First of all, I grew up among the Xtians all my life. There are more Jews who blog on Jewschool than I ever knew until the age of 22. Nebraska, Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma, small town California, Oregon and Washington State. I’m not afraid of Christians.
But I do have to be honest, they have some funny ideas about us Hebrews. One asked my family, “Oh, you’re Jewish? So where do you do your sacrifices?” And not because he was an anti-Semite, but because a good read of the Old Testament would lead you to believe that.
And many folks like him happen to believe, in a pretty benign way, that the Jews have been replaced. By them. It’s as easy as saying, “Hey-didn’t-God-tell-the-Israelites-to-kill-the-Canaanites-even-though-they-never-did-anything-wrong?” Yes, indeedy, that easy to believe. Ever met a Canaanite? They’re not around so much, but any Palestinian will do. You see, the ideas of “replacing” a people are quite common here at home among us Jews. They’re not so different, they’re really good people, trust me.
But that doesn’t mean I want them making foreign policy decisions about Israel. Their love of Israel is as uneducated as you can get — and not a tap we want to open without the ability to shut it. American policy vis a vis Israel under greater influence of the Evangelicals is going to become the Jews’ Proposition 8: all the Christians will out-fund and out-influence the Jews on our own issue. Don’t believe me? Look up the 990 tax forms of the biggest churches. Above and beyond any Federation.
I love Eli’s comics because of their double-punch. Not only do we get to lampoon the Evangelicals’ blood thirst for the End of Days, but we harpoon our own people for our unfortunate Crusades-related baggage. Sometimes it’s even hard to tell who’s the main target of the cartoon: us or them.
Commentary asks how this cartoon got past the “liberal, tolerant” editors at The Forward. I’ll explain why: Eli proves time and again that the best comedy material — stupidity, fanaticism, embarassment — is in the mirror.
Holocaust survivors said Monday they are through trying to negotiate with the Mormon church over posthumous baptisms of Jews killed in Nazi concentration camps, saying the church has repeatedly violated a 13-year-old agreement barring the practice…..
“Baptism of a Jewish Holocaust victim and then merely removing that name from the database is just not acceptable,” said Michel, whose parents died at Auschwitz. He spoke on the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Nazi-incited riots against Jews.
“We ask you to respect us and our Judaism just as we respect your religion,” Michel said in a statement released ahead of the news conference. “We ask you to leave our six million Jews, all victims of the Holocaust, alone, they suffered enough.”
Michel said talks with Mormon leaders, held as recently as last week, have ended. He said his group will not sue, and that “the only thing left, therefore, is to turn to the court of public opinion.”
In 1995, Mormons and Jews inked an agreement to limit the circumstances that allow for the proxy baptisms of Holocaust victims. Ending the practice outright was not part of the agreement and would essentially be asking Mormons to alter their beliefs, church Elder Lance B. Wickman said Monday in an interview with reporters in Salt Lake City.
“We don’t think any faith group has the right to ask another to change its doctrines,” Wickman said. “If our work for the dead is properly understood … it should not be a source of friction to anyone. It’s merely a freewill offering.”
A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days.
If such a messianic description really is there, it will contribute to a developing re-evaluation of both popular and scholarly views of Jesus, since it suggests that the story of his death and resurrection was not unique but part of a recognized Jewish tradition at the time.
The tablet, probably found near the Dead Sea in Jordan according to some scholars who have studied it, is a rare example of a stone with ink writings from that era — in essence, a Dead Sea Scroll on stone.
It is written, not engraved, across two neat columns, similar to columns in a Torah. But the stone is broken, and some of the text is faded, meaning that much of what it says is open to debate.
Still, its authenticity has so far faced no challenge, so its role in helping to understand the roots of Christianity in the devastating political crisis faced by the Jews of the time seems likely to increase.
(Matthew) Lincoln alleges that Lakewind (Church) and its pastors were “negligent in not supervising the catchers to be sure that they stood behind the person being prayed for…should they have a dizzying, fainting, or falling in the spirit as had occurred on many occasions before.”
I’m thinking there’s a fascinating dissertation to be written about the connection between fervently religious and American litigious…
Reported all over the place, but the WaPo doesn’t have that annoying registration thingy. As pretty much everyone knows, Obama has had a lot of political problems with his church. First there was the out of context Wright quote, which was taken to mean that Wright hated every white person, but especially Jews. Apparently the latest hitch has been (Roman Catholic) Rev. Michael Pfleger slamming Clinton in a sermon and implying that she’s a white supremacist.
I have to admit, I have some mixed feelings about this. Now, y’all know that I’m pretty annoyed about the misogyny behind a significant amount of the anti-Clinton activity, from speechifying, to musing about her personal life and sartorial choices, and don’t even get me into the various objects intended to deride (nutcrackers and the like). Let me just say, I don’t think that Obama himself is a misogynist.
