Posts from — March 2007

The Agudah released the following over the top statement of blatantly absurd and delusional support for Bush and the war in Iraq:

Upon consultation with its rabbinic leadership, Agudath Israel of America issued the following statement: Since September 11, 2001, the United States has been involved in a war against forces of evil and terror. These forces pose a grave danger not only to the United States and its allies in the Western World, but also to our Jewish brethren in Israel and across the globe. America’s efforts in Iraq have been part of this larger battle. While, in retrospect, the planning and execution of some of these efforts may have been less than perfect, there have also been significant achievements. The bottom line, at this time, is that the stakes in Iraq remain high, and that there still remains much to be done.

Agudath Israel of America believes that President Bush is entitled to great deference in his ongoing efforts to stabilize the situation in Iraq. Such deference is appropriate both because of the constitutional authority that inheres in the President’s position as Commander in Chief, and also because of the moral authority the President has consistently displayed in leading the battle against international terror.

We feel compelled to express our views at this time because the Union for Reform Judaism, purporting to have arrived at its position through an application of “halachic norms� and “Jewish values,� has publicly proclaimed its opposition to the President’s policies in Iraq. This group is entitled to its own organizational position, but that position is neither a legitimate expression of halachic Judaism nor reflective of authentic Jewish values.

Clearly these guys are out to lunch if they believe this war is going anywhere good like they claim. But they aren’t, and they don’t. Bush is in a desperate position because of the horrific slog he has got us into and under false pretenses, and it’s only going to get worse. We lost this war a long time ago, and the increasingly unbearable cost for protracted attrition, both domestically and to our world standing, will continue to escalate.

But. If those few Jewish groups who are usually considered his allies retreat from their support, this will be remembered. It won’t affect the war—at all—in terms of where the Agudah positions itself. Consider that first of all. But for the Agudah to support this president in this horrible war is a sound strategic decision not just for the Agudah’s standing with the Christian far-Right, but for American Jewry generally, as we are hedging our bets. We on the moderate-Left and even the moderate-Right cannot be held to such expectations. But the far-Right is another thing in its entirety, and haredi realpolitik concerns cannot and should not be crafted by those like ourselves.

Needless to say, I am certainly not an Agudah loyalist, and am no supporter of this war, detest Bush, and voted against him twice. I was so crushed after the second election I huddled in my living room and rented Burns’s “The Civil War.” But I think the Agudah did something smart here. I have to admit, if I were a haredi political leader, I think I would have done the same thing. Of course, I’d never be a haredi political leader, and probably neither would you. But that’s not the point. Consider this from their paradigm, and do a cost/benefit analysis from that place.

This was shrewd.

Hat tip: Likelihood of Success

The Jerusalem Post reports,

Because this year many young Jews are now aware that marijuana is forbidden on Passover, new gentiles are being sought for the sale of chometz than has occurred in past years, both in traditional secular quarters, and in the Left-wing Modern Orthodox[…] Michael of Jewlicious usually sells his chometz to his gentile best friend Chris, but because that will now include his marijuana, Michael does not trust Chris to “leave my stash alone.â€? Chris did not dismiss Michael’s concerns explicitly, but rather, noted, “That dude always has good s—.â€?

However, others see this as a positive development. Yosef Leib of Seven Fat Cow noted that, “The issur is on owning the seeds. But if my homeboy comes over and lights up and offers me the smoke, well, that isn’t seeds now, is it?” Yosef grinned broadly.

Y-Love, the Aramiac rapper, said that as a Bostoner Chassid who does not eat gebrachts on Pesach, and with many baal teshuvah members of his community, he is pleased with this awareness. “Many newcomers to Chassidus grew up…differently, and if they get baked and go over to a friend’s house where they’re serving Matzoh Ball soup…” Y-Love shook his head. “Look, we’ve all heard the horror stories.”

Though ck of Jewlicious is Sephardic and does not advocate a ban on all Kitnyot products on Passover, he warns that, “Marijuana should be restricted on Passover everywhere in the Diaspora, as there are Pizza shops open everywhere.”

Full Story

Young Manhattanite reports that Big Aish Passaic can’t give it away – they are actually paying people to go.

$1,000 for a month. It’s called the “1 month Jewish challenge.”

Don’t take it.

Many have asked me why I am so obsessed with BTs attending a good college. Well, I saw some ugly, ugly things in the haredi kiruv world, and heard some very bad advice and guidance dispensed. Very bad.

Like this:

In his article, “Inside Le Affair Le Marais” Failed Messiah writes,

Yitzchak Bitton’s story is sad. He is one of the very best rock drummers in the world. In France, before becoming Chabad, he led a band, Jackie and the Variations, which kept the Beatles out of the top spot on the French pop charts. He gave up his ’sinful’ life and moved to Crown Heights. He learned, and he eventually formed a band Raya Mehemena, which was one of the best live bands I ever heard, religious or not[...]But the haredi and Chabad worlds (apart from BTs) were not ready for real musical talent. Bookings were not frequent enough to pay the rent, and the Rebbe would not give his blessing for the type of shows Matisyahu now does, surfing mosh pits and dancing in front of and sometimes with women. (This is a problem many BT musicians faced in the 1980s and early 90s.) So Yitzchak Bitton sold cameras for a living. He apparently went from that to serving as a mashgiach.

