But today’s may be the best one yet. According to Lazer, not only do Jews believe in reincarnation, but dogs are the reincarnated spirits of slanderers:

Jews firmly believe in reincarnation. Reincarnation is designed to attain a correction of the soul and mend sins of former lives. For example, those who slander others and who speak idle gossip are usually reincarnated as dogs. We should try our best to fulfill G-d’s commandments and to avoid the need for further reincarnations at all costs.

There’s so much going on here I hardly know where to begin. Perhaps I’ll start with the “content” of this blog post. Yes, many Jews have historically believed in reincarnation. The Talmud speaks of gilgul neshamot, or “transmigrations of the soul”, and it is posited that souls migrate to new bodies after death to atone for sins committed in their former lives. Kabbalistic tradition makes much of this, especially in the Zohar, the writings of the Ari (Rabbi Isaac Luria), and Hasidic folk stories and traditions. Some people even believe it today, as we can see in the crazy ravings of a certain Internet nutjob who believes that trees contain souls in need of “correction”. Even an otherwise reasonable rabbi I know in California believes in reincarnation.

Apparently, Jews also believe that the souls of those who speak lashon ha-ra—gossip and slander—are reincarnated in canine form. Who knew?

Jewish belief in reincarnation (inasmuch as it can be called “Jewish”) has its traditional, pre-rabbinic origins in the nebulous concept of tehiyat ha-meitim, the resurrection of the dead that will be one of the defining features of the Messianic Age. But Jewish notions of post-death reward and punishment have always been very poorly defined: “heaven” and “hell” are not native Jewish concepts and do not translate very well into Jewish eschatology. This is why the traditional answer to the questions “What age will I be when I’m resurrected in the Messianic Age?” and “If I were to die by having my head chopped off, would I be resurrected without a head?” is “Don’t ask stupid questions.”

Judaism is focussed on this world and what we do with our lives in it. In the age-old “works versus faith” debate, Judaism falls squarely on the side of works. A human being who does good deeds and does not believe in God is worth many times more than one who pays lip service to God and does not try to live up to his or her God’s ideas about human honour and dignity. God demands that we give charity to the poor, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, strive to rid the world of anguish and strife. A Jew who does not do these things is not practicing Judaism.

If you speak slander or gossip—and who hasn’t?—the penalty is not reincarnation into another form (how you’re supposed to perform penance as a dog is beyond me, anyway). If you sin, you won’t be punished with eternal hellfire or damnation or anything like that. The penalty for those who create a worse world with their wrongdoing is to live in a worse world.

That these outrageous comments and beliefs are still confined to a small corner of the online world and haven’t been getting the kind of press that Barack Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright has been enjoying, I can only attribute to (a) the so-called liberal media’s ongoing love affair with McCain and (b) the incredible wealth and power of Hagee’s ministry and media empire.

Money quote: “How did [the Holocaust] happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said, ‘My top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel.’ Today Israel is back in the land … They are physically alive but they’re not spiritually alive.”

Full transcript and video (YouTube video of audio recording of sermon) after the jump.

Again he said unto me, “Prophesy unto these bones, and say unto them: O you dry bones, hear the word of the Lord!” And he spoke to them and they stood and they became an exceeding great army—meaning they physically came to life.

Now how is God going to bring them back to the land? The answer is fishers and hunters.

The answer is given in Jeremiah 16, verse 15 and following. God says in Jeremiah 16: “Behold I will bring them (the Jewish people) again unto their land that I gave unto their fathers”—that would be Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—”Behold I will send for many fishers and after will I send for many hunters. And they the hunters shall hunt them”—that will be the Jews—”from every mountain and from every hill and from out of the holes of the rocks.”

If that doesn’t describe what Hitler did in the Holocaust… you can’t see that.

So think about this—I will send fishers and I will send hunters. A fisher is someone who entices you with a bait. How many of you know who Theodore Herzl was? How many of you don’t have a clue who he was? Woo! Sweet God!

Theodore Herzl is the father of Zionism. He was a Jew that at the turn of the 19th century said, “This land is our land, God wants us to live there.” So he went to the Jews of Europe and said, “I want you to come and join me in the land of Israel.” So few went, Herzl went into depression. Those who came founded Israel; those who did not went through the hell of the Holocaust.

Then God sent a hunter. A hunter is someone who comes with a gun and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter.

And the Bible says—Jeremiah righty?—”They shall hunt them from every mountain and from every hill and out of the holes of the rocks.” Meaning: there’s no place to hide.

And that will be offensive to some people. Well, dear heart, be offended: I didn’t write it. Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said, “My top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel.”

