Pesach countdown - Day 4. Jews can have
mixed feelings about
Christian seders. I personally am torn between gratification and pride that others find our symbols and structures useful, and dismay when they are thoughtlessly used (I am not suggesting that all, or even most, Christian seders do that). (I really feel for Native Americans, who for the past 30 years have had to watch hordes of young New Age seekers build sweat lodges and perform smudge purifications without having any kind of grounding or education in the culture behind the rituals.) Of course, it is possible to borrow ritual from another culture with care and sensitivity.
Last year, on the anniversary of 9-11, I
pointed to several essays on how Jewish ritual - including the Passover seder - could be useful in commemorating that horrible event. One writer said:
. . . . In part because of the prohibition against idol worship, Judaism has a distinctly modern attitude to memorials. Objects do not represent the past; rather, they are used to conduct passage to it. In my view, the most successful memorial ever constructed is the Passover meal. At the seder, for example, the physical items on the seder plate are conduits to experiences and ideas thousands of years old. With the Passover ritual we root the present into the past. For eight days we change our routines and do not eat bread.
Every year, the ritual items for the seder plate have to be made anew. These symbolic objects — the shank bone, the matzah — cannot be preserved or inherited. The seder is itself a conversation, scheduled annually to “refresh” the present by pulling depth from the past. Dynamic questions without fixed answers make these conversations iterative; in some cases, the record of important conversations becomes a permanent part of the seder.
That's about the best description of what we do that I've ever read.
Back in Texas. I went back to Austin for Pesach, because
my friend who's hosting the seder has both a traditional and
innovative Jewish background and experience leading Jewish events, so I expect a really stimulating seder. My contribution will be some new melodies for
"Ki Lo Naeh" and "Had Gadya" I learned from
Kehilat Hadar folk and a summary of some Talmud study I did in a class with
Rabbi Burt Vizotsky (the class wasn't about Pesach but we were using texts about Pesach to illustrate his points about how rabbinic culture developed in post-Roman Palestine). And maybe haroset or my mom's flourless pecan torte (which requires expertise with egg whites that I don't have, but the worst that can happen is that it comes out a really yummy brick instead of a really yummy sponge). (And I volunteered to lead minyan at my Austin shul Tues and Wed morning and chant torah on Monday. I think I bit off too much but what the hell.)
Today was cloudless and 75 degrees, so I went hiking in my shorts and sandals in
St. Edward's Park, a small jewel of a wilderness area off Old Spicewood Springs Road which is 5 minutes from where I am staying. I got to wade through a creek, climb
a limestone cliff, sit on top of a thin waterfall into a deep green swimming hole. The high point was seeing a great blue heron flap off up the creek and then come back the other way.
The elephant in the room. More good stuff from BeliefNet (as opposed to the
bad stuff from BeliefNet) : Remember the
brouhaha about
nefarious Jewish influence on foreign affairs? It seems like years ago, doesn't it? Well,
this article weaves together many of the news/opinion links about Israel's role in the conflict with Iraq, and leads off with a great joke:
Saddam Hussein phoned President Bush. "I had a dream about the United States," he said. "I could see the whole country, and over every building and home was a banner."
"What was on the banner?" asked Bush.
"LONG LIVE SADDAM!" answered the dictator.
"I'm so glad that you called," said President Bush, "because I too had a dream. In my dream, I saw Iraq and it was more beautiful than ever; totally rebuilt with many tall, gleaming office buildings, large residential subdivisions with swimming pools in every yard; and over every building and home was a big, beautiful banner."
"What did the banner say?" asked Saddam.
I don't know," answered President Bush, "I can't read Hebrew."
(I know I'm supposed to worry that jokes like this carelessly bandied about will increase anti-semitism by lending credence to the idea of the International Jewish Conspiracy TM, or I'm supposed to cringe at the joke's lack of political correctness, but you know, I really don't give a shit.)
New blogger on the Kesher Talk team: Laurence Simon just joined our crew of Jew-bloggers from
Amish Tech Support.
Welcome to the &^*@, Laurence, and many happy returns...
Apology not accepted, Eason, because it would mean we'll apologize for what you're still doing. It's one thing to stay neutral from a story to remain unbiased and capable of reporting the truth, but it's an entire different matter when you utterly divorce yourself from humanity and allow horrors, brutality, and torture to happen under your watch all for the pursuit of what you market is a real and unimpeded flow of information.
