Torat HaLev - Leftorah

Having Reached Seventy

2005-11-16T09:01:00.000-05:00

14 Cheshvan. Perhaps, thank God, the Republican travesty is all unravelling before our eyes. New revelations only add to our astonishment at the audacity of Republican mendacity. (Hey, not bad alliteration there...)

Evidence of torture by American-trained Iraqi forces ("Torture Alleged at Ministry Site," NY Times) has emerged. The Senate, even many of its Republicans, is now so frustrated with the ineptitude and deceit of the Bush administration that it voted to demand regular updating and serious change in the Iraqi campaign. Cheney did meet with oil industry executives in 2001, it turns out, despite his and their repeated denials ("Document Says Oil Chiefs Met With Cheney Task Force," Washington Post), in order to secretly set policy in line with corporate interests. Journalist and editor Bob Woodward testified this week that he, too, learned of outed CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity from a senior administration official, a full month before her name was publicized in the media, because the official "talked casually" about her, as if her identity were not strictly confidential ("Washington Post's Woodward Talks to Leak Prosecutor," NY Times). The just-ousted chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, has been found to have repeatedly broken the law in his efforts to Republicanize the organization ("Broadcast Chief Violated Laws, Inquiry Finds," NY Times). Even Time Magazine is doing its job (again, as it had reported about abuse of Koran's in U.S. detention centers for "enemy combatants"), reporting with a recent cover story about how corporations are stealing into employee retirement benefits plans, with congressional approval ("The Great Retirement Ripoff, Time 10/31/05).

This is the culture of governance Republicans have created; lies, law-breaking, defrauding the poor and defenseless -- and self-righteous poses of outrage at any hint of criticism. Bush's latest attacks against critics shows simply that nothing substantive can be found by way of defending his methods. May it all crumble, speedily in our day! May the American people's gut feeling that Bush and his cronies are dishonest and ideologues carry the day! May our national moderation and basic Enlightenment-inspired liberalism return to the fore!

On the last note, Abe Foxman at the ADL merits a big yasher koach (kudos) for having finally seen the Christian fundamentalist movement for what it is. The stealth enemy threatening American freedom and democracy isn't Muslim "terrorism," it's the unholy alliance of Christian religious fanaticism and the Republican party.

This will be my 70th post. It has been a pleasure to vent my anger at such naked Republican contempt for its own constituency. It has been a learning experience as well. I wish I had more time to devote to this most worthy cause -- truly one for the sake of heaven. More constancy on my part might have produced a wider, more loyal and more interactive readership. But I have no complaints. However, baruch hashem, my life is too full right now for me to continue posting. I may return once the current academic year is over in May (yes, for those who don't know me or who haven't figured it out yet, I teach at a university).

May the light of this month's expanding moon inspire our own moral, intellectual and spiritual expansion!

Love and blessings to all!

Jonathan

Sermonize at Your Own Risk

2005-11-11T11:26:00.000-05:00

9 Cheshvan. I just came across the following story from Monday in the L.A. Times. An Episcopal church in Pasadena has been threatened by the IRS with the removal of its non-profit status because the church's former rector, in a guest sermon just before the 2004 elections, had criticized the war against Iraq and imagined a debate between Bush, Kerry and Jesus, in which the latter lambasted Bush for his mililtant logic. You must read the story itself to fully appreciate the depth of hypocrisy at work here, given the number of churches whose clergy explicitly supported Republican positions and Republican candidates in the same election.

How can one claim to be truly religious if one tramples constantly on the divine? The Kotsker Rebbe, Menachem Mendl, taught as follows about Kohelet/Ecclesiastes 1:2, "Vanity of vanities. said Kohelet; vanity of vanities, all is vanity." The midrash says that the seven repetitions of the word hevel (vanity) in the book refer to the seven days of creation. The Kotsker asked how is it possible that one could call the seventh day, the sabbath, hevel and answered: "To a person for whom the whole week is worthless and full of vanities, the sabbath as well is nothing."

May our sabbaths and divine worship elevate the rest of our time and actions. May mundane motivations -- political power, control over others' behavior, vanity -- never bring down our divine worship and sabbaths!

Shabbat shalom u-mevorach!

Are the Gates of Repentence Opening in Washington?

2005-11-10T21:32:00.000-05:00

8 Cheshvan. What a blessed few days it's been! One, Democrats took two important gubernatorial races, in Virginia and New Jersey. Two, Californians overwhelmingly resisted Schwarzenegger's retro ballet initiatives. Three, the Senate scrapped the oil industry- and Republican-inspired effort to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve from its budget bill. Four, today the House rejected Republican attempts to cut $54 billion of vital social service programs in order to (minimally) reduce government spending.

These are welcome, unexpected victories (even if there is a long way to go)! Moderate Republicans are to be thanked for their courage and return to moral decency.

How appropriate that today is the yahrzeit of R. Yonah Gerondi, author of the beloved text, Sha'arei Teshuva, the Gates of Repentence. Perhaps our nation is really ready to do teshuva, to renounce extreme Republican ideology and worship of the so-called free market. I hope and pray that this is so! May it be Your will, God, who bestows intelligence and wisdom in humans!

The Trouble With America -- It's Pagan!

2005-11-08T12:51:00.000-05:00

6 Cheshvan. "Microsoft has decided (and publicly confirmed this summer) that anyone in China doing a search containing the words 'freedom' or 'democracy' will be shown a message explaining that those words are banned and the requested search query will not be processed" (G. Pascal Zachary, "See No Evil: How American Businesses Collaborate with China's repressive Government," In These Times 11/21/05). According to other web reports, the language shown to users and the contexts in which such messages will be received differs somewhat, but the gist is the same.

You can see, therefore, why I remain intrigued by the notion, as I reported in my last posting, that national leaders need to possess a "pagan" ethos in order to be effective. (No offence intended to any actual pagans.) What author Robert Kaplan -- God, I hope he's not Jewish -- meant is that leaders must care only about success and strategies for achieving it, such as deception, surprise, ruthlessness, etc., in other words, the basic Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, Von Clausewitz repertoire. Now, I don't want to mischaracterize Kaplan, who is merely trying to be "realist," but the fact is that Microsoft's attitude is absolutely typical of how the Republican party wants our country and businesses to operate. Profit über alles!

Isn't it precisely such logic that permits, no, encourages leaders to, say, ignore warnings about non-credible intelligence sources and present the information as fact simply in order to steer policy the way they want? (Walter Pincus, "Newly Released Data Undercut Prewar Claims: Source Tying Baghdad, Al Qaeda Doubted," Washington Post, 11/6/05). And let us not forget the timely ghost story run in the New York Times on Halloween that reveals that

"The National Security Agency has kept secret since 2001 a finding by an agency historian that during the Tonkin Gulf episode, which helped precipitate the Vietnam War, N.S.A. officers deliberately distorted critical intelligence to cover up their mistakes, two people familiar with the historian's work say. The historian's conclusion is the first serious accusation that communications intercepted by the N.S.A., the secretive eavesdropping and code-breaking agency, were falsified so that they made it look as if North Vietnam had attacked American destroyers on Aug. 4, 1964, two days after a previous clash. President Lyndon B. Johnson cited the supposed attack to persuade Congress to authorize broad military action in Vietnam" (Scott Shane, "Vietnam Study, Casting Doubts, Remains Secret," New York Times, 10/31/05). Sound familiar? Even eerier is the fact that, according to this study, the "midlevel agency officers [who] had deliberately skewed the evidence [...] had done it not out of any political motive but to cover up earlier errors." The study was "published nearly five years ago in a classified in-house journal, and starting in 2002 [the author] and other government historians argued that it should be made public. But their effort was rebuffed by higher-level agency policymakers, who by the next year were fearful that it might prompt uncomfortable comparisons with the flawed intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq, according to an intelligence official familiar with some internal discussions of the matter"!

Any truly God-loving and God-fearing Jew or Christian should be aghast, should be up in arms in opposition! Is this what "pagan" policy-making looks like?!? Let us name it as the evil that it is.

Hence as well the recent remarks of Senator James M. Inhofe (R-Ok), who thinks the idea of global warming is a great hoax. (I guess you'd have to be "reality-based" or something to believe the overwhelming scientific evidence of ongoing and worsening climate change.) The senator "said the National Evangelical Association had been 'led down a liberal path' by environmentalists and others who have convinced the group that issues like poverty and the environment are worth their efforts" ("When Cleaner Air is a Biblical Obligation," New York Times, 11/7/05)! Now I happen to disagree heartily on the issue of environment and can accept that there is dispute over this complex area. But poverty?!? How can anyone who reads the Gospels be against addressing poverty?!? How can anyone who believes the Hebrew Bible to be a foundational text of our culture (and favors school prayer and publicly-posted Ten Commandments, etc.) find alleviating poverty an objectionable cause?!?

I found it interesting that the New York Times ran a major, front-page story on the horrific conditions of African jails (Michael Wines, "The Forgotten of Africa, Wasting Away in Jails Without Trial," New York Times, 11/6/05). On the one hand, the timing can be read as an admission that things here look pretty darn sane and safe in comparison with the ugly, evil Third World. On the other hand, I take it the point was to convey exactly what awaits us if we let Cheney and the neo-cons' neofascist aspirations triumph. Coincidentally, yet tellingly so, the Washington Post ran a story, also on Sunday, outlining the hundred-fold increase in FBI use (abuse) of national security letters, which, under the misleadingly named Patriot Act, permit "clandestine scrutiny of U.S. residents and visitors who are not alleged to be terrorists or spies" (Barton Gellman, "The FBI's Secret Scrutiny: In Hunt for Terrorists, Bureau Examines records of Ordinary Americans," Washington Post, 11/6/05). National security letters "do not need the imprimatur of a prosecutor, grand jury or judge. They receive no review after the fact by the Justice Department or Congress." Needless to say, "The Bush administration defeated legislation and a lawsuit to require a public accounting, and has offered no example in which the use of a national security letter helped disrupt a terrorist plot." "Senior FBI officials acknowledged in interviews that the proliferation of national security letters results primarily from the bureau's new authority to collect intimate facts about people who are not suspected of any wrongdoing." Despite all this, "[t]he House and Senate have voted to make noncompliance with a national security letter a criminal offense."

Wake up people! How damaged does our democracy need to become before we realize that it was purposely ruined by religious fanatics who don't care about people and by politicians and business leaders who don't care about ethics?

If you love and God and the Torah, don't vote Republican today!

The Emperor's New Clothes?

2005-11-04T09:19:00.000-05:00

2 Cheshvan. Bitter indeed is this month. This week's revelations by the Washington Post about secret CIA prisons scattered about the world seem to be provoking more criticisms of the Bush junta. The attacks are justified and justifiably indignant, incredulous, angry, especially given the record of prisoner abuse in those "detention centers" we know about (what goes on in places that are totally unsupervised?!) -- and Bush's first threatened veto comes to maintain the "right" to such inhuman terrorism, for such it is. The so-called new American century reveals a nation turned into a semi-Third World despotism, led by people who worship might and harbor adolescent fantasies of redemptive violence.

I can't help sharing this painting (Undefeated, by Stephen S. Sawyer), perfectly reflective of what I mean:

Syria, under international pressure, releases 190 (!) political prisoners (how many more are/were there?); the president of Iran threatens to wipe out an entire foreign nation (Israel, of course). But these models are actually what our neo-con armchair imperialists aspire to be! They have found the perfect holy idiot to serve as their mouthpiece, spouting nonsense about love and Christ.

God bless Sen. Harry Reid, therefore, for finally showing some spine and demanding at least some Republican accountability for their crimes. All the closed-door-session drama perfectly suits these traumatic times. Perhaps the Democrats can become a responsible and moral political force again.

Another, smaller, story, however, unveils the reason so many of our geo-political game-playing turn both disastrous and farcical (and at what cost to others and ourselves!). It turns out that the Bush Administration's source for the alleged fact that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium from Niger was "an occasional spy," who had "been kicked out" of the Italian intelligence agency for whom he had previously worked, who forged the documents in question for personal profit. Despite the fact that "Italian intelligence had warned Washington in early 2003 that the Niger-Iraq documents were false," clearly Bush administration officials didn't care. "Information about Iraq's desire to acquire uranium from Niger" came from Italy "as early as the 1990's, but [Italian intelligence officials] had never said the information was credible." (This all comes from Elaine Sciolino and Elisabth Povoledo, "Source of Forged Niger-Iraq Uranium Documents Identified," New York Times 4 Nov. 2005. Alas, articles from this paper's website can no longer be accessed except by registered members.) No wonder the U.S. intelligence community wants to keep its operations out of the public eye; it's too embarrassing to believe that such "bad spy novel" shenanigans serve as the basis for policy-making (the quoted phrase is from the title of Eugene Robinson's Washington Post op-ed column today).

When will we learn?

Imagine my delight, then, when, after writing all the above, a search on Amazon.com for something totally unrelated turned up Robert D. Kaplan's 2001 book, Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos! Pagan! In other words: realpolitik without a conscience. I had never heard of this title, but how telling it is! As if we needed more proof of the real nature of the apocalyptic, utopian, muscular Christianity that runs Washington these days: amoral, machiavellian, addicted to control (that they can never achieve). Even better, the first reviewer listed on the Amazon.com site is none other Newt Gingrich -- I kid you not -- who wrote (in Feb. 2002): "I highly recommend Kaplan's new book to anyone who is trying to understand what needs to be done to response [sic] to September 11. There are a number of references in this book to asymmetric power, fanaticism and the intelligent use of unsuspected force outside the rules of modern state warfare, which are prescient of [sic] what we are now living through"!!! Every U.S. citizen who voted for these back-to-"might-makes-right" thugs should wonder why he/she couldn't or didn't want to see the writing on the wall.

Oy! -- deep breath -- A blessed and PEACEFUL shabbat to one and all!

Recovering from Hurricane Bush

2005-11-02T08:11:00.000-05:00

30 Tishrei. Hodesh tov! A wonderful and distrubing letter arrived today in my e-mail, from the Rev. C. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance and pastor at a Monroe, Louisiana, Baptist church. The letter describes the visit of an interfaith delegation to areas and populations devastated by hurricane Katrina. The letter is too long, unfortunately, to share it in its entirety, and does not seem to be on the organization's website (though they should post it -- hint, hint), but I thought two paragraphs particularly compelling. Here they are:

Speaking to a dinner sponsored by the Republican National Committee recently, President Bush called for support for this “Faith-based and Community-based Initiative.” I find his words as interesting as they are disturbing. After describing the faith-based initiative as “one of the most important initiatives” of his presidency, Mr. Bush turned his attention to opponents of the initiative—such as those of us who oppose it because of its compromise of the constitutional guarantee of religious liberty and its negative impact on the autonomy and integrity of religious bodies—charging that we are seeking to limit the government’s “capacity to love” and opposing government’s involvement in “changing America one heart at a time.”

What bad theology, poor politics, and a distorted view of charity. The government as institutions [sic] is not charged with the responsibility of changing hearts, though it is challenged to provide for the public welfare. The government, just as individuals cannot be limited in its capacity to love. And individuals can no more be prevented from loving others and caring for others than from breathing.

Amen! I would emphasize Bush's misguided view of government's purpose here. He seems to confuse governing with missionizing, a most dangerous confusion indeed, but an honest indication of his desires. Is this what a "Christian nation" means? Howabout starting with providing those he wants to "love" with basic services and protection from poverty, poor health and societal isolation? No, I suppose that would all be too "fleshy." Remember, however, that love means never having to say you're sorry. In other words, "if you don't like the effects don't produce the cause" (I love quoting George Clinton).

I have set up the petition to impeach Bush (top of the column to the left), which is ready to accept names. Please sign it! Nothing could be more important than pre-empting future pain and suffering by eliminating its current cause: Republican spiritual ignorance and political misdiagnosis.

I pray with increased urgency the daily prayer that God should restore our judges (literally and metaphorically) to the level of things at the beginning, i.e., under Moses and a true sense of the divine.

May it be a month of blessings and not curses! May we erase all bitterness and restore our constructive priorities!

We Cannot Afford Another 39 Months

2005-10-29T21:25:00.000-04:00

26 Tishrei. Shavu'a tov. Here is a copy of a letter I sent to my senator and representative. Please feel free to copy it, modify it and use it. Please send it to your own senators and representatives. The time has come to act for God (YHVH, i.e., precisely the beneficent, life-giving, merciful side of God), for they have voided your teaching (Ps. 119:126).

Dear ___,

I am writing you to urge that you initiate and/or support efforts to impeach President Bush. Our country and world cannot afford another 39 months of his disastrous administration.

Former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega makes an excellent case for impeachment on the legal grounds of repeated violations of Title 18, United States Code, Section 371, which prohibits conspiracies to defraud the United States, in her article in this week's issue of The Nation, "The White House Criminal Conspiracy" (unfortunately not available online).

Ms. De la Vega does not go far enough, however. In addition to Bush & Co.'s conspiring to defraud the nation by misleading the public regarding the war in Iraq -- the contention of her convincing piece -- I believe the same legal argument opens other, perhaps less controversial, avenues. After all, various governmental departments attempted to defraud the country by paying individuals to pose in person or in writing as independent journalists while they parroted the administration's position at its behest. Taxpayers have been and continue to be defrauded by government funding grants given to "faith-based" sex education programs that knowingly use false information that is not backed by any evidence.

Furthermore, despite rhetoric lauding a strict interpretation of the Constitution, the White House and other Republicans have clearly established a religious test for nominees to the Supreme Court, something strictly prohibited by our Constitution (Article VI, Clause 3).

These are criminal violations, punishable by law. This coming week I intend to begin gathering the signatures of people who support Bush's impeachment. When enough have been collected, I will present them to you in the hope that you will act. The threat to our democracy has never been more urgent.

Sincerely,

Joe LefTorah

Bush, not Miers, is the one who Should Withdraw

2005-10-27T22:44:00.000-04:00

24 Tishrei. No time tonight to cover the many things I'd like to discuss. I just wanted to say, quickly, that Harriet Miers's withdrawal strikes me as a most respectable move. It reflects integrity on her part and an ability to read the evidence around her -- all things lacking in the president who nominated her.

Let it Rain -- Loving-Kindness, but Real Stuff

2005-10-23T17:35:00.000-04:00

20 Tishrei. I spent most of last night in the enormous -- and I do mean enormous -- sukkah of the Bobover hasidim in Boro Park, watching and enjoying their celebration of simchat beit ha-sho'eva, the water-drawing ceremonies that took place in the Jerusalem Temple during sukkot. The rebbe, from what little Yiddish I understand, spoke of the various ways we try to draw down God's hasadim, sweet acts of loving-kindness, during sukkot, mostly by waving the four species in the six directions of existence.

The rebbe's talk of our holiday efforts to start the flow of the heavenly shefa, abundance, reminding me of many similar teachings in the hasidic/kabbalistic literature, got me thinking when I saw a story today in the L.A. Times about the problems facing Colorado's state government because of 13 years experience of a Republican-inspired referendum imposing a cap on government spending. Here is a case study of rulers lacking chesed, perhaps the key characteristic necessary for responsible and responsive governing. According to the article, because of the budget cap, Colorado now faces serious problems, including the following:

* "K-12 spending has fallen below the national average."

* "Colorado lags every state but one in keeping teacher pay competitive with private-sector earnings."

* "The state ranks near the bottom in providing health insurance to its poor."

* "Public university tuition has shot up 21% in the last four years as the state economy reeled from recession."

* "[T]raffic is snarled, with 55 road projects threatened with cancellation if voters don't lift the cap."

This is the Bush model of governance. This is what Schwartzenegger & Co. want to introduce in California. It is essentially a model of leadership through negligence. Only those who can afford services get them, through the private sector. As to the rest of the people -- screw 'em.

The Bobov experience also resonated with me upon my seeing in this week's New York Jewish Week an advertisement for an upcoming "sneak preview," aimed at local synagogue professionals, for Synaplex. For those who don't know, this is basically a mall in which the stores are replaced by synagogues and sundry pre-packaged religious experiences. The model originated with churches desperate to spread the good word to a generation that prefers malls to places of worship. Perhaps not surprisingly, Synaplex was concocted in Los Angeles.

Back to the advertisement, I was immediately struck by the fact that the name Synaplex is a trademark. In other words, the real significance of Synaplex is that that which is supposed to be a most profound and personal experience and relationship has become a brand name, something marketed, a style or gimmick "owned" by a group of organizational founders and sponsors who have so far clearly not managed to "sell" Judaism very well at all. The usual suspects are involved here, the big-money "mavens" who keep pouring dollars into "creative" ways to package and market Judaism -- online, nightclubs, record labels, as "lifestyle" choices -- but who fail to understand that the issue is substance, substance, substance: the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Foundation, Jewish Life Network/Steinhardt Foundation, and the Samuel Bronfman Foundation. The haredi world certainly has many problems of its own, despite the thousands (of men) thronging to hear or get a glimpse of the rebbe, and I do not see it as a magical solution. The same can be said for the modern Orthodox sphere. But whatever the problems, these worlds offer substantive responses to individual crises, to dilemmas of modernity. The ba'al teshuva movement within Orthodox circles and the lasting transformations experienced by most of these individuals are not merely the result of manipulation or seduction by the ba'al teshuva "industry." The very need for "SynaplexTM" tells me that some leaders/institutions are failing miserably at convincing Jews that they have answers to basic spiritual, psychological or social problems: why are we here? what kind of people should we strive to become? what should we spend our time doing? who cares about us and our needs? is there significance to our actions? Instead of looking to "capture greater markets" these leaders/institutions might want to ask themselveswhether they really know what they are about.

Finally, at least for today, as I've got to get to a hoshana rabba learning/singing fest with the kids, is this: at shul this shabbos I was happy to have a conversation with two friends/neighbors about growing talk of impeaching Bush. (And I didn't even initiate the conversation!) From their lips to God's ears... And if anyone knows of actual, viable efforts to oust this world-destroying bastard and his locust-like parasites, please let me know. So, in the interest of creating facts on the ground, I feel it is perhaps even a step (a small one, admittedly) to simply register the words online, where they can be picked up by the world's millions of electronic cultural antenae.

Impeach Bush!

Let's impeach Bush now!

We need to impeach Bush!

Ah, a moment of calm and satisfaction... Chag sameach everyone!

Where Has the Soul of the World Gone?

2005-10-21T09:57:00.000-04:00

18 Tishrei. Amazing, the yohrzeyt of Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav! He said once of himself that he was a wanderer in desolate places, seeking desperately to plant a human settlement. In other words, he explained, he wandered between the desolate hearts of people, desperately hoping to implant in them something living, growing and nourishing. If only our living rabbis had a seventieth of Reb Nachman's ability to penetrate hearts. How alive is the Torah of this "dead" rebbe!

What would he make of the continuing revelations of pseudo-orthodox lobbyist Jack Abramoff? What would he think of the debasing of religion done daily by so-called people of faith these days? See, for instance, the Washington Post editorial from Tuesday. Here we learn how Abramoff "maneuvered to kill an Internet gambling bill for his $100,000-a-month lobbying client, eLottery Inc." Just one pertinent detail:

"The eLottery tale also illustrates how corporate money can be disguised -- laundered might be a more appropriate word -- to obscure its questionable origins. Enlisting former Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed to help defeat the Internet gambling ban, Mr. Abramoff used two passthroughs to get Mr. Reed the money. The first stop, Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, which got a $160,000 check from eLottery, took $10,000 off the top, and passed it on to the second passthrough, the Faith and Family Alliance, which then sent on $150,000 to Mr. Reed. 'I was operating as a shell,' the group's former director, now in prison on sex charges, told The Post."

How appropriate, then, that a Monday article in The Guardian about this past weekend's conference of Christian bloggers excerpted the following self-description of beliefs by a blogger known as Texas Tommy: "The conservative view of government and politics: limited government, individual freedom and responsibility, free market principles, traditional values." Funny, I don't recall any of the Gospels mentioning most of this clearly retrojected ideology.

