing it.

“We have seen the objectionable statements that allegedly appear in a sefer [book] written by Rabbi Grama, a former student at our yeshivah,” wrote Kotler, whose late grandfather Rabbi Aharon Kotler founded the Lakewood yeshiva. “I did glance briefly at the book but did not read it carefully — which is the general practice in providing approbations to the many books by alumni that come across a desk like mine.”

In his rare statement to the press, Kotler added: “In looking at the specific points allegedly contained in the sefer, I can certainly tell you that they are not reflective of normative Jewish thought and are certainly not the philosophy of our yeshivah. Our philosophy asserts that every human being is created in the image of the Lord and the primacy of integrity and honesty in all dealings without exception. I strongly repudiate any assertions in the name of Judaism that do not represent and reflect this philosophy.”

The statement Tuesday struck a dramatically different chord from Kotler’s earlier endorsement of the book, in which he said Grama has written “on the subjects of the Exile, the Election of Israel and her exaltation above and superiority to all of the other nations, all in accordance with the viewpoint of the Torah, based on the solid instruction he has received from his teachers.”

Kotler’s disavowal of the book on Tuesday came at the end of an intense, day-long scramble during which the Anti-Defamation League and the chancellor of Yeshiva University condemned the book, and several ultra-Orthodox communal spokesmen tried to convince the Forward not to report its existence. During the course of the day, a popular bookstore in the heavily Orthodox Boro Park section of Brooklyn told the Forward that it had just pulled the book off of the tables at the author’s request.

The controversy over Grama’s book comes as the yeshiva is close to securing $500,000 in federal funds for a Holocaust library (see accompanying story on Page 4).

Coincidentally, in his book, Grama argues that the Holocaust was both a divine punishment against the Jews for assimilation and also proof of the “true nature and face” of the non-Jewish world. The book’s title could be translated in several ways, including “The Grandeur of Israel and the Issue of Exile” and “Jewish Superiority and the Question of Exile.”

Grama did not return a call seeking clarification on this point and other questions about his polemic.

In his book, Grama writes: “The difference between the people of Israel and the nations of the world is an essential one. The Jew by his source and in his very essence is entirely good. The goy, by his source and in his very essence is completely evil. This is not simply a matter of religious distinction, but rather of two completely different species.”

Grama’s explanation of the Holocaust, as well as his other theories, drew harsh criticism from Rabbi Norman Lamm, chancellor of Yeshiva University and the rosh hayeshiva of its affiliated seminary. Lamm said that his only knowledge of the book came from passages provided to him by the Forward, but that he rejected what he understood to be Grama’s arguments.

“It is a book by someone who has obviously taken leave of his senses and adopted the kind of racism that was used against Jews since the beginning of time,” said Lamm, one of Modern Orthodoxy’s most prominent leaders. “I almost feel like offering a conjecture that it was written by an antisemite posing as a rabbi.”

Lamm added: “The passages that I have read managed to offend everyone — the Torah, the martyrs of the Holocaust, the Jewish ideals of justice and the essential divinity that inheres in every human being regardless of religion, race or ethnic origin.”

In an effort to back up his arguments, Grama draws on an array of racist sources ranging from medieval theological tracts to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche to the works of Nazi figures. Among other things, Grama argues:

• The differences between Jews and gentiles are not religious, historical, cultural or political. They are, rather, racial, genetic and scientifically unalterable. The one group is at its very root and by natural constitution “totally evil” while the other is “totally good.”

• Jewish successes in the world are completely contingent upon the failure of all other peoples. Only when the gentiles face total catastrophe do the Jews experience good fortune.

• The Jews themselves brought about their own destruction during the Holocaust, since they arrogantly endeavored to overcome their very essence, dictated by divine law, by leaving their ghettoes and trying to assimilate into Christian European society. The confrontational approach of the Zionists, their boycott of German products and anti-Nazi demonstrations in particular, only exacerbated the peril to European Jewry. For this they were massacred by Hitler who, while himself an evil person, was acting as God’s agent in punishing the Jews.