But let’s get away fro this most recent thing, which I think Obama shouldn’t have to answer for, either, and get back to Wright. I think that Wright may well be saying something that we ought to be listening to. If you’re an African American, your experience of racism is quite different than any other group of color’s in this country. Unlike (Ashkenazi) Jews and Italians whose move up the economic ladder has allowed us to assimilate and blend in, and the Japanese and Chinese whose model minority status is moving them in that direction as well (along with extremely high exogamy rates), if you’re African American, your class has to get pretty outstandingly high before you - as an individual- are exempted from some of the worst of the bigotry. Even then, go someplace where your name isn’t recognized, and you can wear silk and rubies and it’s not going to help you much.
SO, while I don’t necessarily love Wright, I think we need to listen to him a little more carefully, because he can tell us a lot about what we don’t normally hear. and so, I respected Obama for sticking to his church and not resigning. Especially since it is often true that when you cut yourself off from someone who is angry, you’ve lost your chance to talk to them and help them see a different way out. Obama was a trusted friend, insofar as a clergyperson can unbend among congregants, and Obama might have led him to a more nuanced way of speaking. Who will do that now?
Good news or bad? Hard to say. Methodists overwhelmingly defeated measures calling for divestment from companies that allegedly enable Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.
Divestment doesn’t strike me in this case as the most precise tool, especially given the supersessionist theology background grumbling that goes along with this movement, apparently. But OTOH, we don’t seem to hold the evangelicals to such a measurement when they say they will “support” Israel in any action they take.
SO when we have allies who disagree with Israel’s policies, what can they do to show it without being labelled as haters?
Well, There’s always J-street, now!
Day 13, week two, day six
Yesod of Gevurah
Ynet reports on the lastest mishegas:
Rabbi Shlomi Aviner has ruled that God disapproves of pants on women even when women are alone(!) Apparently the fact that God is not male and does not lust after women has been lost sight of somewhere. You should not even sleep in pajama pants since sleeping is a grand opportunity to show off your filthy, sinful bodies, ladies. Cover them up!!!
Aviner, Beit El’s rabbi and one of Religious Zionism’s most prominent leaders, was asked in a cellular Q&A session published in the “Small World” bulletin, “When a girl goes to relieve herself at night, is she allowed to say the ‘Asher Yatzar’ (’he who formed’) prayer while wearing a short-sleeved shirt and trousers?”
The rabbi replied that it is permitted to say the prayer in such a case, but added that “in general, a woman must always wear modest clothes even when she is alone and in the dark, because the Holy one blessed be he is everywhere. And yes, trousers are a self-prohibition even when a woman is alone.”
However, Tsomet seems to have gotten the point that was made a few months ago when it came out that Hareidi women had begun taking upon themselves the modesty wrappings as seriously as Rabbi Aviner does and wrapping themselves in Burqas and more.
Rabbi Israel Rosen, head of the Tsomet Institute, has claimed an article published in synagogues over the weekend that “too much modesty leads women to the opposite direction, from abstinence to immorality.”
Rabbi Rosen also slammed the haredi norm to omit names of women from newspapers and from invitations, comparing it to the veil phenomenon in Muslim countries.
“For so-called modesty reasons, the woman is only presented as ‘his wife’, nameless, veiled, and my heart twitches,” he wrote in a weekly column published in synagogues over the weekend. “Is there no psychological connection between the hypocrisy of concealing the name and hiding the face under the ‘Taliban-style’ veil?”
Jews On First has the details. You may remember Indian River as the area of Delaware from which the Dobriches, a Jewish family, fled to escape the non-stop harassment, antisemitic abuse, and Christian bigotry which began when they complained about the district-sanctioned proselytizing by teachers and school officials.
The story has been proceeding through varying levels of ugliness for a few years. Just a few months ago there was that elementary school teacher who told her class that Barack Obama was a Muslim, and therefore “different” and “scary”. Or the mob of 800 that turned out to jeer & silence advocates of pluralism at an IRSD board meeting in 2006.
Hopefully, this lawsuit settlement - which includes not only monetary damages paid to the victims of the harassment but new, constitutional, policies on what religious expression is and is not allowed in a public school - will eventually protect the religious minorities of southeastern Delaware from more violations of their and their childrens’ constitutional rights. (see Jews On First for the text of the new policies, it’s a fascinating read) But before the happy dances can begin in Indian River, there needs to be a sea change in the local culture. And there needs to be eagle-eyed vigilance to make sure these new policies are followed.
I was astonished when this story first broke a few years ago, that these kind of First Amendment and civil rights violations could happen in the beach towns of what I considered the diverse and enlightened Mid-Atlantic, but a friend from Wilmington, DE insisted that she wasn’t surprised. The reaches below the C & D Canal (containing most of Delaware’s area and a tiny fraction of its population) are known to the Wilmingtonians to their north as “The Slower Lower”, a region less defined by its historical stature as the First State or by its consumer-pleasing lack of sales tax, and more by its residents’ apparent difficulty with remembering which side of the Civil War they were on. (That would be the winning side).
So is it possible to introduce a culture of respect for diversity by fiat? What is needed to make it stick?