Meanwhile the man supposedly leading the free world insists, in public, in the face of foreign leaders, no less, that God speaks to him and tells him what to do. Despite White House denials, he told a Palestinian delegation that included Mahmoud Abbas in 2003: "I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan. And I did. And then God would tell me, George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq... And I did. And now, again, I feel God's words coming to me, Go get the Palestinians a state and get the Israelis their security, and get a piece in the Middle East. And by God I'm gonna do it" (see various stories: cnn.com, The Guardian, Reuters AlertNet).

Despite -- because of? -- his divine clear channel, Bush heads up an administration tallying up an unprecedented record of sins. Here are a few just from recent days: Close advisors who leak the name of a CIA operative in order to silence or get back at her husband who is critical of administration policy-making, and then cover it up (i.e., Karl Rove and I. "Libby" Lewis; see pieces in the Washington Post, New York Times). Bush nominates a clearly unqualified political crony and personal friend to a position on the Supreme Court, a move that reflects Bush's utter contempt for the political processes meant to ensure a responsible and reliable judiciary. Today a piece in the Washington Post reveals that Bush-appointed crony Michael Brown, former head of FEMA (also unqualified for the job), ignored urgent eyewitness reports that the New Orleans levees had burst. I could go on, but don't have the stomach.

Kudos to the Forward, therefore, for a hard-hitting editorial, inspired by our imminent return to the beginning of the Torah this week, chastizing the Bush administration for its willful blindness:

"Two new studies — one by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the other by the Purdue University Climate Change Research Center — document a growing tendency toward extremes of weather over the past two decades as a result of atmospheric warming. The two studies point to more intense precipitation and harsher storms, coupled with desertification of some currently fertile regions, as the warming increases. Yet another report, by a coalition of environmentalist investors, has found a 15-fold increase in insured losses as a result of extreme weather events over the past 30 years. A third study, this one by the United Nations University in Bonn, calculates that as many as 10 million people per year are currently being displaced by catastrophic environment changes, including desertification of their farmlands and flooding of heavily populated coastal regions. The study projects 50 million such refugees over the next five years, and calls on the U.N. to begin redefining the notion of 'refugee' to include environmental as well as political and religious displacement. Most dramatic, on the eve of Yom Kippur, the International Council for Science, comprising the national science academies in 103 countries, announced the launch of a two-year study to assess the state of the polar ice caps, determine their rate of melting and calculate the impact on ocean levels. Most current studies show the ice sheets melting at an alarming rate, with the likely result that vast areas of current human habitation will be swallowed by the oceans in the next century or two. Until now, however, no attempt has been made to quantify the rate of melting, identify the populations under threat or come up with a plan of action."

"Finally, the Bush administration has made its own modest contribution to the ongoing debate. On September 30, the federal Bureau of Land Management issued new guidelines, authorized in the energy bill passed by Congress in August, that drop the requirement of new environmental impact studies when energy companies propose new drilling. The purpose is to make new sources of oil available more quickly, so we can speed up our burning of carbon-based fuels."

One might add to this last bit the mysterious disappearance of a vital map of Alaska from an Arlington, Va., office. A new U.S. Geological Survey map coincidentally includes "1.5 million acres of coastal plain in the refuge" that the oil industry and the Bush administration want to open to oil drilling that had not been included on the authorized but now missing map. Not surprisingly, based on the new map, the Republican-controlled Senate Energy and Commerce Committee passed a measure opening all this up to drilling (New York Times). Given the m.o. of this administration and its allies, it is hardly paranoid to wonder whether intentional theft is involved here.

This shabbat I will pray in the hope of gaining some information about the missing soul of the world.

For some reason, the following story comes to mind. Maybe the prayers we utter this holiday for life-giving and healthful rains are in the back of my mind.

"When Rav Yitzchak from Vorki passed away his son started to become perturbed and perplexed and he needed someone with whom to speak. There was no one else closer to his father than Rav Menachem Mendel from Kotzk, so Rav Yitzchak’s son decided to go to the Kotzker to discuss his problem.

The son of Rav Yitzhak from Vorki asked the Kotzker, 'Why is it that after my father has passed away that his soul never comes to visit me, and not even in a dream does he come to me?' The Kotzker replied, 'I had the same question as I was very close with your father and I thought he would for sure come and visit me.” The Kotzker continued , 'So I said to myself if Yitzakel won’t come and visit me I decided that I’ll go visit him.' The Kotzker meant that would rise his own soul up to heaven to try and find the soul of Rav Yitzchak.

The following is what the Kotzker told the son in his sear for his father Rav Yitzchak. 'I ascended first to the realm of the great Achronim Rabbi Akiva Eiger, the Bach, the Taz, the Shach, etc and I inquired there after Rav Yitzchak and I was told that Rav Yizchak was there and left. So I ascended higher to the realm of the Rishonim the Rif, Rambam, Ramban, Rashi etc. and once again Rav Yitzchak was there and left. I ascended yet higher to the realm of the Amoraim Abaya and Rava and the like and once again the same response. My soul continued to ascend to the realm of the Tannnaim Rebbe Akiva and the like and once again I was told that Rav Yitzchak was there and he left. Finally I reached our holy fathers Avraham, Yitzchak, and Yaakov and once again the same answer.'

'Now I didn’t know what to so I decided to inquire from one of the angels where Rav Yitzchak from Vorki can be found. So an angel told me that to get to Rav Yitzchak I have to go through a very dark and dangerous forest. So I told the angel I was ready, and I girded together all my stregnth and went into the forest. With the Almighty’s help I made it through the forest, and at the end of this forest there was this great sea with waves ascending high in the heavens. And than I saw him your father Rav Yitzchak. He came over to me and said "Hello Mendele, do you know where you are?" I said "No Rav Yitzikel, I don’t know, where are we?" So Rav Yitzekel said, "This is the sea of tears. These are the tears that the Jewish people have shed while we’ve been in exile. And I’ve made an oath that I will not leave this place until the Master of the World will fufill his promise and redeem the Jewish people."'

Now Rav Yitzikel’s son knew why his father hadn’t come to visit him" (taken from http://www.kolbrisk.com/kiruv.htm).

But, of course, it isn't just the Jewish people that needs redemption... Shabbat shalom u-mevorach! Mo'adim le-simcha!

Heretical Haredim?

2005-10-16T15:11:00.000-04:00

13 Tishrei. Later that same day (depending on how you count)...

Ok, finally got the sukkah up after days of non-stop rain. Now we only need to replace the etrog our son left on the schoolbus Friday.

After discussing with my wife the article regarding New Square that I commented on in the last post, and after some additional late-night ruminations, the following, no doubt completely unoriginal thought occurred to me: if it says explicitly -- twice -- in D'varim/Deuteronomy that one should not add to God's teachings (Deut. 4:2, 12:32), why is it that those who glorify stringency and severity and the adding on of new or harsher rules ("kol ha-machmir harei hu meshubach" and the like) are not considered deviants or heretics, as they clearly should be? Can anyone enlighten me about the history of this oversight?

May we be blessed with a sukkot holiday that teaches us the emptiness of excessive structure, the meaninglessness of too much order, the danger of compulsive prevention! May the fresh air, newly visible skies and porous walls of sukkot revive us all to sanity and wisdom! May we merit seeing in our sukkot this year -- even hosting -- the seven holy flour-covered bakers and realizing, before it's too late, just who they are and how much we need their transcendental bread!

Speaking of bread, the rabbis comment on Yirmiyahu's laments (Jer. 16:11) concerning the failure of the Israelites to follow God and keep His instruction, "If only they had just deserted Me, but kept My teaching! For in the course of studying Torah they would have been stirred by the yeast therein to return to the good" (Eicha Rabbah, Petikhta 2). Their statement may well be an intertextual retort to the Jesus who in the Book of Matthew warns his disciples to avoid the yeast of the Pharisees. But how much yeast is enough; what amount is too little? The proper path is often seasonal, an existentially and temporally situational habitus. There are times when we require for our own good self-deflating (matza, no leaven, the bare minimum, humility) and others when we desperately need spiritual/emotional inflating and expansiveness. Pump up the volume of self-knowledge! Dance, dance, dance in the eternal rhythm of self-correction!

See you at the celebration. Chag sameach!

Those Primitive, Repressive Squares (or is that Neo-Squares?)

2005-10-16T00:07:00.000-04:00

13 Tishrei. Shavu'a tov!

I just can't resist this. A must-read article in this week's Forward reveals that the Haredi community of New Square, New York, like Saudi Arabia, forbids women to drive or even to sit in the front seat of a motor vehicle. Since the articles on the Forward's website cannot be accessed without a password, here are some excerpts:

"[I]n the Hasidic village of New Square, N.Y., religious leaders recently issued a document reminding residents that "women should not sit in the front of a car." [....] 'It's considered not tzniusdik [modest] for a woman to be a driver, not in keeping with the out-of-public-view [attitude],' village spokesman Rabbi Mayer Schiller said. 'If you can imagine in Europe, would a woman have been a coach driver, a wagon driver? It would've been completely inappropriate.' [Now that's a convincing argument... ] In some ways, Saudi Arabia's laws regarding women are more permissive than the religious edicts in New Square. For example, a Saudi woman is allowed to ride in the front seat of a car if the driver is her husband. While husbands and wives in Saudi Arabia are allowed to walk with each other, New Square men and women always must walk on different sides of the street. In strong contrast to Saudi Arabia, the government does not enforce the religious rules in New Square; violations do not result in any form of corporal punishment. But those who frequently violate the rules in New Square are blackballed from the community."

The intriguing question is what is the actual fear -- tzni'ut is a notoriously vague halakhic category. Is it that women in the front seat are more visible? Are the community leaders worried about independence of mobility for women? Is the issue the perceived status-bending involved in having a woman "in the driver's seat"?

Are women created in the image of God? As we know from our sages, the latter drives the sun's chariot every morning. Shouldn't women be allowed the same privilege (leaving out the sun)?

"Fly me to the moon, take me to the stars. Let me know what life is like on Jupiter and Mars..."

Republican Honesty (Can't Hide the True Results)

2005-10-14T10:56:00.000-04:00

11 Tishrei. In hurricane Katrina's wake (in both senses), and the increasingly clear privatization and development plans for the sake of Bush cronies and corporate allies, Representative Richard Baker (R-La) was overheard telling lobbyists, "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did" (as reported by Joel Bleifuss, In These Times).

I have also recently learned -- better late than never -- some intriguing things relating to "religion" and Katrina. Evidently, Houston greeted refugees from New Orleans with crates of Bibles (www.therevealer.org). Back in September, media critic Mark Crispin Miller alerted the public to the fact that FEMA's website, which listed suggested charities after Katrina, placed Pat Robertson's organization, Operation Blessing, second only to the Red Cross on the list (which was then distributed by state and local governments throughout the country). Juan Gonzalez, of the New York Daily News, penned a September 6 column outlining some of Operation Blessing's deceitful methods. His column helped motivate ABC, which followed suit with an expose of Operation Blessing on September 9 -- for a change, thankfully. Among the revelations detailed by Gonzalez:

"An investigation conducted by the Virginia attorney general's office concluded in 1999 that the planes [chartered by Operation Blessing to ferry aid to genocide-stricken Rwanda] were mostly used to transport mining equipment for a diamond operation run by a for-profit company called African Development Corp. And who do you think was the principal executive and sole shareholder of the mining company? You guessed it, Pat Robertson himself. Robertson had landed the mining concession from his longtime friend Mobutu Sese Seko, then the dictator of Zaire. Investigators concluded that Operation Blessing 'willfully induced contributions from the public through the use of misleading statements.'"

In addition, wrote Gonzalez, it turns out that "the biggest single U.S. recipient of the charity's largess, according to its latest financial report, was Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network. It received $885,000 in the fiscal year ended March 2004." How very interesting... (But even bad can bring about good: a few minutes on the web led me to the blessed Trinity Foundation, founded and run by E. Anthony, an organization devoted to tracking down and outing fraudulent and criminal televangelists -- and whose members take a vow of poverty while helping the poor and homeless in a direct and truly Christian way. If it weren't time to light shabbos candles I'd whip off a check right now -- www.trinityfi.org.)

The new issue of ITT, as usual, contains more examples of the status quo bestowed on us by the Republicans. A small Chicago-based peacenik non-profit group, Voices in the Wilderness, was fined $20,000 and threatened with up to $160,000 in penalties by the enforcement arm of the Treasury Dept. for having violated sanctions on Iraq by bringing in medical supplies without a permit. Meanwhile, as an organization spokesperson complained, for-profit companies have never been prosecuted for breaking sanctions in the pursuit of profits. Companies such as Texas-based BayOil and Connecticut-based Odin Marine benefitted and benefit from the government's averted eyes (Erin Polgreen, In These Times). Why is this not surprising?

Connected to this hypocritical prioritization of mammon, er, I mean, an energetic economy, a new Institute for Policy Studies report, "Executive Excess 2005," shows that the ratio between CEO and worker pay now stands at 431-to-1! In other words, the average CEO in the United States annually earns $11.8 million, the average worker $27,460. Since 9/11, CEO's heading defense contractor firms have seen their pay increase by 200 percent. All this while 46 major corporations paid no federal income taxes (in 2003, the most recent year for which data is available), despite reported income of $30 billion; the CEOs of these 46 companies (led by pharmaceutical giant Pfizer) pocketed an average salary of $12.6 million (Silja J.A. Talvi, In These Times).

Let's play a game: how many of the sins itemized in the litanies we just recited in confession yesterday -- supposedly with contrite hearts and teary eyes -- can we identify in the above? And yet Bush has the gall (calling it chutzpa would only glorify it) to cite Yom Kippur in a speech on forgiveness. Is it a sin to be full of shit?

Cry me a river...

High Holiday Message

2005-10-10T12:40:00.000-04:00

7 Tishrei. Shalom aleichem! I hope everyone had an inspiring and wonderful Rosh HaShana!

For no particular reason, I want to take this opportunity to thank and acknowledge all the people who have written me with their generous comments. Since most of you post from "anonymous" blogger e-mail addresses, I cannot write back. Please know that I appreciate every message I receive.

I also want to apologize to readers for not posting so frequently recently. Hard to believe, but I actually do have a non-virtual life I try to lead every now and then (or, better: try to just live).

A short story for the season (borrowed and poorly paraphrased from one of the Rabbi Krohn books of stories): a man was asked by a visiting rabbi whom he thought higher, those who had been continuously observant or those who had repented. The rabbi expected the usual answer from the Talmud, that repentant sinners stand at a far higher level than those who have never strayed from strict observance. The rabbi was taken aback, however, by the man's reply. "For me," said the man, "I am older and have already discovered that the world is a sham, its attractions empty and worthless. Therefore, I am like one compelled by circumstances and on a rather low level. But these observant youth I see everywhere, they still believe that the world holds incredibly tempting attractions for them and yet continue to observe their religion punctiliously. They deserve the true reward."

I wish I could say I belonged to either group, but that's another story...

May we each find the willingness and ability to forgive one another for the wrongs and harms we have committed. Perhaps even more difficult, may we find the wherewithal to forgive ourselves.

May we all be inscribed in the book of life for a year of spiritual growth, fruitful and helpful productivity, world-repair and unmitigated joy!

Cheering for Obliviousness

2005-09-29T13:56:00.000-04:00

25 Elul. A story in today's Christian Science Monitor reports that a Texas judge has "blocked the extradition of terror suspect Luis Posada Carriles, who is accused of planning the 1976 bombing of a Cuban passenger jet that killed 73 people." Venezuelan Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel said the decision by the judge to block Mr. Posada Carriles's extradiction showed the hypocrisy of the U.S. government and the double standard of the US government's position on terrorism.

Along similar lines, at a dinner in Washington for the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, "an organization that partners pro-Israel evangelicals with Jews," the audience gave Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas) "a standing ovation hours after he stepped aside from his Republican leadership position because of a criminal indictment," according to a JTA breaking news item today.

I say forgive them Lord, they know not what they've done.

May the year finish, along with its curses. May a new year begin, along with its blessings.

Creating Ignorance

2005-09-28T13:01:00.000-04:00

24 Elul. Today's Washington Post has a story, frightening in all its banality, about a high school biology teacher from a small town in Pennsylvania who says he faced "continual pressure from board members not to 'teach monkeys-to-man evolution.' He said that the board required teachers to watch a film critical of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution." The board requires "the reading of [a] four-paragraph statement that criticizes evolutionary theory. The statement notes that 'intelligent design' offers an alternative theory for the origin and evolution of life -- namely, that life in all of its complexity could not have arisen without the help of an intelligent hand." "Sworn testimony as well as two newspaper accounts note that [various] board members dismissed the separation of church and state as a myth, and initially favored equally teaching creationism and evolution." Things got ugly. Neighbors began to call this teacher an "atheist with . . . a lot of words added on to it." This teacher's main concern about importing an essentially religious program?: "Nine board members without degrees in science should not be dictating science curriculum."

Amen! "With God on our side...," I can hear Reb Dylan crooning now, with weary bitterness.

First Fruits First

2005-09-27T19:02:00.000-04:00

23 Elul. The L.A. Times Magazine had an intriguing story Sunday that inspires some optimism, about the growth of the green building movement in southern California, or at least Santa Monica, "No Longer Just Hippie, Green is Finally Chic." See also the related story, "Green Living: The Case Studies." I am gladdened to hear of the "Million Solar Roofs Initiative" now moving through the California State legislature. What is interesting is the source of pressure for ecologically-suitable housing: water districts, utility companies, the home-building industry. Growing numbers of so-called ordinary Americans, as well as an increasing number of professional societal managers, recognize the wisdom of ecologically-suitable planning and design.

Still, once again I am distressed to see "hippies" contrasted with "hard-headed businesspeople" and "realists" and "effective transformers of society." None of these mainstream "futurists" have yet proven that humans can live sustainably in a city of millions of people. If things weren't so broken, we would be looking for alternatives and solutions. Perhaps the hippies are us!

As the Sephardim say about weeks (que tenga una semana verde), may we experience a green new year!

Religious Bestiality (Thank God)

2005-09-21T22:05:00.000-04:00

17 Elul. A nice bit of coexistence for a change. A story at the Jewish Telegraph Agency website (I noticed it today) relates that members of the Academy of Evangelical Scientists and Ethicists and the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life presented plans on Monday to campaign together against congressional attempts to weaken the Endangered Species Act. A statement released by COEJL, signed by 36 rabbis and 28 Jewish scientists, said "recent legislative initiatives have distorted statistics, used unrealistic timetables, questioned the integrity of scientists, and couched themselves in pseudo-scientific language" ("Christians, Jews Want to Protect Animals"). As Congress is exploring making revisions to the Endangered Species Act this week, the coalition, known as the Noah Alliance, plans to use "the Bible and biology to mobilize faith communities nationwide to protect at-risk-species," in a series of "TV, print and radio ads to run in religious community media" unveiled Monday (Religious News Service story).

Interestingly, neither of the above-cited news stories mention that the Alliance wants a broader constituency, including "Protestant, and other religious community organizations, and individual people of faith," according to their website (http://www.noahalliance.org/about.htm). The website is worth checking out, by the way. I'm happy to learn that an organization exists called Eco-Justice Ministries.

Curiously, however, I can find nothing online regarding the Academy of Evangelical Scientists and Ethicists. In June, one Dr. Dorothy Boorse, a professor of biology at Gordon College, a Protestant liberal-arts college, testified before the House of Representatives' Committee on resources, at a hearing of on the impacts of environmental regulations on energy and mineral development (the Wildlands Project). She referred to the Academy in her words (her passionate remarks in defense of wildlands preservation can be found online in PDF format, at http://www.house.gov/apps/list/press/ii00_democrats/boorsetestimonyfinal.pdf, but you have to use a search engine to get there). Otherwise, no information on the group as far as I can see. The Noah Alliance website itself offers no address or other contact information for the Academy, nor does a website appear in the many links offered to other "religious groups" (the Alliance serves merely as a clearinghouse). Now I don't want to sound paranoid -- suspicious, maybe --but given the recent politics around creationism or intelligent design and other scientific/technological/political trends (nod to Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern), I'd like to know more about where these scientists and ethicists stand or what they are up to besides opposing the Endangered Species Act, even who they are. Does COEJL know? I hope so.

That Radical Big Government

2005-09-14T14:21:00.000-04:00

10 Elul. A posting Monday, "Rebuilding for Sustainability," on Worldchanging, a wonderful and important website, introduced readers to a treasure trove of information on rebuilding communities devastated by natural disasters for maximum sustainability. The useful and enlightened documentation, thousands of pages in PDF files, available to all, seek to help produce "a truly sustainable community [that] meets its current needs, while also protecting resources for future generations. Sustainability involves the interwoven elements of resource conservation, environmental protection, economic revitalization, and community dialog [sic]. The results are a community that protects its natural and social resources – a community with little pollution and waste, recycled and reusable energy sources, minimal exhausted space and urban sprawl, plentiful green areas, a strong economy, and heightened efficiency."

Who produces such visionary materials? The Federal Emergency Management Agency! No kidding. See the agency's Rebuilding for a More Sustainable Future webpage. (The voluminous documents were published in 2000, by the agency leadership then in the process of being ousted by the Bush administration in favor of political appointees.) Some of the language within is especially revealing and intriguing. Section 5 of the sustainability "operational framework," entitled "Eighteen Tools and Programs for Sustainability," presents a PowerPoint presentation available to be given to groups of local officials, businesspeople or citizens. The very first point: "Today in the United States, we spend tens of billions of dollars each year to rebuild communities after natural disasters. And the frequency and severity of these disasters is growing." In other words, the climate is changing, you idiots. Why is FEMA involved in the environmentally-responsible rebuilding of communities? Because "Federal, state and local governments have spent a disproportionate amount of time, money and resources recovering from repetitive disasters. [...] Repetitive loss and deterioration diminish our ability to effectively mitigate the risk in these disaster-prone areas. If a community has the willingness to improve their circumstances and become “sustainable” we want to encourage them to take that step." The language implies that these disasters have a quotient of human causation behind them.

The govt. presenter concludes the PowerPoint Introduction by giving a laudable and clear summation of responsible governance as defined by Enlightenment liberalism: "We are here today because the federal government can reap the benefits from this approach. It is prudent for the government to spend taxpayer dollars to the best possible benefit. You are here today because your community is recovering from a disaster, and over the long term, this approach can help you reap benefits. Most importantly, we all benefit when we help individuals to a better, safer, more secure future."

Now we know the truth. FEMA director Michael Brown was fired by Bush not for his agency's poor performance in the face of Hurricane Katrina, but because it acknowledged the reality of global warming, and promoted as solutions ecology and secular humanism!

May we face thousands of hurricanes, all conceptual and harmless; may they destroy the entire infrastructure holding back the birth of a new land under new skies!

Since today is the yahrzeit of R. Pinhas of Koretz, I dedicate this posting to his blessed memory. More than anyone, he wanted us to free ourselves from strictness, severity and fanaticism. Reb Pinhas, may your soul go up and up; intervene with the Guy on The Throne, please, and ask Him to send His messenger on his way asap.

Love and blessings!

More on What the Hurricane Unveiled

2005-09-08T09:11:00.000-04:00

4 Elul. I noticed that Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, Chancellor of JTS, in his comments to this week's parsha, Shof'tim, articulates the same critical view of government leadership as did Scheer, as I quoted earlier. Schorsch derives his disappointment and revulsion from the Torah. I'll quote the whole thing, which is unfortunately not yet online, as a public service:

Rabbi Hananiah, the Deputy High Priest, taught: "Pray for
the welfare of the government, for if people did not fear
it, they would swallow each other alive" (Pirkei Avot 3:2,
trans. Sim Shalom for Shabbat and Festivals, 264). His
sage counsel bespoke bitter experience. He was an eyewitness
to the misguided rebellion against Rome by Judea in 66 CE
with its catastrophic results: the taking of 97,000 prisoners
and of 1,100,000 lives and the razing of Jerusalem and its
Temple (Josephus, The Jewish War, VI line 420; VII line 1).
In time, the synagogue would act on his advice by introducing
a special prayer on Shabbat and festivals for the benefit of
the government in whose domain Jews happened to be living, a
version of which we offer to this day after the Torah reading
(Sim Shalom, 148).

