stupid

…and apparently plucks them and makes ridiculous suits out of their exquisite plumage. So okay, the last time—coincidentally exactly one month ago, when the playoffs began—that Don Cherry wore something this outrageous, I was really at a loss for words. But today’s Coach’s Corner just killed me:

If this isn’t modern asherah-worship, I don’t know what is.

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…

Yet another hilarious example of government waste, this time from Natural Resources Canada. Apparently its wireless and mobile communications spending is way out of control. The CBC is reporting on a recent audit which has discovered that the lack of oversight in this government agency is so bad that they could not even provide an inventory of all the BlackBerries and mobile phones they own. This one department is costing taxpayers half a million dollars per year. Multiply that by dozens more government departments, and that’s one huge hell of a waste.

Among the particulars of this audit that I find so amusing: employees made their own contracts with the phone companies, resulting in a patchwork of over 1500 individual contracts, 20% of all the devices were owned by people who had no reason for owning one in their job, and the department in question had no procedures to recover the cost when an employee used a government-provided mobile device for personal matters.

This is a perfect example of what happens when laws and government policies are too slow to catch up to actual practice. It’s a shame that an audit—probably costing the taxpayers the equivalent of a year of wireless services for Natural Resources Canada—had to be conducted as the first step on the road (hopefully) to eliminating some of this waste. No surprises here, and I bet that nobody’s going to raise the issue in today’s Question Period because they’ll be too busy benefitting from government waste elsewhere.

• Privacy
  • Agents at the U.S. border can search your laptop without cause, on the legal grounds that they already have an exception to the Fourth Amendment that allows them to search any paper documents you have with you. Privacy advocates are concerned.
  • Los Angeles International Airport and New York’s JFK Airport will start using a new technology to electronically strip-search passengers. Privacy advocates are concerned.
  • An atheist soldier sues the U.S. Army over personal threats because of his choice of religion. Privacy—and freedom of religion—advocates are concerned.
• Politics
  • A college student utterly pwns John Ashcroft during a campus appearance. If you haven’t seen this one yet, go read it; it’s amazing.
  • How does the Democratic primary end? There are three possibilities, and none of them are good for the future of the party.
  • On the other hand, if Clinton somehow manages to win, it’s payback time in Clintonland.
• Culture
  • Sun Myung Moon, worldwide cult leader and lesser-known owner of the right-wing Washington Times, was crowned as the Second Coming—in a U.S. Senate office building.
  • Richard Dawkins’s open letter to an unsuspecting victim of Ben Stein’s awful creationist propaganda film Intelligent Design-informed exposé of Charles Darwin, Expelled.
  • In Alabama, an experiment in gay hand-holding in public by the newsmagazine 20/20 generates an emergency call to 911 by a concerned citizen under the impression that laws were being broken.
  • Textbooks cost too much. What can be done about it, realistically?

This year, a monkey wrench appears to have been thrown into Israeli Jews’ strict, Torah-true observance of Passover. An Israeli court has ruled that a law that only prohibits the display of hametz in a public place does not also prohibit the sale of hametz. The ultra-Orthodox are up in arms, as are a few secular officials, but Asher Maoz’s opinion in Ha’aretz is spot on:

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.

The ever-reliable Lazer Brody has written a blurb about why pi is the coolest number ever. Hint: it has to do with God. And Toyrah:

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.

A couple of interesting tabs I’ve had floating around in my browser for the past couple of days, to slake your thirst for the time being, but hopefully whet your appetite as regards the future—all right, I’m done:

• 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.

I know Don Cherry is a loudmouthed tool, and his fashion sense would get him laughed off the set of Project Runway in a heartbeat, but what sort of animal did he have to rip the hide off of barehanded to get the jacket he was wearing on Coach’s Corner on tonight’s Hockey Night in Canada?

I seriously have no idea why this story has been getting all sorts of press in Europe and virtually none in North America. It makes Eliot Spitzer’s recent sexual escapades look positively heartwarming. From the New York Times:

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.

I am absolutely stunned by this story. It’s like something out of a deranged episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, Oy Vey. Except much darker. From the Canadian Jewish News:

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.

