Torah Talk – Parasha Bo (Exodus 10:1–13:16)

Posted on January 29, 2017 by Luke Ford

* It’s really important to God to make a mockery of Egypt. Sounds racist. Moshe says to Pharoah, “Until when will you refuse to humble yourself before God?” Hardcore humiliation in response to the hardcore humiliation and genocide that Pharoah has mounted against the Jews.

* Dennis Prager says that the lesson of slavery is not that Egyptians or whites are bad, that’s a racist lesson. The lesson is that anyone who thinks in terms of race is repeating the errors of the past. Racism can afflict anybody who thinks in terms of race.

* The plagues demonstrate God’s supremacy over nature, and that God is intimately involved in the lives of men.

* Not all Egyptians hated Jews yet all Egyptians suffered terribly from God’s plagues. We tend to suffer and benefit collectively. I suspect that the Egyptians had the same range of attitudes towards Jews as Germans did in WWII.

* The main characters in Exodus seem like they are in the grip of forces greater than themselves. There doesn’t seem to be much free willing operating. If we were honest, I think we would admit that in much of our life, forces greater than ourselves are operating and our freedom is constrained to how we react.

* If Egypt had had a stricter immigration policy, it might not have had these problems with the Hebrews.

* Moses asks Pharoah to provide cows, lambs and goats (gods of Egypt) to sacrifice to the Jews’ God. Later, the Jews sacrifice lambs and post the blood on the lintel.

* Ex. 11:2. The Jews ask their Egyptian neighbors for gold and silver. Just reparations for slavery? Artscroll commentary on Ex. 11:2-3: “One would have expected the Egyptians to hate the Jews, blaming them for the suffering of the plagues, but the Torah tells us that this was not the case. The population bore no grudge; they said that the Jews had been righteous while they, the Egyptians, were the wicked ones.” I doubt it.

* Ex. 12:43: God says, “No apostate or stranger can eat the pesach offering. Only circumsized slaves can eat.” Torah is far more about boundaries protecting the gene pool than it is about inclusion and love. If you don’t eat and drink with non-Jews, you are less likely to have sex with them.

* When I was a goy reading Exodus, I concentrated on the stories. As a convert to Orthodox Judaism, I concentrate on the laws. As a goy, this story seemed primitive and tribal. As a Jew, this story tells me how the world works.

* Judaism is obsessed with history, with the Jewish heritage. Jews believe this world matters, that history matters, and that the human story should progress in a linear way. Judaism is the most this-world focused religion.

* Does study of history make people better? I don’t think so. The only thing that makes people better is increasing the quality of their bonds with others.

* Have Christians changed from the group that committed the Holocaust? Are American Christians better than European Christians because they have persecuted Jews less? Or are American Christians weaker in their Christianity? I see significant Protestant vs Catholic differences. Protestants believe in individual salvation and tend to see people as individuals. Catholics prefer corporate worldviews and create corporate states, which are less friendly to Jews.

* Haaretz: Adding Insult to Injury, Trump Flirts With Classic Holocaust Denial

* What is Holocaust denial?

* Jenna Jameson is Jewish?

* Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism. It seems like the Pharoah was far from totalitarian. The midwives felt free to disobey his orders and his advisors felt free to give him bad news and Moshe felt free to talk back to him.

* What White Supremacists Taught A Torah Scholar About Identity

* You would expect a faithful wife to open her doors to her husband and to slam them to everyone else. Similarly, I would expect a smart country to open its doors to those who will benefit it and to slam them to everyone else.

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Please keep calling us racists and misogynists

Posted on January 27, 2017 by Luke Ford

Dennis Prager writes:

It seems universally believed on the left that conservative opposition to Hillary Clinton was due to her being a woman. See Peter Beinart’s piece in The Atlantic titled “Fear of a Female President,” which says, “Hillary Clinton’s candidacy has provoked a wave of misogyny — one that may roil American life for years to come.”

See the open letter written by Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank to his distraught 12-year-old daughter: “To my daughter: You are going to be okay.”