Eason Jordan, chief news executive of CNN,
confesses now what he claims he couldn't tell before out of fear of Saddam's regime. Eason no less than confesses... I take that back - begs for forgiveness for the disconnect between truth and journalism on a major news network, all for the sake of a promotable bauble such as "The only American news network with a bureau in Iraq."
This man makes me sick, especially when I go back and read his recent claims of a lack of bias when covering the Palestinian Authority. It all comes back to what price has CNN paid to get access to other "key stories" where the skewing of information and lack of integrity is the price for access? When Yasser Arafat is gone, will Eason Jordan suddenly testify of all of the brutality, torture, and horrors that Arafat's thugs and terrorists threatened journalists with, so Eason was "forced" into a devil's bargain with him, too?
Notice all of these famous people, powers-that-be, and celebrities begging for forgiveness for what they "had" to do.
Never forget, or they will do it again.
Pesach countdown - Day 5. Ten Ways to Tell You've Invited Too Many People to Your Seder.10. You can't find anywhere out of sight to hide the afikomen.
9. To recline while drinking the wine, you all have to lean in unison.
8. You had to sketch your living/dining room on graph paper and cut out scale models of tables.
7. You have to use floss to divvy up the knaidlach.
6. When you rotate the verses of "Echad Mi Yodea?", someone ends up singing "Who Knows 39? I Know 39."
5. You start looking at ads for closed circuit TV and auxiliary speakers.
4. While waiting for everyone to wash their hands the second time, the matzah rises.
3. Even the kids complain that they don't have enough bitter herbs.
2. When you recite the names of the ten plagues, the locusts really ring a bell.
1. Elijah finally shows up, and you have to give him his wine "to go."
BBC joins the tinfoil hat brigade. most devastating fisking yet of the BBC, in particular, the World Service. As the author points out:
The World Service of the BBC is the planet’s radio station, broadcasting around the clock in virtually every major language, from Arabic to Urdu, to some 150 million people - far more than listen to the Voice of America and CNN Radio combined.
Keep this in mind while reading the story.
. . . By mid-afternoon, I had listened to the World Service for five straight hours. During that time, the World Service, in its reporting and analysis, was obviously deeply skeptical of any Coalition claims of success and insistent that the Americans be denied simple good faith. The anger of Iraqis, however, was widely and consistently featured. . . .
. . . I watched the TV while listening to the World Service on my hand-held radio. It was a startling multimedia event. I could listen to the BBC’s Paul Wood telling me once again that there was no sign of the American incursion into Baghdad. Yet on the screen in front of me there was the 3rd Infantry. They were cruising through Baghdad, driving down the highway, turning into the streets. Along the sidewalks, there were waving children and adults, cheering them on. Men in passed by in trucks and cars crying out, "Saddam down!" and giving the soldiers big smiles and waves.
. . . On the BBC News channel, the anchors got Wood on camera and very gently pointed out to him that they were getting a lot of video in showing the Americans had indeed taken a drive deep into Baghdad and that the information minister’s odd claims didn’t seem to be holding up. Wood was kind of chubby, younger than I expected. He seemed obviously pained. But he had his story - no Americans in Baghdad as far as he was concerned - and he was sticking to it.
But of course he didn’t have the story. One of the war’s turning points had taken place under his nose and he and the rest of his BBC colleagues in Baghdad had missed it . . .
The excerpts here give you the gist of the story, but there is much more colorful, cringe-producing detail - read the whole thing. (via
Sullivan)
In the Gulf among the Jews: The
Jewish Week, just before the start of war, checked out how Jewish soldiers and chaplains were
practicing their faith under the 'fog of war.'
Pesach countdown - Day 6. If you are keeping kosher for Pesach, you'll want to counter the tendency to get obsessive-compulsive about the
halacha for the holiday with attention to
the deeper meanings of the texts, story, and symbols. Humming some
Mizrachi Pesach melodies while you go about your shopping might help too.
Michael Kelly, R.I.P. One of the online eulogies for
journalist and columnist Michael Kelly linked to
this satirical piece. I didn't recognize who Kelly was when he died, but I remember reading this column and loving it.
`"Good evening, and welcome to 'All Is Lost,' the nightly public affairs program produced by National Public Radio and the British Broadcasting Corporation. Tonight, we discuss what has been called America's war against terror. I am your host, Perfectly Modulated Voice of Reason.