The Canadian government is cracking down on Internet scams offering a miracle cure for cancer. Now, if only they (and allied governments) would go after Hasidic rabbis with quack cures for the same:

The websites advertise medicines, herbal remedies, other supplements and treatment regimes of questionable value. It’s impossible to know how much money has been lost to bogus claims, but the amount could be huge. Health information is the third-most-searched topic online. An estimated 8.7 million Canadians are turning to the Internet for medical advice, but only one-third actually talk to their doctors about what they found online, according to Statistics Canada.

By taking decisive action against scammers who trick unsuspecting cancer victims into paying millions of dollars for snake oil, the Conservative government in Ottawa is showing its resolve to crack down on people unfairly and illegally taking the money of innocent people afflicted with cancer. Unless, of course, the cancer victims in question are independent MPs whose votes they’re trying to buy in order to bring down the government…

Ack! Another ‘monstrous’ headline! And on no less a reputable Web site than CNN.com. I am utterly aghast that they would write such a thing without a proper citation to everybody who ever used the word ‘monstrous’ or even the image or the very idea. Quick, overzealous Internet-dwellers, sue CNN for plagiarism!

Seriously, though, the monstrous robot in question that NASA’s shooting up into space next is pretty darn cool.

In an op-ed in today’s LA Times, Aaron Miller takes a stab at explaining why large segments of the American Jewish population seem to have it in for Barack Obama—or anybody else who can even be remotely connected with criticism of Israel:

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.

The odious John Hagee, supporter of John McCain, has added yet another stupid set of assertions to the racist and ridiculous things he’s done lately, like organizing a ’slave sale’ and calling the Catholic Church ‘the great whore’. Now, I know it’s unfair to hold candidates accountable for every last thing said and done by their supporters, as people are doing with Louis Farrakhan’s endorsement of Barack Obama, but the difference here is that Obama has repudiated Farrakhan while McCain appears to be sticking by Hagee and his endorsement. (There’s a serious double standard with how the media are handling both of these cases, but what else is new.)

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.

My good friend Friar Yid has an excellent post detailing a competition by Brandeis and the Bronfman philanthropies to find “the best proposal for a book that would transform the way Jews think about themselves and Judaism.” Sounds good, right? Except they settled on a book with a prescription of text study as the next best thing to save the Jewish People.

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.

Our friendly cyber-neighbourhood rabbi Lazer Brody is at it again, it would appear. You may remember our unfortunately-named friend from an incident last month in which he told a woman experiencing homosexual urges that she could ‘lick the battle’ with her latent desires by, among other things, making sure to ritually wash her hands in the morning. Today, Rabbi Lazer is peddling a cure for cancer found in mushrooms, which somebody forwarded to him in the full-blown manner of an e-mail scam. The typography has been preserved exactly:

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.

A clearly mentally unbalanced fifty-year-old married man with six children tried to hire a hit man to kill his wife. The hit man in question turned out to be a police informant, and the man subsequently got fifteen years for his troubles. What is amazing, though, is the motive:

James Gau pleaded guilty to solicitation of murder for asking a police informant in July to go to his wife’s American Fork, Utah, home, pretend to be a robber, and strangle her.

Gau said left his family and moved to Reno because he wanted to live as a homosexual.

The article (from the AP) makes note of this point twice in its five sentences: he wanted, apparently, to ‘live as a homosexual’. What does that mean, and just how much underlying homophobia is there in this particular formulation? (On the other hand, the jokes basically do write themselves…)

The phrase to live as X generally entails, I believe, the notion to adopt the characteristics of other Xs. If the article said ‘moved to Brooklyn to live as a Hasidic Jew’ we would know what it meant: we would suppose he grew a beard and sidelocks, stopped watching television, and attempted to commit fraud on federal subsidies. Of course, I don’t mean to paint Hasidim with such a broad brush, but this is exactly my point: the phrasing to live as X brings up a particular set of images, not all of which may be appropriate, but many of which would certainly be present, rightly or wrongly. So what does ‘he moved to Reno because he wanted to live as a homosexual’ entail? Certainly it evokes particular images—both of Reno and of a specific type of homosexual—again, rightly or wrongly. Does this reflect latent homophobia? Possibly, but I’d be more inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt, if only because ‘to adopt a homosexual lifestyle’ would have been far too obvious and ‘because he realised he was gay’ doesn’t really have the same ‘ring’ as a motivation for murder, does it? Mental instability, sure, but homosexuality? Doesn’t really work.

