Dreams Into Lightning

Rav Kook - Weekly Torah Portion Website

Via comments, Rabbi Chanan Morrison informs me that his excellent site on Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook can now be found at the following URL:
http://ravkooktorah.org
Please go pay a visit.

What's wrong with the Jews?

Muslims Against Sharia:

When Muslims criticize Jews chances are it's Islamists. You rarely see moderate (an I do mean real moderate, not Islamists like CAIR who claim to be moderate) Muslims saying unflattering things about the Jews. So, normally, when I see the Jews do dumb things i.e., supporting an Islamist congressional candidate because of partisanship (American Jewish World's support for Keith Ellison) or providing utilities to a terrorist enclave (Gaza), I try to keep my mouth shut. For obvious reasons. But not this time.

I thought I've seen everything: Cuban missile crisis, fall of Berlin wall, 9/11. Until recently, I thought that the father of modern terrorism getting awarded a Nobel Peace Prize was the most peculiar event in my lifetime. But a recent, largely unnoticed event, could take the cake in peculiarity contest.

On December 15, Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie, the president of the Union of Reform Judaism (one of the largest Jewish organizations in America), gave a sermon in San Diego in front 5,000 Jews in which he announced URJ's alliance with Islamic Society of North America (ISNA - one of the largest Muslim organizations in America).

As a part of the sermon, Rabbi Yoffie stated that "[ISNA] has issued a strong and unequivocal condemnation of terror, including a specific condemnation of Hizbollah and Hamas terror against Jews and Israelis. It has also recognized Israel as a Jewish state and supported a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict." But has it really? The statement Rabbi Yoffie refers to reads: "ISNA rejects all acts of terrorism, including those perpetrated by Hamas, Hizbullah and any other group that claims Islam as their inspiration." While there appears to be forward progress in this statement, there are several problems with it:
- ISNA does not say it condemns but says it "rejects" acts of terrorism. What does reject mean? Why not say "condemn"? Rejection is not synonymous with condemnation.
- Yes, ISNA seems to be acknowledging that Hamas and Hizballah carry out acts of terrorism but nowhere do they say come out and say that Hamas and Hizballah are terrorist groups. Only the other day we saw witnesses on behalf of the Holy Land Foundation in Dallas claim that Hamas can be divisible by its "military (terrorist) wing" and its "social-humanitarian wing." The failure to unequivocally condemn Hamas or Hizballah as a terrorist group is like me saying that I reject the tactics used by anti-abortion doctors who "claim to be inspired by Christianity." The use of the term "claim Islam as their inspiration" is another attempt by ISNA to deny the unequivocal fundamental Islamic basis for groups that carry out acts of terrorism. This is in line with ISNA's statement which claims the use of the term "Islamic terrorist" is racist. Now, how can one be said to condemn Hamas or Hizballah while simultaneously denying the existence of "Islamic terrorism"? ISNA's statement "condemning terrorism" from http://balancedIslam.org quotes approvingly the European Council of Ifta and Research. This is a council that has justified suicide bombings by Hamas. One of its leaders is Yousef Al-Qardawi who has issued fatwas calling for the killing of Jews (not Israelis) and Americans in Iraq.

We all remember bogus fatwa issued by Fiqh Council of North America (FCNA). The same FCNA whose chairman, Taha Jaber Al-Alwani, is an unindicted co-conspirator in the case against Sami al-Arian, the North American leader of Palestinian Islamic Gihad (PIG). Is ISNA's rejection of terrorism any different?

Prior to his praise for ISNA, Rabbi Yoffie stated the following: "Islamic extremists constitute a profound threat. For some, this is a reason to flee from dialogue, but in fact the opposite is true." I am a bit confused. Does this mean that the Rabbi realizes that ISNA is an extremist organization? ...

Cops Blocked Religious Sympathizers from Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade

In 2006, two young religious Israelis wanted to show their support for the gay rights march in Jerusalem. But the police were having none of it. Jerusalem Post:

When Hebrew University students Isaac and Shlomo wanted to demonstrate their solidarity with the Jerusalem parade in 2006, police prevented them from entering parade grounds. Their crime? Wearing kippot.

"Because we're religious, the police assumed we were there to attack," Isaac explains. "We were there to support democracy, to show that as religious Jews we support gay rights, and instead we were treated like criminals."

When the two students, both 25 at the time, first attempted to enter the parade grounds, they were taken aside into a tent and strip-searched by the police. "We agreed because they told us that after we were searched, we could go inside," says Isaac.
Their participation in the parade was not a matter of personal grievance, but of idealism, explains Isaac, saying that he was determined to demonstrate his support of a marginalized community.