`"With me, in our Washington studio, are: Fabled Newsman Who Was There When Saigon Fell ... Scientifically Trained Impartial Scholar ... and Bureau Chief of Second-Rate Regional Monopoly Newspaper Who Is Desperate to be Hired by The New York Times. From London, we are joined by our European affairs analyst, Loathes America and Prays for its Swift Destruction. . . "
And this is from November
2001!
More war links. I haven't managed to get over to
Command Post for a few days. For some reason it still freezes my IE, and my Netscape randomly crashes. All this in OS 9.2.2. I'm fine in OSX, but I hate the interface so much I have resisted porting everything over there. Mainly, I hate the system font. It's fuzzy and often whatever app you are in uses it, and it's too large and makes some tasks cumbersome. I come back to OS9 and all the type on my screen is so sharp I can use much smaller type sizes.
Can any of you Mac heads tell me if they fixed this in Jaguar? Or are there any hacks out there to put a mostly OS9 lookandfeel interface on top of OSX? I browsed around the popular download sites but didn't see anything. Also, I've had this piece of shareware forever that lets me assign a key to be a Forward Delete key (which Apple in its infinite wisdom decided its customers didn't need as an integral part of the keyboard). I use my FD key all the time and I haven't found an OSX way to do this. Any tips would be appreciated.
Anyway,
here's a UK Sun reporter posing (fully clothed) on Saddam's gold-plated toilet. Residents took revenge on
Saddam's torture chambers, destroying a lot of evidence, but hopefully not all of it. It's hard going for aid workers in the midst of
a post-war breakdown of law and order.The last 2 paragraphs of this story are interesting.
Bush said that despite Britain's desire to move more quickly on the "road map" detailing steps towards peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this will not be published until the Palestinian prime minister Mahmud Abbas "finally (puts) his cabinet in place." There were reports Tuesday that Abbas was threatening Tuesday to resign, however, as he is facing opposition from Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat (news - web sites) in trying to form a government.
Once again,
the Bush MO in action.
Pesach countdown - Day 7. Pesach is next week, and everyone I know is either starting to go crazy getting ready to host that combination of performance art, hootenany, poetry reading, and gourmet meal known as the
seder, or going crazy making sure they have an invitation to one, hopefully two.
I am going back to sunny warm Austin for both seders, then back here for an institutional Shabbat dinner, then to another shul for Shabbat morning because they asked me to chant a chapter of
Shir haShirim.Tonight I am
looking up Pesach songs so I can be ready to sing along no matter what my hosts throw at me. Seder customs can
vary considerably.Going to another family’s seder is a bit like going to Europe on an exchange program: The people are doing the same things but in unfamiliar ways. . . . Lately I’ve been asking friends and acquaintances about their Passover rituals, and almost all answered in the same tone: “Well of course the father hides the afikomen, silly. Then the children search for it and if they find it they get a prize. What else do you expect?”
Except that in my family, it’s the children who hide the afikomen, and unless my father finds it, he has to negotiate with the children for its return. That is the way of things.
I thought there was only one way to sing the “Who knows One?” song until I heard of a family in which the grandfather “points at random table denizen” shouting out numbers in English, Hebrew and Yiddish, and the appointed family member sings the appropriate verse.
This grandfather must be related - by ethnic subculture if not by blood - to
Forward columnist Marjorie Ingalls, who relates:
My parents have always had dueling Seders. My dad calls his "My Zeyde's Seder." It is a rapid-fire, singsong spew of Haggada delivered, in his words, "with the same intonations, incantations and misogynistic deprecations that have been handed down by rabbis to my grandfather thousands of years ago." In other words, he bangs on the table a lot and barks, "The women will be quiet!" This performance is only semi-intended as camp.
My mother's Seder, on the other hand, is all about cooperative learning and hands-on participation. As befitting a professor of education at the Jewish Theological Seminary, she finds neat-o lessons everywhere. In the past, we've compared and contrasted various kinds of Haggadot (feminist, archeological, Manischewitz, pacifist, Claymation). She's made game boards so we could play Jewpardy (with categories including Pharaoh Phacts and On the Seder Plate) and Jewish Family Feud. We've mimed the plagues, turned "The People's Court" into a one-act play in which Pharaoh was on trial (I was Rusty the Bailiff), and slapped each other with leeks (don't ask). She incorporates multicultural readings, finds amusing Passover songs on the Internet, invites questions and commentary from the group. My father assures readers of his Web site, "Believe me, God does not listen."