Hat-tip: Jess.

Over the last weekend, the rules for crossing the Canadian-American border changed: Canadians must now present a passport at the border to enter the United States. Previously, they’d let you across with nary a second thought, sometimes not even demanding to see your driver’s licence or any other form of identification: if you were driving a car with Canadian plates and appeared non-threatening, they would simply let you pass. This happened to me several times; usually they just asked me (on the American side) where I was coming from, where I was going, and waved me on through. I am given to understand that when you work in a profession like one with U.S. Customs and Border Patrol or the Canadian Border Services Agency, or even security in general, you develop, over time, something of an eye for what might be trouble, and what will probably be fine. Now, of course, much of this is—consciously or otherwise—probably based on some underlying profiling (you’re white and drive a car in reasonably good shape? excellent, you’re neither a terrorist nor a drug smuggler), but that’s life, I’m told, in this kind of a world.

The one exception to this rule, in my experience, has been the crossing at Point Roberts, a small exclave of Washington State that was created when the border was determined to lie at 49° north latitude, but before they had done the mapping to see what was out there (besides Vancouver Island, which was accounted for separately in the treaty). There are only two (major) reasons Canadians go to the Point: (1) cheap(er) gasoline and (2) visiting the U.S. post office or some other shipping outlet for sending or receiving purposes. Therefore, when you enter and leave the Point, they usually know what you’re on about, and therefore the litany of questions is very specific—if it even gets asked at all.

But now, an American law passed in the wake of 9/11 is mandating that everyone provide proof of citizenship (i.e. a passport) when entering the United States by sea and, more importantly, land. As of last January—over a year ago—the rules changed to mandate passports from all passengers entering the United States by air, which people appear to have dutifully followed, taking it as one of the many necessary of unnecessary changes that have taken place since 9/11, and for better or worse, going along with it. And carrying a passport for flights between the U.S. and Canada is a good idea anyway; it simplifies matters when you go through customs and immigration control—remember, they really are two separate countries.

I’ve been using the word passport relatively interchangeably with the phrase proof of citizenship; I should clarify that what is actually required is proof of identity and citizenship. A passport proves both those things, but so do some other things, which are listed in the NPR story linked to at the beginning of this post. A NEXUS card, for example, will serve these functions just as well as a passport, though I once tried to use my NEXUS card as identification in San Francisco Airport, which though totally legal, didn’t quite work because the agents I was talking to had no idea what it was. The other relatively new—and potentially quite scary thing that you will soon be able to use is an enhanced driver’s licence, which are now being rolled out in both British Columbia and Washington State. I will skip lightly over these except to note that people of the privacy-advocating sort are worried that these licences are the first step toward a national ID card in both Canada and the United States. But this is a discussion for another time.

What is amazing, though is that what with all the new regulations on the books, the U.S. border guards are not enforcing these policies. Let me repeat that: these new laws say you have to present a passport at the border, but those guys who work for the Department of Homeland Security will not turn you away if you don’t have a passport. They’ve pushed back the date on enforcement of law by at least eighteen months, meaning that it will come into effect in July 2009 at the earliest; until then you can expect to receive ‘an educational flyer’ when you cross the border sans passport. There appears to be some question, furthermore, as to the next step—that is, whether or not to press on with the regulations at all. Leading the opposition are three U.S. Senators: Chuck Schumer (D-New York), Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), and Ted ‘Series Of Tubes‘ Stevens (R-Alaska). These politicians all come from border states, surprise, surprise—guess whose economies are going to lose money if cross-border traffic is hindered further than it already is.

But one of the most salient objections I can think of—and one that, to my knowledge, hasn’t really surfaced yet—is that we’ve been hearing from the Bush administration, for years and years, how insecure and unsafe America’s borders really are, and how desperately needed are new measures to strengthen border security. Well, the new measures just came into place, and guess what? Bush’s own government isn’t enforcing them! What blinding hypocrisy and idiocy!