The past two weeks, the words of R. Hananiah have been very
much on my mind as I watched in horror with all Americans
the unraveling of law and order in the murky waters of New
Orleans. Among the impoverished masses temporarily trapped
and abandoned, panic, desperation, greed, and lust converged
to erupt in repeated outbursts of raw violence. The
inattention and unpreparedness of the federal government for
a cataclysm long known to be waiting to happen exposed again
a largely stratified society, where individual freedom
continues to run roughshod over a fair measure of equality
for all. A viable democracy cannot survive on either pillar
alone. In the months ahead, investigative commissions without
number will seek to plot missteps, assign blame, and propose
initiatives. But how will politicians, for whom winning is
everything, cleanse themselves collectively of guilt where
no one is directly culpable? How do we spiritually atone for
the stain left on our body politic by Katrina's assault?

This week's parashah, which takes up the contours of good
governance, among other subjects, actually addresses the
issue with an exotic proposal. What is to be done with the
discovery of a slain corpse in an open field when no one
has any notion as to who might have committed the crime? In
a rural society with minimal security between villages,
such cases must have not been rare.

The Torah prescribes a ritual of atonement. The unpunished
murder of a stranger polluted the land. When Cain killed
his brother Abel in a fit of jealousy, God accused him: "What
have you done? Hark, your brother's blood cries out to Me
from the ground" (Genesis 4:10). Without justice being done,
Abel's innocent blood would defile the land. Deuteronomy
returns to the case. The earth must be cleansed of bloodguilt
in a public ceremony whose awesomeness might just induce the
culprit or an accomplice to step forward.

The elders and magistrates from the town nearest the corpse
are to take a heifer that has never been yoked or worked. At
a wadi that never runs dry, they are to break its neck from
the back (with a hatchet according to the Rabbis, thus not
a sacrifice) and wash their hands over it (rather than laying
them upon it, thus no scapegoat). At which point the elders
are required to declare publicly that they were not party to
the crime either as perpetrators or bystanders: "Our hands
did not shed this blood, nor did our eyes see it done" (21:7).

The Mishnah elaborates. Is it conceivable that we might
suspect a court of law of committing murder? Hardly. The
intent of the confession is to exonerate the elders of
facilitating the travesty by their indifference. "We did
not send him away without provisions nor let him go
unaccompanied" (Sotah 9:6). That is, we know the victim;
he approached us and we did help him. We do not bear even
an indirect responsibility for his death. Only then can
the elders complete this rite of purgation by beseeching
God to absolve "Your people Israel whom You redeemed and
do not let guilt for blood of the innocent remain among
Your people Israel" (21:8).

It is significant that the Torah adds the salient detail
that the land alongside the wadi was to be barren. Modern
commentators have scarcely improved on the Talmud's
explanation of this perplexing rite. What links its
components is precisely the theme of barrenness. God said,
"Let the neck of a heifer that has not yet given birth be
broken at a site which is wholly unfertile to atone for a
human being who was stripped of his right to have offspring"
(BT Sotah 46a). In short, all the parts contribute to the
message of the whole. Though not directly responsible, the
elders lament the loss of life with all its promise. The
crime has not only desecrated the image of God imprinted
in every human soul, but also diminished the capacity of
society to sustain itself. The ritual cleanses because it
forces conscience to the fore. Without remorse, there can
be no forgiveness.

I have often wondered if office holders should not be made
to undergo a rite of purification when the public suspects
their culpability. Not an investigation in which they exercise
their right to defend their actions, but a sacred setting in
which they might give voice to their feelings of remorse and
sense of fallibility. Their oath of office, taken on a Bible,
implies a duty to God as well as society. An occasional
confession in the house of worship of their choice might even
reinforce the sanctity of their public trust. It certainly
would give authority a more human face.

Of course, I must acknowledge that the scale of things
makes a difference. The biblical ideal fell victim to
the rampant violence that marked the years prior to the
uprising against Roman rule. The Mishnah records
laconically that as the number of murderers (i.e., political
zealots) roaming the countryside increased, the rite of
breaking a heifer's neck was abandoned (Sotah 9:9).
Circumstances had rendered a divine injunction unfeasible
and ineffectual. With blood flowing like water, the soil
of Judea became irremediably impure.

But the ideal remains valid even in contemporary America.
Office holders are accountable to God as well as to their
constituencies, otherwise they would not swear on Scripture.
And for God, humility has always been one of the qualifications
of leadership. Moses looms as the greatest of ancient Israel's
leaders because in part at least he was also the humblest of
men (Numbers 12:3).

Let us water the barren places with justice! Shabbat shalom!

When Elephants Fly

2005-09-07T12:58:00.000-04:00

3 Elul. We send out all our blessings, support and sympathy to our brothers and sisters whose lives and homes were shattered by Hurricane Katrina. A reminder, and we evidently need many, of one of the motivations for the self-assessment we will soon be undertaking in our annual process of teshuva. The facts increasingly indicate that Hurricane Katrina's destruction was not entirely of a natural order. An op-ed piece by Robert Scheer in the L.A. Times, "The Real Costs of a Culture of Greed," powerfully condemns the con job perpetrated by pro-"free market" ideologues, the anti-government assult conducted by Republicans (and Democrats) since the Reagan Revolution and which led to the country's abysmal governmental and administrative unpreparedness for this predicted and known disaster.

Hot and Humid, Baruch HaShem

2005-08-09T05:42:00.000-04:00

Shalom aleichem. Israel beyn hameitzarim. A trend my wife and I have noticed: beginning already on our flight over here (before the three weeks), women, mostly, wearing t-shirts bearing English-language statements of outright sexual content, such as the very good-looking young Israeli woman on the plane in a shirt reading "Go ahead and stare" across her good-looking chest (not that I was looking, of course). Other such slogans: in Ashkelon, young women wearing "Let's Play Now"; a little girl in a long-sleeve tie-dye reading "I'm beautiful girl." There were other examples that I cannot remember. This is in addition to the fact that, even in a place like Jerusalem, many young women walk around dressed, essentially, like prostitutes. Ah, the blessings of having a state of our own. My wife just saw a man with a "Hot Sex Now" t-shirt. I know the power of English has created a whole genre of cheap third-world clothing with things like incomprehensible slogans or combinations of words just so an Israeli or Palestinian or Somali, Thai, etc. can wear something with English written on it, which I see a lot here too, but the sexual content is rather startling. I have to assume the wearers or their friends or parents understand what the words mean, no?

what is going on here? The return of the repressed? have I been missing similar shirts in the U.S.?

More from the World's Navel

2005-08-04T04:51:00.000-04:00

More tidbits, for whatever they're worth:

A friend of a friend (etc.) who runs a restaurant refuses to get a kashrut certification. Why? Because the rabbinate forces everyone to buy certain vegetables, such as lettuce, from Gush Katif, though they cost some four times more than other sources. They would not permit any deviation from this policy. Obviously the policy is political, but it also hints that some officials, even rabbis, are earning kickbacks from this arrangement. This is Torah and this is its reward?!?

Furthermore, it turns out, perhaps not surprisingly, that according to Israeli law, only the chief rabbinate may give a heksher to a food establishment or company producing food products. Badatz (and others) can give supplementary certification. But there is no substitute for having a heksher from the rabbinate. All this religious monopoly stuff, of course, is the fallout from the pact made by Ben Gurion way back when between the forces of secular zionism and orthodoxy.

Finally, a friend who lives outside of Jerusalem was telling me of a nearby monastery, he thinks Franciscan, which has the area's most desirable mikve! They let Jews use it from 9:00 to 5:00 -- no kidding. It seems to be the favorite place of the local Bratslavers. The Hasidim think they are elevating the sparks of this Christian site by using it for their ritual baths. Meanwhile, the Franciscans encourage the Hasidim, and other Jews, to use their mikve because they think that they are thereby saving the souls of the Jewish bathers. Baruch Ha-Shem!

Uninformative Update from the Holy Land

2005-08-02T07:58:00.000-04:00

Incredible! I actually found an internet connection here in Israel and remembered my password at the same time. God be blessed.

So much to convey, but can't yet. Just a few moments to share.

Driving down the new Highway 6 on a tour bus (I refuse to get on the road in our rental car because of its environmentally-destructive costs), stopped at evening-time at one of the glorious new service stations. All over were Jews and Muslims praying their respective evening prayers. A beautiful sight.

Learned recently about the group of Tsohar rabbis. Tsohar, I assume, after the upper window built into Noah's ark and much-discussed in the midrash. They are a group of some 200 orthodox rabbis who are willing to perform weddings -- so far for no money -- for Israelis that are more flexible and suited to the couple, unlike the distant, black hatters who demand money on the side and come to mumble the ceremony that means nothing to anyone involved in the wedding.

I heard from a well-informed friend that Efrat (and other settlements) have enormous problems with their youth, with drugs -- the price of a highly regimented and ideologically-driven lifestyle lived in isolation.

I have no time to get into anything now. Thank you to those who have visited during my hiatus. I shall, iy''h, be back soon.

The other day I noticed, suddenly, and once again, in Mizmor le-David that we say before aleinu and the end of morning prayers, the line reading: "Natati ke-fi levavcha / for I [God] will give according to the state of your heart." Amen. May we always make ourselves worth receiving. Love and blessings,

The Elephant On the Room...

2005-06-24T10:46:00.000-04:00

17 Sivan 5765. The elephant on the room, not just in the room, is the fatal product of politics consorting with commerce, hardly a monopoly of the Republican party, though the balooning Republican government (federal outlays of $2.29 trillion) has given birth to a luxurious trough at which to slurp. A nice article in the Washington Post by Jeffrey Birnbaum focuses our attention on the United States' real growth industry: lobbying. Over 34,750 lobbyists, starting salaries for top aides at around $300,000, claiming nearly half of all congresspeople who return to the private sector.

These people, representing what Rousseau would call private interests, determine much of the country's policies. They prove the lie to Smith's contradictory understanding of an invisible hand that will providentially transform the mass of self-interested actions by individuals into the collective good.

This week, we relive the fatal mistake of the 10 scouts and the Israelites who listened to their private wills. When will we learn to listen to that side of ourselves that believes that God will enable us if only we proceed justly, righteously.

Thank the Holy One, I am going hiking for a week with my three oldest kids, to let them (and me) climb among the hills. Then, the whole family will be in Israel through August. I will try to continue writing from Israel, God willing, venting and fuming for the sake of the Lord. Stick around. Shabbat shalom! Happy, holy trails!

More Confusion, Sown Intentionally

2005-06-21T09:41:00.000-04:00

14 Sivan 5765. Once again things get ugly. Yet another Lebanese politician critical of Syria was murdered today. Baruch dayan ha-emet. In Iran, the hardliners are threatening those reformist-minded politicians who have dared assert that the recent election was flawed, if not fraudulent ("Iran's Leaders Warn Candidate Who Charged Vote Fraud," New York Times, Mon.).

Unfortunately, the same crisis that now faces Iran faces our country. Gore Vidal (not necessarily one of my favorites; but when he's right, he's right) penned a devastating piece in The Nation (June 27) discussing, among other things, the depressing difference between English parliamentary debate and congressional kowtowing to the president. He also dwells on the election fraud perpetrated in Ohio last November, referencing a report issued by Michigan Representative John Conyers. Remember Ohio, the critical swing state? Entitled Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, the report is must reading for anyone who cares about this country (accessible in PDF format at Conyers' website). We've heard rumors and even read the few stories (including an important one by Christopher Hitchens) that discussed events in Ohio on and before election day. But just check out the executive summary (pp. 4-7; the whole report reaches 102 pages) of Conyers' report. Some excerpts:

"[W]e find that there were massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio. In many cases these irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio."

* misallocation of voting machines, leading to unprecedented long oines in predominantly minority and Democratic areas

* widespread instances of intimidation and misinformation violating the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1968, Equal Protection, Due Process and the Ohio right to vote (none investigated by Blackwell)

* improper purging and other registration errors by election officials (in Cuyahoga county alone it is likely that over 10,000 citizens lost their right to vote as a result of official registration errors

* 93,000 spoiled ballots where no vote was cast for president, the vast majority never inspected (two precincts in Montgomery Country had an undervote of more than 25% -- nearly 6,000 voters who stood in line but purportedly declined to vote for president

* numerous, significant unexplained irregularities (in Mahoning county at least 25 electronic machines transferred an unknown number of Kerry votes to the Bush column; Warren County locked out public observers from vote counting citing an FBI warning about a potential terrorist threat, yet the FBI states that it issued no such warning; In Butler county a down ballot and underfunded Democratic State Supreme Court candidate implausibly received more votes than the best funded Democratic Presidential candidate in history; in Cyahoga county, poll worker error may have led to little known third-party candidates receiving twenty times more votes than such candidates had ever received in otherwise reliably Democratic leaning areas; in Miami county, voter turnout was an improbable and highly suspect 98.55 percent, and after 100% of the precincts were reoprted, an additional 19,000 extra votes were recorded for President Bush.

* counties which did not conduct a full hand count after the 3% hand and machine counts did not match; counties which prevented witnesses for candidates from observing the various aspects of the recount

* the voting computer company Triad "has essentially admitted" that it engaged in a course of behavior during the recount in numerous counties to provie "cheat sheets" to those counting the ballots (informing election officials how many votes they should find for each candidate, and how many over and under votes they should calculate to match the machine count, in that way avoiding a full county-wide hand recount mandate by state law)

And there is much more, particularly in terms of Blackwell's actions and decisions. This is serious stuff, folks. This is a congressional representative detailing incredibly troubling behavior, often on the part of Republicans, found after investigation by the Democratic party staff. One or two of these events might not add up to much, but so much?!? I think that the outing of "Deep Throat" -- former FBI staffer -- is a hint that the Watergate-era mafia-like behavior of the Republican party is either still with us or has returned. Florida in 2000 was a foreshadowing. This is not kosher or moral politics; it is thuggish, fascist. The bravery of a whistleblower like Mark Felt ("Deep Throat"), even if complicated by other human and political motivations, we are reminded is needed today. Who among Ohio Republican party staff and operatives will be bold and honest enough to step forward and confess for the good of the country and people to Republican plans, strategies, options, even if applied spontaneously and creatively on election day -- i.e., a bag of dirty tricks?

It makes me wonder. I have lots of problems with the Demoratic party, especially the D.C. branch of it. And, yes, there are and certainly have been corrupt Democrats in and since the Cold War period, even those who engaged in criminal activity. But I can't think of anything similar to the repeated Republican criminality, whether domestically or abroad -- so frequently connected to Republican ideological goals.

Page 5 of the Conyers report features a photo of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and a quote: "True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice." Amen. Rev. King here expresses the attitude of the nevi'im, the biblical prophets. Justice is a quality of, prerequisite for divine blessing and favor (one could add truth as well); a sign that we are getting closer to the divine ideal and plan for us, a means for us to do so.

Do we care enough to speak, to act?

Confusing Love and Hate

2005-06-19T20:43:00.000-04:00

12 Sivan 5765. Interesting review in The Nation of a new book on the Vietnam War by Gareth Porter. Porter is said to essentially rewrite in part the history of the Cold War, documenting how U.S. national security experts scared the public by portraying a monolithic and powerful worldwide Communist conspiracy, all the while asserting behind Washington's closed doors that the Soviets were no match for U.S. military force. It was this arrogance and belief in a "strategic asymmetry" in the U.S.'s favor, argues Porter, that determined U.S. intervention in Vietnam, the idea that the U.S. had nothing to lose, and not the oft-repeated fear of Communist expansion. In other words, nothing has changed in the last few decades.

It is this same self-willed belief in near-total U.S. supremacy and reckless optimism regarding the possibilities of shaping the world as we wish that leads the U.S. to befriend state terrorists like Uzbekistan and the Sudan in the name of geopolitics and short-term gains (on this see the New York Times story from Saturday, "Uzbek Ministries in Crackdown Received U.S. Aid"). Porter's above-mentioned book also delves into the power jockeying in Washington that winds up creating policy, with the president frequently bested by the seemingly permanent and definitely unelected national security leadership. Here, too, the current currying of the Sudan reveals that little has been learned ("C.I.A. Role in Visit of Sudan Intelligence Chief Causes Dispute Within Administration," NY Times story, Saturday).

One (C.I.A.?) official is quoted as saying: "For years the C.I.A. was forbidden to meet with anyone who didn't qualify for choirboy. After 9/11 it became clear that you have to talk to bad guys from bad neighborhoods to fight terrorism." But the first part of this statement is just an outright lie and was rarely enforced even if it was supposed policy, while the ends-justifies-the-means "war against terrorism" has replaced the fight against global Communism as our favorite excuse to do whatever we want in order to control the world in our interest, at the cost of ignoring the needs and interests of others. Again, are these lies aimed at convincing others or ourselves?
Adam Shatz's eye-opening eulogy in The Nation for murdered Lebanese journalist Samir Kassir shows that Kassir understood this lesson precisely. Nice to learn in its own right is the fact that Kassir evidently crusaded in the late 1990s against French Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy and helped prevent the similarly-inclined Institute for Historical Review from holding a conference in Beirut. While he published the anti-Assad criticisms of Syrian dissidents, he also demanded that "the liberal West must also be liberal in the Middle East: It must abandon its support for dictatorships, even those considered as moderates and allies. Look what happened with Libya: Once Muammar al-Qadaffi renounced his nuclear ambitions, Bush and Blair acclaimed him. What a message when you are calling for democracy in the Middle East!... Most importantly, the West must accept that the strategic importance of the Middle East must not justify denying its peoples the rights to self-determination."

Reviewing Gareth Porter on Vietnam, Andrew Bacevich notes how "[t]hese national security chieftains," "when hawking their wares, [...] speak movingly of their commitment to freedom, democracy and human rights. When they step away from the podium and the TV cameras, values take a back seat to considerations of power." To say the least. I am struck by how often I am hearing the same confusion of love and hate -- selflessness for the sake of others versus contempt for them -- in different registers these days. Russell Shorto's evocative piece on Christian anti-Gay Marriage activists in Sunday's NY Times Magazine reminds us, if we had any doubts, that their opposition stems decidedly from their hatred of homosexuality as voluntary sinfulness, if not disease. The "saving" of homosexuals and of the country from them that these activists proclaim as their motivation seems rather imaginary; it comes across pretty clearly as hate.

Perhaps this is what God's instructions to Aaron mean in this past shabbat's parsha: you can't light a flame that is intended to illuminate others if you yourself are not elevated to at least basic, minimal standards of truthfulness, especially regarding yourself and your own intentions and actions.

Finally, though I can't vouch for my segue here, I have been fruitfully reading Ellen Bernstein's new book, The Splendor of Creation. Her meditations on the biblical creation account of the world's species -- trees which give forth seeds of their own kind, etc. -- made me wonder why all these "believers" who hate evolution and think God created all the species exactly as they are do not see the extinction of one (or hundreds) of God's species as a sin of earth-shattering proportions?! If we have caused even one such collective death, have we not tampered sinfully with God's plan and planet?!

As always, yours truly...

Smoking Gun at the Justice Department? and Other Updates

2005-06-16T13:01:00.000-04:00

9 Sivan 5765. No surprise here. The New York Times has a story today showing that officials at the Justice Department intervened in the government's case against the tobacco industry to significantly reduce the monetary penalty sought from $130 to $10 billion.

"[N]ewly disclosed documents make clear that the decision was made after weeks of tumult in the department and accusations from lawyers on the tobacco team that [Associate Attorney General] Mr. [Robert D.] McCallum and other political appointees had effectively undermined their case. Mr. McCallum, No. 3 at the department, is a close friend of President Bush from their days as Skull & Bones members at Yale, and he was also a partner at an Atlanta law firm, Alston & Bird, that has done legal work for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, part of Reynolds American, a defendant in the case."

Nothing could better exemplify contemporary politics in the United States.

But the tide may be turning, God willing. Yesterday, according to an article in the Washington Post, the House of Representatives voted to "curtail the FBI's ability to seize library and bookstore records for terrorism investigations." Bush, of course, has threatened to veto any curbs placed on the Patriot Act. But we'll see what happens. On another front, congressional Republicans seem to be acknowledging that Bush's sales pitch for privatizing Social Security has bombed, according to the Washington Post, and are seeking an exit strategy.

Perhaps some hope remains that the American people refuse to have their lives and welfare totally corporatized.

Now if we could only find an exit strategy for Iraq, globalization, anti-global warming, etc. Oh, yes, the White House official who rewrote government literature to minimize global warming resigned two days after being outed by the press (doing its job for a change). A White House spokesperson of course "said the decision was unrelated to revelations about the documents" (story in the New York Times). Sure. Meanwhile, documents leaked from the G8 summit show that "the US is unwilling to put its name to anything that says the world is getting hotter," according to a story in The Guardian. The Bush administration evidently refuses to acknowledge that "our world is warming," that the problem is "urgent," that the G8 nations have "a responsibility to show leadership" and "cannot afford to postpone action" -- all phrases that have square brackets placed around them in a draft statement to indicate lack of agreement! As the executive director of Greenpeace noted, the White House's head-in-the-sand approach is the equivalent of "claiming al-Qaida never existed."

Finally, between last shabat and shavu'ot I forgot to report an interesting item that caught my attention. It turns out that the other day, when Texas Gov. Rick Perry signed measures to restrict abortion and prohibit same-sex marriage at an evangelical school, the controversial event's closing benediction was given by "Rabbi" David Stone of the Beth Yeshua Messianic Jewish Congregation in Fort Worth. Is this a not-so-subtle notice to Jews that Evangelicans will not respect Jews' "right to privacy" (i.e., the right to be free from religious proselytization), a right not recognized as constitutional by many conservative judicial scholars? It also turns out that rapper 50 Shekel -- Aviad Cohen -- has recently embraced Jews for Jesus and "attributed [his] transformation to listening to evangelical Christian radio and to seeing Mel Gibson's film 'The Passion of the Christ' (story in The Forward).

So much for David Klinghoffer's anti-liberal diatribe in The Forward last week arguing that Jews act unfairly when excluding Jewish believers in Jesus from their communities. Not surprisingly, his column is reprinted at jewsforjesus.com. "Liberal" Jews may not believe every word of the Torah was given to Moses by God at Mt. Sinai, which Klinghoffer (now that he's discovered the Talmud and Rambam) wants to paint as a transgression of equal significance to believing in Jesus as messiah, but most of them are not seeking to undo Judaism with the same vengeance or purpose as are Christ-followers (and have for some two thousand years). Seeking change is one thing; denying the validity of an entire religion and seeking to woo all of its followers to a different and "better" religion quite another. Politics certainly does make strange bedfellows...

And speaking of strange bedfellows, another sickening story I meant to post before the holiday swept me away comes from The Nation. Author Ayelish McGarvey reveals, yet again, the seeming inevitability of the return of the repressed, this time in the case of evangelical ob-gyn and Bush medical advisor Dr. David Hager. While purporting to guide women regarding their own health, by means of a good old Christian paternalism and anti-contraceptive outlook (as a member of an FDA advisory panel he helped convince the agency not to permit over-the-counter sales of emergency contraception, so-called Plan B), it turns out he was sexually abusing his own wife for years (who since divorced him). You must read this story if you want to know the price to be paid for biblical patriarchy and religiously-inspired abstinance of awareness. Other than the suffering he caused his own wife, the worst part is that Hager is almost definitely going to be re-appointed to the advisory panel by Bush on June 30th.

Dear God, grant us enough self-knowledge to avoid thinking that pious ignorance is bliss!

Milking Torah for All it's Worth

2005-06-10T10:31:00.000-04:00

3 Sivan 5765. While the elephant continues trampling and destroying the forest in which it lives (the same one we call home), many of us will be, thank God, preparing this shabbos for our shavu'ot reunion at Mt. Sinai.