Last year Mom outdid herself. She had us tell the story of Passover through a combination of Haggada reading and Paper Bag Players-style improvisation. She divided us into teams, gave each team a bunch of random props (dental floss, a plastic lei, a tape dispenser, a vintage Dukakis/Mondale button) and assigned each team a section of the Haggada to act out.
Despite some kvetching, the family rose to the occasion. Some people went conceptual. My aunt Belleruth's team used Arafat as a stand-in for Pharaoh; my brother used the pimping of baby formula in Third World countries as a metaphor for the killing of the first-born. Some were more literal. My 90-year-old grandmother played the youngest child reciting the Four Questions, with shoelaces — one of her team's props — tied in her short steel-gray hair like bows. She read the questions in a piping babyish voice while my cousin Abie stuck his arms under her armpits and made amusing hand gestures. My father rolled his eyes and muttered things that sounded suspiciously like "hillul hashem" (an abomination unto God).
Mom's Seder can be scary. You will be in a skit, and you will solo on "Echad Mi Yodaya" even if you do not know Hebrew. My mother resolutely refuses to see that this is terrifying. She hands people a transliterated Haggada and sings encouragingly along with them. But hello! Still terrifying! Past guests have included Brown University students, who tend to look like deer in the headlights when the solos start, as well as my mom's friend Mary, a nun (whose Hebrew is better than mine, so she's not a very good example), and my dad's Franciscan co-worker from a group home for troubled boys, Brother John. Everybody steps up to the mike; everybody represents. Khad Gadya, yo!
When I said performance art, I wasn't kidding.
Medicine to heal the Arab-Jewish rift: Members of two families, Jewish and Arab residents of the Galilee, underwent
simultaneous kidney transplant procedures this week, saving the lives of their loved ones who suffered from chronic kidney problems. The families say that the experience has left them feeling closely connected to each other and hope that their actions will serve as a message promoting peaceful relations between Israeli Jews and Arabs.
On Monday the 'cross transplant' kidney operations were performed at the same time in Rambam Hospital in Haifa and Schneider Hospital in Petach Tikva. Ilia Halon, 45, an Arab truck driver from Acco, received a kidney donated by Yigal Ozri, 38, a Jewish resident of Kibbutz Naot Mordechai. At the same time Ron, Ozri's ten-year-old son, underwent a procedure which gave him a kidney donated by Halon's wife Lena.
... Ilia Halon added his wishes for continued peaceful relations between Jews and Arabs in Israel, saying, "I want very much to meet the child. We'll continue now as one family and plan to keep in touch. Part of his father was transplanted into me, and part of my wife was transplanted into him. I'm sure we'll visits with each other. I have lots of Jewish friends; relations between Jews and Arabs in the north are excellent. I wish everyone health and peace. Nothing is more important."
War-related URLs. As I've said before, timely stuff goes to
Command Post, stuff with shelf life goes here.
Iraqi pop star Ismail Hussain
describes being summoned to play for Uday, Saddam's sadistic hedonistic son.
Josh at Oxblog fisks Marc Herrold's latest attempts at bodycounts, pointing out that "the
Iraq Body Count Project's minimum count of Iraqi civilian deaths is higher than what the Iraqi government itself claims!" Also,
plenty of links and comments on post-war reconstruction, including a look at
retired army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, who has many impressive qualifications for managing the job.
Michael Totten reports on an
unusual "teach-in" about the war:
. . . each of the participants was fairly thoughtful - which shouldn't have been surprising, but was.
The real surprise, though, was the response from the audience. . . Certainly, the room's mood was anti-war and even more strongly anti-Bush. But it was a GOOD kind of anti-war sentiment--questioning, skeptical, fully cognizant of the difficulty of coming to an unambiguous position.
This happened at Bush's alma mater, BTW. Michael is also
collecting Iraq
war photos
from different
news sources. He's also got a
round-up of editorial cartoons.
The Jewish community also
has a problem of the right-wingers
monopolizing the mikveh.
Latest Fisk fisking. Robert Fulford
dissects everyone's favorite consistently-wrong anti-American journalist.
He has vast experience and an adoring American audience on the Internet. But it's his moral certitude that seems, in a way, most enviable. He never lacks a strong opinion, and it's always the same: Whatever goes wrong in the Middle East, he blames the Americans and the Israelis.