President Bush welcomed the Anaheim Ducks, winners of the 2007 Stanley Cup, to the White House today, and made some stupid jokes about Dick Cheney shooting an old man in the face:

President Bush quipped to the Anaheim Ducks: “Like, have you noticed a lot of security around here? It’s because the Vice President heard there were some Ducks around.”

This guy just cracks me up. Actually, he doesn’t. But he still does, y’know. What a doof.

The Washington Post reported over the weekend that a county school district in Maryland has implemented a controversial—even illegal—new policy that ‘directs Howard County school officials to notify parents when students reveal they are pregnant’. Way to go, Howard County, to ensure that more girls who need medical help will be even less willing to seek it out.

Howard’s policy “really pushes the issue of informing the parents, when state law says minors have the right to make decisions independent of the parents,” said Deborah Chilcoat, an education and training specialist for Planned Parenthood of Maryland and co-chair of a county coalition on adolescent sexuality and reproductive health. “It’s not going to be in the best interests of young people in Howard County,” she said.

Ugly, gross, crazy, and stupid. The way to help pregnant high schoolers is to provide them with medical assistance and the love and support of their community, not to sic their parents, their school officials, and the full weight of The Law on them.

Tip of the hat to Cara at The Curvature, via Ann at Feministing.

The district municipality of West Vancouver is considering a ‘user fee’ if you get into a car accident and crews have to rescue you from your crushed car with the jaws of life, even if the accident is not your fault. Let me repeat that: if you get into a car accident, and your car gets crushed, you’ll get charged $970 to get rescued. Further clarification: the proposed fee is nine hundred and seventy dollars, as in ‘just shy of a cool grand’; not nine dollars and seventy cents.

The argument, apparently, is that such rescues are expensive, and that the person who needs to be rescued should have to foot the bill. This is actually a rather imprecise formulation: as I understand it, the city’s contention is that the party responsible for the costs should be the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia, which, as the only licencing authority for motor vehicles and their drivers in the province, would pass the cost on to the insured driver. This idea has apparently been floated before as part of a plan to increase the revenue of the West Vancouver fire department, but the council is apparently serious about it this time.

Surely there are other, better places where the city could look for money rather than from the wallets of people who have just been in life-threatening accidents. In fact, I think I can come up with a few off the top of my head. Seeing as how West Vancouver is one of the most affluent cities in the country, perhaps they could consider attempting to cut government waste, increasing government efficiency, and possibly—gasp!—enacting a modest tax hike to pick up the cost? (Actually, the best commentary I heard was on CBC Radio One today: someone proposed a sliding scale for rescues from burning buildings: $1000 if you want to be rescued from the first floor, $2000 for the second floor, and so forth.) It makes absolutely no sense to penalize innocent people, charging them a thousand dollars to get extricated from their smashed car, especially when they were not at fault. Emergency services—especially emergency rescuing—should be provided to all people without a price tag attached. This is pure and simple greed combined with a silly refusal to consider efficient and reasonable solutions.

A photograph recently released by NASA from the Spirit rover on Mars shows what appears to be a humanoid form in a rock formation, curiously similar to the Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen. Naturally, the BBC science section, traditionally noted for its stellar science reporting, picked this up and immediately ran it under the headline ‘Mystery image of “life on Mars”‘. Casting this as an even-handed, two-sided report between alien life enthusiasts and dour, grumpy old skeptics, the Beeb reported, apparently in all seriousness, that theories explaining this phenomenon ranged from a garden gnome to Sasquatch to the Virgin Mary. But by far the best comment came from some poster on some site somewhere, which the BBC did not see fit to identify except by the handle ‘Madurobob’, who ’said it was a statue “obviously built by an ancient civilisation that later departed Mars and settled Denmark”.’ There are also some gems to be found in the talking point page on the BBC website.

Bad Astronomy, mentioned in the article but not linked to, has some terrific commentary and follow-up posts.