When police prevented the two from joining the parade, Isaac says he felt "hurt. I felt betrayed by the system, that they made assumptions about us [religious people] ... that they didn't allow us to support the same people that they were trying to protect."

"This year, I wore a hat to cover my kippa, and they let me in," he adds. ...

Really, really sad. Read the whole story at the link. A tip of the kippah to my gay Orthodox friend in San Francisco for passing this on.

Israel's Pride

Two important conflicts have played out in the Land of Israel this past week. But first, a word from Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook:

Near the end of their journey in the desert, the Israelites arrived at Kadesh. But there was no water to drink, and the people complained bitterly. God commanded Moses to take his staff before the entire people and speak to the cliff-rock, to provide water for the nation. Moses took the staff and assembled the people. But he shouted,

"Listen now, you rebels! Shall we produce water for you from this cliff?" [Num. 20:10]

Moses then struck the cliff twice with the staff, and a huge amount of water gushed out. ...

According to Rav Kook, all religious rage, all intolerance for moral failings, is rooted in this display of anger by Moses. Instead of words of reconciliation, he shouted, "Listen now, you rebels!" Instead of speaking to the heart, he hit the rock. While righteous indignation stems from sincere and pure intentions, the highest goals of holiness will only be achieved through calm spirits and mutual respect.

In our generation, the instruction of Torah and its details involves a pedantic form of debate. Father and son, teacher and student, struggle and battle over Torah study. In the end, their mutual love returns; but the residual feelings of enmity are never completely erased.

The restoration of the peaceful ways of Torah will come through the prophet Elijah, who "shall turn the heart of fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers." [Malachi 3:24]

Rav Kook, who is widely regarded as the founder of religious Zionism (and who's one of my personal heroes), embodied an extraordinary combination of idealism and pragmatism, nationalism and universalism, mysticism and rationalism. One of his greatest strengths was his ability to build bridges between seemingly antagonistic parties. The optimism and magnanimity of spirit that enabled him to do this is evident in the passage I've quoted here.

In Jerusalem this week, the annual controversy over the city's gay pride parade ran its course. Regular readers of Dreams Into Lightning will know that I have sympathies on both sides of the issue, and I posted extensively on the controversy last year. This year, the event seems almost anti-climactic. Here is the Jerusalem Post article:

"Jerusalem of Gold," the ballad that united Israelis following the Six Day War, once again echoed in the streets of the capital as both gay rights activists and religious counterprotesters used the song as their anthem.

The point of unity may have been unintentional, but was not entirely surprising, as both the protesters and the marchers acknowledged that the theme of the parade was more about its Jerusalem location than its message of gay pride.

"When we march in Tel Aviv it's like a big party. We have music, we have fun. We are glad to be here but it isn't fun… we're looking over our shoulders all the time, wondering if it will become violent," said David Etkes, a Tel Aviv University student participating in the event. "We came here because we wanted to show Jerusalem that they can't scare the gay community. Jerusalem must learn to accept us, too."

The article goes on to say that the gay parade was seen by observers as much more subdued than its counterparts in cities like Paris, and that a few religious demonstrators managed to infiltrate the parade and heckle participants before being escorted away by police. Meanwhile, Arutz Sheva reports that leading rabbis are moving away from encouraging any kind of counter-demo:

Leading hareidi-religious rabbis say that anti-Gay Pride Parade protests should be put on a low burner. "Prayers are more effective than rallies," they say.

Rabbi Shmuel HaLevy Vozner, Rabbi Nissim Karelitz, and other leading rabbinical sages in Bnei Brak have issued a statement against participation in the "protests and similar events" against the upcoming gay-pride parade in Jerusalem.

The homosexual march is scheduled to take place along King David St. in Jerusalem on Thursday at 5 PM, followed by a rally at 8 PM. Some 7,000 policemen will be on hand to try to neutralize violence, though Jerusalem Police Chief Ilan Franco says he has no illusions that the event will be "violence-free."

"We again warn regarding the gathering of youngsters in the streets of Bnei Brak for protests and similar events," the rabbis wrote, "and we hereby present our position, the position of Torah, that the Sages are not pleased with these gatherings, and whoever studies Torah should guard himself and stay away from them."

The rabbis even say that it is known that the organizers are reckless and "do not have fear of G-d opposite them, and joining up with them is a spiritual danger... A significant number of them are not yeshiva students, but youngsters from other towns who are looking for an excuse to go wild, burn trash bins and destroy public property... Our strength is in our mouths, in prayer to G-d that He will bring down a spirit of purity to enable us to serve Him truly." ...