If an Arab nation commits some outrage, that's because Washington supports Arab dictators. If Palestinians kill, it's because Israel stole their land. He dislikes Yassir Arafat ("corrupt, vain little despot") but believes he's Israel's fault because Israel helped create the Palestinian Authority and brought in Arafat "as a colonial governor" to control his people.
Most journalists are biased, but Fisk paints himself into a particularly narrow corner. He has one subject and only about two opinions, which he expresses with an abundance of sneering pride and a total absence of nuance.
It just gets better from there. (via
Damian Penny)
Anti-Semitism Conference. Old Demons, New Debates: Anti-semitism in the West is a 3-day conference taking place at the
YIVO Insittute for Jewish Research in New York next month. It is extremely inexpensive to attend, and speakers include Ian Buruma, Abraham Foxman, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Todd Gitlin, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hillel Halkin, Deborah Lipstadt, David Pryce-Jones, Leon Weiseltier, and Simon Schama. If you are able to get to Manhattan, put it on your calendar.
Troll watch. Balloon Juice is
keeping an eye on Mac Diva, a particularly nasty troll who
made some racist comments about Shark's wife on his blog a few months ago. (Scroll to the comments.)
Sneering pomo Euros Dept. Our latest sneering poseur is another Brit, MP George Galloway, who
went to a great deal of trouble to avoid meeting a Kurdish refugee.
Mrs Raper, a teacher who lives in north London, first came to prominence when she appeared on BBC'S Question Time and berated Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, the columnist, for her anti-war views. "She should be grateful that as an Asian immigrant she has a British passport and not an Iraqi one," she said, to approval from the studio audience.
She turned her sights on Mr Galloway last week when the MP called on British troops not to fight and urged Arab leaders to "stand by the Iraqi people". . . . Mrs Raper was keen to make him hear her views.
And MP Galloway was just as keen to avoid hearing a walking, talking fact which contradicted his fantasy, leading to a cat-and-mouse chase across London worthy of an
Ealing Studios production.(via
Damian Penny)
New stats on the sharp rise in antisemitism in California. It's way up for '02, not surprisingly concentrating in the leftist Bay Area.
Antisemitic incidents soared 800% in Northern California last year, according to the Anti-Defamation League's annual audit released last week.
Northern California logged only 13 events in 2001 but saw 117 in 2002. Thirty-five occurred in San Francisco; 27 occurred in Alameda County, including Berkeley and Oakland; and 13 occurred in Santa Clara County, including San Jose and much of Silicon Valley. Many of these were verbal — including anonymous phone calls and public taunts — or written, including a blood-libel flier distributed on a college campus and many instances of swastikas and other graffiti. . . .
In Oakland, arson caused $24,000 in damage to Congregation Beth Jacob, an Orthodox synagogue. In San Francisco, police found unexploded Molotov cocktails on the roof of the Conservative-Reform Congregation Beth Israel-Judea during Passover. In Sacramento, two men asked a pedestrian wearing a yarmulke whether he supported Israel; when he said he did, they came at him with fists and a stun gun, inflicting bruises and a sprained elbow, the audit notes.
Nationwide, the ADL audit showed an 8% increase in antisemitic incidents, from 1,432 incidents in 2001 to 1,559 in 2002. These figures included a 17% increase in harassment such as intimidation, threats and assaults aimed at people or institutions, and a 4% increase in vandalism of Jewish community institutions, synagogues and property.
Stats on the rise in French anti-semitismViolent hate crimes in France quadrupled in 2002 over the year before, rising to their highest level in a decade, according to a new report by the National Consulting Committee on Human Rights. More than half the assaults were aimed at Jews.
Another article on recent French violence against Jews.
Yet another blog round-up. Eve Tushnet turned me on to
Dash Reads a Book. (When I visited he had just finished Noah.)
Why are so many Persians blogging? Hossein Derakhshan, one of the instigators of the Iranian blogger boom, has
some thoughts.Finally,
Slient Running's links are fixed, and I can point you to
the cautionary tale of little Bobby Fisk, who grew up to be
an even bigger penis-head than he is in this story. (As a commenter said, "Great story! I didn't know you could Fisk a car.") And another cautionary tale of
a writer's pique. Consequences, gentleman - actions have
consequences.SF writer and fan John M Ford reports on
Electrolite that
Microsoft Corporation today announced a high-level arrangement with the U.S. State Department to restructure postwar Iraq as a Windows-based application.