After providing crucial confirmation of his views that the United States Constitution should be amended to conform to ‘God’s word’, Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has, in the same interview, directly equated homosexuality with bestiality. And this isn’t what is usually meant by ‘equates’, which is something like ‘mentioned in the same breath’. He means to draw the direct equivalence between that two men having sex with one another and a man having sex with an animal:

Well, I don’t think that’s a radical view to say we’re going to affirm marriage. I think the radical view is to say that we’re going to change the definition of marriage so that it can mean two men, two women, a man and three women, a man and a child, a man and animal. Again, once we change the definition, the door is open to change it again. I think the radical position is to make a change in what’s been historic.

This has already been kicked around by the blogosphere a bit, especially by Talking Points Memo and by John Aravosis, who rightly points out that it’s about time the media start treating Huckabee’s nutty religious views as the same sort of fair game as he seems to treat Mitt Romney’s supposed beliefs, as a Mormon, in the siblinghood of Jesus and the Devil.

But I haven’t yet seen anybody raise the question: if two gay men having sex is like a man having sex with a (non-human) animal, which of the participants in the H. sapiens-on-H. sapiens sex is equivalent, from a physical, metaphysical, and/or moral standpoint, to the non-human participant in the latter case? Follow-up question: how far removed from ‘human’, taxonomically speaking, does Huckabee intend this equivalence to extend? Surely he means to exclude things in kingdoms other than Animalia, thus permitting the usage of, say, vegetable matter in lawful sexual relations between husband and wife as God intended. I foresee some tricky grey areas here.

Oh, and one other question: if we are to take the bible at its word–you know, literally–the prohibition on bestiality would seem to apply specifically, if perhaps not exclusively, to women (Leviticus 18.23)):

וּבְכָל־בְּהֵמָ֛ה לֹֽא־תִתֵּ֥ן שְׁכָבְתְּךָ֖ לְטָמְאָה־בָ֑הּ וְאִשָּׁ֗ה לֹֽא־תַעֲמֹ֞ד לִפְנֵ֧י בְהֵמָ֛ה לְרִבְעָ֖הּ תֶּ֥בֶל הֽוּא׃

Neither shalt thou lie with any beast to defile thyself therewith: neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down thereto: it is confusion.

I have chosen the King James Version translation–which is close enough here to the Hebrew for my purposes–to try to reflect some of the theology underlying, as it were, the sexual philosophy of people like Mike Huckabee. What about it, Mike? Do you believe that women need to be specially interdicted from animal-human relations? Does this require a Constitutional amendment–perhaps in the same vein as an anti-abortion amendment? Why not just have a whole anti-female amendment while you’re at it? Oh wait, it’s halfway there already.

There is a silly tradition among some Jews of reciting Exodus 16.4–36 on the Tuesday before the Saturday on which the Torah portion containing this chapter is read publicly in the synagogue worship service. I’m sorry for starting with such a confusing sentence, but it’s the best way I could render ‘the Tuesday before parshas B’shallach‘. See, every week Jews read a different passage from the Torah, completing the whole cycle in a year, and this week the reading is from the middle of—never mind.

Anyway, this particular chapter relates the story of how God sent manna to the Israelites in the desert. Reciting it on this particular day is supposed to be a segulah for a good livelihood and good sustenance. (A segulah is a ritual object or action that has some kind of magical mystical power: nine times out of ten it suffices to substitute the word ’superstition’.) This chapter is known as Parashat Ha-Man, or in proper Ashkenazic Yiddishy Yeshivish Hebrew, Parshas Ha-Mon, which means ‘the section about manna’. Some people seem to recite it every day—the Yerushalmi maintains that if you do, you will never go hungry—but there is a particularly special segulah on this day to say it. What narishkeit.

You can find the complete text in Hebrew here, along with the traditional before- and after-texts, along with the late antique Aramaic translation of Onkelos, for whatever that’s worth. It also seems to be on pages 181c–181f of my ArtScroll prayer book. Since the text is only available in Hebrew (except for ArtScroll’s awful translations), I will translate the silliest parts of this superstition for your reading and deriding pleasure below. My snide comments are in italics and parentheses. For a translation of Exodus 16.4–36, please consult a quality translation. But seriously, if you’re skipping work to spend more time in shul to make sure to recite this section with extra devotion, expecting that God above will make His bounty to fall out of the sky and onto your family’s dinner plates, then you might be in for a bit of a surprise when your paycheck gets docked for the missed work.