Today Israel is back in the land and they are at Ezekiel 37 and 8. They are physically alive but they’re not spiritually alive.

Now how is God going to cause the Jewish people to come spiritually alive and say, “The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, He is God”?

Via Bruce Wilson at The Revealer

Israel at 60, Jews at ±3000

• Problems of every sort: demographic, political, religious, you name it. Can Israel continue to exist? Mayyybeee…
• Israel’s huge demographic problems are being compounded as the government sits on its hands with regards to the deepening Sudanese refugee crisis.
• News flash: Anti-Semitism still exists in Eastern Europe. (And the NY Times still reports on it in the “Art & Design” section.)

Saudi Arabia and mobile pornography

• Porn constitutes about 70% of all files exchanged between teenagers’ mobile phones in the sexually repressive Arab kingdom.
• To deal with the sexually repressive culture—and Bluetooth harassment by young men—Saudi girls have developed all kinds of strategies, such as cross-dressing. There is an interesting debate over whether or not reading a man’s Facebook page is tantamount to hearing his voice, since all you’re perceiving is his writing.

Other random stuff

• Jane Doe (i.e. anonymous) rape kits will soon be available on a national scale in the United States. It’s about fucking time.
• After all these years, there is still nothing business analysts love more than to predict doom and gloom for Apple.
• Summer music camps—of whatever musical persuasion—aren’t just for young people anymore.
• A NY Times columnist comes to the startling realization that young people hold huge political power.
• M.C. Escher drawings recreated in Lego.
• A book entitled Uncensored Amazon Kindle Buyer’s Guide: Know for Sure if the Amazon Kindle is Right for You is now available in Kindle format.

Lazer Brody, our friendly neighbourhood chassidic nut, informs us—complete with video—about an intriguing custom that is apparently Jewish: saying blessings over fruit trees that are blossoming in the springtime. According to Rabbi Lazer, this is a great mitzvah because

According to Kabbala, this blessing is deeply significant, and helps correct the soul that is reincarnated within the tree. That soul is forever beholding [sic] to the person that makes the blessing, for he or she has done a great favor in helping that soul attain its tikkun, or correction.

You can’t make this shit up. (Actually, I guess you can.) I am stunned. Souls being reincarnated in trees?! This is the kind of thing the Kabbalah Center would come up with, and then sell twigs to unsuspecting celebrities and Angelenos for $150 a pop.

If this were not a Jewish ritual, and a Jewish (sort of) spiritual justification, Jews like Rabbi Lazer would instantly associate it with barbaric and misguided animism or spirit-worship or idolatry, just like the Bible condemns cultic worship involving the asherah. But since this one is sui generis Jewish, or something, it’s totally kosher and Kabbalistic and a beautiful and important mitzvah and a great way to “correct” reincarnated tree-souls.

If my spirit ever has to get reincarnated into a tree, I hope it’s one of those awesome bristlecone pines that live forever and are basically indestructible. Actually, what with the pine beetle going around these days, maybe not…

As reprinted here, the manuscript cuts off writing out all the repeats after the first two verses and skips right to the last verse. Some of the handwriting in the manuscript is difficult to make out; this transcription is as accurate as possible given the limitations of current understanding of Klingon papyrology and manuscript tradition. Errors in spelling or grammar should be put down to thousands of years of transmission—and the fact that this is a drinking song in the first place, designed to scan and sound euphonic.

At any rate, a great mystery of the cosmos can now be put to rest. A zissen Pesach, or as they say throughout the Klingon Empire, veb DIS veng wa’Dich Qo’noSDaq!—”Next year, in the First City of Kronos!

(Edited to add: Yes, this is an original translation of mine.)

האוכל מצה בערב הפסח כבא על ארוסתו בבית חמיווהבא

One who eats matzah on the eve of Passover [i.e. before the holiday has started] is like one who who has sex with his bride-to-be in the home of his future father-in-law.

Asher Ginsberg, alias Ahad Ha’am, is reputed to have said in response:

עשיתי שניהם ואינם דומים

I’ve done both, and they’re nothing alike.

Also, my good friend the Friar notes that Ahad Ha’am was an early blogger, griping about the state of things in the Holy Land decades before it was cool.

Hat-tip: DovBear

The ruling by Judge Bar-Asher is a reasoned judgment, and it conforms with the logic on which the law is based. The judge refused to accede to the argument of the defendants that the law should be struck down because it violates their fundamental rights and is not in keeping with the values of the State of Israel. She did not accept their argument that the law represents religious coercion. The only thing she did was examine the definition of the “public” place in which the display of leaven is prohibited. She concluded that the interior of a business is not considered a public place according to the legal code, and therefore displaying chametz there does not violate the law, whose intent is not to offend the sensibilities of observers of Torah and mitzvot.