War-related URLs. As I've said before, timely stuff goes to
Command Post, stuff with shelf life goes here.
Another analysis of troop strength and tactics, from a Daily Dish reader. As Sullivan says, "I have a feeling this debate is going to go on for quite some time."
Kuwait
isn't happy about Arab support for Saddam, as evidenced by what they see of the war on Arab satellite TV.
"Some Arab channels are not showing the good, they do not show when the Americans bring help to the Iraqi people. They show just one side," says Balqis Aziz, who joined up to 2,000 other Kuwaitis at an open air meeting to reaffirm their support for the efforts to unseat Saddam Hussein. . . . Criticism from fellow Arabs is particularly hard to swallow, say some Kuwaitis, because of the aid this oil-rich emirate has given to its regional neighbours and its short, but bloody, experience of rule by Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War.
Did you know that El Paso TX is
the home of the German Air Force Command? Thirty-one allied nations train at Fort Bliss, but only Germany keeps permanent military installations there.
Until the Iraq war, the US and German forces and their families got along well, and German residents assimilated enthusiastically into Texas culture. But . . .
privately some military personnel at Fort Bliss grumble about the irony of welcoming German troops only to watch them lay their arms down when America went to war.
At the AIPAC Conference. The Jews Colin Powell faced
at AIPAC last week were not mollified by his
fluency in Yiddish.Powell was cheered when he demanded an end to Palestinian violence, but there were audible hisses and boos when he turned his focus on Israel, saying that “settlement activity is simply inconsistent with President Bush’s two-state vision. As the president has said, ‘as progress is made toward peace, settlement activity in the Occupied Territories must end.’ ”
(This sounds like typical Bush strategy to me: insist you are all for peace, love, democracy, self-rule, or whatever the other side wants to hear, and then attach a condition. Bush is for a Palestinian state,
if it's democratic. Bush wants settlements to cease,
if the Pals demonstrate a changed attitude. I'm not worried about Bush's intentions, or even Powell's. I'm worried about
Blair and Straw, and their obligations to the EU.)
On the plus side:
There were an unusual number of Defense Department officials at the gathering, reflecting heightened interest in U.S.-Israeli military cooperation. The most daring attendee: the French ambassador. The least surprising incident of the evening: he was booed.
"The Virtue of Hate", redux. That Soloveitchik essay in
First Things seems to be making the rounds. Eve Tushnet
wrote about it a few months ago,
twice. Our own Josh Kraushaar noted it
here last week.But Naomi Chana
fisks it really good, after a mild disclaimer:
There is probably not a single, unified Jewish position on the vast majority of topics. This is the case for any major religious tradition, but it goes double for anything descended from rabbinic Judaism, where we keep the minority opinions in the Talmud and then disagree about why we have kept them in.
She points out numerous examples of the importance of forgiveness in Jewish theology.
. . . Soloveichik's citations are all, to the best of my limited knowledge, accurate,** and he has done a bang-up job of sketching out a certain strand of the Jewish tradition which does indeed clearly indicate that we are to hate, not forgive, our enemies. (The fact that this strand also plays into the worst kind of Christian theological prejudices about Judaism is . . . OK, not totally irrelevant.) But it is easy enough to find texts from within the mainstream Jewish tradition which contradict these ideas. If Soloveichik can read selectively, so can I. So here's another Jewish position on forgiveness, running parallel to Soloveichik's.
She also points out where Jesus was similarly tough-minded.
It is perhaps worth emphasizing at this point the fact that Jesus was indeed Jewish, and that even if he were the Big Fluffy Bunny of Sweetness and Light Soloveichik depicts him as (going, I think, on unexamined assumptions derived from Christian theologians who should know better), Jesus himself would still be part of "the Jewish tradition" unless you stick the modifier "rabbinic" in there (and even then, it's arguable). I'm not going to push that, though, and I'm not going to utter a peep about Desmond Tutu's theology -- I'll leave further discussion of the mainstream Christian tradition to those with more of a stake in it.
I find it significant that this article is circulating widely enough in Naomi's academic circles that colleagues were asking her to comment on it. I may be reading this subtext into Naomi's post, but I sense that somewhere back in the email/blog/conversation foodchain some antiwar anti-Israel academic latched onto the Soloveitchik essay as evidence that Jews Are Not Very Nice People, and others are hoping that's not the case and want their resident Knowledgeable Jew to reassure them.