Perhaps the flashing noises and roaring colors will wake up Jewish Republicans this year. Perhaps as well it is anticipation of the receipt of heavenly wisdom that has given Howard Dean the courage to speak the truth regarding Republicans. Among other things, Dean has said that "he hates 'Republicans and everything they stand for,' that many of them 'have never made an honest living in the [sic] lives,' that House Majority Leader Tom DeLay 'ought to go back to Houston where he can serve his jail sentence' and -- most recently -- that Republicans are 'pretty much a white Christian party'" (recounted in a Washington Post story from today). Honors also to the National Council of Jewish Women, whose president, Phyllis Snyder, "said that given [just-confirmed judge Janice] Rogers’ views opposing abortion rights, affirmative action and anti-discrimination laws, the confirmation is a 'blow to justice we will long regret'" (JTA Breaking News item today).

Circling the mountain even more closely, writing today in Haaretz, Yair Sheleg meditates on the flourishing of tikkun leyl shavu'ot ceremonies in Israel, many aimed at the secular population, and what all this might mean. More importantly, however, according to another Haaretz story written with Shavu'ot in mind, Israeli cows produce more milk than their counterparts in Holland, Spain, Australia, the U.S. and New Zealand. Clearly a reflection of the fact that even Jewish cows have a neshama yeteyra...

Finally, for those who find the section of this week's parsha, Naso, dealing with the sotah, the adulterous woman, difficult, I highly recommend taking a glance at Reb Mark Kirschbaum's fascinating elucidation of a few radical hasidic commentaries on it.

Have a happy Shavu'ot, and a peaceful and blessed shabbat! See you at the foot of the mountain...

The Elephant Sleeps While Standing

2005-06-08T22:09:00.000-04:00

30 Iyar 5765. My but what a busy day it's been. The elephant appears to be standing but those in the know realize it is actually sleeping. Just a grab bag of recent news:

From today's New York Times, a story on numerous fantasy weapons systems that the military desires but which rarely work and for which you and I pay dearly (in reduced budgets for "extraneous" things like education or health). If the consequences weren't so tragic the tales would seem more suited to a Monty Python skit. A single example: "Nine years ago, the Navy set out to build a new guided missile for its 21st-century ships. Fiascoes followed. In a test firing, the missile melted its on-board guidance system. 'Incredibly,' an Army review said, 'the Navy ruled the test a success.' Recently, the Navy rewrote the contract and put out another one, with little to show for the money it already spent. The bill has come to almost $400 million, five times the original budget." I don't know why people refer to it as the military-industrial complex; it seems like a laughable simpleton to me.

Two seemingly unrelated news stories in fact speak to the ideologically-motivated willful suspension of disbelief within the Republican party (which has been foisted on the rest of us). Another New York Times article reveals how a White House official rewrote "government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming." The official in question is Philip A. Cooney, chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Before joining the White House staff in 2001, Cooney served as "the 'climate team leader' and a lobbyist at the American Petroleum Institute, the largest trade group representing the interests of the oil industry. A lawyer with a bachelor's degree in economics, he has no scientific training." At API, that is, he helped lead the organization's (and industry's) opposition to the Kyoto Accords and any regulatory measures to address global warming. This is precisely the kind of "bureaucrat" that Republicans supposedly hate, yet here he is, "remov[ing] or adjust[ing] descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved," though as a lawyer with a BA in economics "he has no scientific training"! But of course, only we "reality-based" fools would think that a problem.

"Unrelated" story number two: the English paper Guardian Unlimited reported today that "Bush's decision not to sign the United States up to the Kyoto global warming treaty was partly a result of pressure from ExxonMobil, the world's most powerful oil company, and other industries, according to US State Department papers." Bush "'rejected Kyoto in part based on input from you [the Global Climate Coalition],' says one briefing note before [under-secretary of state] Ms [Paula] Dobriansky's meeting with the GCC, the main anti-Kyoto US industry group, which was dominated by Exxon. The papers further state that the White House considered Exxon "among the companies most actively and prominently opposed to binding approaches [like Kyoto] to cut greenhouse gas emissions." Meanwhile, company spokespersons lied blatantly and publicly that there had been no influence whatsoever flowing to the White House. Business as usual...

Finally, according to a piece in The Forward, the Republican congressmen who refused to permit an external investigation of the religious troubles at the Air Force Academy justified their actions, as could have been predicted, by lamenting "how those of the dominant religion felt they couldn't express their religious views because of political correctness," in the words of one Democrat. Republicans feel that attempts to address the concerns of Jewish cadets and others, such as those of Congressman Israel, would "quash the religious expression of millions of service personnel." In other words, "zealous," proselytizing Christians have a "constitutional right" to voice their religious beliefs, which include the need to convert everyone else to their religion! This is nothing but the logic of the Evangelican party, that Christians have a "legal right" to missionize because it is part of their religion, the religion of the founding fathers. Better, I suppose, to have such noxious views aired publicly and for the record sooner rather than later. Yidden, wake up!

There's more bad news to report -- the confirmation of yet another extreme conservative judge, the Bush administration's support for Saudi Arabia's joining the World Trade Organization (!?!) -- but who has the stomach?

Psalm 34: "To David, when he changed his demeanor (or feigned madness, etc.) before Avimelekh..." According to the commentary attributed to the disciples of the Ba'al Shem Tov (Asifat Amarim), the verse alludes to the manner in which tzadikim who truly serve God are filled with regret and lowliness of spirit, to the point that it seems to them constantly that they distance themselves from holiness. Therefore, however, they strengthen themselves ever more to serve God. None of this can be said of evildoers and dealers in falsehood, who always consider their own path the only one, the only righteous one. Ha-mevinim yavinu. Nuff said.

May tomorrow be a better day...

The Elephant Searches out the Lowest Common Denominator

2005-06-07T10:16:00.000-04:00

29 Iyar 5765. A story in the latest issue of In These Times on Bush's recent visit to our ally the former Soviet republic of Georgia notes that "20 of the top 25 U.S. arms clients in the developing world in 2003 were either undemocratic regimes or governments deemed by the U.S. State Department to have committed major human rights abuses." This is the same problem facing us in Uzbekistan and the Sudan (for an example see the latest report from Human Rights Watch about the Uzbeki massacre of protestors). Haven't we learned yet that the short-term gains, in tracking and neutralizing "terrorists," for instance, pale in comparison to the long-term stifling and murdering of democracy that we help underwrite? I guess not.

(By the way, the author of the above story is Frida Berrigan, a Senior Research Associate with the Arms Trade Resource Center of the World Policy Institute, and daughter of peace activist Phillip Berrigan. She has clearly learned well and is a voice worth following.)

Such behavior abroad is neuther coincidental nor ancillary to Republican goals domestically. Republicans dream of a United States that, like its authoritarian allies, controls labor without challenge, permits free speech only when it is innocuous or convenient and rules without concern for morals. Another In These Times piece, by Jamie Daniel (not yet online), delineates the ideological indifference of the Bush administration to worker health and safety. Based on a different Human Rights Watch report, Daniel discusses the increasing rates of traumatic and longer term injury for workers in the meat and poultry industry as the sector pushes for greater efficiency and profit margins with the anti-regulatory collusion of the Bush administration. He reminds us that one of the first actions taken by this administration last term was the repeal of the Occupational Safety and Helath Administration (OSHA) Ergonomics Standard adopted by the Clinton Administration. Last February, the White House proposed freezing the budget for OSHA standard enforcement programs, "even though OSHA is already so inadequately funded that its staff will only be able to inspect any particular plant an average of once a century." For Fiscal Year 2006, the Bush budget proposes "to eliminate all funding for union-run worker health and safety training programs." Additionally, the administration "has shut down the development of new workplace rules on exposure to cancer-causing substances, reactive chemicals and infectious diseases such as tuberculosis. It has refused to issue a rule requiring employers to pay for the sort of personal protective equipment that could prevent thousands of injuries to the mostly immigrant, mostly low-wage workforce in industries like meat processing."

Does the Republican party care about the quality of life of U.S. citizens? No. Profit über alles! The single most glaring blind spot of conservative ideology is its dark view of human nature, a view often religiously tinged with notions of sin, yet its continued trust that humans and human institutions (such as corporations) will act responsibly and humanely if left to their own devices. Why does the Torah repeatedly command us to act with kindness, generosity and a recognition of the humanity of others? Because it will not be done if left to the Republican mantra of "voluntary compliance." Is it possible that the Evangelican party's worship of "voluntary compliance" stems from New Testament antinomianism? Here "government" becomes the equivalent of "The Law" (of the Old Testament), which only brings death.

The sadness and irony of it all. Phillip Berrigan, alav ha-shalom/peace be upon him, used to quote Matthew 5:48, which urges exactly that which the classical Rabbis urged: "be compassionate, as your God is compassionate." Amen!

The Talmud (BT Berakhot 7a) relates the following strange and relevant tale (in paraphrase): "Rabbi Yishmael son of Elisha said: 'Once I entered the Holy of Holies to light the incense and I saw Akatriel Yah Lord of hosts sitting on the chair of mercy, great and lofty. He said to me: "Yishmael my son, bless me!" I said before him: "Master of the universe, may it be your will that your mercy should conquer your anger and that your mercy should push aside your strictness and that you should treat your children with the quality of mercy and deal with them [generously,] not by the strict requirements of the law." He nodded at me with his head.'"

What a tale! Two things stand out (at least). First, Rabbi Yishmael addresses the fact that both the attributes of severity and mercy stem from the same heavenly source, are but different faces of the divine (the Lord of Hosts, yet sitting on a chair of mercy). He therefore encourages God to allow the merciful and compassionate qualities to override their contraries. He specifically alludes to God's law as a technical and in some ways inhuman institution, begging that we be judged by a more humane standard. Second, the entire scenario must strike us as slightly absurd, God asking a person for a blessing!? But this is key; it is the saving grace needed by any religious system (pro)claiming a "perfect" deity, a recognition of the bi-directionality of divine-human affairs. God, the divine forces, requires human input, human effort, human good will, human corroboration. Why? Because while divine law may be impossible to fulfil, it is the human face and voice of the beseecher that reminds God of the purpose of the entire edifice.

We have a great deal to learn if we are to bless God like Rabbi Yishmael. We must act with compassion toward others. We must see human laws as making possible knowledge of and attainment of proper behavior, and therefore making possible an understanding of what is merciful. Relying on voluntary compassion is meaningless if the minimum requirements of compassion are not spelled out and expected by the law. Finally, if we are to be respected by God or government or "The Law," we must be able to give it our blessing, we must be able to see that it is created for us, for our benefit. If authority abuses its authority, we have the right to withhold our blessing. But those who do not respect the basic premise of government, for instance, cannot be expected to know how to use regulation wisely, nor will their calls for "voluntary compliance" carry any weight, as they have already evacuated the meaning of "compliance."

God in and through Nature

2005-06-03T11:33:00.000-04:00

25 Iyar 5765. The home-wrecking mudslides in Laguna Beach helped unearth a perhaps unintended matter, the real estate driven transformation of the town. A story in the Los Angeles Times reports on how the environmental calamity has re-focused attention on building excess, insensitive over-development, "forcing out the storybook village atmosphere," where "Craftsman cottages and simple stucco houses are giving way to palatial homes of blocky contemporary design and lavish developments" that "appeal to young millionaires and professionals."

The same commercial and societal pressures operate to one degree or other throughout the country, perhaps world. Are we aware of the costs? Peter Canby has a brilliant and fascinating review in the March Harper's ("The Cat Came Back: Alpha Predators and the New Wilderness") of some new books about the ever-changing relationship between human and non-human worlds in places such as Boulder, Colorado and the always advancing exurbs. Here deer thrive beyond "natural" levels because all of the alpha predators (bears, pumas, wolves, and the like) have been eliminated by humans (the real alpha predator). The populous deer adapt to the "safe" environments of manicured exurban and make themselves at home. In response, the few remaining alpha predators (pumas around Boulder, for instance) and those re-introduced to the wild (or what little of it remains) have adapted and begun enroaching on these deer-heavy areas of "human settlement," with increasingly tragic consequences for local dogs and joggers. These are tales of what happens when the nature humans desire breeds its own adaptive "self-interest," one conflicting with human intentions. (One of the book's discussed by Canby is David Baron, The Beast in the Garden: A Modern Parable of Man and Nature.)

Entering Bamidbar, the desert, as we are this week, the book R. Shlomo Carlebach called "the Book of mistakes," let us remember to keep close watch on, to take excellent care for our surroundings, which are inevitably involved if we make mistakes (as we learned in the tokhekha of last week's parsha), also enduring the suffering and consequences. Of course, the reverse is true as well; we are inescapably part of natural processes and cycles. The oracular pillars of cloud and fire still offer to lead us as always, we just have to recognize their contemporary forms in time.

Have a peaceful and blessed Shabbos!

A Short Break

2005-05-31T11:03:00.000-04:00

21 Iyar 5765. Back from a short break living life. I increasingly understand the verse from Psalms, "Yom yom ya'amas lanu." Every day God fills our proverbial sacks, burdens/blesses us with things to do; people and things needing care, attention, repair; occupations and pre-occupations. Baruch Ha-Shem!

The elephant advances, crushing all in its path...

2005-05-26T21:47:00.000-04:00

18 Iyar 5765. The elephant advances, crushing all in its path...

Jim VandeHei offers a disturbing analysis of the rise of the imperial presidency under Bush and the Republicans, with a concomitant bowing of congressional power, independence and courage. "The common theme," writes VandeHei, "is to consolidate influence in a small circle of Republicans and to marginalilze dissenting voices that would try to impede a conservative agenda."

"House Republicans [...] discarded the seniority system and limited the independence and prerogatives of committee chairmen. The result is a chamber effectively run by a handful of GOP leaders. At the White House, Bush has tightened the reins on Cabinet members, centralizing the most important decisions among a tight group of West Wing loyalists. With the strong encouragement of Vice President Cheney, he has also moved to expand the amount of executive branch information that can be legally shielded from Congress, the courts and the public."

"The Republican bid to ban the filibustering of judges made it easier for Bush to appoint conservatives to the Supreme Court and holds open the threat of future attempts to erode the most powerful tool available to the minority party in Congress."

"Those [Republican representatives] who cross party leaders often pay a price, usually by losing positions of influence. Most recently, Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.) lost the chairmanship of the Veterans Affairs Committee after clashing with party leaders over spending and other issues. At the same time, loyalists are rewarded. The result, writes American University's James A. Thurber in a forthcoming book on Congress and the presidency, is less powerful representatives facing increased pressure to carry out their leadership's wishes."

Bush "has constructed what many scholars said amounts to a virtual oligarchy with Cheney, Karl Rove, Andrew H. Card Jr., Joshua Bolton [Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) -- any relation to John Bolton?], himself and only a few others setting policy, while he looks to Congress and the agencies mostly to promote and institute his policies. [...] Bush has demanded similar loyalty from GOP lawmakers -- and received it. Republicans have voted with the president, on average, about nine out of 10 times. Critics and some scholars charge that the Congress now seldom performs its constitutional duty of providing oversight of the executive branch through tough investigations and hearings."

The increasingly secret proceedings of the administration converge with its way of conducting itself heedless of the law: propaganda packaged as independent news, hired plants posing as reporters, town meetings consisting of 21st-century Potemkin villages, attacks on news stories that accurately report problems. Welcome to Democracy in America...

What does Republican unity aim for? A story from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that was on the organization's website this morning (and has since disappeared), reported that "Republicans in Congress defeated two measures to end proselytizing at the Air Force Academy." Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), member of the House's Armed Services Committee, introduced a resolution to ban coercive proselytizing, which was rejected by the committee last week. He then tried to get the Rules Committee "to refer a watered-down version to the full House, directing the Air Force to investigate the problem and come up with solutions. That dies as well." Representative Israel stated in response: "Many of my colleagues appeared to believe that the problem is not people who are coercing one religious view over another, the problem is the people who are complaining about being coerced." For a list of the Republicans on the committee, see the following govt. website; these are some of our Christian friends.

Today, at least, "A Texas judge said [...] that the treasurer of a political fundraising committee organized by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) violated the state's election law by failing to report $684,507 in contributions from corporations and other donors in 2002. The civil court ruling is the first to sustain complaints by Democrats that improper acts underpinned a Texas political victory engineered by DeLay and his advisors, which had the effect of cementing Republican control of the House of Representatives" (Washington Post story). Ah, more good ole Republican democracy in America.

What else is all the administration secrecy hiding? A Sydney Schanberg story in this week's The Village Voice alerted me to an article Ken Silverstein wrote for the L.A. Times in late April reporting on the mostly secret ties the Bush administration has with the regime in Khartoum (published on the Global Policy Forum website -- the L.A. Times story is already archived and I'd have to pay for it; short term virtual memory strikes again)! You know, the people responsible for the genocide or near-genocide currently unfolding in Darfur, the Sudan?!? Who would have guessed that Sudan is "emerging as a surprisingly valuable ally of the CIA," sharing intelligence on "terrorists," detaining al Qaeda suspects for interrogation by U.S. agents, etc. In April "the CIA sent an executive jet [to L.A.] to ferry the chief of Sudan's intelligence agency to Washington for secret meetings sealing Khartoum's sensitive and previously veiled partnership with the administration, U.S. government officials confirmed."

Read the story. It is shocking. More geopolitical games, more losers all around. Is it possible "strategic" interests are keeping the U.S. from really acting to prevent the Sudanese massacres and rapes of thousands, it's ethnic cleansing campaign against Black-African "animists"?! Stay tuned...

Im bechukotay teylechu... If you should go in my ways...

On Judgement

2005-05-24T21:20:00.000-04:00

16 Iyar 5765. Well, Senate moderates came up with a compromise regarding votes on Bush's judicial nominees. The one up for consideration now for the federal appellate court, Priscilla Owen, is not one of two hitherto rejected ones that Senate Democrats continue to oppose absolutely. In other words, she's not so noxious as to have been automatically ruled out for consideration. What is her record like? Just see the reports offered by Independent Judiciary. Here are some excerpts:

* Owen has already been twice nominated and twice rejected by previous Congresses.
* The Minneapolis Star Tribune noted that "Even her conservative colleagues have commented on her habit of twisting the law to fit her hyperconservative political views." The San Antonio News Express found that "her record demonstrates a results-oriented streak that belies supporters' claims that she strictly follows the law." The Houston Chronicle concluded that she is "less interested in impartially interpreting the law than in pushing an agenda."
* Justice Owen has taken campaign contributions from law firms and corporations, including Enron and Halliburton, and then, without recusing herself, ruled in their favor when their cases came before her.
* Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, when he was one of Justice Owen's colleagues on the Texas Supreme Court, criticized Justice Owen [...] for attempting to re-write the parental notification statute [for minors desiring an abortion], calling her dissent "an unconscionable act of judicial activism."

I haven't even gotten into the substance of her "hyperconservative" views. (Though, as Senator Harry Reid said, "As a member of the Texas Supreme Court, Justice Owen has consistently ruled for big business and corporate interests in cases against workers and consumers.") Once again we are alerted to Bush's agenda and the real meaning behind his statement to reporters that "I've been consistent with judicial philosophy in my picks as well as the character of the people I pick." That's exactly the problem!

Hashiva shofteynu ki-va-rishona!

Still Above Ground...

2005-05-22T21:32:00.000-04:00

14 Iyar 5765. Just to show that I am aware that I constantly generalize about evangelicals and bash "religion," I thought I would convey a few news items showing that even I can be inspired by the undemolished margins, persistently sprouting questioners, conscientious dissenters and just good old moral people.

Today's New York Times had a moving report about a mass held at St. Rose of Lima Church in Rockaway for a still unidentified 3-year-old boy found dead on the beach, rolled up in a sheet of Disney characters. The corpse's broken ribs and vertebrae attest to a tragic end, if not brief life. The parish pastor of this Catholic church, Rev. Peter Gillen, spoke beautifully about this anonymous mystery to a crowd of some 200 people, all strangers to the unknown little martyr. Though a utilitarian element in part motivates the public funerals for abandoned children -- encouraging troubled mothers to call the sponsoring group, the Children of Hope Foundation, for counseling or even to offer their babies for adoption -- such rituals demonstrate the willingness of religion to do that which the marketplace might be inefficient, wasteful, even pointless. French theorist George Battaile even speculated that the whole point of religion might be to sacrifice time and money to the sacred, to "waste" it, to remove it from circulation, from the hands of a world which can only appreciate things if they are "useful." This is why some of the most highly considered mitzvot are those for which no reward can be expected. The Times story brought tears to my eyes. As we have learned, one who kills a single individual, it is as if killing the entire world...

Another piece in today's Times depicts the protests from students and faculty that attended Bush's speaking engagement at Calvin College in western Michigan, a Protestant institution. Socially more progressive than many evangelical schools, faculty there estimate that 20% of the student body opposed Bush in the last election. About 100 faculty members signed a letter to a local paper, stating that "As Christians, we are called to be peacemakers and to initiate war only as a last resort. We believe your administration has launched an unjust and unjustified war in Iraq." The signers to the letter further declared that "the policies and actions of [the Bush] administration, both domestically and internationally over the past four years, violate many deeply held principles of Calvin College." Amen to that!

Finally, a cute story in the LA Times, "Crusading iPoders for Christ," shows that many young evangelical college students think very well for themselves, thank you. (The piece presents a nice counterpoint to today's NY Times front page story about the rise of evangelicals on ivy league campuses.) "The Bible is full of contradictions," [one student] said when asked about the evangelical prohibition against ordaining women. "In 1 Timothy, women are told to submit to men, but in Acts, women teach men. God changes his mind all the time." The same young woman held that "If Jesus came back, he would be just as liberal for today as he was for his time."

There's still enough hope to at least start the work week. I hope it goes well for all of us!

Beginning Yet Again...

2005-05-21T22:52:00.000-04:00

13 Iyar 5765. Shavu'a tov! I just had a beautiful shabbos, despite my giving in this afternoon and reading the papers. Finally got around to davening with our soon-to-be-bar mitzva son at the shul's "teen" minyan. While later watching our youngest I made it through at least two paragraphs of the No'am Elimelech on B'Har. I don't want to go into it now but his comments on Lev. 25:25 ("Should your brother be in straits and sell his [land] holdings...") leaped out at me as the perfect retort to the behavior and worldview of our Colorado Springs evangelicals (see previous posts). Absolutely amazing how precisely his thoughts touch on what I was saying in my last post, though, of course, nothing is coincidental. Got through a mishna of Pirkei Avot with my oldest son and daughter in the afternoon. Before minha I even waded -- with the usual exhaustion- and ignorance-induced difficulties -- through a good bit of the Komarna Rebbe's explication of the sh'mita commandments.

Coming abruptly our of the world of shabbos atzilut... I can remember few times when I have been so embarrassed to be an American. The front page of the Friday New York Times had the most depressing story about the abuse, in one case fatal, of detainees by U.S. military forces in Afghanistan. We have lost any pretense of adhering to our own rhetoric about humaneness. Honesty has also long gone out the window. Most damagingly, a memo from a high-ranking member of the English intelligence apparatus seems to prove that Bush had decided at least as early as July 2002 -- months before congressional authorization came in mid-October -- to "remove Saddam, through military action" (a quote from the memo, as quoted by the Times; see also the unflinching editorial in this week's Forward). The notion of working through the U.N. was knowingly fraudulent, the campaign to convince U.S. leaders and the population a total sham. Let's finally just admit that Bush jr. wanted Hussein's ass because the latter had dared stand up to Bush sr. (and knowing that dad had already ensured that Hussein's military capabilities were far weaker than those of Iran or North Korea). Now, to further "counterterrorism efforts," Bush and the Republican leadership want to give the FBI even greater powers to track people without judicial permission or oversight. The defense establishment forced Newsweek to retract its story about flushing a Koran down the toilet at Guantanamo, but report after report (for some examples from the mainstream press, see this or this) shows that other forms of purposefully provocative and abusive behavior toward Muslim detainees there -- and their beliefs, sacred text, and mores -- is routine.

Proof of our lack of an inkling as to what we're doing abroad -- or our utter cynicism -- comes from the front page publication of a humiliating photo of Saddam in various tabloids or newspapers operating at the same level. (Not that I have a shred of sympathy for the man.) Can you imagine how the U.S. would react if a similar photo of Reagan appeared on al-Jazeera? In response, the man who claims to be our elected leader can only express, even after fairly widespread Muslim riots over the Koran-down-the-toilet matter, "doubt that publication of the pictures in The Sun of Britain and The New York Post would further inflame anti-American sentiment in Iraq" (from another Times story on Friday)!!! As if he would know.