These people will in any case not enter a store or restaurant where nonkosher products are sold and served, and as such they will not be exposed to chametz and their sensibilities will not be offended. On the other hand, as long as there is no law prohibiting selling and serving leavened products to those who want them, why prohibit their display inside a place of business that is permitted to sell them?

The Israeli Haredi establishment won’t be satisfied until every square inch of Israel is a theocracy, and the men in black hats have all the power. Like Iran, but Jewish. People should have the right to buy, sell, and eat what they want during Passover. Just because some three-thousand-year-old law says you shouldn’t eat hametz, that means everybody in the country must be prohibited from it? Passover is about freedom. This includes the freedom not to give a damn about old laws and customs.

Many people know that on Passover, many Jews refrain from the eating of hametz, which is defined as food made from any or all of the “five grains”: wheat, barley, oats, rye, and spelt, in which fermentation has taken place by means of water for over eighteen minutes. If you bake whatever it is you’re making before eighteen minutes of hydration, it won’t rise but will turn into matzah instead. This (so goes the story) is in memory of when the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt, and had to leave in a great big hurry after all those ten plagues, the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart, and various special effects.

Jews are also prohibited from “deriving any benefit” from hametz during Passover, so a legal expedient has been invented: you can sell your hametz to a non-Jew. Essentially, you sell all of your hametz for some trivial amount, like $1, and the sales contract includes a clause that makes the hametz automatically revert to you if the non-Jew doesn’t come up with the rest of the money for the full value of the hametz. Since the hametz presumably remains in your kitchen somewhere, the “wink wink” nature of this contract is clear: it is a legal fiction designed to allow Jews to get around the Torah laws. (This is nothing new, by the way. Two examples: (1) The eruv, a kind of “boundary” created around a large area like a city to “enclose” it and thus make it one “domain” for purposes of carrying things within it on the Sabbath. (2) The Prozbul, a legal fiction wherein a debt can be “transferred” to a rabbinical court so it cannot be defaulted on during a Sabbatical year.)

Anyway, I’m glad for the judicial ruling that recognizes that if people—Jews—want to sell and buy hametz during Passover, they have every right to do so. This is victory for rationality, consideration, and tolerance, and against caving to the Haredim and surrendering personal choice to the theocracy that some Jews are intent on creating in Israel. People have rights, including the right not to observe old (and frankly, quite silly) traditions.

Let Israeli Jews who don’t want to eat hametz on Passover do what we do in the Diaspora: get really jealous at everybody they know who does eat hametz, and then have a massive pizza-and-pasta party after eight days of self-affliction. And if they happen to walk by a store selling cookies, cakes, breads, what have you—they should give thanks that they live in a country that allows people to buy, sell, and eat what they want when they want.

Our Torah is sweeter than honey. Within it, you can find all the secrets of creation.

I’m going to share with you something that none of the math or geophysics professors in MIT or Cal Tech know, nor does anyone on the staff at NASA. Now hear this from your buddy Lazer:

I think there might be a reason they won’t tell you these things—but anyway, why make the facile assumption that nobody who works in science or engineering or mathematics is a Jew who takes this sort of stuff seriously?

Pi is the secret of creation. Kabbalah, our esoteric portion of Torah passed on to us by Rabbi Yitzchak Luria Ashkenazi (the famed “Arizal”) and his disciple Rabbi Chaim Vital, may their holy memories arouse mercy on us,

(Yes, he did actually write ‘arouse mercy on us’. I am not making this up.)

explains that Ain Sof, Hashem The Infinite, created the world by a process known as tzimtzum, or contraction, whereby Hashem had to designate a point in the middle of his Divine and all-encompassing light to make room for a physical universe. This process, super simplified, was done by hishtalshelut, a series of cocentric [sic] circles the correspond to each of the sefirot, the holy spheres that mainifest [sic] Hashem’s different attributes.

Okay, whatever. It’s the conclusion that our sage mathematician/kabbalist comes to immediately after this point that really blows my mind:

Therefore, nothing in creation is square. All of creation is round, from electrons and protons to the great galaxies.

Nothing is square? Everything is round? What about: squares, cubes, right angles, television sets, sofas, stereo speakers, pianos, and books (sorry, seforim), just to name a few things? Also, many galaxies have shapes other than circles. But if you’re intent on making a silly, poorly-informed point, I guess you can’t let little details like these stop you.