The Orthodox Union is in a big fight with Mr. Bitton over accusations they are not frum enough. The Orthodox Union is the parent organization of NCSY.

Update: Radloh of Seven Fat Cow (and only Radloh, others distanced themselves from his post either because they disagreed with him or just for fun and spite) challenges Failed Messiah’s analysis based on his own personal knowledge of Mr. Bitton.

Hey guys, you figured out I was kidding about the chulent piece when I added satire tags, right?

If you look at what drives the bizarre controversy of the religious Jewish Left, of demands for “parallel� ceremonies of circumcision, whether a simchat bat, the Tzipporah precedent for the mohelet movement, or the incessant babbling about how circumcision makes sense as an Aids prophylactic when we have condoms which do that better, and still, the feigned shock that the procedure continues to drop among the U.S. general population. It is the elephant in the room, and direct contact with its trunk is often assiduously avoided.

And that will now be harder to do. Assuming that the findings presented by this anti-circ group in the British Journal of Urology is accurate, the practice and eventually the legality of circumcision are going to come under siege like we couldn’t imagine, and this attack will come from very reasonable people.

According to the International Coalition for Genital Integrity the study proves that,

“men with normal, intact penises enjoy more sexual sensitivity — as much as four times more — than those who have been circumcised. Circumcising slices off more of a male’s sensitivity than is normally present in all ten fingertips.â€?

The study itself concludes that,

“The glans of the circumcised penis is less sensitive to fine touch than the glans of the uncircumcised penis. The transitional region from the external to the internal prepuce is the most sensitive region of the uncircumcised penis and more sensitive than the most sensitive region of the circumcised penis. Circumcision ablates the most sensitive parts of the penis.�

Link to study is here.

To be clear, this study was initiated by those with an anti-circ bias, including Marilyn Milos. Who is Ms. Milos? A former nurse who is the founder of Nocirc, who was nurse fired for showing parents a video of the actual circumcision procedure in 1985. But 1985 was a long time ago in American anti-circ years, and she received an award for patient advocacy from Nurseweek in 2001.

Who do you think will win this battle over time in the general U.S. population? And how will the liberal Jewish community not follow suit?

But if the traditional community offered a less radical option for circ considered in line with Torah (though at its most moderate, not in-line with Rabbinic law) law according to no less than the Rambam, some of the intense bitterness that will grow towards this ritual could be conceivably mitigated a bit, even though this would require changing tradition, something that is not advocated by the Rambam. A deal of sorts could be cut.

But that won’t happen on a massive level, and possibly – at least publicly – may not happen at all.

Instead, all aspects of a radical bris including brit periah, will be defended with fantasies and legends of martyrdom in the recent and ancient past. And all who seek a compromise will be denounced as Hellenists.

But this is not expansively declaring various foods “chometz.” This is cutting babies. And while those of us in the secular community who lean traditional may want to continue circumcising our boys in some literal manner, we would prefer not to do so radically.

Fortunately, we have a crucial partner in promoting a less radical circumcision. That partner is within the haredi community — those factions which insist that sucking baby-penis blood by mouth (well, that’s what it is, isn’t it?) is an integral aspect of tradition that cannot be tampered with, as well as those who defend their position.

That’s a really compromised position for laying down the law, and opens the issue up to allow for reconsidering other stringencies and traditions never referenced or discussed in the Torah itself.

As some of you may know, three young men are to be cleared of the false charges that were leveled against them, maybe. To be clear, these men were victims of racism. Academics rushed to judgment at least partially because the young men are white and their lying accuser black.

John Podhoretz writes in the NY Post,

“Some 88 of them - more than 10 percent of the entire Duke professoriat - engaged in a shocking rush to judgment in the weeks following the party where the accuser falsely alleged she had been raped.

They signed an ad declaring they were “turning up the volume at a moment when some of the most vulnerable among us are being asked to quiet down.”

Their shameful conduct helped create the lynch-mob atmosphere that tempted and seduced DA Nifong to believe he could ride an indictment of the three young men to political victory in the Democratic primary that took place only weeks after he charged them.

It is not too much to say that many of the adults at Duke, who should be stewards for their students, actually wanted the false rape story to be true because it fulfilled their ideological predilections.

Since the academic work of those who organized the ad centers around the notion that the white male power structure subjugates and violates all those who are neither white nor male, the case was actually a dream come true for them.“

Now – it’s important to note that almost 90% of the “professoriat� signed no such advertisement. While this is indicative of the absurdity and bile of a small percentage of academic professors, that is a major problem, but it cannot be proven that they dominate academia.

However, if the signers were overrepresented from the history and sociology departments, then maybe we do have a very big problem indeed. If there is significant density of this point of view in these departments, this surely affects the quality and fairness of their teaching in ways it might not affect the IT or chemistry professor’s.

I would like to see the breakdown.

I wouldn’t expect Newsweek to get anything right about Judaism, and would expect their list of The Top Fifty Rabbis in America to be a joke.