I have to say I have mixed feelings about all this. Naomi's friends remind me of nervous white liberals of 40 years ago who wanted their Black friends to reassure them that most Black people didn't condone the radical separatism of the Black Panthers, and were really just like White liberals under the skin.
On the one hand, I agree with both Naomi and Eve that Soloveitchik is overstating his case to make a point. On the other hand, he is making a necessary case. The Jewish worldview
is significantly different from the Christian worldview, and - at a time when the intersection of religion and politics is so central to world events - both Christians and Jews need to be reminded of our differences as well as our similarities.
Sneering pomo Euros Dept. Proud heroin addict and literary poseur Will Self
is miffed at all the attention PFC Lynch is getting.. . . how fed up I am with the grotesque moral nonequivalence of this war. How sickening it is to observe the thousands of column inches that are expended on Lynch, when the lives of many thousands of nameless Iraqi conscripts pass without mourning.
Those nasty Americans - how dare they care about their troops more than the enemy's?
He also completely ignores the drama of Pvt. Lynch's capture and rescue (including the sympathetic native who braves death to help her), not to mention the drama of a feisty young woman in a combat situation. A screenwriter couldn't have come up with a more compelling story - of course it's going to be in the headlines for awhile.
The lives of hundreds of coalition soldiers will also pass without public commentary, Will, just as those of Iraqi conscripts, because their particular stories are either unknown or aren't dramatic enough for mass media to grab onto. To be blunt, every 24 hours can hold only so many column inches, and Pvt. Lynch's story will command less and less public attention as it is overtaken by more recent events, as it should be. I'm sure your green-painted parachuting hero got his share of media attention in his time.
. . . any movie director worth his salt would ensure that the real Private Lynch - like Private Ryan - had joined the US Army to fight for deeply held ideals. Unfortunately, none of these plot devices applies to this scenario, but most telling in its absence is the last. Apparently, Lynch, who comes from the dirtpoor hill country of West Virginia, joined the army to get an education, and her real ambition is to be a teacher.
It's typical of pseudo-intellectuals like Self to insist that high ideals can't coexist with the need to earn a living. Unless of course you're earning a living writing drivel like this.
Susanna Cornett also has
some incendiary thoughts on Will Self. She points out that Self totally ignores the pivotal role of the Iraqi lawyer who helped her, because it doesn't fit his scenario of brutish nasty Americans vs. little brown Iraqi victims.
Delusions of grandeur Dept.The Palestinian Authority's mufti, Ikremah Sabri,
threw a hissy fit this week. Let me see if I've got this straight: A Muslim religious authority bans two Christians from entering a Christian house of worship.
American University chaplain sponsors a conference with anti-Semitic overtones. The media was slow to catch up with this story (and I've been in London since January, so I was unaware of it) but finally the Washington Jewish Week
reports on a conference held at
American University that was filled with anti-Israel and anti-Semitic propaganda. More disturbing, it was organized with the active assistance of AU chaplain Joe Eldridge, who used his office to circulate and copy fliers and other material relating to the National Conference on Organized Resistance this past January. American University also gave conference members free space to hold their activities for this radical organization. There is no disputing the conference was virulently anti-Israel ("One conference observer heard justification for suicide bombings") and anti-Semitic ("The individual also noticed, on one table at the conference, a petition urging the ban of kosher food on campus").
It's a very disturbing story, and I passed it along to some friends of mine working at the student newspaper. Nothing seems to surprise me anymore of the left-wing hate and intolerance on campuses. I myself am working on a column for the
student paper on this, but am waiting to see if anything materialized on the news end of things.
Contrasts between Christianity and Judaism in response to evil. Meir Y. Soloveichik has a
fascinating, well-sourced article about the differences between Judaism and Christianity in the "redeemability" of the truly evil. Here's a sample:
In his At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden, journalist Yossi Klein Halevi speaks with Johanna, a Catholic nun who is struck by the hatred Israelis bear for their enemies. Johanna tells of an Israeli Hebrew teacher “who was very close to us. She told us how her young son hates Saddam. . . . She said it with such enthusiasm. She was so proud of her son.” “I realized,” Johanna concluded, “that hatred is in the Jewish religion.” She was right. The Hebrew prophets spoke in the name of a God who, in Exodus’ articulation, may “forgive iniquity and transgression and sin,” but Who also “by no means exonerates [the guilty].” Likewise, in refusing to forgive their enemies, Jewish leaders sought not merely their defeat, but their disgrace. When Queen Esther had already visited defeat upon Haman—the Hitler of his time, attempted exterminator of the Jewish people—and had killed Haman’s supporters and sons, King Ahasuerus asks what more she could possible want:
The king said to Queen Esther, “In the capital of Susa the Jews have killed also the ten sons of Haman. . . . Now what is your petition? It shall be granted you. And what further is your request? It shall be fulfilled.” Esther said, “If it pleases the king . . . let the ten sons of Haman be hanged on the gallows.”