Parshas Ha-Mon

It is said in the sources that he who recites Parashat Ha-Man every day will not lack a livelihood, and beforehand he should recite ‘May it be Your will…’. He may recite Parashat Ha-Man even on the Sabbath; only the prayers for livelihood should not be recited on the Sabbath. (Because it doesn’t count as a prayer for livelihood if you don’t say that’s what you’re doing! How’s God going to know the difference?)

May it be Your will, Lord our God, God of our ancestors, that You provide a livelihood for all Your people, the House of Israel, as well as my livelihood and the livelihood of the people in my household besides, in comfort and not in trouble, in honour and not in disgrace, in permission and not in prohibition, so that we will be able to perform Your worship services and study Your Torah, just as You provided sustenance to our ancestors in the wilderness, in a barren and desert land. (Because it totally worked out for the Israelites in the desert, didn’t it, when God sent sustenance and those sorry ingrates rebelled. I’m sure He had some good method for dealing with that, didn’t He. Oh wait, yeah, in the very next chapter, there is no water for the people, and they go nuts. Good planning there, God.)

(Exodus 16.4–36 is read here. Seriously, go read it. If you do, you’ll find that the food in your refrigerator has suddenly doubled. Or at least it will seem to have doubled if you dig deep enough inside.)

One of my favourite Jewish (specifically Breslover) wankers, the Rabbi Lazer Brody, keeps a blog, Emuna Outreach (emuna is Hebrew for ‘faith’—but for some reason it’s also called Lazer Beams, a pun that seems to be escaping me at the moment). On this blog he periodically answers questions from readers and offers his ‘expert’ advice on a wide variety of issues. Today, he has a new post answering a question from a woman who has been experiencing some homosexual urges. She is married and has a child but has been ’struggling’ with the feeling that she ‘would like to have a relationship with another woman’. Desperate, she writes to her web-based spiritual adviser Rabbi Brody, who gives several points of advice, including:

Talk to Hashem every single day in your own words, for no less than a half hour (preferably an hour), and spill your heart out to Him. Ask Hashem to help you overcome the lewd urges, which are nothing more than a stupid temptation fantasy from the “dark side”. This strategy completely disarms the Yetzer Hora (evil inclination).

Avoid any secular media, movies, TV, and even newspapers, and immerse yourself totally in kedusha [Sam: Hebrew for 'holiness'].

The same way that you don’t contemplate eating pork or cheeseburgers all day long, you don’t have to think about other women. This will be difficult for you at first, because your entire mission on this earth could very well be to lick the battle with homosexual or other lewd tendencies. [Sam: sic.]

Double-check yourself that your appearance outside the house is super-modest, and don’t try to attract anyone’s attention except your husband’s. For him, make yourself the most ravishing and appealing female in the world. If you don’t get back triple dividends on your investment, write me again and we’ll take it from there.

Be very careful about ritually washing your hands as soon as you open your eyes in the morning (”negel vasser“).

Rabbi Brody suggests that this should cure her of her homosexual urges within 40 days, and additionally suggests the recitation of several psalms, the motivations for some of which escape me (105? 150?). Two things upset me about this. First, none of these things, of course, are going to cure this poor woman from her obvious latent homosexuality. All that’s going to happen is that it’s going to get even more buried and only cause further mental torment. Time and time again, this is what happens with these ex-gay ’solutions’, particularly with the religious ones. Sublimating your homosexual urges into your newfound religious identity will only hurt in the long run.