We have missionizing evangelicals on the rampage at the Air Force Academy. Pharmacists at major retail outlets (Walmart, Walgren's, among others) refuse to dispense contraception (even if prescribed!) to customers on the basis of their religious views. A Times Magazine Section piece on Pennsylvania Republican Senator Rick Santorum (not yet online) makes it clear that despite his admirable efforts to mitigate poverty (as a down-to-earth Catholic he hasn't bought into the evangelical feel-good mentality of ignoring your brother's straits), his political goal is to impose his understanding of God's word on the country as a whole. Yet Laura Bush gushes about how she thinks "it's really important for America to be able to get over to people in the Middle East what we are really like, and that freedom of religion and respect for other people's religion is a very, very important part of our country" (well, perhaps it used to be), while a story today quotes her as saying (pretending, really) that "people in the United States are sick about" the allegedly atypical events at Abu Ghraib. Really?! I wish! Who is sick over Abu Ghraib? A bunch of bleeding-heart liberals, ignored and mocked by the conservative media for this very sickness. In a letter printed in today's Times, Dennis Prager blames the Newsweek flap on the journal's liberal bias, but says he cannot "think of any mainstream news media reports that erred by falsely depicting America or its military in too positive a light"!?! I kid you not. No, not the failure of Fox News or Sinclair Corp. or CNN (etc., etc.) to take Bush & Co. to task for lying about WMDs or the command structure for using abuse and torture against prisoners (ourselves or through our cronies in Egypt or Uzbekistan) or the entire military leadership, including the commander in chief, for waging a war with blithe incompetence! No, these are not "errors" with any consequence. Are these people lying (to others only or to themselves as well) or just plain stupid? I'm not sure which is a graver crime for supposed leaders of opinion.

I feel like I should stop reading so much about Republicans and conservative Christians (and Jews). It's downright depressing. Even (some) moderate Republicans and Christians voice terror about their extreme methods and goals. These people are fascists plain and simple. They think they know what the world needs, and cite God as their main source, and have no compunction about forcing it on everyone else. In contrast, I think of a teaching of Reb Hayyim of Sanz that I came across while looking for something else. It is brought in vol. two of Buber's collection (p. 214) and goes as follows.

"The rabbi of Zans used to tell this story about himself:
'In my youth when I was fired with the love of God, I thought I would convert the whole world to God. But soon I discovered that it would be quite enough to convert the people who lived in my town, and I tried for a long time, but did not succeed. Then I realized that my program was still much too ambitious, and I concentrated on the persons in my own household. But I could not convert them either. Finally it dawned on me: I must work upon myself, so that I may give true service to God. But I did not accomplish even this.'"

Buber titled this "Resignation," but I think the anecdote communicates realism, humility, prudence against wreaking damage through un-self-conscious action. Perhaps (borrowing a bit from Franz Rosenzweig) it teaches the difference between a missionizing approach to religion, concerned with numbers, with conquering "the whole world," and a religious approach that looks inward. It definitely teaches the vast difference between conveying godliness by acting as an exemplar of piety and coercing others to "do what God wants" regardless of their convictions. The former path is far more difficult, inefficient, perhaps even futile. But it relies on individuals' free will, the only true source of godliness. It may not bring about world revolution, but if an individual gets turned on, it is the most radical turning in and of the universe.

Sunday night. Mots'ei shabbat. The eve of the first day. Though we get fixated on sabbath, the day of rest, tonight marks the actual beginning of everything, the creation of the world, life. It seems no one has ever really stopped beginning. May it be a good week to begin again!

If the Mountain Won't Come to You, Destroy It

2005-05-20T09:09:00.000-04:00

11 Iyar 5765. Meditate carefully on the following this shabbos:

Six of our U.S. senators, along with 30 representatives to the House (Frank Wright, new and extreme head of the National Religious Broadcasters association of Christian broadcasters claims that 130 representatives are "born again"), stand as sponsors of the Constitutional Restoration Act. According to Joel Bleifuss' editorial in this week's In These Times (May 23), the "act does three things. First, it prohibits the Supreme Court from ruling against any government official or government body whose actions acknowledge 'God as the sovereign source of law, liberty or government.'" Bleifuss thinks this is limited to "enshrining the Ten Commandments in public places," but the wording sounds dangerously wide; wide enough to prevent court rulings of any kind against "God-fearing" officials or agencies? Second, the act "prohibits federal judges from citing the laws or judicial policies 'of any foreign state or international organization or agency.' [...] Third, the act provides that any judge who rules in either of these two ways 'may be removed upon impeachment and conviction.'"

Hence at a recent conference Phyllis Schlafly stated that Justice Anthony Kennedy's "citation of international legal standards in his opinion against executing juveniles was 'a good ground for impeachment.'" Christian legal scholar Edwin Vieira, also at the conference, argued that Kennedy should be impeached because "his opinion striking down Texas' sodomy statute 'upholds Marxist, Leninist, Satanic principles drawn from foreign law.'" Hmmm. This act might be a good thing, as citing the New Testament -- a Greek, perhaps even Aramaic document of the international Christian movement (originally a Middle Eastern thing) -- could be grounds for impeachment.

But seriously, further on in the same issue of ITT we learn of the following letter former-Cardinal Ratzinger sent to all Catholic bishops in 2001, when he headed the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (publicized recentlly by the London Observer): Ratzinger instructed bishops "that they must not refer priestly abuse cases to civil authorities. Rather, they should investigate abuse allegations 'in the most secretive way restrained by a perpetual silence, and everyone is to observe the strictest secret which is commonly regarded as a secret of the Holy Office under the penalty of excommunication.'"

Do I sense a pattern here? Ah, but it's good to see Catholics and evangelical protestants getting along these days...

All the above illuminates the hidden meaning of two verses in this week's parsha, B'Har, Lev. 25:35-37: "If your kindsman, being in straits, comes under your authority, and you hold him as though a resident alien, let him live by your side: do not exact from him advance or accrued interest, but fear your God. Let him live by your side as your kinsman." What the Torah is telling us here by means of economic vocabulary is that authority cannot be abused by treating those who differ with you as second-class citizens, as suspect, as traitors, as blasphemers. All must be included in the spiritual body-politic; they are your kin, literally part of your family.

John Leonard (in the May Harper's) quotes Eugene V. Debs to great effect, seconding the Torah's intent throughout the seemingly mundane laws of this week's parsha: "While there is a lower class I am in it; while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

A blessed sabbath to the whole world!

Right for the Taking...

2005-05-19T08:30:00.000-04:00

10 Iyar 5765. The Tosefta Baba Kama 10:2 (and see B.T. Bava Kama 50b) relates the following fairly oft-quoted story:

"It once happened that a farmer was removing stones from a field and putting them onto a public thoroughfare. There was a certain hasid who challenged the farmer: 'Why are you taking stones from what is not yours and putting them onto what belongs to you?' The farmer just laughed. Some time afterward that farmer fell into need and sold the field. Walking along in that very place, the farmer stumbled on the rocks, and said: 'It was not for nothing that that hasid said to me, "Look, you are removing stones from what is not yours and putting them onto what belongs to you."'"

Writing in Earth Island Journal (Summer 2005), David Oates depicts a modern-day version of this Rabbinic parable. The scene of this modern parable is the state of Oregon, which recently passed a referendum called Measure 37. "The language of its ballot title was deceptively appealing: 'Governments must pay owners, or forego enforcement, when certain land-use restrictions reduce property value.' The statute provides that anyone who owned land when a restriction was imposed on it may appeal and be paid for any loss of value (even speculative value), or be exempted from the restriction. [...] The probability is that no local or regional government will have the money to pay such claims, and thus will have to waive the regulations in question. The result will be uncontrolled development."

"Measure 37 is, to date, the greatest success of the so-called 'takings' movement, which has been brewing in the West since libertarian guru Richard Epstein's 1985 book of the same name." An earlier version, Measure 7, passed in 2000 but was struck down by the Oregon Supreme Court. "In the Voters Pamphlet for that measure, the Libertarian Party in Oregon voiced this dangerously simply view: 'Your property belongs to you... When government officials enact regulations that strip a property of its value, [they] trample the rights of innocent people.' Emotionally, the metaphor tells all: the citizen denuded shamefully and trampled by jackbooted tyranny."

"The argument ignores what legal scholars call 'reciprocity of advantage': the surround of social order and mutuality -- schools, police, marketplace, etc. -- that is a huge portion of any property's 'value,' a value that is created by those many other people who have no deed to the land, but whose interests are nevertheless deeply implicated in it. Ignoring this wider truth, Measure 37 enacts a libertarian fantasy that an owner possesses a near-absolute property right, as if each piece of land were located on a one-person planet."

"Almost daily now, post-election news stories recount consequences of which voters were probably unaware. Pear orchards in Hood River are being prepared for subdivision. House-building in Wallowa Lake will encroach on Chief Joseph's gravesite and ring the beautiful lake with developmentt. Communities around the state are waking up, complaining, organizing, but it may be too late. Private-property 'individualism' like this really means 'let someone else pay the price.'"

The "takings" movement is not just a libertarian fantasy, however, it is embedded in the writings of people such as John Locke, texts foundational to the Anglo-American ethos of government vs. private property. Oates' explication of the underlying assumptions can be sharpened. Farmers and homeowners, for instance, demand "rights" to the water "on" their property -- as if that source of water was not connected through underground or surface streams to other properties, to mountain runoff, to large rivers, to an ocean. Companies pollute "their" properties (and then abandon them if profits decline or the company fails), as if wind does not carry airborne contaminants onto "other" properties, often far away, as if buried toxins will not seep through the groundwater elsewhere. The seemingly inevitable death of the Dead Sea, featured on the front page of today's Washington Post (!), serves as another, still-unfolding parable of the return of such repressed "hidden" costs. Pastor Ted Haggard, of Colorado Springs' New Life Church (sorry for bring him up again), lauds the Ukrainian evangelical church and population -- both growing tenfold in recent years -- which took to the streets in protests to usher in a pro-Western candidate. He calls them an "army of Christian capitalists." "They're pro-free markets, they're pro-private property. That's what evangelical stands for."

Sharing goods, lands and mental space is difficult. It takes maturity. The New Life Church is structured out of 1,300 cell groups, each with a leader who reports to a higher-level leader up the command structure. But these are not groups of neighbors. To quote Sharlet's story again (see previous post), "In devising New Life's small-group system, Pastor Ted says that he asked himself and his staff a simple question: Do you like your neighbors? And, for that matter, do you even know your neighbors? The answers he got -- the Golden Rule to the contrary -- were 'Not really' and 'No.'" What a sad commentary. "Okay, said Pastor Ted, so why would you want to be in a small group with them? His point was that arbitrary small groups would make less sense than self-selected groups organized around common interests. Hence New Life members can choose among small groups dedicated to motorcycles, or rock climbing, or homeschooling, or protesting outside abortion clinics." "Affinity" groups for those who won't take the trouble to forge a community, which means getting along with others, with those who may be different than you. In one of his books, Haggard rails against religion that "exhausts" members with "worthwhile projects," a term used disparagingly to include activities like soup kitchens. "New Life" (is this another brand name?) offers the same homogenization as comfort and solace as McDonald's; happiness can only be mass-produced, and hopefully without the bothersome guilt about helping others.

Chief Joseph, of the Nez Perce, encroached upon even in death, like the "Dead" Sea, had this to say: " Perhaps you think the Creator sent you here to dispose of us as you see fit. If I thought you were sent by the Creator, I might be induced to think you had a right to dispose of me. Do not misunderstand me, but understand fully with reference to my affection for the land. I never said the land was mine to do with as I choose. The one who has a right to dispose of it is the one who has created it. [...] And in the winds which pass through these aged pines we hear the moaning of [our people's] departed ghosts. [...] Their tears fell like drops of rain. I hear my voice in the depths of the forest, but no answering voice comes back to me."

A Hasidic story relates that two men were once fighting over a piece of land, each saying "I, me, mine." They went to the rebbe, who listened as each man voiced his claim. Unable to decide between the two incompatible voices, the rebbe said, "Since the question concerns the land, let us hear what the land has to say." He put his ear to the ground and listened. Soon the rebbe declared: "The land says that it belongs to neither of you, but that you belong to it!" This anecdote obviously is based on the verse in this week's parsha, B'Har, "the land must not be sold beyond reclaim, for the land is Mine" (Lev. 25:23). Amen.

Enough with hasagat g'vul! Let us stop trying to attain boundaries (l'hasig g'vul)! May we never forget that community stems from common.

Turn the Other Cheek?

2005-05-18T08:35:00.000-04:00

8 Iyar 5765. A ticker item on Ha'aretz online this morning indicates that Israeli police say "thousands of U.S. Baptists to flood Gush Katif in coming weeks."

Meanwhile, in the May Harper's Jeff Sharlet provides an absolutely frightening look at the evangelical "spiritual NORAD," New Life Church in Colorado Springs, one of the country's largest megachurches. Among the prayers posted by the staff at the church's World Prayer Center to large flat screens around the complex and around the world are: "900,000 Bibles in the Arabic language distributed by Christians in Iraq." Under the church's auspices the local paper included a new glossy edition of the New Testament one day shortly after last Hanuka (the city's Jews were not pleased). Here's an excerpt from one Sunday service:

"Just as we conform ourselves to God's will, so, said [pastor] Ted [Haggard], must 'the Woman.' The Woman must take on her man's calling, her man's desire.
'Mmm-hmmm,' murmured Linda [the woman sitting next to the author], eyes closed.
In return, Pastor Ted continued, the Woman gets the Man's love; authority just wants to serve. 'Total surrender!' he called. 'True or false?'
'TRUE!' answered the 8,000 assembled.'
The Man is the Christ; the Woman is the Body. He is coming; she is the church; she must open her doors. United, they are the Kingdom, ready for battle. 'The Christian home,' preached Pastor Ted, 'is to be in a constant state of war.' This made many so happy they put their hands in the air, antennae for spirit transmissions. 'Massive warfare!' Ted cried out."

The next Harper's story, by Chris Hedges, treats the National Religious Broadcasters association (some 1,600 Christian radio and television broadcasters, claiming an audience of up to 141 million). At their most recent convention in Anaheim, displays and booths included the remains of the bus blown up in Jerusalem, the Israeli Tourism Ministry (one of the hall's largest displays), but also Jews for Jesus, and seminars entitled "Invading Cities for Christ: The Thousand-Day Plan." Most major evangelical organizations, writes Hedges, from the NRB to the Southern Baptist Convention, are controlled by "Dominionists," who call for Christian dominion over the United States and, eventually over the entire world. They envision, and work actively toward, a United States run according to a militant biblicism. Jewish conservative radio talk-show host Michael Medved, a speaker at the convention, claims that "A more Christian America is good for the Jews [...] A more Jewish community is good for the Christians [...] because a more Jewish community is less seduced by secularism."

The joke regarding secularism is that pastor Ted and his ilk worship the so-called free market and operate their churches along consumerist models. (I urge you to read Sharlet's article, which in this regard confirms contemporary evangelical obsession with capitalism as divine.) The line between secular economics and theology has been erased. New Life leader Haggard has made Thomas Friedman's book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree required reading for his hundreds of pastors. Haggard believes that "globalization [...] is merely a vehicle for the spread of Christianity."

Friends, you decide. To me, this all reeks of authoritarianism in the name of salvation (and we know that the messiah's authenticity will be deducible by smell, by an instinctive truth-seeking inner sense). This is Christian jihad, the mirror image of its Muslim ancestor. As author Karen Armstrong opined recently, if Bush and Bin Laden met to chat, they'd find they have a lot in common. Amen.

God, please help us make peace, out in the world, and within ourselves. Cleanse us of military metaphors. Free us from the temptations of econometric models. Melt our phallic swords into ploughshares of satiated full-body orgasms. As the Ba'al Shem Tov wrote, each of us should become in our entirety as sensitive and filled with desire as our eiver, desire for love, love of justice and love of walking humbly with God.

The Holy Ecosystem

2005-05-17T19:17:00.000-04:00

Moico Yaker (b. 1949; Peru), The Secret (1999)

7 Iyar 5765. Sunday I had the z'chut to go with my two oldest kids to the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx. Strolling through the enormous greenhouse we saw a cinnamon tree, a cocoa tree, a mahogany tree, a coffee tree, a vanilla tree and many more varieties, unknown to us. A good number of them were flowering and/or fruiting. The leaves hung in glorious immenseness, novel and variegated; the colors shone and shimmered. It was truly a moment to say baruch she-kacha lo be-olamo, blessed is God that such things exist in God's world. Or, baruch she-lo khisar ba-olamo davar u-vara vo bri'ot tovot ve-ilanot tovim, blessed is God that God did not leave out a single thing from God's world and created good creatures and good trees. Amen, ve-amen!

Today, on the other hand, I met an old friend in the urban jungle. She told me about a Nez Pierce woman who channels the niggunim of R. Shlomo Carlebach. A learned chabadnik went to check her out, only to be stunned and dumbfounded.

What a wonderful world, as that philo-semite Louis Armstrong crooned in 1967 (what a time for positivity) to the lyrics co-written by brother yid George David Weiss.

Evangelical Economics?

2005-05-16T22:49:00.000-04:00

7 Iyar 5765. In the May issue of Harper's Gordon Bigelow writes about the nineteenth-century evangelical roots of the Anglo-American sanctification of the so-called free market. In response to the pessimism regarding capitalists and class struggle expressed by Adam Smith and David Ricardo, early evangelicals emphasized the free market as a "perfectly designed instrument to reward good Christian behavior and to punish and humiliate the unrepentant." Continues Bigelow, "The trials of economic life -- the sweat of hard labor, the fear of poverty, the self-denial involved in saving -- were earthly tests of sinfulness and virtue." The pain of earthly life could atone for original sin. They "regarded poverty as part of a divine program," believing that "the suffering of the poor would provoke remorse, reflection, and ultimately the conversion that would change their fate. In other words, poor people were poor for a reason, and helping them out of poverty would endanger their mortal souls. It was the evangelicals who began to see the business mogul as an heroic figure, his wealth a triumph of righteous will."

The history Bigelow unfolds makes explicable that which baffles David Brooks, who just the other day wondered in his New York Times column about why the DC Republicans fail to understand and help their poor constituencies. Why? Because helping the poor would imply that God created a world in which socio-economic status does not make sense.

Has this ever been a Jewish view? There is some ambivalence on the subject. This is precisely the understanding of hashgacha p'ratit that Rambam disputes. Still, one can find talmudic statements that moralize lack of wealth or its opposite. Billionaire CEO Howard Jonas writes in his autobiography, ludicrously entitled without a shred of irony or self-consciousness, I'm Not the Boss I Just Work Here, that God "set the world up in such a way that" American individualism triumphed over evil centralized collectivism: "He could have had capitalism not work"! On another level, one blog, which I will not name, recently approvingly cites R. Nahman of Bratslav, basing himself on the Talmud, that one should refrain from giving financial support to "unsuitable" persons. On the other hand, one finds R. Hayyim of Sanz (unless I'm misremembering, always a possibility), who particularly loved the mitzva of tzedaka, saying that he never worries about the "suitability" of a recipient -- all acts of tzedaka are meritorious.

This is why the Torah repeatedly reminds Jews that we were once slaves in Egypt, to ensure that we will not come to think that we "deserved" our freedom and good life. Indeed, according to the Zohar (parshat Emor) God's removal of the Israelites from Egypt is mentioned precisely 50 times in the Bible, a purposeful parallel to the 50 days between liberation and the gift of Torah, to the 50 gates of wisdom through which we must pass individually and collectively.

On this topic I would prefer to err on the side of mercy and generosity. Only arrogance would lead one to think that we can understand God's economic plan.

Evangelical Judaism?

2005-05-15T22:41:00.000-04:00

6 Iyar 5765. Last week I had dinner with a very learned friend in town for a few days. Among our varied topics of conversation was his contention that orthodoxy today is undergoing a noticeable Protestantization. He cited phenomena such as Esh HaTorah, the obsession, even among Jews, with Creation and abortion, the popularity of Bible codes. I would add the recent emphasis on "making souls" in movements such as Chabad and the ba'al teshuva industry, the new fixation on "spirituality" and synaplexes. Another phenomenon my friend mentioned was Meir Kahane's fondness for p'shat. Having heard Kahane many times in his Brooklyn home growing up, he related the manner in which the rabbi brilliantly relied on the plain meaning of many biblical passages in order to convey his perspective that God gave all of the land of Israel to the Jews, that Jews needed to resort to unsparing violence to achieve their (excuse me, God's) aims, and so on. It is clear, I ventured, that Kahane's literalistic reading of the Bible was meant to interrupt the liberal American hermeneutical efforts to sanitize or make sense of the raw, pre-modern, stark text that stood and stands as the foundation of "western religion."

Other incidents this week came to corroborate my friend's worries. A review in The Jewish Week of David Klinghoffer's new book, Why the Jews Rejected Jesus, revelaed that he is working on a forthcoming volume entitled Why God is a Republican: An Honest Look at the Poltics of the Bible. Klinghoffer, not surprisingly a born-again Jew, might have missed two millenia of Jewish history, including the Rabbinic revolution, and should perhaps consider a title such as "Why God Fled the Republican Party a Long Time Ago" or "If They Tell You Right is Left and Left is Right Start Looking Elsewhere for Advice." If the Bble's politics are to serve as a model today I expect Klinghoffer wants us to burn to death sexually-promiscuous daughters of priests, slaughter our enemies' wives and children, force rape victims to marry their rapists (hey, they'll learn to love each other). An article from the New York Times from this past week (sorry, it's too late and I'm too beat to bother looking it up) told the fascinating and troubling story of how several African peoples continue to force widows to have sex with a new man after the death of their husband -- in some cases a relative of his -- in order to "cleanse" their spirits of their connection to their now-dead husband. Though obviously the motivation and practice of biblical yibum, or levirate marriage, differs considerably, I immediately wondered whether these African customs proffer an explanation of its origins. (I have not yet probed my anthropologist colleagues.) Nicholas Kristof, discussing former bishop John Shelby Spong's book, The Sins of Scripture, ponders the same questions of selective conservative use of the Bible in today's Times.

No sooner did I suppress my (nervous) laughter about Klinghoffer's agenda than I read an op-ed in The Washington Post by Tony Perkins, president of the conservative Christian organization, the Family Research Council. Perkins argues that liberals are fighting Bush's judicial nominees not over judicial philosophy but over "personal beliefs." He defends one, Charles Pickering, who was challenged for having said that "the Bible is an 'absolute authority' for human conduct," because Perkins thinks this "a standard that just about any religious person would hold." Really!? Besides the fact that this leaves out Buddhists, Hindus and most native Americans, I doubt that most Jews consider the Bible the absolute authority for human conduct, thank God. Just how does one know what this text means? Who gets to decide? If the Bible's interpretation is so straightforward, why is it that well over a thousand commentaries have been written over the centuries? That Perkins and Klinghoffer sound so similar should surprise no one. But Klinghoffer should know better, after all, what does one do with the entire edifice of Rabbinic Judaism and its many complex negotiations with the intransigent biblical text? Negotiations frequently made precisely in order to mitigate the latter's severity and impracticality. Klinghoffer also must undo all the developments of kabbalah and Hasidism, which also often offered universalistic and tolerant mystical nuances which made (or should have made) intolerance and religious hatred and self-righteousness unacceptable. (Of course I do not want to mythologize the progressivism of these later movements.) Ironically, both Pickering and Klinghoffer fail to note the revisionist revolution wrought by Jesus against the mean-spirited faces of the biblical old man (though the young upstart ushered in some of his own).