This is how his column begins:

“As I watched the returns at Donald Trump’s celebration here Tuesday night, the hardest part was trying to reassure my seventh-grade daughter at home, via phone and text, that she would be okay. She had expected to be celebrating the election of the first female president, but instead, this man she had been reading and hearing horrible things about had won, and she feared her own world could come apart.”

As a loving father, he might want to reflect on whether his own overwrought views contributed to his daughter’s fearing that “her own world would come apart” if a woman weren’t elected president.

Milbank made sure to inform his readers that he was a Jew by reassuring his daughter that she will feel better when she receives all of her family’s love at her upcoming bat mitzvah.

Of course, the reduction of Republican votes to misogyny, racism, xenophobia, etc., was hardly unique to Jewish leftists. In The Washington Post on the day after the election, Jill Filipovic, a young feminist writer, explained Hillary Clinton’s loss this way:

“[It was] a clear statement of what so many of my countrymen (and the people who put Trump in power are mostly men) value: white male supremacy above all.”

And in The New York Times, Susan Chira, a senior correspondent and editor on gender issues, made up a rule: “We do know that voters disproportionately punish women who are seen as dishonest.”

For eight years, many on the left have described criticism of Barack Obama as racist. Similarly, leftists explain opposition to Hillary Clinton as an expression of misogyny and sexism. For the left, it is not possible that conservative opposition to either has been rooted in public policy and moral differences that have nothing to do with race or gender.

Then there is another hysterical charge on the Jewish left, that a President Trump will make anti-Semitism respectable. This, too, is old news. In 1980, Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King Jr., said, “I am scared that if Ronald Reagan gets into office, we are going to see more of the Ku Klux Klan and a resurgence of the Nazi Party.”

But the scare tactics apparently aren’t working as well as they once did. More and more Americans are catching on to the left’s crying wolf regarding racism, misogyny, sexism and all the other terms of opprobrium hurled at conservatives.

But leftists won’t stop, for two reasons: That’s all they have. And because they really do believe their libels about conservatives. Why wouldn’t they? It’s all they’ve ever read, heard or studied.

Incredibly, many Jews symbolically sat shivah at their synagogues last week. But for all the harm the left has done to universities, to Judaism, Jews, Israel, America and to Western civilization, they should have done teshuvah instead.

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Rabbis fasting on Inauguration Day

Posted on January 27, 2017 by Luke Ford

Dennis Prager writes: The rabbi of a Conservative synagogue in Berkeley (and other left-wing rabbis, it turns out) fasted on Inauguration Day.

If it’s good for the left, it’s good for the Jews and it’s Jewish; if it’s bad for the left, it’s bad for the Jews and not Jewish.
As reported in The Jewish Press: “Conservative Rabbi Menachem Creditor, spiritual leader of Congregation Netivot Shalom in Berkeley, this week sent an email to his members on the eve of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, sharing with them that he was ‘deeply worried about this American moment, as a Jew, as a father, as an American, which is why I cannot abstain from thoughtful action today. … Some of us will fast on Friday, an interfaith moment of unity.”

Did any of these rabbis announce they were fasting when America backed the most devastating anti-Israel resolution in United Nations Security Council history? Or when Christian communities were wiped out by Islamists? Or any time Israelis have been murdered? Or after any of the other horrors taking place in the world today?

If they did, I could not find mention of it. Apparently, it was the inauguration of Donald Trump that moved these rabbis to publicly fast.

Such is the depth of identification with the left among many American Jews.

In order to understand the modern world, it is necessary to understand that the most dynamic religion of the last century has not been Christianity, nor Islam, and certainly not Judaism. It has been leftism. Leftism has not only become the ideology of the Western world’s intellectuals, academics and media, but it also has deeply influenced Judaism and Christianity — far more so than Judaism and Christianity have influenced the world during these hundred years.

For many mainstream Protestants and many Catholics, including the current pope, Christianity and leftism are essentially identical. Christianity for these Christians is leftism with a cross. And for many non-Orthodox Jews, Judaism is leftism with a yarmulke and tallit.