A magical number, the key to computing circles, diameters, and circumferences is Pi, or 3.14 with subsequent fractional digits to infinity.

The Holy Name that Hashem used and uses (for creation is renewed every single day) in the contraction process is שד”י, the Hebrew name Shaddai, which is made up of 3 letters, shin, dalet, and yud.

All Hebrew letters have a numerical value. Shin is 300, yud is 10, and dalet is 4. Together, the Holy Name of Shaddai equals 314. If we divide this number by 100, the number that signifies perfection - which only Hashem is - we get 3.14, or pi, the secret of creation.

All right, so if you add up the letters you get an approximation of pi times a hundred. So you have to divide by a hundred to get a meaningful result out of this. What’s the justification for doing this? You could come up with so many other than ‘it signifies perfection’. I will leave these as an exercise to the reader. But more important—and interestingly, from my point of view—is the fact that unless you believe in some form of the documentary hypothesis—which I presume Lazer does not—the name Shaddai leads you into all sorts of contradictions. For a terrific example, see Exodus 6.3 and Genesis 22:14, which seems to suggest that Abraham knew the name ‘Yahweh’ (translated as ‘the LORD’). Also, Shaddai seems to have been a Mesopotamian cult title of one of the Semitic chief gods El. For a useful point of comparison, see Psalm 82, which begins: ‘God (elohim) stands in the congregation of El‘ (god? El? could this mean the council of gods under El?). At any rate, this is quite a vexed issue, much more complicated that Lazer is making it.

However, these are but minor obstacles to the determined mind of our esteemed rabbi. If he wants to believe that pi is holy, mystical, and the secret to knowledge of creation, then by all means let him go ahead and believe it. The rest of us will keep on thinking that it’s pretty neat in its own right—or, if not, then at least an opportunity to hold a demonstration.

• From Failed Messiah: Ashkenazic chief rabbi of Israel: Real Haredim (ultra-Orthodox Jews) don’t abuse children; child abuse is a problem only among ba’alei teshuvah (naturalized ultra-Orthodox Jews). Reason? Haredi children don’t call their teachers by their first names.
• From the Slog: University of Washington College Republicans are holding an odious and racist event on Tuesday: ‘Find an Illegal Immigrant Tag’. Stated purpose: ‘to send a a “clear statement that we need to get serious and crack down on illegal immigration and secure our borders.”’ Unstated purpose: to be huge white-privilege racist dicks.
• From The Province: A good summary of the problems surrounding this year’s Vaisakhi parade and festivities in Surrey, B.C. A what point does it stop being a family-friendly religious celebration and start being political, especially when you throw photographs of Sikh men who committed violent terrorist attacks against Indians in support of a Sikh homeland into the mix?
• Finally, from the Onion:
  
  

  

  Mead Releases New Grad-School-Ruled Notebook

  The pages, in addition to having extremely narrow ruling, will be triple-perforated and seven-hole-punched, to meet the modern grad student’s requirements. I’ve been wanting something like this for years.

The tabloid newspaper that broke the story of Mr. Mosley’s Chelsea session, The News of the World, described it as “a depraved Nazi sadomasochistic orgy,” and said Mr. Mosley had paid the equivalent of $5,000 in cash for the five-hour session.

In a video the paper posted on the Internet but later removed, two of the women wore black-and-white striped robes in the style of prisoners’ uniforms. The video showed Mr. Mosley counting in German — “Eins! Zwei! Drei! Vier! Funf!” — as he used a leather strap to lash one of the women.

Okay, so he was caught on tape in a Nazi S/M orgy. Sounds bad, right? But wait. It gets creepier:

The video, which has been removed from the newspaper’s web site, also captures a prostitute commanding Mosley to strip before she inspects his head and genitals for lice, which the paper suggest was “mocking the humiliating ways Jews were treated by SS death camp guards in World War II.” Placed in chains, Mosley leans over a torture bench and whimpers as a dominatrix strikes him with a rod, saying “You’re going to be shown how we treat prisoners in our facility.” Later, when Mosley takes hold of a whip, he states that a blonde inmate “needs more of ze punishment.”

This guy plays both the concentration camp guard and the concentration camp prisoner in the same Nazi-fetish orgy. How sick is that? (And, I have to wonder, how unusual is it, from your run-of-the-mill BDSM point of view, to play both the ‘top’ and the ‘bottom’ characters during the same orgy? Multiply that by ‘Nazi’, and see what happens.) As a Jew, I am completely squicked out. As (I like to think) a mostly decent, rational human being, I am simply in a state of aporia.