Grama also argues that in opposition to Zionism’s advocacy of Jewish national self-assertion and self-defense, which he views as an imitation of “gentile ways,” the Torah mandates that the Jews, while in exile, should employ such means as appeasement, deception, duplicity and even “bribery” in their dealing with gentiles, so as to avoid their wrath.

Grama’s full-blown racialist theories appear to break new ground, building on a handful of hints of national and racial chauvinism occasionally found in the writings of a few earlier rabbinic figures, but combining them into a racialist doctrine with no precedent in rabbinic literature. To be sure, a minority stream exists in the rabbinic tradition — from the 11th- and 12th-century Hebrew romantic poet Yehuda Halevy to the 18th century chasidic sage Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev — which sees the differences between Jew and gentile as innate, rather than merely religious. Perhaps the most extreme version of this view is found in the central text of Chabad chasidism, Tanya, whose author, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Lyadi, Chabad’s founder, maintained that Jewish and gentile souls are fundamentally different, the former “divine” and the latter “animalistic.” That viewpoint has gained ground in recent decades, particularly among charedi thinkers.

Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, who is considered one of the leading ideologues of the Israeli Chabad movement, has written and spoken widely on the superiority of Jews and was briefly imprisoned in Israel for racial incitement. Yated Ne’eman, an Orthodox weekly in upstate New York that is affiliated with one of Israel’s main charedi dailies, has published essays on the question of whether medical research can be understood to apply to Jews given the innate physiological differences between Jews and gentiles.

Such arguments, however, have historically stood in tension with the prevailing rabbinic view that the righteous gentiles of the world — those who exhibit the basic ethical and moral behavior encapsulated in the “Seven Laws of Noah” — had the same access to personal salvation as fully observant Jews. This view was summed up in the 12th century by Moses Maimonides, arguably the most important Jewish sage of the past millennium, when he wrote in his code of Jewish law: “Anyone who accepts the Seven Laws of Noah and is careful to observe them is one of the righteous among the nations of the world and he has a portion in the world to come.”

Critics complained that Grama’s racial theories also conflicts with ancient and medieval rabbinic rules mandating equal treatment in all realms for converts to Judaism.

Grama frequently quotes Biblical verses that advocate terribly harsh treatment of the pagan inhabitants of ancient Canaan, implying that the same standards ought to be applied to his non-Jewish neighbors in America. By doing so, he appears to disregard extensive rabbinic deliberations dating back to the early medieval period whose general consensus was that Christianity and Islam are licit, monotheistic faiths. The net result of these medieval rabbinic deliberations was to limit the application of such Biblical laws to ancient pagans, and to mandate that Muslims and Christians could not be classified together with the idol-worshippers of earlier times.

From the book, Rethinking the Messianic Idea in Judaism:

Marc: “This is not something Rav Harlap made up… It is not new. It is found in standard texts. You can chart that as Jews are persecuted, negative views of non-Jews come out, and as Jews are welcomed, you have more positive views [of non-Jews]. I don’t see how this doesn’t become dangerous when it becomes the motivating principle.”

“Moshe says David Duke quotes that stuff as well. Every tradition has difficult texts. So what to do? Islam has these texts and plenty of Muslims follow these views. It’s not fair to just take these texts. We also have these texts, that the best of non-Jews should be killed, that the best of doctor should be killed… Shuls are filled with doctors. You have to know how the text has been interpreted and has it been actualized or not. How do people live? It is not enough to cite a text.”

“That any Jews would give up his personality and submerge himself in someone else goes against the Lithuanian approach.”

“Some of his reflections on the Holocaust are troubling to me.”

“With these great figures, we have to speak of enduring elements and transitory elements. No one ever assumes, unless you are a hassid, that you need to adopt everything of every figure. Not everything is enduring… Who’s greater than the Rambam? Not everything the Rambam said [has been widely accepted]… You have to judge the totality. Rav Harlap recognized what the return to the land of Israel means to the Jews.”

Posted in Fascism, Israel, Nationalism, Rabbis | Comments Off on The Fascism Of Yaakov Moshe Harlap