It's a fascinating read.
Socialism of fools Dept. Even Coyne Maloney, the ruthless chronicler of the seamy underbelly of the antiwar movement,
turns his video camera on the movement's anti-semitism. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll want to put your fist through the wall.
(WARNING: Trying to play the video made my Internet Explorer freeze, but Netscape handled it fine.)
Naive tool / duplicitous terrorist sympathizer Dept. A Command Post reader sent
a story from a Seattle paper which (in contrast to
this) is the most lengthy, balanced, dispassionate, investigation I have read so far about Rachel Corrie, with vivid portraits of Corrie's fellow activists, especially Laura, who
. . . found herself increasingly interested in the Middle East and her Jewish roots. She came to Israel on a "birthright" program run by Livnot U'Lehibanot, a religious organization that pays the travel expenses of American Jews who want to come to Israel to solidify their Jewish identity. When she finished with her birthright program, she took up residence with the foreign supporters of the Palestinian resistance--which, it is safe to say, was not what the birthright program directors were hoping for. "It's really done a number on my Jewish identity," Laura says.
I'll bet. The author
Eli Sanders also nails the contradictory nature of Rachel's organization, the
International Solidarity Movement:The group claims to operate completely independent of the Palestinian Authority and its various internal factions, but it also claims to be "Palestinian led." The group is dedicated to nonviolent direct action in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., but it is using that nonviolent direct action in the service of a liberation movement whose favored direct-action tactic in recent years has been suicide bombings.
And here is the most glaring contradiction: Virtually all of the foreign activists currently in Rafah characterize themselves as anarchists. They reject notions of hierarchy and even the very idea of a political state. . . . Yet the sole reason that Rachel, Stefan, and the other ISM anarchists go to Rafah is to aid a people whose driving aim for four decades now has been the creation of a state. . . .
Ironically, Eli later finds out from an Israeli army spokesman that the house Rachel was protecting was not in danger of being demolished at all. That day the bulldozers were searching for Palestinian-planted explosives.
Eli stays overnight with a Palestinian family and worries about Stockholm Syndrome.
I again remember something that Joe told me: "When we come and we stay with a family, and we eat dinner with a family, and watch them take care of their children, it's very clear that these people are normal individuals. Anybody can distinguish between clearly militant fighter terrorist types and normal, everyday people. Anybody."
He's right, I think. Abu Jamil is clearly not a terrorist. This home and these kids are no threat to anyone. And then I think: How would I know? I've never met a terrorist. It's possible that terrorists and militants can be gracious hosts, too, can be gentle with their children, just like everyone else.
As soon as I think this I feel guilty for doubting Abu Jamil . . . . I realize that there is the potential for a sort of Stockholm syndrome to be warping the Rafah activists' perception of reality--how can you allow yourself to think bad thoughts about someone who has fed you, has sheltered you in a dangerous city? How can you think critically when, like Rachel Corrie, you start to become a member of the family?
There's much more.
Latest blog round-up. Ghost of a Flea points us to
The Tikal Digital Access Project from the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. I visited Tikal about 5 years ago, as part of a side trip from a vacation kayaking the barrier reef of Belize. They said there were jaguars about but they were very shy and nocturnal and we wouldn't see one. And I didn't.
Imshin finds out that children
grow up fast in Israel.7 Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers. Corny and insubstantial, but a nifty idea. Keep developing it.
Daddy Warblogs does some math, and ends up asserting that
"an attack on a third Middle East country could yield one-tenth of a bin Laden." I mentioned some months ago that this is a consistently acerbically amusing site, in the way that only bloody-minded Brits can be. Well, let me repeat that.
Oxblog waxes rhapsodic about
Leviathan, specifically a colossal squid spotted by a Russian trawler off Antarctica.