Turns out that this Nazi-fetish thing didn’t come completely out of nowhere:

Mosley’s background ensures that he won’t get off that easily. His mother, Diana Mitford, was a celebrity British Nazi sympathizer in the prewar years, while his father, Sir Oswald Mosley, founded and led the British Union of Fascists — a guest of honor at their wedding in 1936, at the Berlin home of Joseph Goebbels, was none other than Adolf Hitler.

Also, Mosley is the president of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, the governing body of things like the Grand Prix and Formula One racing. Which depends heavily on car-makers like BMW and Mercedes-Benz for support. Gee, I wonder what their reaction is, given these companies’ histories vis-à-vis Jews and the Holocaust. And how is the esteemed Mr. Mosley responding to this, er, incident? With an apology? Nah, see, you’re still thinking like a reasonable person. He’s employing a device that we Westerners have raised to an art form since Roman times: the lawsuit. From the NYT article:

Mr. Mosley has acknowledged participating in the session. But he has denied that the role-playing had a Nazi motif, and announced Friday that he had filed a lawsuit against the newspaper, claiming “unlimited damages” for invasion of privacy.

In a letter on Saturday to the head of Germany’s motoring federation, he renewed his insistence that the Chelsea session was a private matter, and added, in a reference to the F.I.A.’s role in promoting road safety around the world: “Had I been caught driving excessively fast on a public road or over the alcohol limit, I would have resigned the same day. As it is, the scandal paper obtained by illegal means pictures of something I did in private, which, although unacceptable to some people, was harmless and completely legal.”

The issue isn’t whether he should be prosecuted, because what he did was legal, though distasteful, as he rightly points out. However, in the YouTube era, privacy has been redefined: when the video of you beating women dressed as concentration camp victims—or whatever else it happens to be—goes onto the Internets, there’s simply nothing you can do about it. The issue is whether he should resign, which would be an expression of humility and an acknowledgement of wrongdoing. Unfortunately, I don’t think this guy is smart enough to put two and two together.

He has refused to resign his F.I.A. post, appealing to the federation’s global network of motoring organizations for support. But denunciations have cascaded from much of the racing world, from Jewish groups, and from F.I.A.-affiliated motoring organizations around the world, including the American Automobile Association, which said in a statement on Saturday that Mr. Mosley, as F.I.A. chief, needed to set “the highest standards of ethical behavior” if he was to represent millions of motorists worldwide. It added: “It would be in the best interest of all concerned if he were to step down.”

Perhaps more significantly, calls for his resignation have come from four major car companies, each of which owns or substantially controls grand prix racing teams: BMW, Daimler Benz, Honda and Toyota.

Ugh. I simply don’t know what to say, except why the heck isn’t this story getting more press in North America? Also, why hasn’t this guy resigned? Actually, the answer to that’s an easy one: shamelessness. But I’ll have to leave the solution to the grander problem as an exercise for the reader.

An Israeli woman with two children is fighting deportation from Canada, claiming that she fears returning to Israel because a rabbinical court there has granted custody of the children to their abusive father.

Last week, one day before she was to be removed from the country, Renata Makias won a temporary stay from a Federal Court judge pending a judicial review of her case.

Judge Sean Harrington wrote that Mrs. Makias and the children “face imminent peril on their return” to Israel because the rabbinical order makes clear the children must be handed over to their father, Yossef Makias, immediately. …

The rabbinical court decision is at odds with a Quebec Superior Court judgment granting Mrs. Makias custody of the children and apparently does not take into account the fact that Mr. Makias was charged in British Columbia with uttering threats of death and violence against his family and with breaching a restraining order. …

Mr. Makias was charged with uttering threats to cause death or bodily harm to his wife, but he was released on conditions that included a restraining order that forbade him from having any contact with his wife or their children. He did not respect those conditions and was convicted of breach of the order. …

Harrington wrote that he finds it “disturbing” that, despite Yossef’s record and the decisions of Canadian courts, that the Regional Rabbinical Court of Tel Aviv has ordered that the children be handed over to him “immediately and with no further delay,” quoting the rabbinical court.

Or, the couple’s son, testified that he was afraid to go back to Israel because his father beat him and his sister frequently and “always used to threaten to kill” them. “He would run after me with a hammer in his hands to hit me with it.”

The boy also stated that his father “almost killed my mom once by throwing a very heavy cup of glass and he would throw stuff at her like cellphones and plates.”