In other words, what has happened was exactly what needed to happen: both sides have learned to assert their beliefs and values in a civilized way - and they have learned to live with each other. And that is all that anybody could expect.

And this is how it works in a civilized society. Protesters may sometimes get carried to extremes in the heat of the moment - for example, the Haredi demonstrations in past years, or the original Stonewall riots - but ultimately they understand that it is in their own best interests to reach out to the community through dialog.

Contrast this with the mayhem that occurred in Gaza with the takeover by the islamist fanatics of Hamas. Ha'Aretz reports that some Palestinians are seeing the irony in being forced to flee to Israel:

"There were five of them. They stood over me and shot my legs from the knee down. One of them put his Kalashnikov to my head. Instinctively I moved the barrel aside and the bullet hit my hand," Shadi told Haaretz yesterday. He arrived at Ichilov with one leg amputated and the other leg crushed.

"I wanted to shoot myself for voting Hamas," another patient said. He came with his brother, who had been shot in the head while evacuating wounded people in his taxi. "We really believed Hamas would change things," he said. ...

Later yesterday, Zecharia Alrai, 39, an officer in Fatah's elite Force 17 commando unit, arrived. He had been abducted by four Hamas gunmen a week ago. They loaded him into a jeep and drove him to an isolated spot, where they shot three bullets into his leg and dumped him.

"That's not Islam. That's evil and hypocrisy. How ironic that Israel is rescuing us from our Muslim 'brothers,'" he said.

Like Gay Patriot West and Nate Nelson, I'm skeptical of the concept of "gay pride" as such; I think it's better to be able to be proud of one's achievements. Israel - a free, strong, and democratic state surrounded by hostile dictatorships, and a nation where the most widely divergent views can find open expression - has much to be proud of.

The same profundity and precision which in the past was achieved via zeal and passion ("rit'cha d'oraita"), will be achieved in the future through the spiritual strength of gentleness and equanimity. Then the light of the sukkah of peace will encompass the Jewish people and those nations of the world who gather from afar to the holy city of Jerusalem.

Rabbi Oppenheimer Assumes Post at YI Forest Hills

The Jewish Press:

As sunshine poured through the window of his office at the Young Israel of Forest Hills, Rabbi Leonard Oppenheimer, the shul’s newly appointed spiritual leader, described his feelings about taking the place of Rabbi Feivel Wagner, zt”l, who was niftar suddenly last year, after serving as the shul’s rabbi for over two decades.

“I am stepping into the shoes of a very great man,” remarked Rabbi Oppenheimer, with deep reverence. “I never met Rabbi Wagner. In some ways I am sorry that I never met him, but in some ways it is better. With all the wonderful things that I hear about Rabbi Wagner – what a wonderful man he was – what a tzadik and talmid chacham – I don’t know if I could have taken this job. I just know that I am the successor of an extraordinary person.”

A friendly, unassuming and keenly intelligent man, Rabbi Leonard Oppenheimer is not your “typical” pulpit rabbi. He earned a Master’s degree from Polytechnic Institute and possesses a law degree from Brooklyn Law School. ...

Read the rest at the link. I had the privilege of knowing Rabbi Oppenheimer during his tenure as the rabbi of Kesser Israel in Portland, Oregon. The folks at Young Israel of Forest Hills are very fortunate.

Just Passin' Over

Posting has been light lately, again due to a busy personal life. But I don't want to let Erev Pesach fall without posting something.

First and foremost, thanks to Cinnamon Stillwell for the link! Welcome, CS and Kesher Talk readers.

Via Neo: "Did I miss the part where it was progressive not to fight medieval religious fascists?" Marc "Armed Liberal" Danziger has some ideas about how you can help stop Congress from abandoning the Iraqi people. Go here to learn more.

Finally, I don't have anything particularly inspired to post about Passover right now, so I'll leave you with these links: A prayer for the captives at Kesher Talk, and ShrinkWrapped's magnificent Passover essay, "We were slaves."

Chag sameach ... happy Passover!

Rabbi Steven Greenberg on Homosexuality and Judaism

This post explores some of the issues around Judaism, homosexuality, and gender raised by Rabbi Steven Greenberg at his brunch appearance in Portland this morning. This is not a transcript of the talk, but rather a reflection on its main points. Previous post: Rabbi Steven Greenberg in Portland.