What really irks me more, however, is the presumption with which Lazer Brody—a man with zero actual experience in human psychology, psychiatry, or medicine—dares to answer this question. His capacity as a rabbi should limit the scope of his expertise to spiritual matters, like ‘I’m having problems connecting with God’. Now, he and other believing Jews (and Christians and others, for that matter) maintain that this is a spiritual matter—the first thing he helpfully tells this woman is ‘Negative thoughts contaminate the soul’, and then goes on to laud her for bringing her problem to him, because ‘when you tell your problem to a rabbi that you trust, you in effect release the pressure of the problem (the lingering negative thought) on your soul, and create an opening for divine light to reach you’. What complete bullshit. This woman needs the assistance of a professional trained in psychological medicine, not a nutty Breslover rabbi who believes the solution to homosexuality is to stop watching television, recite Psalms, and make sure to wash your hands in the morning. If you don’t know the answer, there’s no shame in admitting it and referring the questioner instead to a person who does know. But if you’re an intellectually arrogant man with a god-based solution to everything, then this may well be beyond your capabilities.

If you go to the wrong source, you’re going to get the wrong answer. I just hope this woman doesn’t permanently damage herself by following Lazer Brody’s ‘advice’.

This is what passes for Environmental Protection these days? And from the Environmental Protection Agency itself? My god.

“The question is how to have an effective strategy. Is it more effective to let each state make a decision as to how to proceed in curbing greenhouse gases or is it more effective to have a national strategy,” Bush said at a news conference Thursday.

Johnson said California’s emissions limits weren’t needed because Congress just passed energy legislation raising fuel economy standards nationwide.

By this logic, no state should have to have a state highway system, because there’s a federal highway system that’s both already in place and qualitatively better. Generalized: no state should have laws that legislate any matter peripherally touched on by federal law. You’ve got to admire the Bush administration: ‘we don’t torture detainees, only logical argumentation’. Anyway, the one bright spot: the Governator Schwarzenegger has announced that the state will sue the federal government, and several other states, including Washington and Oregon, are apparently going to join the fray. Good for them. What a crock. What a total crock. Honestly, I simply can’t believe it.

And meanwhile we’re worried about Mitt Romney’s pizza-eating habits while the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Words cannot describe.

His most royal majesty King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud, absolute ruler of Saudi Arabia, has most graciously pardoned a woman, the so-called Qatif Girl, who was found guilty of being in the same car as a man she was not married to. Both the woman and the man were gang-raped by a group of seven men, but the two of them received penalties for being together and unmarried. Both ‘participants’ received sentences of ninety lashes, but in the woman’s case this was increased to two hundred lashes, plus six months in jail, when she appealed her sentence. Commentary, by and large, on this issue has highlighted the backwardness of this aspect of the Saudi justice system—a point echoed, if somewhat undercut, by the White House—but has also focussed a little on the gender inequality inherent in a system that sentences the man and the woman to different penalties for the same ‘offence’. But it’s still funny, at least to my mind, that we didn’t observe the same kind of reaction to the Sudanese teddy bear named Muhammad incident, which provoked genuine worldwide outrage, in this case in Saudi Arabia.

Today, the Saudi King Abdullah has generously pardoned and set free the woman. No doubt this is being done as something of a goodwill gesture at the beginning of the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. There is of course plenty of reason for the Saudi government to want to appease various elements in the Western world, especially at this time (which was, in fact, the actual justification—’serving the public interest’—offered by the king as his reason for the pardon). Yet the king is still being criticized, apparently, by the religious-conservative elements in the Muslim world:

The BBC’s Heba Saleh says the king’s decision to pardon the woman victim is already arousing controversy with some contributors to conservative websites, who say he has breached the rules of religion in order to appease critics in the West. (from the article cited above)

Of course, the U.S.-Saudi relationship is one of the most important in the international community, what with the extensive trading (read oil trading) relationship between the two nations. And of course, who can forget Bush’s hand-holding incident with then-Crown Prince Abdullah?

So Abdullah finally made the right decision, but with a thinly veiled motivation, fearing some sort of recrimination by the West. But—and this is a more general question—what leverage can the West really exert on these oil-producing nations? Do they even really want to? Can the West risk their vital oil supply going ever upward in price, not to mention the threat of it being cut off? Of course not. (History has proven, however, that rising oil prices are not deterring oil purchasing and use, contrary to general economic rules. But this is a different topic.) As long as the relationship between the oil exporters and importers continues the way it currently does, there will be very little possibility in the future to prevent the next Qatif Girl from being sentenced for a ‘crime’ of this nature. We got lucky this time; next time may be very different.