And the bet din (rabbinical court) of Tel Aviv, just like that, handed sole custody to this crazy maniac. And who is the head of this court? Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, noted corrupt fundraiser, homophobe, and Haredi schmuck. He seems to be taking a hands-off approach to this ridiculous case that went through a court under his jurisdiction. I quote the always excellent commentary of Shmarya Rosenberg:

Rabbi Lau was the first haredi to become chief rabbi. He presides over the rabbinical court in question. From what I know of him, I don’t think Rabbi Lau likes this decision. But Rabbi Lau will never buck his haredi masters, and it is those masters who are responsible for much of the agunah crisis and for horrible cases like this.

There is a darkness in Zion and it is destroying us.

(The agunah crisis has to do with women who are not granted a religious divorce (get) by their husbands and therefore not able to remarry under Jewish law. Liberal strains of Judaism—and even some left-leaning Orthodox strands—allow a rabbinical court to issue a get in the husband’s absence to ameliorate this problem. However, these women are still screwed over in traditional circles of Judaic jurisprudence.)

This is the kind of shit they don’t tell you about in Jewish schools when brainwashing teaching you to vote Likud love Israel. Canada must grant this woman and her family asylum immediately. Any legal recourse to a civil lawsuit in Israel would be futile, since the law grants a high degree of autonomy and privilege to religious courts in such matters. The ‘darkness in Zion’ is indeed a destructive one—but not only is it destroying us, certain of us are bringing it on the rest.

• Sometimes I think my viola-playing belongs in the Really Terrible Orchestra.
• Microsoft executives are not surprised to learn how awful Windows Vista really is.
• Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to be nominated for Vice President and current Clinton hench-person, believes that Obama has got this far only because he’s a black man.
• Some amusing British humour about the U.S. presidential election.
• Required reading: Daniel Gordis’s most recent dispatch regarding how Hayyim Nachman Bialik would be mortified by the State of Israel today.
• Iraq really didn’t have WMDs—can you friggin’ believe it?
• Chris Beam’s excellent insight that the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal is more likely to harm the Democratic Party than Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.

Now I can close all those tabs, and Firefox can stop memory-leaking (ha). Hat-tips all round.

Don’t get me wrong. Jews—and yes, I am one of them—worry for a living. Their history compels them to and to be always vigilant. Yet in America, where they have achieved a level of security, acceptance and power unparalleled in their history, their existential worries paradoxically seem to have grown even greater. When Jimmy Carter writes a book—a bad book, incidentally—comparing Zionism to apartheid, many American Jews go crazy. When two university professors, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, write another bad book—about what they call “the Israel lobby”—many Jews react as if the sky is falling.

Essentially, what’s going on is a severe overreaction to any perceived threats against Israel. Israel is equated with the Jewish people both there and in the Diaspora. Never mind that the ultra-Orthodox elements in Israel, which have de facto control over the country’s civil life, hate—to the point of considering Not Jewish—liberal Jews, or even Orthodox Jews who don’t wear the right hat. (In case you missed it, Gershom Gorenberg had an excellent piece in last Sunday’s NY Times Magazine demonstrating the extent of this ultra-Orthodox control and craziness when it comes to ‘proving’ your Jewishness for the purpose of marriage in or immigration to Israel.) Back to Miller:

This “us versus them” mentality still runs deep, and it is particularly harmful when it comes to the Arab-Israeli issue. That conflict is not some kind of morality play in which the forces of evil do battle against the forces of light. It is a conflict in which both sides have legitimate needs and requirements and do both good and bad things in pursuit of them.

This point, unfortunately, is correct in its essence. However, as we’ve learned time and time again, nuance simply doesn’t sell. And if your message is at all nuanced—not 100% rah-rah Israel, all Arabs are terrorists, etc.—then you are, by definition, an enemy not only of Israel but of the Jewish people. How pathetic is the discourse, how sad is the conversation? There is neither discourse nor conversation, because the attitude is ‘us versus them’—nuance equals betrayal.

And now, Hagee apparently believes that Jews are responsible for their own suffering and persecution:

“It was the disobedience and rebellion of the Jews, God’s chosen people, to their covenantal responsibility to serve only the one true God, Jehovah, that gave rise to the opposition and persecution that they experienced beginning in Canaan and continuing to this very day. …

How utterly repulsive, insulting, and heartbreaking to God for His chosen people to credit idols with bringing blessings He had showered upon the chosen people. Their own rebellion had birthed the seed of anti-Semitism that would arise and bring destruction to them for centuries to come … it rises from the judgment of God upon his rebellious chosen people.”

That was me, sorry. My personal rebelliousness and disobedience brought on God’s wrath, and made Him send John Hagee and Louis Farrakhan to earth to let me know just how bad I was for eating a California roll with real crab that one time, or for driving to Seattle yesterday on the Sabbath. My bad.