But two of them in the top ten aren’t even from the branches of liberal Judaism. They are leaders of other religions entirely. That is to say, unlike the progressive branches of Reform or Conservative who wrestle to find Jewish meaning (and usually lose) in their negotiations with secularism and liberalism, these two religions represented in the top ten contain specifically foreign theological content.

Number four is Yehuda Berg, of the cult New Religion, the Kaballah Centre.

And the number one (number 1?!?) is Rabbi Marvin Hier, the leading theologian for political Holocaustism.

Holocaustism is more insidious than the Kaballah Centre, as Holocaustism is tolerated by so many in the mainstream Jewish community, and worse, it has infiltrated large swaths of Jews in all the major denominations.

We must stand up to Holocaustism, declaring to ourselves and the world that this is not Judaism. We are much deeper and complex than that, and we go back a couple of years earlier than 1933. Judaism is NOT victimology, and our past conflagration is not the burden or history of the American people. We should not be building these ubiquitous memorials and museums like they are a town mikveh. We have to try and make our own understand that the Holocaust did not happen here, and these museums and this singular, shrill, and obsessive focus is not helping us. Not outside, not inside.

If Rabbi Marvin Hier had his way, we would build a Holocaust memorial with a U.S. flag in front of it on the moon.

Hat tip: Failed Messiah

The Jerusalem Post reports,

The rabbinic court system must offer alternate judicial services not under the auspices of the haredi establishment, Efrat Chief Rabbi Shlomo Riskin said Thursday in response to the appointment Tuesday of 15 new judges to the rabbinic courts, 12 of whom were haredi.

“After this week’s selection of an inordinate number of haredi judges, many of whose chief qualifications were family relationships, I call for an alternative court of religious-Zionist, modern Orthodox judges who will include love of Israel together with concern for the purity of Israel and will express the principle of ‘for the sake of preventing agunot. [women trapped in a marriage by Jewish law] our law finds leniencies,’” Riskin told a conference dealing with the Israeli constitution in Jerusalem on Thursday.

Failed Messiah notes,

“Personally, I think this is a case of too little, too late. The MO-NRP world wasted its time on land and expanding Jewish ‘control’ over the West Bank and Gaza. While it did so, haredim hijacked the apparatus of state religion, making life worse for everyone but, perhaps, a few haredim themselves. And, at the same time, secular Israelis and the Israeli center – made up mostly of traditional Jews who at one time valued rabbis and Orthodoxy, if not as a daily way of life then as an ideal – have moved farther away from religion and have increasingly hostile views of Orthodoxy and of rabbis.â€?

The cost of course, is to world Jewry as well. The myth that being “religious� is synonymous with being “haredi� is one many Jews (including myself many years ago), both religious and secular have bought, both in Israel and in the Diaspora.

The issue though, is not just that this is bad for Judaism itself (which it is, it’s awful) but it is simply a bold-faced lie, absolute historical revisionism. And the Modern Orthodox, who so frequently publicly focus only, or at least, mostly, on the State of Israel, have done nothing but aid and abet this nonsense by allowing themselves to be portrayed as a purely post-1948 brand of Judaism.

Haredi power brokers seized upon this perceived weakness, and further disseminated and contrasted their lie of a unique religious continuity, by incessantly appealing to a past intense purity that never existed the way they pretend it once did, and dismissing the reality that they too have changed just as much (and perhaps, much more) because of the establishment of the Jewish state, just like the Modern Orthodox and secular Jewish communities, but of course, in very different manifestations. And not because Jewish secularists oppress them (they really don’t), but because we all change when a major geo-political development affects us.

Most Jewish communities have substantially changed because of the State of Israel, both there and in the Diaspora. But by overemphasizing and restricting their focus to a religious-Zionist vision that was often speculative, the Modern Orthodox allowed themselves to be marginalized externally by both haredim and secularists, and even internally.

Having said that, Rabbi Riskin’s fight against this haredi power grab is encouraging. Once again, when the haredim go too far and take too much, the Modern Orthodox are demonstrating the will to fight.

Welp…as some of you may know, there was this big article in the NY Times about this social group I’m peripherally a part of, and indeed, I went to cholent last night, and was horrified by what I saw. There were hordes of Upper West and Upper East Side Jews in search of “the scene.â€? Some wanted the chulent (those would be the Upper-West Siders), and some inquired as to the appropriate amount of the “suggested donationâ€? (those would be the Upper-East Siders). Some of the high-heeled crowd were puzzled by the lack of an elevator, and many complained about the smoke…even while outside. There was some perfumed yuppie from NY Magazine doing yet another article as well, and she kept insisting her story was already in the works before the Times piece came out, and she was interviewing people I’ve never even seen before.

And then there were the kiruvniks. Formerly of Big Aish, Rabbi Sammy “Are you ready to rock?!?� was there, and he declared that, “Judaism is the ultimate counter-culture!� Sholom the anarchist rabbi almost pummeled the poor bastard, but unfortunately, some dude in a serugah intervened (you know how the Zionists are). He offered some platitudes about Jewish unity, and probably because of the vodka mixed with beer, I went outside and promptly vomited.

Anyway, that’s it for that.