Think about it. The one Jewish state is threatened with extinction, its population threatened with another Holocaust, and many American rabbis are in a frenzy about the election of Donald Trump.

What we have here is the latest example of the left in yet another hysterical moment. Hysteria is to the left what oxygen is to life. Thus, mainstream newspapers and electronic media are filled with stories about the new fascist — even Hitlerian — regime.

On Inauguration Day, Chris Matthews of MSNBC’s “Hardball” actually said Trump was Hitlerian, and at the Women’s March on Washington, actress Ashley Judd actually spoke of gas chambers. Innumerable New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post writers have called Trump a fascist. This abuse of the words “fascist” and “Hitlerian” has prompted no outcry from American Jews or their institutions, even though all it does is trivialize Hitler and the Holocaust.

In their thorough identification with the left, rabbis and Jewish academics publicly appealed to Rabbi Marvin Hier not to give an invocation at President Trump’s inauguration. That he was the first rabbi invited to do so in more than 30 years meant nothing to these Jews. That he read the biblical passage reminding people not to forget Jerusalem likewise meant nothing to them. Why? Because Rabbi Hier, in their fevered view, was giving a Jewish blessing at the inauguration of a fascist.

Last week, a colleague of mine attended a bat mitzvah celebration at a major local Conservative synagogue. In his congratulatory remarks, the rabbi told the girl how proud she should be that her bat mitzvah and the women’s march took place on the same day. At least a dozen people, recognizing my colleague, went over to her to express their resentment at the rabbi for injecting his politics into this celebration and for assuming that all his congregants are on the left.

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Mexico First

Posted on January 27, 2017 by Luke Ford

Comments:

* In other news, the NYT reported that the president of Mexico “reiterated his commitment to protect the interests of Mexico and the Mexican people.” The New York Times declined to condemn President Nieto’s “Mexico First” policy, and did not compare President Nieto to Hitler.

* Washington DC has a worst murder rate than Chicago! Why doesn’t Trump do something about it, right where he’s living

* All of which are in some shape or form linked in large part to black people.

1. Blacks generally take more from the system than contribute. Their low incomes don’t generate enough taxes. Since their communities are high crime the homes aren’t in demand so little comes in the way from their property taxes.

2. Their social dysfunction leads to higher policing, schooling & other municipal expenses. A good example of this is to compare the sizes of the police forces in Baltimore to Boston. Boston has fewer officers than Baltimore & cost Boston less.

3. Their voting styles lead to leaders who are often marginal & corrupt. They tend not to hold politicians accountable if they pander to their sense of victimhood. Often time corrupt black leaders will cry racism after beung charged & the community rallies around them.

* Just Google mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and Detroit to see how the Detroit black community rallied around their corrupt mayor and his equally corrupt Congresswoman mother, who rallied the blacks by saying: “Don’t let them do yo boy this way” after he was indicted.

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Benjamin Netanyahu says he will build a fence around the whole of Israel to keep out ‘the wild beasts’

Posted on January 27, 2017 by Luke Ford

I hope America does this.

Israel takes it survival seriously. We could learn from her.

And there’s nothing wrong with declaring people who want to slaughter you “beasts.”

The Guardian:

Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to build a 15ft fence to surround the whole of Israel, saying that the country must “protect itself from wild beasts”.

The Israeli Prime Minister appeared to use the extraordinary phrase – which has also been translated as “predators” – to describe both Palestinians and the people of neighbouring Arab states.

Mr Netanyahu was speaking during a tour of a newly-completed security fence along the border with Jordan near the southern Red Sea city of Eilat.

“In the end in Israel, as I see it, there will be a fence like this that surrounds the whole country,” he said.

“I’ll be told, ‘this is what you want, to protect the villa?’ The answer is yes. Will we surround all of the State of Israel with fences and barriers? The answer is yes,” he said.

“In the environment we live in, we need to protect ourselves from wild beasts.”

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