This is not a new idea, theologically speaking—the Bible provides this justification over and over when bad things happen to the Jewish people, notably in the Book of Lamentations (check out 1.8, 3.39–47, and 5.16–18 for some typical examples). However, nobody except religious nuts and douchebags takes this ‘line of reasoning’ seriously. Kingdoms and countries are always getting sacked by other kingdoms and countries. This is the human race we’re talking about, people. What a douchebag, this religious nut Hagee.

(Hat-tip: AMERICAblog.)

Update: Josh Marshall has video and analysis of CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-Tex.) both totally blowing it on McCain and Hagee on television today.

Text study. That is, studying the Torah and commentaries, the Mishnah, the Talmud, the Law Codes, and so forth and so on. Ad nauseam, really.

The Friar quotes me as saying, ‘The problem with [insert would-be revolutionary Jewish thinker here] is that they think text study is going to save the Jewish people. It won’t.’ Now, I don’t remember saying this in so many words, but it’s exactly the kind of thing I would say, because it’s true.

Repeat after me: Text study will not save Judaism.

By and large, nobody gives two hoots about anything said in, for example, the Talmud. When modern Jews are looking for guidance about an issue, be it ethical, moral, political, financial, whatever—the Jewish tradition is one of the last places they’ll look. To use the Talmudic jargon, la salqa da’atakh, it wouldn’t even come into your mind to consult the Talmud. When making these kinds of choices, people will follow the values of their society and their associates and friends, not their religious tradition’s. The Talmud, or any traditional Jewish text for that matter, is seen as so far removed in time and place from the modern world that most Jews simply don’t care. However, this is, of course, an oversimplification. The more Orthodox among us, and some of the more conservative among the Conservative branch, and possibly even some liberal Jews, genuinely believe in (a) the value of text study lishma, that is, ‘for its own sake’, and (b) the potential of such study to save the Jewish People. If you believe in the sanctity of the texts in question, or the potential to glean valuable life lessons from these texts, then I suppose (a) makes some sense. However, the vast majority of Jews cannot be arsed to care about texts. Texts are not going to save Judaism. Let me outline a couple of reasons why. There’s more than these three reasons, but I’ve already spent too long writing this essay:

1. Difficulty and inaccessibility. The Talmud is hard to read—it’s written in colloquial Aramaic with a highly technical and specialized jargon, for heaven’s sake, and the translations are uniformly awful. The commentaries are even more difficult. You have to be able to follow several different logical threads at the same time, the argumentation is very frequently obscure and arcane, and it’s not easy to figure out the function or purpose of much of what goes on in Jewish texts. Then, when you finally get through the difficulty of the text itself, you are still faced with the daunting task of making sense of the underlying argument, and in some cases this isn’t even possible.
2. Steep prerequisites. You can’t make head or tail of the Mishnah, much less the Gemarah (the two constituent parts of the Talmud) without a thorough grounding in the Torah. Not just the story-history bits of it, like Abraham sacrificing Isaac or Moses smashing the Tablets of the Law, but the Law itself, every precept, every nuance. You simply can’t approach any other text in Judaism without knowing the Torah. Then, the Talmud becomes the prerequisite for the commentaries, the Law Codes, the medieval philosophers, and everything else. It’s cumulative, and the learning curve is incredibly steep. They don’t call Jews ‘the people of the book’ for nothing.
3. Irrelevance. This applies both in time and in space. Much of the Talmud, and related writings, are about traditions thousands of years in the past, or places thousands of miles away, or both. Example: Deuteronomy 21.18–21 commands you to stone your son who is stubborn and rebellious (the so-called ben sorer umoreh). Do we do this anymore? Of course not. Did they even do it in the time of the Talmud? Of course not, and the Talmud itself basically admits as much: Chapter 8 of Tractate Sanhedrin (pages 68b and following) is obviously unhappy with this Torah law, so it institutes so many rules and regulations that it basically makes the ben sorer umoreh impossible to exist, thus legislating the Torah’s law out of existence. But the argumentation involved covers five pages of Talmud, concluding with ‘there never was one, and there never will be one’, but then Rabbi Jonathan says, ‘I saw one, and I sat on his grave.’ What the hell does this mean? And what relevance does the whole discussion have for our lives today, given that we are perfectly capable of coming to the conclusion that the Torah’s law is stupid on our own, without the help of the Talmud’s stipulation that to qualify as a stubborn and rebellious son, the boy in question must have drunk four log of Italian wine? Who the hell cares?