Lesbianism: "Doubled alienness" and the lesser challenge. Almost inevitably, discussions on homosexuality and Judaism begin with the topic of male homosexuality, which is explicitly prohibited by the Torah (Leviticus 18:24 and 20:13). By comparison, lesbianism appears to be a "lesser challenge" scripturally speaking, and therefore gets less attention. Rabbi Greenberg challenged this approach, opening the talk with a discussion of lebianism. Lesbians, he noted, experience the "doubled alienness" of being both homosexual in a heterosexual culture and female in a male-dominated culture. The general rabbinic reticence around the subject, he said, owed in large part to the difficulty of finding solid legal ground to declare lesbianism forbidden.

"I did not have sex with that woman!" Is lesbian sex sex? Don't laugh, it was a real question for the Rabbis. Talmudic sources disagreed as to the degree to which a sexual encounter between women could be counted as "sex" for purposes of establishing infidelity or eligibility to marry a man of the priestly caste (kohanim).

Lesbians and gay men. For political reasons, it's natural for lesbians and gay men to join together in LGBT organizations. But, Rabbi Greenberg observed, in real life they form separate communities. Greenberg suggested that recognizing the differences between gay men and lesbians (which, after all, are a subset of the differences between men and women) is an important step toward building a truly cohesive community.

Traditional religion as an ally. "The Human Rights Campaign did important work with governments for many years, but they never worked with churches because they didn't see religion as a potential ally. Then they hired Harry Knox ... " Traditionally religious people and secularists often have an adversarial relationship (as was made evident by one very argumentative non-religious guest).

Beyond the victim identity: finding our voice. Rabbi Greenberg asserted that the generosity necessary to dialog with people very different from ourselves is exactly what is asked of the queer community today. We delude ourselves, he said, if we deny that there are some people whose "otherness" makes us uncomfortable; the challenge is to learn what these people come to teach us. Regarding the gay community, Rabbi Greenberg envisioned a future where we can look "beyond our victim status" and find lessons in our own experience that will be meaningful to the world at large.

Gender and power. Drawing on the legend of Lilith, whose "sin" was her refusal to take a subordinate sexual postition to Adam, Greenberg explored the ways in which "top" and "bottom" sexual positions (in both heterosexual and homosexual acts) have been read as indicators of power relationships. The equation "bottom = submissive = female" has profound and far-reaching implications.

RELATED: Rabbi Steven Greenberg in Portland.

Rabbi Steven Greenberg in Portland

As promised, I am liveblogging Rabbi Steven Greenberg's appearance at a private gathering in Portland.

10:45am - event begins

Rabbi Greenberg begins by discussing lesbianism in the Jewish tradition. Traditional rabbis tend to avoid the subject because it is a "doubled alienness" and because it is seemingly less of a biblical challenge than male homosexuality. The result is the perception that male homosexuality, rather than homosexuality itself, is an issue in Judaism. ...

Rabbi Greenberg opens up the issue of gender differences within the G&L community and invites guests to suggest some common differences between lesbians and gay men. ...

"Lesbian Relations" handout is passed around ...

RSG: The HRC worked for many years, doing important work, but never addressed the question of religion - because religion was never seen as a potential ally. Then they hired Harry Knox ...

How can the gay Jewish community reach beyond the victim identity? Can we offer some insights from our own experience that are relevant for the non-Jewish world?

11:15am - Study of rabbinic texts: Yevamot 76a; Sifra on Leviticus 18:3-4; Rambam, Hilchot Issurei Biah 21:8.

... There's so much going on here! I really can't do justice to the dialog that is going on. I'll post more soon. The event is proving to be much richer and more exciting than I could have imagined. More soon.

Update and remarks. This event really exceeded expectations. By opening the discussion with the subject of lesbianism, and from there moving to gender roles, Rabbi Greenberg chose "the road less traveled" and, I think, got right to the heart of the real issues. Watch for a full post on the Rabbi Steven Greenberg brunch shortly.

RELATED: Rabbi Steven Greenberg on homosexuality and Judaism.

Three Jewish Souls Seeking a Way Home

Ha'Aretz:

Three Iranians interested in converting to Judaism recently left their native country, but have been unable to find any entity to assist them.

The three Shi'ite Muslims left Iran and approached the Israeli embassy and Jewish communities in Azerbaijan, but were rejected. It is impossible to convert to Judaism in Iran, as they would be considered heretics, a crime punishable by death. They are now waiting in a makeshift city in Turkey for a United Nations hearing on their application for refugee status.

The three left Iran two months ago and immediately approached the Israeli embassy in Baku. According to N., they were given a chilly reception. N. points out that embassy officials did not invite them into the building, but talked to them on the street.

"We told them we want visas to Israel in order to convert," N. recounts. "They told us that if we are not Jewish, our parents aren't Jewish and we have no family members in Israel, we cannot get visas."