Klinghoffer's cluelessness is corroborated by his column in The Forward this week, which dwells on Jack Abramoff, failing to note in the process the degree to which this man's sins go against biblical standards (see my earlier posts), and claiming that had he donated his ill-gained profits to liberal causes no one would have heard of him. This is laughable (again). There is no doubt that had he been a liberal and done what he has been doing he would have been even bigger news a long time earlier; every conservative media venue would have been all over him as a liberal hypocrite and criminal. Conservatives, Jewish as well as Christian, cannot accept the fact that nearly everything about a career like Abramoff's makes a total mockery of biblical mandates, whether he technically broke laws or not. An extramarital presidential blowjob and you face impeachment, but fucking over thousands of poor immigrant women workers is seen as upholding the sanctity of the free market and standing up to special interests. So much for the Bible's "absolute authority."

Dear God, protect us from those who don't know how to read your writing!

The Gay Republican Worldview (Revisited)

2005-05-09T16:02:00.000-04:00

30 Nisan 5765. A story in yesterday's New York Times got me thinking again about Gay Republicans. This new article by Timothy Egan related recent revelations about the secret electronic boy-chasing of Spokane's Republican mayor, James E. West. West's online relationships with, or at least hunting of, young boys, conducted from municipal office equipment on government time, come alongside accusations of molestation dating back at least two decades. More fascinating to me is the typical setting: Mayor West is a "staunch opponent of gay rights, and recently threatened to veto a measure passed by the City Council that would grant benefits to domestic partners. He once promoted a bill in the Legislature to outlaw teenage sex, gay or straight." See Egan's story for more disturbing details.

This self-closeting, this wildly contradictory gap between public and private faces, amounting almost to a kind of self-loathing, is what strikes me as most salient about the gay Republican worldview. To one of his online interlocutors Mayor West wrote: "Remember, I'm very closeted. No one knows I like guys, It's just that the openly gay guys are a little over the top for me. I don't really like the in-your-face attitude some guys have. And the massive political agenda either." Yes, there are openly gay Republicans, as the article cites one Democratic politician saying, though I wonder about the numbers. I suspect, however, that in fact most Republicans see open homosexuality as antithetical to their political stance, including most gay Republicans. In this sense gay Republicans offer a kind of parable about contemporary American culture. If you cannot or will not conform to the explicitly moral agenda of the dominant majority you must hide your true identity in order to get along or climb upward. This is becoming the expectation for liberals, non-believers (or disbelievers), and so on. This is the orthodox solution. Just pretend you are one of us. Any effort to promote a "political agenda" means ostracism, expulsion. Truly, silence = death.

Reform, Ho Hum(mer)

2005-05-09T11:07:00.000-04:00

30 Nisan 5765. Yet another example of what the Bush administration considers reform. H2 Hummers, which get 9 miles per gallon, worse than what the Model T got 80 years ago, cost over $50,000; the larger and original H1 goes for over $100,000. Yet if these vehicles are bought or used by a business (for over 50% of the time), the gov't gave their owners a federal tax deduction of nearly $38,000! This was because in the mid-1980s Congress tightened rules about how much money could be written off on luxury automobiles used for business, but excluded vehicles with a gross weight of 6,000 pounds or more, partly an attempt to help farmers afford tractors, large trucks and other heavy equipment. Until 2004, the law allowed business owners an immediate deduction of up to $100,000! Hummers and Escalades (Cadillacs, also getting terrible mileage) replaced sedans as the business vehicle of choice. (For a better explanation, see the coverage at Bankrate.com.)

Under the American Jobs Creation Act, passed late last year, the tax break for business vehicles under 14,000 pounds has been reduced to a mere $25,000. Though this sounds almost reasonable in comparison to the earlier deduction, individuals who buy a Toyota Prius hybrid receive only $4,000 through Bush's much-touted tax deduction for hybrid cars. No wonder there are so many SUVs on the road. We as a society are paying -- for extra, unnecessary oil and for cleanup costs for the resultant air pollution -- for the luxury of wealthy self-employed dentists and athletes. This is what Bush had in mind as an Economic Stimulus Plan?!

"Those with vehicles, these with horses, but we, in the name of Adonai our God call out!" (Ps. 20:7)

Sustaining Life

2005-05-08T21:29:00.000-04:00

30 Nisan 5765. Another weekend's worth of depressing news. Once again I come close to vowing to give up reading the papers. Yet, a few hours in shul, or rather, with my almost-two-year-old son in the social hall, and I even finished the commentary on parshat kedoshim by the B'er Mayim Hayim, R. Chaim Tchernevich. It's enough to instill some hope.

But it is the Komarna Rebbe, R. Safrin, whose kabbalistic thoughts about the mitzvot (in his commentary, Otsar HaHayim) blew me away, once again. His understanding of the mitzva of Pe'ah, leaving a corner of one's field unharvested, for the poor and immigrants to glean, offers a corrective to "free market" agri-business as usual. According to the Komarner, our fields and their harvesting represent the birthing of souls that takes place in the universe's invisible realms. The numerical equivalent of the word "Pe'ah" is "elohim," God. We must leave a sixtieth of our harvest untouched, in order to leave sustenance for all the souls being born, even those whose cosmic forces seem (in this go-round) rather meager -- i.e., the poor and marginal -- because if only some souls are elevated, the tikkun the world so desperately needs cannot happen. Like God, that is, we need to look out for everyone. The B'er Mayim Hayim, commenting on the mitzva of fearing one's parents makes a similar point, noting that we are being reminded to worry about the cosmic forces that gave us our existence, the supernal mother and father within the divine constellation, so that their blessings and abundance of love will continue to flow, as in "all the rivers flow to the sea" (Ecclesiastes 1:7). The Hebrew word for river, "Nahal," the B'er Mayim Hayim tells us, stands for Notser Hesed LaAlafim, for God, whose loving-kindness flows to all.

In contrast, a story in this week's Jewish Week, the umpteenth on Jack Abramoff, cites Newsweek to the effect that he siphoned off "donations [...] meant for inner-city children [...] to West Bank settlers." Additionally, the teachers at his now-defunct suburban Jewish dayschool "are suing for unpaid wages." In contrast, the Bush budget looks like it is getting closer to congressional approval, though the only Jewish organizations to protest its planned $10 billion Medicaid cuts, $70 billion tax cuts, cuts to education, environmental, housing and Supplemental Security Income, food stamps programs is the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. In contrast to the Torah, suddenly, according to conservatives orthodox and evangelical, screwing the poor just isn't a Jewish issue. (Following up on the Abramoff/DeLay Mariana Islands debacle by explicating the Komarner's teachings on paying workers properly would keep me awake far too long tonight.)

May this new month of Iyar bring us the blessing of a lag in distinterest, unconcern and blindness! Hodesh tov!

Wasting Away...

2005-05-05T22:55:00.000-04:00

26 Nisan 5765. Though the study was made public around last Thanksgiving, I only recently learned that Timothy Jones, of the University of Arizona, calculated that the United States wastes about half of its food supplies. Even the industry website where I came across an article concerning the study says that the findings should cause "alarm." "What he found was that not only is edible food discarded that could feed people who need it, but the rate of loss, even partially corrected, could save US consumers and manufacturers tens of billions of dollars each year. Jones says these losses also can be framed in terms of environmental degradation and national security." Though much of the waste occurs long before the agriculture and food industries get crops and supplies to stores and homes, "On average, households waste 14 per cent of their food purchases. Fifteen per cent of that includes products still within their expiration date but never opened. Jones estimates an average family of four currently tosses out $590 per year, just in meat, fruits, vegetables and grain products. [...] Nationwide, he says, household food waste alone adds up to $43 billion, making it a serious economic problem." "Jones estimates that reducing food waste by half could reduce adverse environmental impacts by 25 per cent through reduced landfill use, soil depletion and applications of fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides."

Even I had no idea what a wasteful society we are. Every rabbi, priest and minister in the country should be preaching against this sin of bal tashchit, of destroying food that could feed the hungry. Where is the public outcry?!? According to the understanding of the classical rabbis, the prohibition on such sinful wastage derives from Deut. 20:19-20 and its prohibition on cutting down fruit trees while besieging an enemy city. The biblical context rings frighteningly true to today's situation. Except now it is our own fruit trees we are axing as well, both figuratively and literally. The prohibition, according to the mystical Hasidic master R. Yitzhak Yehuda Yehiel Safrin, holds in all times and places, on both women and men. It's time to wake up and smell the landfill. Sometimes it is so hard even to just count to 50, to count on a complete body- and soul-nourishing harvest, which we need more than ever.

Off Abraham, Jack!

2005-05-04T22:13:00.000-04:00

26 Nisan 5765. That's Jack Abramoff, if you didn't get the pun. More than we ever wanted. Today we found out that indeed Reb Abramoff "submitted bills to his law firm for more than $350,000 in expenses for several trips to the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands in 1996 and 1997 on behalf of the congressmen [Tom DeLay], as well as several others including Edwin Buckham, Mr. DeLay's former chief of staff, and Tony Rudy, his former deputy chief of staff" (www.nytimes.com/2005/05/04/politics/04delay.html?). Never mind that this is patently against the rules of the House of Representatives.

Yet the question of payments merely distracts attention from the political backscratching going on. Why did Abramoff help DeLay and others visit the islands on an ostensibly national security-related trip supposedly paid for by a conservative foundation? "The islands, under scrutiny for sweatshoplike garment factories, hired Mr. Abramoff in 1995 to help them fend off measures aimed at establishing American workplace and wage standards. The trips appear to start in 1995 and continue through at least 2000." Of course one immediately wants to know who in the islands pushed for opposing these standards to protect workers and for hiring Abramoff. Could it have been the factory owners, i.e., the textile industry trade group, and their political allies, such as then-governor Froilan Tenorio? Yes, of course. In any case, "When Mr. DeLay returned home in 1998, he declared the workplace measure dead." "In 1999, Mr. DeLay's former chief of staff, Edwin Buckham, and his former spokesman, Michael Scanlon, both of whom later worked with Mr. Abramoff in his lobbying firm, visited the islands to persuade two local lawmakers to change their votes for speaker of the islands' House of Representatives. The DeLay associates wanted the two legislators to support the candidate of the garment industry, Ben Fitial, who was close to Mr. Abramoff, and promised that federal contracts to the islands would follow if they did"(www.nytimes.com/2005/04/29/politics/29delay.html?fta=y).

The plot thickens, however, at least from the Jewish perspective. In 1996, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands awarded a no-bid contract to Rabbi David Lapin to promote "ethics in government" (www.nytimes.com/2005/04/29/politics/29delay.html?fta=y). "The contract was one of several totaling about $9 million given to Mr. Abramoff and his associates that have provoked questions." Remember that it was Rabbi David's brother, Daniel, who introduced Abramoff to DeLay two years earlier, and that Abramoff had helped Rabbi Daniel found an organization to promote political conservativism. Rabbi David, meanwhile, serves as CEO of a California outfit called Strategic Business Ethics. (I kid you not.) Nevermind that audits conducted by the island government in 2001 indicated clearly that Abramoff had been wildly overpaid, or that the attorney general for the Marianas said on Thursday that "the government had been unable to determine what work David Lapin had done."

According to Representative George Miller (D-Cal.), who called for the investigation into Abramoff's activities in and around the Mariannas, he lobbied to protect an "industry that exploited tens of thousands of women workers, many of whom were channeled into the island sex trade." That's for sure. In 1998 testimony before a U.S. Senate Committee immigrant workers and federal investigators described horrific conditions and abuses, often amounting to virtual slavery; women lured from mainland China by false promises from employers; crowded into barracks that resemble forced labor camps; lacking running water, adequate toilets or proper ventilation; many forced to participate in live sex shows (see the old stories from the Washington Free Press, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, the World Socialist Web Site, U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce, and others, still available on the web).

Who blocked legislative efforts to improve conditions for many thousands of working women in the Marianas? Key Washington Republicans. That's why Abramoff was hired, because "Supportive columnists with The Saipan Tribune, owned by the owner of the largest garment business in the commonwealth, have said he is a star in Washington because of his prowess in deflecting Congressional efforts to tighten labor laws." Who benefitted from these horrible conditions? U.S. companies which use facilities in the islands such as JC Penny, the Gap, and Levi's -- and U.S. consumers, of course, who saved a few dollars or pennies on the price of their clothes.

Are these the kinds of activities -- preventing the elimination of abuses against innocent workers -- observant Jews should be pursuing? How can they pretend to care about Torah when they routinely trample the halakhot relating to treatment of employees? Are we not supposed to be holy, as God is holy? When prominent Jews in the public eye fornicate with capital, which should be abhored as foreign to our values, should they not be verbally speared with the frenzy of righteous anger? Silence is assent, the Talmud tells us. I will never assent to such self-interested hypocrisy. Get off my father Abraham, Jack, you're killing him and all of us!

Confidential Affairs

2005-05-04T18:07:00.000-04:00

25 Nisan 5765. Since today is the yahrzeit of R. Haim Halberstam of Sanz (d. 1876), I might as well give over a story about him. The story offers a glimpse of the kind of confidentiality and secret interventions the world can really use in place of the macho for-your-eyes-only toying with people's lives in the name of politics we get from administrations Republican as well as Democratic. For Your eyes only, God, we might say. Here goes, to the memory and honor of all the tzadikim out there (and in here) acting to keep the world from destruction:

The Sanzer rebbe was deeply involved in the mitzva of tzedaka (charity). While he and his family lived most frugally, he gave with an open hand from his own meager funds and solicited from others as well. In keeping with the rabbinical dictum that charity collectors should travel in pairs, he always went on his rounds with a respected member of the community.

One time the Sanzer Rebbe set about to collect a large amount of tzedaka for a certain once- wealthy man who had gone bankrupt. He and a trusted companion were going from house to house soliciting funds when they came to the elegant home of one of the richest men in the city. They entered the elegant anteroom and were shown to a velvet sofa where they were served tea from a silver tea service while they waited for the master of the house to appear. After a few minutes, a well-dressed gentleman entered and greeted the illustrious Rabbi warmly.

The Rabbi and his companion requested that the wealthy man donate the large amount of five hundred rubles for an unspecified "worthy cause". The rich man considered their request for a few moments and then asked, "Tell me, exactly what is this cause that you are collecting for? Is it for some public institution or for a private person?"

Rabbi Chaim replied that he was collecting for a wealthy citizen who had lost all his money and gone into bankruptcy. However, this answer wasn't sufficient for the potential donor, and he began to inquire further about the identity of the person.

"I'm sorry," replied Rabbi Chaim, "but I cannot divulge the man's name, since that would cause him terrible embarrassment. You'll just have to trust me when I tell you that he's a very deserving individual."
The rich man refused to be dissuaded from his curious pursuit of the man's identity. "Of course, I trust you implicitly, and I would be only too happy to donate even several thousand rubles to help you, but I would first like to know to whom I'm giving the money."

At this point the man who was accompanying the Rabbi interjected his opinion that perhaps it wouldn't be so bad to divulge the man's identity in this case. Certainly the rich donor wouldn't allow the information to leave the room, and it was a wonderful opportunity to amass the large amount of money needed to help a fellow Jew rebuild his life.

But Rabbi Chaim would say only that the man had up until recently been one of the pillars of the community and had himself contributed to many worthy causes before his unfortunate business collapse. Nonetheless, their wealthy host continued to insist that he wouldn't publicize the man's name.

The rich man, far from being silenced, was even more aroused in his curiosity. "If you tell me his name I will give you half of the entire amount you need." Rabbi Chaim's fellow collector again tried to convince him to reveal the man's name due to the tremendous sum of money involved, but to no avail.

"You must understand," the Rabbi replied, "that even though the sum you are offering is more than generous, the honor of this Jew is more important and valuable to me than any amount of money! If you were to give me the total sum that I require, I would still refuse to reveal the identity of the recipient!"

The rich man's countenance changed suddenly and he became very still. After a moment, he softly asked Reb Chaim to step into an adjacent room, for he wished to speak with him privately.

Standing alone with the Rabbi, the rich man broke down into bitter sobbing. "Rebbe," he began, "I, too, have lost my entire fortune and am about to enter into bankruptcy. I was too embarrassed to tell this to anyone, but when I saw how scrupulously you guarded the other man's privacy I knew I could trust you. Please forgive me for testing you in such an outrageous manner, but I am a desperate man. I needed to know for sure that under no circumstances would you tell anyone about my terrible situation. I am in debt for such a huge sum, and I have no hope at all of repaying it. I am afraid that I will have no choice but to leave my family and go begging from door to door!"

The Sanzer Rav left the home of the rich man and, needless to say, not a soul ever heard a word of their conversation. Less than a week later he returned to the same man's house with a large sum of money. He had been able to raise enough money to rescue not only the original intended recipient, but this one as well. They were both able to pay off their debts and resume their businesses successfully.

The role of the saintly Sanzer Rebbe in this affair became known only many years later after he had gone to his eternal reward. (Stolen shamelessly from the Ascent website.)

Akiva Kenny Segan (b. 1950; United States), Old Man Praying (1992)

The Gay Republican Worldview

2005-05-04T08:06:00.000-04:00

25 Nisan 5765. I finally have a chance to catch up on the news from the last days of Passover. The tidbits scattered through one day's edition of the New York Times (having gratefully rediscovered its liberalism) can often reveal a world of Republican activity, if one puts the pieces together. So here are a few items that caught my attention. My title will hopefully become clear below.

First, a piece by Warren Hoge in Saturday's Times reveals that the United Nations human rights monitor "who accused American military forces and civilian contractors last week of abusing and torturing prisoners in Afghanistan" has not had his contract renewed. Whether or not the dismissal of the Egyptian-born U.S. law professor, M. Cherif Bassiouni, stems from his perceived betrayal as a whistelblower, his findings should cause great concern in light of the supposed acquital of U.S. policymakers and military brass regarding prisoner abuses in Abu Ghraib. He states that "he was rebuffed repeatedly in his efforts to to visit prisons at the United States bases in Bagram and Kandahar by American officials who told him he was exceeding his mandate." Nonetheless, "he had no trouble learning of rights violations," because, as he relates, "Arbitrary arrests and detention are common knowledge in Afghanistan because the coalition forces are known to go to villages and towns and break down doors and arrest people and take them whenever they want." Furthermore, "It was very reminiscent of what I had seen in the former Yugoslavia, where you would ask victims of beatings and torture who had abused them and they would say they couldn't identity them because they wore battle fatigues with no names and no insignias." Human rights monitor Bassiouni's prediction concerning abuses in the Middle East? "torture will go down at the U.S. facilities, but what will go up is torture at the Afghan facilities. It's the usual shell game. The U.S. feels the heat, it tries to discontinue the practice itself, but it finds special forces in the Afghan army to do its bidding."

Funny Bassiouni should mention this uncanny familiarity, as Sunday's Magazine section features a cover story by Peter Maass on the "Salvadorization" of Iraq. Maass follows a contingent of the Special Police Commandos, the country's most feared and professional anti-insurgency troops. These two attributes might well derive from the fact that most of the soldiers, including their general, fought in Saddam Hussein's army. (Though General Adnan Thabit was also jailed for attempting to overthrow Hussein.) Even worse than this bit of "pragmatism," some of the commandos' U.S. advisors got their experience in places such as El Salvador. One of them, James Steele, the subject of Maass's story, is "one of the United States military's top experts on counterinsurgency," and "honed his tactics leading a Special Forces mission in El Salvador during that country's brutal civil war in the 1980's." Maass reminds readers that the Salvadoran struggle against leftist forces killed some 700,000 people (out of a population of 6 million), mostly civilians, mostly tortured and murdered by the army and affiliated right wing death squads. These "anti-communists," supported by then-president Reagan with hundreds of millions of dollars and a team of 55 Special Forces advisors led for several years by none other than Jim Steele, "trained front-line battalions that were accused of significant human rights abuses." Any wonder that a new reality show, "Terrorism in the Grip of Justice," broadcast on U.S.-financed Al Iraqiya TV, routinely violates the Geneva Conventions, according to critics. The detainees filmed "have not been charged before judicial authorities, and they appear to be confessing under duress. Some detainees are cut and bruised. In one show, a former policeman with two black eyes confessed to killing two police officers in Samarra; a few days after the broadcast, the former policeman's family told reporters, his corpse was delivered to them. The government's human rights minister has initiated an investigation." I could go on, but what is the point? Read the story. Like Bassiouni, Maass raises the eerie resemblance of outfits and methodology to what he saw "among the Serbian paramilitaries who terrorized Croatia and Bosnia during the Balkan wars in the 90's, and it is the look of the paramilitaries that operated in Latin America a decade earlier."

You might say, "Well, this is the reality of wars; they are ugly. The war against terrorism is like the war against communism." But are these wars that we should be fighting? Didn't we get into Iraq based on false estimations of Hussein's offensive capabilities and desires? Was it just a grudge war because Hussein dissed Bush's father? Are we in Iraq and Afghanistan to secure oil supplies for our gas-greedy Humvees? If we've become like Al Qaeda in order to fight them haven't we essentially become terrorists? Why can't we stay at home and attend to our own needs? Are we running around the world causing trouble because of some sense of American exceptionalism and quasi-messianism, or in order to make the world safe for U.S. corporations?

Most disturbing is that the extra-judicial, unconstitutional actions we perpetrate abroad go hand in hand with similar behavior at home. Saturday's Metro Section has a front-page story by Andrea Elliott, revealing that "thousands of [Muslim immigrant] men have been deported and some have simply been swept away -- 'rendered' in the language of the C.I.A. -- to be interrogated or jailed overseas." Thousands?! Are non-Muslim Americans aware of this? Do we care? The piece relates some horrendous tales of mistreatment, removal, job reassignment and the like faced by U.S. citizens who have converted to Islam. Speaking of "rendering," the U.S. has been sending detainees for interrogation to our ally, Uzbekistan, despite widespread knowledge of its authoritarian nature and human rights abuses, according to a story in Sunday's Times by Don van Natta, Jr. A 2001 report from the State Dept., issued before 9/11, stated that Uzbeki "police repeatedly tortured prisoners [...] noting that the most common techniques were 'beating, often with blunt weapons, and asphyxiation with a gas mask.' Separately, international human rights groups had reported that torture in Uzbek jails included boiling of body parts, using electroshock on genitals and plucking off fingernails and toenails with pliers. Two prisoners were boiled to death, the groups reported." Yet, "Immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, however, the Bush administration turned to Uzbekistan as a partner in fighting global terrorism. The nation, a former Soviet republic in Central Asia, granted the United States the use of a military base for fighting the Taliban across the border in Afghanistan. President Bush welcomed President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan to the White House, and the United States has given Uzbekistan more than $500 million for border control and other security measures."

Such geo-political games are hardly limited to the "war on terrorism." Perhaps Saturday's most fascinating article appeared in the Arts & Leisure Section. It details the life (and death) of R. Gregory Stevens, "a gay Republican political operative," who died of apparently cocaine-related causes at the house of actress Carrie Fisher. Grandson of a German Baptist minister, from conservative California stock, Stevens had "worked for every winning Republican presidential campaign since Ronald Reagan's re-election," in addition to his "jet-setting career as a political fixer manipulating elections in backrooms and palaces from Costa Rica to Croatia, Thailand to Togo, South Korea to the former Soviet Union," as well as Angola, Kenya, Nigeria, and the Philippines. One needs only a little imagination to fill in the outlines of just what kind of interventions into other nations' domestic affairs he might have been conducting. Ironically, he met one of his long-term romantic partners in the Bush-Quayle campaign!? Among the lessons of Stevens's life is that one cannot essentialize a group such as gay men, some of whom, evidently see no contradiction between their sexual orientation and the anti-gay stance of the Republican party. Yet another lesson entails the close link so often apparent, on both the individual and collective levels, between nationalist foreign meddling, thrill-seeking and addictive behavior.

All the above perhaps tells us why the Organization of American States chose as its new leader a socialist, Jose Miguel Insulza, whom the United States opposed. This is the first time in the hemispheric organization's history "that a candidate initially opposed by the United States will lead the 34-member group," according to a story by Larry Rohter in the same issue. This is what those in the intelligence community call blowback; when our own actions and interventions abroad come back to haunt us domestically. The examples I've just given are what I call the gay Republican worldview. Gay in the old sense, meaning "carefree," "innocent," lacking worry for the future, unconcerned with the inevitable consequences of destructive behavior.