However, the assumption underlying not only this ’solution’ of text study, but the very question of ‘what will save the Jewish People’ in the first place, is that the Jewish People are, in some sense, fundamentally imperilled. I’m sorry, but it’s going to take more than scare-value stories about Americans’ willingness to change their religions, or the shocking levels of intermarriage, or what have you, to convince me that Judaism is in need of this kind of ’saving’. Another solution in search of a problem from the hallowed halls of academe. What a pity, when there are so many useful things we could be spending our time doing.

Text is from KTU 1.6 (tablet 6 col. 6), transcription from SBL (Parker et al., eds.), 1997, 162–163, with a few emendations and suppositions.

THERE WAS A MAN IN BORO PARK (BROOKLYN, NY) WHO WAS DIAGNOSED WITH PANCREATIC CANCER. HE ASKED FOR A FRUM DOCTOR, BUT HIS INSURANCE AFFORDED HIM WHAT THEY OFFERED JAPANESE DOCTOR. IT ENDED UP, THAT THIS DOCTOR WAS A GIFT FROM HEAVEN. THE DOCTOR WAS STRAIGHT WITH HIM AND TOLD HIM THAT THE MEDICAL PROFESSION COULD GIVE HIM 6 MONTHS OF LIFE, BUT IN HIS COUNTRY (JAPAN) THEY USED A PARTICULAR MUSHROOM WITH SUCCESS AND THAT HE COULD GIVE HIM SOME AND SHOW HIM HOW TO USE IT. 4 YEARS LATER HE IS THANK G-D DOING WELL. FOR THOSE WHO ARE INTERESTED, THE CURE IS BASED ON THE CONCEPT OF A PH BALANCED BODY, THERE IS THE OPINON THAT CANCER FEEDS IN AN ACID BASED BODY. THIS MUSHROOM IS VERY ALKALISING.

Amazing, isn’t it? If you only ‘balance’ the pH of your body, you can cure cancer! And guess what—doing this is, in fact, really easy, because all you have to do is eat this mushroom! There is a link to more information, helpfully provided, on a Hebrew-language website from Israel about the pseudo-medicine of reflexology. More nonsense can be found on a herbalism website, which again refers to the natural powers of this mushroom to balance your pH.

For his part, Lazer himself responds:

From what I understand from alternative-medical literature, cancer patients have too little L-Lactic acid (+) in their connective tissues. In theory, as long as L-Lactic acid (+) is predominantly present in tissue, cancer cannot develop. When there is a deficiency, the cellular respiration starts to fail and this leads to a build up of DL-Lactic acid (-) in the tissues.

Of course! The obvious problem, with cancer, is that they’re missing the right kind of acid in their connective tissues! Why did the medical establishment never think of this, and insist that they just go home and drink a tall glass of milk? (It could be mushroom milk, if you really want, I guess.) No need for all this expensive chemotherapy or anything debilitating. Besides, what do these doctors really know? All they have are fancy degrees from fancy medical schools. They don’t have the thousand-year traditional knowledge of Eastern medicine to back up their ’science’! (By the way, this particular orientalizing tradition among many Jews—especially among, but by no means limited to, Hadisim—is one worthy of a lengthier rant, but that’ll have to come at a later time.) Back to Lazer:

The Kombucha cultured fungus … is supposedly able to re-balance the blood pH and, in so doing, prevent disease conditions from occurring, and repair and relieve existing suffering. I need to learn more about this, but in the meanwhile, I sent out emails to all the Cancer patients who are in contact with me. This is certainly worth further investigation.

I don’t know anything about this subject, but I sent this nugget of information out to every cancer patient I know. This has all the trappings of an e-mail scam, doesn’t it? ‘I don’t know anything about Prince Omar, the deposed former president of Nigeria, but his story is just so compelling, I think I have to send it to everyone in my e-mail address book!’ Or, ‘I don’t know anything about these penile enlargement pills (or that they could be called “male enhancement supplements”), but the mere fact that someone somewhere says they work is enough to get me to forward it to my entire e-mail list!’ Or, ‘This eight-year-old girl who survived a catastrophic plane crash…’ you get the picture.

Seriously, how can seemingly intelligent people buy into this crap—and not only buy into it, but repost it without a second thought on their blogs, and more importantly, send it to all the cancer patients they know, thus proving, yet again, that (false) hope springs eternal? Pity the fool who buys into this miracle mushroom cure (and stops her chemo as a result), but no pity for the man who sells them the snake oil.

A big Beam blessing to Ruth from Crown Heights!

Just…no.

Here’s this week’s flaming liquor signalling an end to this Shabbos. (I ran out of vodka last week, so I’ve switched to Canadian whiskey—Crown Royal, if you’re curious—until I can be bothered to go over to the liquor store.) A good week, everybody!