A short video clip from this past weekend’s first-ever Limmud Southeast:
A little self-promotion: This is part of the “Moses in a Megachurch” speech about a Jewish journalist who spent a year immersed in Christianity. For the complete speech, please see http://myjesusyear.com/limmud2008.mov — And to pre-order your copy of the book, please visit http://myjesusyear.com.
Return to the great Jewish themes of outsider-ness & redemption with “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”— in Yiddish! Performed by Kugelplex with vocals by Jewlia Eisenberg.
Rabbi Yehuda Levin issued the following statement:
Chanukah is not a winter solstice holiday, nor a present exchanging Kwanza lite. The Macabees revolted against the Syrian-Greeks only when they tried to squelch Jewish rituals dealing with modesty, holiness and the service of G-d. It was when the allies of the Syrian-Greeks, upper class socially liberal Jews, known as Hellenists, embraced the attempted abolition of ritual circumcision, Sabbath, and the Holidays and encouraged young Jews to cavort nude in the gymnasiums they built (Gymnos, the Greek word for nude) that the loyal religious Jews defied their “enlightened”, “progressive”, “socially liberal” (read libertine) reprobate brethren and sacrificed their lives to prevent the “Hell”enization of Jewish Holiness. Anyone who is familiar with ancient Greek culture knows about the centrality of homosexuality in their daily lives. It is obvious that what followed the nudity in the gymnasium and the emphasis on the body, was rampant institutionalized homosexuality, which religious Jews have associated with Amalek’s attack on the ancient Jews during their desert sojourn (as stated in the Torah/Bible).
The faithful Jews, willingly martyred themselves to defeat the debauchery of that time both heterosexual and homosexual. Thus Chanukah represents the first ever defeat of a world power’s homosexual agenda!
The best quote from the article (referring to a shellacked bagel one father places at the top of his christmas tree):
In the late ’80s it finally fell apart, and I had to shellac another one
While I am certainly a proponent of multi-faith families, the Times article points to some of the unforeseen emotional difficulties of negotiating a mixed practice household. I actually think much of the trouble would be eliminated if the members of the household actually had robust religious lives, rather than dumping all their ethnic and religious identity into one month of the year.
As director of pastoral care for a community hospital in Maryland, the Rev. Kay Myers halted the placement of sectarian Christian books in patients’ rooms.
Myers said her decision was one of the carefully measured steps she had taken during her seven-year tenure to move her department to a professional level of pastoral care. The hospital’s response was not so measured. The CEO immediately countermanded Myers. Within months she was forced to resign.
The Presbyterian Rev. Myers, in her seventh year directing the chaplaincy at Peninsula Regional Medical Center in Salisbury, had objected to some specific problems: the Gideons had been placing Bibles by going room to room, and she was concerned that this was a violation of HIPAA, moreover, the infection control center at the hospital had sent out an email recommending against placing the books in patients’ rooms because they might harbor long-lived pathogens, which CEO Alan Newberry simply ignored, even after Myers also forwarded him a report from an onlne chaplain bulletin board discussing the same topic.
Rev. Myers also felt that since the Bibles that the Gideons were distributing were only a New Testament and Psalms, and the hospital is a community hospital, significantly supported by public funds including Medicare and Medicaid, and hospitals with such finding must declare that they do not discriminate, it was inappropriate to have such sectarian emphasis, particularly since the facility is the most advanced in the area and locals do not have an easy alternative to Peninsula
Rev. Myers remains adamant that that a “market-place ministry” such as a hospital chaplaincy must be nonsectarian. “It needs to be carried out with best practices, with professional standards,” she said. “I do believe that people in the hospital need spiritual support. But you need to meet them where they are — not try to pull them along to where I am.”
Well, maybe not for ruining it but certainly for injecting a sour note.
In a response to my post earlier today about Yidcore’s new “shteller” (position) you wrote; “That’s all fine. What, however, do you think about Obadiah Shoher’s criticism pf Rosh Hashanah as a holiday that has nothing to do with New Year?
Nikol, Nikol, Nikol. I’m not really sure what your comment has to do with my post other than the fact that the topic is Rosh haShanah. But think. Do we really need to spend our time paying attention to what far right doomsday prophets are saying about Rosh haShanah? I think not but I sensed that you were upset and followed your link despite myself and that’s where the sour note entered my day.
Obadiah Shoher’s post about Rosh haShanah is so offensively ignorant that if he didn’t seem to be a radical supporter of Israel I would think he was an Anti-Semite. His post even includes the prerequisite Anti-Semitic cartoon! But you’d be proud of me Nikol. I made up my mind not to let this get to me and I’ve decided instead to have some fun with his post!
I propose a little game. I put together a list of 9 quotes from his post that are blatant and completely ignorant errors. The rules are as follows: Read his post. As you’re reading come up with a mental list of errors. Then compare your list to mine and if we agree then you win!
I’ve finally put up a site with some subtle cartoons, some previously published, others rejected from every publication in the world. Please visit, and remember to leave insulting comments. Extra points for proper spelling of “despicable self-hatred.”
EV outdoes himself again. And Commentary magazine has had it up to here! Check the comic for yourself, but Commentary’s commentary cites it as exploiting the anti-Christian fears of American Jewry.