R. Gregory Stevens' turbulent and tragic life made me think of its perfect foil, the life of John Graham, still going strong. Graham had also been a self-described "adrenaline junkie," a good ole boy who served in Vietnam "for the fun of it": "I was in Vietnam only for the adventure. It was the only war America had [at the time] and I had to be part of it. I was also there to get my ticket punched. After doing a great job during the revolution in Libya, another good tour under fire would rocket me further up the promotion ladder. Vietnam was a game for me and those [Vietnamese] farm boys were just pieces on the board." In a speech of his that I was privileged to read, however, I learned how Graham managed to turn his life around, in part through his getting to know a man who truly embodied the qualities of leadership to which men like Stevens, Steele and Bush only pretend, South African revolutionary Robert Sobukwe. I urge you to read Graham's speech. Today, Graham runs a non-profit called The Giraffe Project, which encourages and supports people who stick their necks out, who have heart, who can think beyond their job position, who understand what true public service is all about.

May we be blessed to be able to count past 49, to see further than today, to envision the receipt of true wisdom!

Budgeted for Self-Destruction

2005-04-28T23:18:00.000-04:00

20 Nisan 5765. The House passed the Bush/Republican budget today, thereby continuing the nation's plunge into moral oblivion and socio-economic faith-based implosion. When the Torah tells us (Exod. 1:13) that the Egyptians subjugated the Israelites with crushing harshness (b'farekh)," some commentators interpret b'farekh as b'feh rakh, with smooth speech, i.e., through deceit and guile (the Me'am Lo'ez cites the Yalkut Shim'oni; it may come from earlier sources). This is exactly how today's Republicans operate. The nation's poor and working classes are sacrificed for the sake of the wealthy and expanded military spending: enormous cuts to Medicaid, predicted cuts to student loan programs, workers (higher premiums charged to companies with pensions covered by the federal insurance program), earned-income tax credit, health insurance for the elderly, nutrition programs, among others.

Not only will these program cuts -- labeled "entitlements" in order to obfuscate the basic purpose of government -- inevitably generate more "hidden" costs for the private sector, but the $106 billion in tax cuts (capital gains and dividend earnings, mostly accruing to the wealthy who can afford to gamble legally via Wall Street) will ensure that the federal deficit remains untackled, if it does not continue to grow. This is the "smooth speech" of the Republicans with which they guarantee the daily oppression of the majority of the population: pretending that minimal annual savings in taxes for individuals will "trickle up" to strengthen the economy (other than by buying more foreign goods, that is), while the simultaneous cutting of basic services to the people will not in fact cost these same individuals far more in long-term expenses (not to mention eroding quality of life), a veritably voodoo notion that could only be held by those who are not "reality based." The Republicans simply have no clue that the job of the government is to maintain, if not improve the well-being of its citizens. This budget reflects a deep sickness.

Getting back to my earlier comments about the notion that tax policy is not a "Jewish" issue, as James Tisch seems to think, the Ketzot HaChoshen gives a nice comment on Pharaoh's decree that the Hebrew midwives kill all Israelite boys. Since the Hebrew midwives argued that Israelite women differ from Egyptian women (and therefore that they wouldn't do such a thing), Pharaoh ordered that all Egyptians kill Israelite boys. (Kind of like the Republicans ruining the nation through the lower classes first in order to prove to themselves that through the wealthy the "free market" will solve all problems.) Explains the Ketzot HaChoshen: the principle of dina d'malkhuta dina, which requires that Jews obey the laws of the land in which they live, applies only when the laws hold equally for everyone in the land, but not when the laws discriminate against any particular group. In other words, if the law discriminates against the poor and working classes, it is unjust and not worthy of being obeyed.

Hama bar Hanina teaches (Babylonian Talmud Sota 14a) that just as God clothes the naked, so should we. Abba Saul teaches elsewhere (BT Shabbat 133b) that just as God is gracious and compassionate, so should we be. Ignorant, deceitful Republicans! May the evil they do come back to haunt them -- but not the rest of us! Help us, God, to cross the Red Sea without getting drowned. (get it? "red" sea, Republican sea; sorry, I couldn't resist)

We're Not Out of Egypt Just Yet

2005-04-27T06:03:00.000-04:00

18 Nisan 5765. While some of us have been celebrating the Exodus, the Bush administration continues to show its hardened heart. One manifestation is its introduction of a new federal policy limiting access to judges for Medicare beneficiaries with complaints about denial of services by government, reducing the number of venues from over 140 nationwide to just four! Talk about government denying service! The shift is outlined in a front page story from Sunday's New York Times by Robert Pear (www.nytimes.com/2005/04/24/national/24medicare.html?). Those who cannot get to one of these four centers will have to use the telephone or videoconferencing equipment, yet all these beneficiaries are either over 65 years old or disabled. No doubt the rationalization for the new policy is budget difficulties. The real reason may be simply to make challenges to government decision-making impossibly difficult for those whose poverty and powerlessness makes them no threat. After all, the Senate features a doctor who seems not to believe in medicine, Bill Frist, while in general the Republicans who manage the federal government seem not to believe in government (unless it is for the purpose of enforcing their particular values). Policies such as this are the inevitable and tragic result. I have heard the theory that the Republican goal is to eviscerate the federal government, so that it is incapable of providing services to the people, which will in turn provoke precisely more popular distrust and disillusion toward government. I believe it after reading about policies such as this one.

Ironically, merely enforcing collection of monies lost to profit laundering and tax evasion by U.S. corporations through offshore tax havens -- much of it legal -- would net the federal budget well over $100 billion annually (see the disturbing piece by Lucy Komisar in the Spring issue of Dissent). But since Bush & Co. consistently favor such business entities over actual citizens, and since such offshore tax havens comprise an inevitable facet of the so-called "free market," it is doubtful anything will be done. Meanwhile, from another story in Sunday's Times, because of the administration's clamor for eliminating the so-called estate tax, charities stand to lose some $10 billion a year, the equivalent of the 2003 giving of the country's 82 largest foundations, according to a Brookings Institute study (www.nytimes.com/2005/04/24/national/24silence.html). Charitable organizations seem unwilling to protest, however, out of fear of offending their wealthy donors, who stand to benefit most from the estate tax repeal. Major philanthropist James S. Tisch, president and CEO of Loews Corporation (raking it in by diverting Americans from real issues), for instance, opposes any institutional response to the proposed tax repeal. (All this is of course not to argue that the estate tax should exist for the sake of generating philanthropic dollars.) He wrote to the head of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, who had dared criticize the planned policy, "Last time I looked, that was not really a Jewish issue -- and I believe that many of our donors would not be too pleased to see our communal dollars being spent advocating either for or against tax proposals." An astonishing conclusion! The linguistic coding reveals much: "communal" dollars, that is, Jewish monies, which should be spent only on "our" needs, vs. "our donors," who stand to lose some few percentage points of their precious money, vs. "tax proposals," mere bureaucratic regulations, which have nothing to do with "us" nor with values nor with societal management (the society in which we all live). Tisch might want to read Psalm 67, recited by many Jews after counting the omer, which expresses hope for a universal fear of God and for God's judging all nations in fairness. In other words, we're all in this together.

Tisch's self-interested introversion makes me think of Dennis Prager's opinion column in the April Moment magazine, where we find an opposite but strangely similar attitude. Prager castigates the ADL for having maligned Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ and tens of millions of Christians by crying anti-semitism. He urges the organization to move to Texas, Tennessee or anywhere outside of the "Jewish and liberal shtetl of Manhattan." The problem, according to Prager, partially derives from the European survivor mentality of ADL head Foxman, which somehow reflects Jewish liberal suspicion of Christians, especially conservatives, being anti-semitic. Prager misconstrues the problem, however. Liberal Jews fear conservative Christians not because of their anti-semitism -- though indeed their rhetoric shows that they continue to fail to acknowledge the authenticity and autonomy of Judaism -- but because of what they hope to do to this country -- make it into a bastion of "ecclesiastical authoritarianism" (Cardinal Ratzinger/Pope Benedict's words; the one issue on which both conservative Catholics and Protestants seem to agree). In other words, it is as Americans and not as Jews that liberal Jews worry about conservative Christians. Again, we're all in this together. What good will it do if conservative Christians help "save" Israel (the excuse most Jews used for voting for Bush & Co.) if they destroy the United States in the process?! Or do orthodox Bush supporters have a secret plan to ruin this country in order to promote aliyah?

Let us be part of the world when the aim is its true betterment. Let us ignore the world when the aim is merely the bolstering of the already wealthy and powerful. Mo'adim le-simcha!

Justin Faunce, Thanks for All the Memories (2004)

Unleavening the Hypocrisy of Power

2005-04-21T12:12:00.000-04:00

12 Nisan 5765. Some last-minute thoughts before I have to yield completely to preparations for Passover. According to a story Monday in The New York Times (www.nytimes.com/2005/04/18/politics/18reed.html), some of the major Washington players in the most trouble recently share a passion for "religion." Tom DeLay, a fervent evangelical Christian, Jack Abramoff, an orthodox Jew, and Ralph Reed, another evangelical Christian. One of the scandalous stories linking the three goes as follows: "In Washington, federal investigations of Mr. Abramoff, a close ally of Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, have revealed that Mr. Abramoff paid Mr. Reed's consulting firm more than $4 million to help organize Christian opposition to Indian casinos in Texas and Louisiana - money that came from other Indians with rival casinos." The article details other questionable actions of Reed, but I'll ignore that for now.

Significant, however, are the similarities between Reed and Abramoff. The latter, alongtime conservative "firebrand," founded two kosher delis in D.C. as well as Eshkol, a Maryland Jewish prep-school. He is now under investigation by no fewer than 5 governmental agencies, for some $82 million in lobbying fees that Abramoff and his partner, Michael Scanlon, reaped from wealthy tribes with casinos in questionable circumstances as consultants and that Abramoff earned from several foreign entities. According to a story in The Washington Post, "Abramoff also directed tribes to donate to several obscure foundations that appear to have no connection to Indian concerns, including a think tank in Rehoboth Beach, Del., set up by Scanlon" (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53609-2004Jul15.html). "Congressional investigators learned [last] March that Scanlon or organizations he was associated with paid Abramoff $10 million, an arrangement that was not known to the tribes or to" Abramoff's law firm. A recent piece from Slate details other Abramoff follies: "His work trying to secure a visa for the great Zairian kleptocrat Mobutu Sese Seko [...] Native American tribes, clients he described as "monkeys," "troglodytes," and "idiots"? Or his leadership of a 1980s think tank financed, unbeknownst to him apparently, by the intelligence arm of South Africa's apartheid regime?" (slate.msn.com/id/2116389). James Harding's article in Slate shows that Abramoff's ethically-challenged nature goes back a long way: "He became chairman of the College Republicans in 1981. Even then, Abramoff was a fragrant figure: While running the College Republicans, he also chaired the USA Foundation, a group that enjoyed tax-exempt status because it purported to be nonpartisan. In October 1984, the USA Foundation staged anniversary celebrations marking the first anniversary of Reagan's invasion of Grenada—jamborees that the group insisted had nothing to do with Reagan's re-election campaign. A spokesman explained Abramoff's dual role to Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post: 'When he has his College Republican hat on, he's partisan. When he has his U.S.A. hat on, he's nonpartisan.'" With the money Abramoff got from various Indian tribes, "For example, Abramoff helped get the chief of the Coushatta invited to a meeting with President George W. Bush in early 2001, set up by Grover Norquist, once Abramoff's executive director at the College Republicans and now Washington's pre-eminent conservative lobbyist. It was suggested that a donation to Norquist's think tank, Americans for Tax Reform, might be appreciated. Abramoff pressed the Coushattas. The $25,000 check was sent to ATR." (Norquist also happens to be the co-ordinator of the weekly Republican gatherings in Washington at which representatives of numerous media outlets and journalists literally set policy for spinning the news, but I'll leave that aside here as well.)

If you're not sick yet, there's more. Abramoff, the orthodox Jew, and DeLay, the fervent evangelical, "were introduced more than a decade ago by Rabbi Daniel Lapin, the South African-born radio talk-show host who established Toward Tradition, a nonprofit coalition of Jews and Christians that aims to advance the agenda of the devout," according to Harding. The website of Young America's Foundation offers a bio of Lapin (www.yaf.org/speakers/daniel_lapin.html) that makes his agenda explicit: "In 1991, Rabbi Lapin formed Toward Tradition to: 1. Supply religious and intellectual ammunition to the conservative movement by linking it to its Judeo-Christian origins. 2. Build new political alliances between the Jewish and Christian conservatives. 3. Offer a pro-business defense of capitalism based on the intrinsic morality of the free market." There you go; more PR, more packaging, more ona'at d'varim. The question is whether the moral schizophrenia of people like Abramoff (halakhic observance on the one hand, economic "freedom," on the other, i.e., utter self-interest) stands as merely an abuse or corruption of the system or characterizes the system itself? In other words, is there a distance separating Lapin and Abramoff?

Behavior such as Reed's or Abramoff's clearly doesn't bother everyone. One of Reed's defenders is "Kelly Shackelford, a prominent Christian conservative and president of the Free Market Foundation in Texas. [...] Mr. Reed led a new wave of Christian conservatives, Mr. Shackelford said, who 'understand that you have to be part of the system, and you can't sit outside and throw rocks at everybody.'"

Thank God not everybody has sold out. This morning I had the merit of sitting with Reb Arthur Waskow. He alerted me to an essay of Martin Buber's of which I had never before heard, "Recollection of a Death," a tribute to Jewish activist and socialist Gustav Landauer, murdered by right-wingers as Rosa Luxemburg had been. In his eulogy, Buber meditates on the question of ends and means, a meditation that could not be more timely. "I cannot conceive anything real corresponding to the saying that the end 'sanctifies' the means; but I mean something which is real in the highest sense of the term when I say that the means profane, actually make meaningless, the end, that is, its realization! What is realized is the farther from the goal that was set the more out of accord with it is the method by which it was realized." Regardless of which "side" we are on -- Moses or Pharaoh -- these thoughts should haunt us. Landauer, concludes Buber, "fought in the revolution against the revolution for the sake of the revolution."

May we never become complacent, ossifying into pyramids of self-importance, self-satisfaction and self-righteousness! May our souls remain always unleavened, thin and poor, nourishing enough only for helping others in need, needing always only to help, to help! Writes Emmanuel Levinas: "the relationship to the other is the very face of the future itself." May we taste the taste of the world-to-come in this world by baking it ourselves! Happy Pesach!

The Static, er, State Department

2005-04-20T11:45:00.000-04:00

11 Nisan 5765. The State Department appears in two different news stories today, though both tell us essentially the same thing. According to a piece from the Jewish Telegraph Agency (http://www.jta.org), "The State Department [annual report] included erroneous statistics last year indicating that terrorist incidents had decreased. It was forced to republish the report and admit that incidents in 2003 were at their highest levels in years." Gee, I wonder how that error crept in? A story in the Washington Post concerns the now delayed vote on John Bolton's nomination to serve as ambassador to the U.N. because of a growing number of allegations that he seriously lacks emotional self-control. (Too bad his ideological immaturity didn't inspire any Republican repugnance.) The article reveals that "On Monday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told her senior staff she was disappointed about the stream of allegations and said she did not want any information coming out of the department that could adversely affect the nomination, said officials speaking on the condition of anonymity." Once again, ideology trumps truth. The Department of Static at work with our tax dollars.

Holy Smokescreen, Batman...

2005-04-19T22:52:00.000-04:00

10 Nisan 5765. Some last-minute, late-night thoughts before the close of the alleged yahrzeit of Miriam the prophetess. Today the Vatican elected the Bavarian-born Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to be the new pope. "Having seen fascism in action [as a youth in Nazi Germany], Ratzinger today believes that the best antidote to political totalitarianism is ecclesiastical totalitarianism," a reporter for the National Catholic Reporter, John L. Allen, Jr., wrote. But two wrongs don't make a right. Actually, the right is precisely what they make up, alas. Where is Miriam when we need her? Where is her drumming and song-leading; her mobile well of life-giving waters? Please, God, keep us safe from those who claim to speak in your name.

Ironically, the kind of ecclesiastical totalitarianism preferred by the new Pope Benedict XVI is the same as that sought by right-wing American evangelical Protestants and by Bin Laden-esque anti-modern Muslims. (Who says there's a clash of civilizations?) The difference between the "western" and "non-western" visions, and the reason for their current mutual enmity, is that the latter remains unambivalently opposed to the alleged salvific power of the marketplace. As noted by Stewart Ewen, in his seminal social history of advertising, Captains of Consciousness, "The linking of the marketplace to utopian ideals, to political and social freedom, to material well-being, and to the realization of fantasy, represents the spectacle of liberation emanating from the bowels of domination and denial." Elsewhere: "The definition proffered by a 'freedom-loving' political ideology was one in which to produce one's own world was subversive (except where it was legitimated by the 'do-it-yourself' industry); to assert the idea that a community might control its own destiny was 'communistic.'" In other words, we already live in a world of corporate totalitarianism. Evangelical and Roman Catholic Christianity, as does Judaism, recognizes this to some extent, but stands only ambivalently critical toward contemporary socio-economic reality. According to a recent Business Week poll (!), over 70% of Americans believe corporations control too much of our lives. Some in the evangelical and Jewish community voice resistance to the sacralized business model -- they lead in home-schooling, for instance; they avoid the more pornographic media and goods -- but are not able or willing to see or oppose the underlying systemic causes because they too equate "the American way" with messianism.

Lesser Ury (1861-1931; Germany), Jeremiah (1897)

Money, Money, Money...

2005-04-17T09:42:00.000-04:00

Today's Washington Post features a story by Thomas Edsall shedding more light on the way Republicans grow their ideas.
"For years, the Heritage Foundation sharply criticized the autocratic rule of former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, denouncing his anti-Semitism, his jailing of political opponents and his 'anti-free market currency controls.'
Then, late in the summer of 2001, the conservative nonprofit Washington think tank began to change its assessment: Heritage financed an Aug. 30-Sept. 4, 2001, trip to Malaysia for three House members and their spouses. Heritage put on briefings for the congressional delegation titled 'Malaysia: Standing Up for Democracy' and 'U.S. and Malaysia: Ways to Cooperate in Order to Influence Peace and Stability in Southeast Asia.'
Heritage's new, pro-Malaysian outlook emerged at the same time a Hong Kong consulting firm co-founded by Edwin J. Feulner, Heritage's president, began representing Malaysian business interests. The for-profit firm, called Belle Haven Consultants, retains Feulner's wife, Linda Feulner, as a 'senior adviser.' And Belle Haven's chief operating officer, Ken Sheffer, is the former head of Heritage's Asia office and is still on Heritage's payroll as a $75,000-a-year consultant.
On Sept. 27, 2001, Belle Haven hired Alexander Strategy Group, a Washington lobby firm run by Edwin A. Buckham, a former chief of staff to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), to help represent Malaysian clients. Linda Feulner works as a consultant for Alexander Strategy Group as well as for Belle Haven. Experts say that the relationship between one of Washington's most influential conservative think tanks and a network of lobbying firms collecting fees from Malaysian business interests -- well in excess of $1 million over two years -- could pose a problem for Heritage's tax status as a nonprofit group. The fees were disclosed in reports filed with Congress and the Justice Department."

So much for "values." In his commentary to this past shabbat's parsha, Metsorah, the B'er Mayyim Hayyim, R. Hayyim Tirer of Tchernevich revolves his thoughts around not merely eliminating one's sins but searching out their roots in your midot, your character traits; he cites a verse of the prophet Hosea: "Sew for yourselves by righteousness, reap by the loving-kindness" (Hosea 10:12). The B'er Mayyim Hayyim continues, "righteousness does not come to completion except by means of the loving-kindness within it. And on the face of it the interpretation of this verse is not known. But the intention is to the name of God which is called Hesed, loving-kindness. And according to the degree of one's kavannah, intention, toward God, in truth such is the reward for righteousness. And so it is with all of the mitzvot and with all of the character traits with which a person acts for God." Amen.

Some Radical Jews

2005-04-15T11:15:00.000-04:00

6 Nisan 5765. A short post before shabbos preparations. The March-April issue of Utne has a revelatory piece by editor David Schimke outlining his fascination with the religious right and his decision to stop wavering on his own spiritual ambivalence. His timely and resonant conclusion: "I believe Jesus was a radical, and the time has come to start saying so." Of course, the time has come again to communicate this message, for it is not new. This morning I finally had a few moments to flip through the new Spring issue of Crosscurrents, which contains an enlightening dialogue on evangelicals and interfaith cooperation between Shane Claiborne, founder of the Simple Way Community in Philadelphia, and his former professor, sociologist (and Baptist minister) Tony Campolo. Introducing himself, Claiborne relates how during his college years "I met Jesus on the streets of Philadelphia, in his most distressing disguises." How true. I am reminded of the many midrashim about Elijah the Prophet, who is said to appear among us as a beggar, a wanderer, even as a prostitute! These are the kinds of figures "people of faith" like to read about in sacred texts, but like to legislate against in their laws. I am reminded of another radical Jew, zen Roshi Bernie Glassman, founder of the Zen Peacemaker Order. Roshi Glassman "was born in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, New York. His parents were immigrants from Eastern Europe and he grew up in a Jewish family with a strong socialist and Communist orientation," according to his bio-blurb (www.peacemakercircle.org/berniebio.htm). Among the activities he describes in his book, Bearing Witness: A Zen Master's Lessons in Making Peace (Harmony, 1998), are the interfaith meditation vigil he has held at Auschwitz-Birkenau as well as the "retreats" he conducts with his disciples and others in Manhattan, where the participating spiritual seekers live as homeless people, leaving behind all money, change of clothing, etc. If I can be allowed a moment of pride, one beautiful thing about my children is how they say, if they see someone older or poor who needs help, "he might be Eliyahu HaNavi." Amen.

May the whole world have a sabbath in which to re-collect our strength, our ability to see clearly and our daring! Shabbat shalom!

In Honor of the Apter

2005-04-14T12:38:00.000-04:00

5 Nisan (still). In honor of the anniversary today of the death of the Apter Rebbe, Avraham Yoshua Heschel, I'll give over a story my dear friend R. Micha Odenheimer told me recently. Even though it relates to Sukkot, the setting reminds me of Pesach (see if you can guess how) and of the many ways we continue to miss the point. If I get the details wrong or add some of my own, please forgive me.

One year the Apter Rebbe sent his son to conduct some business away from his hatzer, his Hasidic court, to a city somewhere in Germany. Depressed, as the trip meant he would miss Sukkot with his father and his hasidim, the son went with a sunken heart but went nonetheless. He stayed in the far-off town with a Jew, who of course invited him to take his meals with him in his sukkah. The Apter's son did so, but missing his home and the festivities there his heart was not in it. Each night he sat glumly with his host in the latter's sukkah. The first night they were joined by a silent baker, dressed entirely in white, covered in white flour. The son failed even to notice the mysterious guest. Each night, for the next six nights, an additional baker joined them in the sukkah, all of them dressed in their white baker's outfits, all glowing with ghostly white flour. The Apter's son, increasingly despressed and angry with homesickness, paid them no attention whatsoever. Finally, the holiday over, the son rushed back home. Arriving, he went directly to his father the rebbe. Seeing his son, the Apter rose to greet him with an expectant face and smile. "Nu, did you see them, did you meet the seven heavenly bakers, the supernal ushpizin?!" inquired the father.

Faith-Based Healthcare?

2005-04-14T11:29:00.000-04:00

5 Nisan 5765. Yahrzeit of the Apter Rebbe, Abraham Yehoshua Heschel.

An interesting little report by Sara Weinstein, "Hallowed Be Thy Healthcare: A Look at Catholic HMOs" (www.satyamag.com/feb05/weinstein.html) reveals that these HMOs refuse to cover family planning, in accordance with Church teachings. They "forbid the payment of delivery of services that contradict church teachings and prohibit, among other things, tubal ligations, vasectomies, in vitro fertilization, prescribing or dispensing of contraceptive devices, and abortions." Continues Weinstein, " In an effort to control costs and provide higher quality care for consumers, states are increasingly enrolling low-income women enrolled in Medicaid into managed care programs." Nationwide, 15 Catholic HMOs serve some 800,000 women. " The Institute for Reproductive Health Access conducted a study to determine the impact of the Fidelis “carve out” on family planning care. First, the study found that Fidelis [a Catholic HMO in New York] fails to educate current and prospective enrollees about the nature and consequences of its carve out policy. Marketing brochures are confusing at best and incomplete at worst. Medicaid beneficiaries are rarely informed that family planning is not covered, and get no guidance about how to obtain these services elsewhere. Second, the study found that physicians often gave incomplete or incorrect information about how to get family planning care. Women reported that they were flatly denied family planning and abortion services in accordance with Fidelis policy. Women were seldom told that they had a right to obtain family planning services elsewhere—or informed how to do so." Concludes Weinstein, " Family planning care is just as essential to the overall health of a woman as cancer screening or liver disease treatment. However, government officials allow for family planning care to be cut out of service packages, but would never dream of not providing a woman with treatment for lung cancer, for instance, because the Church didn’t support her decision to smoke."

God's commandments are meant to foster life (Deut. 4:1; 5:33; 30:16; etc.). How can it be that religious organizations pose the greatest obstacle to such a goal?

Negroponte Lying Before even Getting the Job

2005-04-13T12:05:00.000-04:00

4 Nisan 5765. Yet another example of Republican morality. John D. Negroponte, responding to the one, weak effort at his nomination hearings to question his performance while Ambassador to Honduras by Deomcratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon (way to go Ron! at least someone's not asleep at the wheel), said that "everything he did was within the law and that previous inquiries by the Senate and other investigators had absolved him of wrongdoing" (Douglas Jehl, "Nominee Vows Tighter Control of Intelligence," NYTimes, 13 April 2005). This is a reply worthy of Nuremberg. As revealed by a Washington Post report based on declassified documents, many never before made public, printed on Tuesday, Negroponte was a key supporter of and activist in the Republican campaign to arm the contras in order to oust the legitimately-elected Sandinista government of Nicaragua (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A44944-2005Apr11.html). This campaign patently went against international treaties -- though, like John Bolton, Reagan-era Republicans saw them as merely suggestions to be heeded or not at our whim -- but also against U.S. law as established by Congress. The Post's story on Negroponte is well worth reading.

What is sorriest about Negroponte's slippery response to Sen. Wyden is that he is lying most of all to himself. This seems to be the Republican modus operandi these days: pretend American law is sacred, while trampling it at every moment it becomes an obstacle to one's ideological goals. That Negroponte has the gall to claim that as Director of Intelligence he will "speak truth to power" is not surprising, but that only one of the Democratic senators sees through his posturing is terrifying (Wyden thought he might oppose the nomination but even this isn't certain). Jeff Ballabon manifests the same self-deception as Negroponte, writing in his blog a while back that "As a Jew and an American, I am bound religiously, morally, ethically to Halacha, American law, and the dictates of my conscience" (quoted on www.lukeford.net/profiles/profiles/jeff_ballabon.htm). The emphasis here falls decidedly on "my conscience." If Ballabon really cared about American law perhaps he'd be decrying the repeated breaking of that law by several government departments when they produce propaganda and pass it off as news. Oh, but then Ballabon might have recognized that that's exactly what his company, Channel One, was in the business of doing. For a pithy analysis on why Ballabon and the media in general could not and will not recognize to what degree they have been bought (off) by the Republican agenda, see Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s "The Disinformation Society" in the May issue of Vanity Fair.

Speak truth to power, indeed.

Torah to Help Prevent the Republican Apocalypse

2005-04-09T23:25:00.000-04:00

Rosh Hodesh Nisan 5765. This week's Forward contains a sickening op-ed from Jeff Ballabon decrying opposition to the Evangelical-Jewish alliance as sour grapes and desperation. Everything about this piece reflects the hypocrisy of these self-interested money-chasers, who understand little about the real message of the Torah. Ballabon used to run PR for Channel One, a for-profit outfit that marketed its insidiously narrow "news" programs, complete with advertisements hawking the worst of American junk food and commercialism, to schools. Though personally observant, he obviously has no problem pushing the country's favorite drug. Again ona'at d'varim rears its ugly head. No doubt his halakhic sources permit this kind of media seduction, this g'neivat da'at. Is this what the "modern" in "modern orthodox" means? Ballabon's fawning petting of Bush and evangelicals reminds me of the story in today's Times about Arthur Finkelstein, a prominent G.O.P. consultant who is gay and who just married his partner in a civil ceremony. Finkelstein, who "directed a series of hard-edged political campaigns to elect conservatives in the United States and Israel over the last 25 years" evidently married his longtime partner "to ensure that the couple had the same benefits available to married heterosexual couples." Hello?!? Another current example of Republican morality is Tom DeLay. Taking money from lobbyists apparently does not trouble him. Paying his wife half a million dollars out of taxpayer money does not bother him. Pontificating about Teri Schiavo does not trouble him, despite the fact that he himself withheld life support from his critically injured father (Katha Pollitt, "Backward Christian Soldiers," The Nation, April 18). His defense is to simply accuse his accusers of "wanting to destroy everything we stand for," that is, to pose as a pious, ethically-motivated public servant. Do these people have any self-knowledge whatsoever or is it just all PR? Perhaps it should occur to Ballabon that the swing of "traditional" Jews has nothing to do with values or morality. No, unfortunately one of the things "traditional" Jews and evangelicals share is a distaste for self-critique, for self-evaluation, for difficult thinking. They want precisely what Ronald Reagan used to talk about: easy answers. They want to feel good about themselves and their country, but not to actually change their behavior. Instead of addressing substance, they toy with packaging.

The vehement, vicious reaction among Democrats and others to Republican and evangelical hubris has less to do with sour grapes and the desperation of losers than it does with a truly moral concern for the state of this society and government. Torah-based Jews must realize that Republican positions are antithetical to Torah. The Torah tells us repeatedly to look out for, to protect the poor and weak. Bush meanwhile cuts as much funding as possible to public schools, housing for the poor, programs to aid troubled youth, etc. If you can't afford health insurance or care, well, too bad. That is not a biblical approach. The Torah sees adoration of "the free market" as idolatry. The biblical economy comes across as rather "socialist" (though I would hardly recommend its total adoption these days): the general public is obligated to support priests and levites; farmers must allow strangers to harvest in various waysminimal amounts of crops for personal survival; land ownership is equalized every 50 years; and so on.

Today, walking to se'udah sh'lishit, I ran into an acquaintence who teaches at a local elite, private high school, but who, thankfully, remains staunchly Democratic. We were talking about our respective Passover plans. I joked about the plethora of ads for Passover program packages at five-star resorts in the Caribbean and the like. He agreed that they seem to contradict the very spirit of the holiday, saying "American Jewry has to much money and too much hubris. It's become too muscular." I couldn't agree more. That's why one of the most beautiful teachers of Jerusalem, R. Dovid Hertzberg, z"tl, once explained to me why for Rosh Hodesh we say all the things we wish for for the coming month should be "for a blessing, not for a curse." Why, he asked rhetorically, should it say "not for a curse"? Obviously, if something is a blessing, it is not a curse. But things are rarely so straightforward. Even something that appears to be a curse can contain positive elements, can lead to good. And the contrary. Even something that is a blessing can contain elements that are not so positive; even what seems like a blessing can come to cause harm or damage, God forbid. The Rabbis tell us explicitly that without peace, no blessing can obtain. Republican efforts these days seem aimed at preventing peace in our own society by every means possible. Jews who care about God and Torah cannot allow themselves to be misled by their own comfort and material abundance.

May God keep us healthy and honest in the face of overwhelming blessings!

Later That Same Day...

2005-04-04T21:13:00.000-04:00

Wouldn't you know it. I start self-publishing and all I get is complaints. Well, two of them (and some positive feedback as well). I guess the Nietzsche quotes didn't go over so well. No one noticed the obvious gaff, which is that the Republicans hardly oppose domination. My only excuse is that I am sleep-deprived like most Americans, happened to be teaching the Genealogy of Morals this morning (unlike most Americans) and came across some seemingly wonderfully relevant passages. Instantaneous access to a public has its pitfalls.

Here's some good news, for a change of pace. Thirty one "national security leaders" wrote Bush a letter last Wednesday, urging him to reduce U.S. consumption of foreign oil through "improved efficiency and the rapid substitution of advanced biomass, alcohol and other available alternative fuels." According to a wire story from Environmental New Service (www.ens-newswire.com), the group suggested "'a major new initiative' that spends $1 billion for alternative fuel production in the next five years, and uses tax incentives to encourage the use of more efficient vehicles, including hybrids, plug-in hybrids, and flexible fuel vehicles." The letter warns, "We do not know today what form a crisis over oil will take, but we know that a crisis is coming." The signatories include figures such as Admiral William T. Crowe, Jr., C. Boyden Gray, Gary Hart, Timothy Wirth, R. James Woolsey (former CIA director) and Robert McFarlane (former National Security Advisor to President Ronald Reagan and IranContra hoolilgan!). Finally the military brass are leading a battle worth fighting (and winning)! The signatories represent an organization called the Energy Future Coalition (http://www.energyfuturecoalition.org), an impressive combination of business, labor and environmental leaders. "Bring environmental considerations into mainstream decision-making of public and private financial institutions," the coalition recommends, and "encourage public international financial institutions (IFIs) to use the leverage they exert over private financial flows (through their co-financing, risk mitigation, and policy advice) to support environmentally and socially sustainable development."

This story, together with the New York Times Magazine section's interview yesterday with Richard Cizik, leader of the country's largest evangelical group, the National Association of Evangelicals, and fervent green advocate, nuance the all-too frequent stereotyping polarization of red and green. The Times interview (www.nytimes.com/pages/magazine/index.html; Deborah Solomon has of late been delighting in talking to right-wingers of various sorts) is well worth reading. Cizik is trying to galvanize evangelicals to think green, most significantly Bush himself. Asked why Bush would challenge corporate interests, Cizik's reply is fascinating: "Look, the big corporate interests have an undue say in party policy [!!!]. And into this reality come the evangelical Christians. And when confronted with making a choice, this administration will compromise. Because about 40 percent of the Republican Party is represented by evangelicals. They wouldn't want the two major constituencies of the Republican Party at war with each other." As I said, fascinating...

Yours truly

24 Adar II 5765

2005-04-04T08:22:00.000-04:00

How much fun to read Nietzsche these days. His Genealogy of Morals provides constant food for thought in our debased times. Who would have thought that he predicted much of the malaise causing and resulting from the Republican worldview. "The democratic idiosyncracy which opposes everything that dominates and wants to dominate, the modern misarchism [Hatred of rule or government] (to coin an ugly word for an ugly thing) has permeated the realm of the spirit and disguised itself in the most spiritual forms." No to government! No to international cooperation! No to regulation! Except of course where the Republican fascist tendency oozes out of their ambivalence to urge federal intervention to protect morals. The origin of this? "the ascetic ideal springs from the protective instinct of a degenerating life which tries by all means to sustain itself and to fight for its existence; it indicates a partial physiological obstruction and exhaustion against which the deepest instincts of life, which have remained intact, continually struggle with new expedients and devices. The ascetic ideal is such an expedient; the case is therefore the opposite of what those who reverence this ideal believe: life wrestles in it and through it with death and against death; the ascetic ideal is an artifice for the preservation of life." How beautiful yet ironic in the face of recent events in Florida, the late Pope's willingness to face death when it came, to refuse yet another hospitalization. In this he showed himself a true man of faith.

The obsession of preserving life at all cost, like the fetishization of profit-making at all cost, echoed in the haftorah we just read for Parshat Parah. There, Ezekiel (36:24-25) uses a fascinating term for the dessicated land of Israel, Neshama, which also obviously means "soul." From the same root as wilderness (sh'mama), when we are ready, willing and able this soul/land will resprout into a new Eden, with a heart of flesh rather than our current heart of stone. Ezekiel reminds us that a land without conscience cannot generate life and that fixating on preserving spiritual wastelands at all cost proves us to be heartless and lacking soul.

Have a good week.

21 Adar II 5765

2005-04-01T15:19:00.000-05:00

I just read a fascinating story in The Jewish Week about a group called Fuel For Truth, which aims to educate Jews in how to speak in defense of Israel. On erev Purim, some 80 young Jewish "professionals -- dressed in business attire" -- gathered at AJC headquarters to hear, between "a sushi dinner and a dance party," a "conservative public relations guru and an Evangelical Christian" named Michael Shannon drill them in the arts of verbal defense. His advice? "Refer to West Bank settlements as 'suburbs'; call Palestinian Arabs 'Arabs' not 'Palestinians' ('The word "Arab" has a bad connotation for them')." Incredible! I could not have invented a better example of the immoral, Orwellian worldview that results from the miscegenation of evangelicalism and PR. This kind of lying -- I can't seem to get far from ona'at d'varim these days, no matter where I turn -- is going to defend Israel?!? This kind of lying is what Jews need to learn from "religious" Christians?!? Is this what standard business practices have become? The group should change its name to Fuel for Burning the Truth. Had this been a Purim prank it would have been hysterically funny. What is funny is the letter in the same issue written by Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, the evangelicals' closest buddy, announcing that "our true friends are those who help us live another day and who declare am yisrael chai." With friends like these it won't matter if we have a country; we'll have no soul.

May God protect us from ourselves. Shabbat shalom.

18 Adar II 5765

2005-03-29T18:20:00.000-05:00

I just flew in to New York the other day. What did I see? Thousands upon thousands of wasted opportunities. I am referring to the multitude of city roofs. Every single one, whether private home or large building, whose roof is capable of hosting one, should be sprouting either a green roof or an array of solar panels. It is unconscionable; literally a sin causing untold, unnecessary pollution. What can we do to move New York's powers-that-be (powers-that-be-asleep, that is) to encourage the construction of green roofs and solar panels? We must pressure officials to give major tax credits to those who take one of these actions; bigger tax credits to those who undertake both. We must break the self-interested monopoly of ConEd in opposing decentralized energy generation. Solar panels on homes and buildings, in particular, will generate hundreds of jobs in installation and maintenance. Let's get on it.

12 Adar II 5765. Macroeconomics: War by Other Means.

2005-03-24T16:00:00.000-05:00

Now I understand why Bush nominated Paul Wolfowitz to head up the World Bank. This rabid neocon's aggressive militarism and hubristic unilateralism suits the purposes of the World Bank perfectly. After all, the bank's main goal is to wage economic warfare against third-world nations in order to force them to aid U.S. corporations and adhere to U.S. policy dictates. According to the sordid memoirs of John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, the scam works as follows: "First, I was to justify huge international loans that would funnel money back to [Chas. T. Main, Inc.] and other U.S. companies (such as bechtel, Halliburton, Stone & Webster, and Brown & Root) through massive engineering and construction projects. Second, I would work to bankrupt the countries that received those loans (after they had paid MAIN and the other U.S. contractors, of course) so that they would present easy targets when we needed favors, including military bases, UN votes, or access to oil and other natural resources." The goal of the hucksters of international finance is to manipulate numbers in order to concoct the project(s) which will guarantee the highest annual growth of GNP. Why? Because GNP is a measurement inherently capable of great deception. "The growth of GNP may result even when it profits only one person, such as an individual who owns a utility company, and even if the majority of the population is burdened with debt. The rich get richer and the poor grow poorer. Yet, from a statistical standpoint, this is recorded as economic progress." The same stacked deck that rakes in enormous profits for credit card companies works on countries as well. This explains why the U.S. "seldom resort[s] to anything illegal because the system itself is built on subterfuge, and the system is by definition legitimate." No doubt Wolfowitz will prove himself a real pro at screwing the rest of the world for the benefit of our economic elites.

For no particular reason this leads me to think of the story I read in yesterday's Ha'aretz. In the past 5 years some 3,000 to 5,000 women have been "imported" into Israel for exploitation in the sex industry. That's three to five thousand reasons for the Haredi and Orthodox rabbis to scream at the top of their lungs against g'neivat nefesh, against a crime mentioned in the supposedly central and sacred Ten Commandments, theft of persons. Where is the outcry?! Why doesn't our concerned evangelical pastor from San Diego go public denouncing this crime which destroys so many lives, instead of fulminating against gay pride parades?! If he had any integrity, he might say, as Judah confessed regarding Tamar, who had dressed like a harlot to ensnare him in his own hypocrisy, "she was more righteous than I." Indeed.

9 Adar II 5765

2005-03-20T16:14:00.000-05:00

More from our "friends" in the evangelical movement: According to a story in this week's Forward by Eric J. Greenberg, a series of Christian children's books comprise one of the most popular contemporary publications. Printed by Tyndale House Publishers of Illinois, the "Left Behind: The Kids" series "are, at their essence, conversion narratives," Greenberg quotes from a new report by Mark Stover on images of Jews and Judaism in contemporary Protestant evangelical fiction. The books in the series stress the importance of "Jews converting to Christianity" and "the implicit spiritual emptiness of Jewish spirituality." The president of Tyndale House Publishers himself corroborated the accuracy of Stover's depiction of "evangelical Christianity as an exclusivist religious system that allows only one way to find salvation and that considers the proselytization of Jews to be an imperative." (The Roman Catholic Church, on the other hand, finally declared, in 2001, that Jews can achieve salvation through the Torah.) Hence, in the Left Behind junior books, "Jews refusing to embrace Jesus often face severe consequences -- including suffering the torments of hell and losing one's soul for all eternity." Though often such proselytization plots occupy minimal space, "in every case, the evangelical Christian characters feel an ardent desire for their Jewish friends to become Christians." This is not a religion that knows how to leave others alone.

The Christian belief in constant and infinite growth in "making souls" perhaps lies at the bottom of contemporary capitalism's most grievous heresy. Those who worship the free market are addicted to a similar belief in constant and infinite growth. Every year, "successful" economic entities must earn more profits than in the previous year. This notion, which can only be considered mystical, knows no parallel in nature. Nothing grows constantly or forever -- certainly nothing real or healthy. Yet this impossible, unnatural, dangerous goal constitutes the holy grail of our entire economic system. In their then-justifiable search for industriousness, writers like Locke and Smith deployed organic metaphors of natural fruitfulness, but only after denying that nature produced any fruits worth considering worthwhile. Contemporary capitalism has made this even more twisted and misguided. Instead of mimicking natural fertility, we pretend nature is irrelevant, superfluous; we act as if human labor could exist and flourish unaided. This is the econometric equivalent of Christian supersessionism; the vampiric usurpation of Jewish identity wrought onto nature. There's only one way to salvation now: convert everything and anything natural we find into fodder for profitability. If it can't be converted, it's not worth saving.

Yours truly.

A Culture of Life?

2005-03-18T19:16:00.000-05:00

The Republicans in Congress are salivating over Terri Schiavo. Good thing she's brain dead. Otherwise she'd never attract governmental attention. Bush claims he wants to foster a "culture of life." Yeah, life as a technical requirement. "You vill live -- or else!" At life's beginning and end, it must be protected at all costs, unless, of course, a court has decided you're an evil criminal and deserve to be executed. Furthermore, quality of life in between birth and death is of little consequence. Then the Republicans can ruin things for you in myriad ways. Most ironic is how all this conflicts with so-called conservative family values. A family cannot be trusted to make a decision of such weight about a loved one, but only a federal court! Again we see the true face of Compassionate Conservativism: hypocrites and parasites...

2005-03-17T19:17:00.000-05:00

Speaking of lawsuits. Is it possible to sue the president and the administration as a taxpayer over global warming? ( A class-action suit would be fitting given the recent legislation clamping down on citizen attempts to defend themselves against profit-motivated malfeasance.) That's probably too tenuous. But couldn't one sue the administration as a taxpayer over the blatant blurring of PR and propaganda, i.e., the many examples of many Departments distributing propaganda as if it were real news (and paid for by your and my tax dollars), claiming direct harm as a citizen?

No Way to Delay that Trouble Coming Every Day?

2005-03-17T16:18:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the Frank Zappa reference. Today I can take it no longer. Nothing in particular, just the usual barrage of bad news. First this week came the announcement that John Bolton would represent the United States at the U.N., akin to sending those who hate government to Washington. Oh, wait! That's what we've been doing for nearly the past twenty-five years! Then yesterday we learn that Bush nominated Paul Wolfowitz to head the World Bank. I don't even know where to begin critiquing this move. Yesterday as well we discovered that the Senate approved drilling in the ANWR. Just another payback to the oil industry. No need to reduce consumption because of our dependence on anti-democratic middle east oil potentates. No need to seriously pursue alternative energy sources for reasons pragmatic or ecological. Just let 'em drill some more. The bitter irony is that while 7 moderate Republicans voted against opening the Reserve (that's wildlife reserve, not oil reserve!), 3 Democrats voted for it!

I'll get to the fourth final straw in a moment, but you get the idea. Conservative unilateralism has already gotten way out of hand. Conservative obliviousness only increases -- the effect of their alleged mandate. Bush and his minions are truly dangerous: manipulative, mendacious, cynical, deceitful. Notice how Bush doesn't even bother to call himself compassionate anymore. None of this is news, but all of it must be stopped. Before it's too late. I fully believe that Bush et al deny global warming not out of deference to corporate profits (though that too) but because they believe it will usher in the end of the world and, so they believe, Christ's Second Coming!

My goal here -- besides venting, complaining and whining -- is to try to do what I can to help bring about the downfall of this administration; to change the atmosphere in this country so that Republicanism becomes a dirty word; help educate people to the utter hypocrisy and callowness of what passes for conservative vision; to articulate, gather, share good news and creative, radical ideas for bringing about change.

I try to base my life around Torah. One of the most disconcerting aspects of the Republican sweep is the degree to which Orthodox Jews have fallen for Bush hook, line and sinker. Jews need to be reminded how pernicious fundamentalism is, no less so when it is Christian (indeed, perhaps much more so). Everything the religious right stands for is antithetical to Torah as I understand it. The fourth final straw that led me to start this blog was my reading two news stories. The first, in Ha'aretz yesterday (http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/552967.html), relates how a coalition of evangelical Christians led by Leo Giovinetti, a pastor from San Diego, is opposing the Jerusalem gay pride parade. They have convinced many haredi ministers of Knesset (and others) to sign a petition to prohibit the celebration. Now really. Who the hell are these people to interfere with the sovereign affairs of a foreign nation and city?! But even if, just suppose, homosexuality is a sin (which I do not believe), just as stealing, lying, killing innocents, etc., what are the real-world consequences of this alleged abomination? None! Some people choose to engage in a forbidden act. Otherwise, most gays and lesbians contribute to society like everybody else Many of them have families. On the other hand, consider the consequences of -- just to take one seemingly petty example -- the routine deceitfulness and lack of scruples shown by credit card companies or the routine manner in which phone companies make it as difficult as possible to obtain customer service, file complaints or retrieve owed monies -- all of this by law. Theft, especially from the weak, is specifically forbidden by the Bible and regularly denounced by the prophets. Where is the religious outcry over these practices? Where is the evangelical fervor? I want a religion that worships God, not the free market.

The second fact I learned this week comes from a fascinating story in this week's The New Yorker by Peter Boyer, "Jesus in the Classroom," about the lawsuit brought against the Cupertino public school district for supposedly not allowing the Declaration of Independence to be taught. This is, of course, nonsense. The group that sued, the Alliance Defense Fund, is an organization that specializes in "Christian" litigation. Their goal, that is, is to eliminate separation of church and state, to ensure that public institutions give license to the promotion and maintenance of this country as a Christian republic. When founded, by James Dobson's Focus on the Family, Campus Crusade for Christ and other groups, it seems to have been modeled on a group imitating the A.C.L.U., the American Center for Law and Justice. This Center, funded initially by tv evangelist Pat Robertson, was founded by none other than Jay Sekulow, "a Brooklyn-born Jew who had converted to Christianity while attending college"! His courtroom successes in fighting those who seek to prevent proselytizing seem to have inspired the religious right and the establishment of the ADF. Is this the kind Jewish-Christian alliance the world needs?!

I am sick, tired, disgusted. I want to weep. Where have we gone wrong? How can we repair the damage already done? Bush is rolling back progress hundreds of years. God protect us from ourselves.

Yours truly