The three also did not receive warm welcomes in Baku synagogues. At one place of worship, they were laughed at, at another, locked out. ...

Jerusalem Gay Pride Wrap-Up

In the end, the event was held in a stadium.

CNN:

A few thousand gays and their supporters rallied in Jerusalem on Friday under heavy security, going ahead with a festival that has sparked religious protests and highlighted deep divisions in Israeli society.

... Organizers had planned a gay pride street parade but cancelled it after police said they needed to beef up security to guard against threatened Palestinian attacks following a deadly Israeli army shelling attack in Gaza this week.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews had also threatened to disrupt the march through the holy city. There have been nightly protests in Jerusalem's religious neighborhoods against the parade.

...Police said they arrested several religious youths near the venue who were carrying knives and brass knuckles. There were also a few minor scuffles between right-wing opponents of the event and gay rights activists in the city but little violence.

Arutz Sheva:

Event organizers reported that some 4,000 people attended Friday’s gay pride event in the Givat Ram area of the capital. About 3,000 policemen were on hand to maintain law and order. There were no serious disturbances reported.

Gay.com:

Police security worries spiraled after an errant Israeli artillery shells killed 19 civilians in Gaza on Wednesday and Palestinian militants vowed to carry out suicide bombings in Israel in retaliation.

Responding to those concerns, Pride organizers agreed to turn the parade into a rally, held inside the fenced-in stadium of Jerusalem's Hebrew University, which was ringed by mounted police and anti-riot units.

This article at Time points out some things you should know about Israeli culture:

The fuss over the Gay Pride Parade also exposed some of the seismic cracks inside Israeli society, where modern, secular values collide with fiercely defended religious traditions. The sharp Tel Aviv-Jerusalem rivalry illustrates this divide. Tel Aviv prides itself on its hip nightclubs and a laid-back, cosmopolitan attitude, while an hour's drive away, in some Jerusalem neighborhoods, ultra-orthodox men re-create the customs of 17th century Poland and wear long, black waistcoats and beaver hats that make them broil in the Mediterranean sun.

Making up half of the Holy City's Jewish residents, the ultra-Orthodox ride their own buses, send their kids to religious schools and have the power to close off their neighborhoods to cars on the Sabbath. Any Tel Aviv visitor wandering into these austere communities in shorts and a T-shirt on the Sabbath runs the risk of getting clobbered by a rock.

Even Jerusalem's gays are more subdued than Tel Aviv's. Organizer Canetti says she asked Tel Aviv's participants to tone down their sexy costumes. "We're not having floats or naked men flashing their asses," she says. "We just want to tell people, hey, we're here. We have a right to exist."

Now for my thoughts.

As regular readers of this site know, I originally opposed the Jerusalem parade because I feared it would result in a net setback for gay rights in Israel, and because I was worried about the negative image of Israeli Jews that would likely result from the haredi protests.

But the gay marchers (who, as the previous article indicates, did not copy the notoriously provocative fashions of gay pride events elsewhere) are not responsible for the behavior of the haredi (so-called "ultra-orthodox") Jews. If religious zealots chose to throw a collective temper tantrum in front of the world, they would have nobody but themselves to blame for the resulting damage to the image of Jews everywhere.

The gay pride event challenged Jerusalem's traditional religious community to grow up. It was never a question of whether the hareidi orthodox would approve the event - no one would expect them to - but how they would choose to express their disapproval. Ironically, while reading descriptions of the rioting and the self-justifications of the hareidim, I was once again reminded of the parallel between the insular worldview of Israel's orthodox and that of American left-wingers, which I previously explored here:

Like the religious Zionist movement, the American Left was the only segment of society that was strenghtened, not weakened, by the last war - in our case, Vietnam. Over the next three decades, the liberal movement - that is, the increasingly dogmatic ideology that called itself "liberalism" - consolidated its hold on our media, our educational and cultural institutions. Liberal communities like Berkeley and neighborhoods like, well, the one I live in, ensured that left-leaning Americans could live comfortably without having to rub elbows with "red-staters".

Liberal Americans, guided by a "deep internal sense of being in the right without asking for or needing external confirmation," built and strengthened their own communities but rarely stopped to ask themselves what they might learn from their conservative neighbors...

The compromises made by each side in this controversy are part of the necessary process of Israel's development as a nation. Even the most basic steps - renouncing lewdness and violence - are evidence that the process continues as it must. In the end it can only strengthen Israel's religious community, its gay community, and its society as a whole.

Finally, let me leave you with this article about Israeli lesbian Avigail Sperber, which comes by way of Sarah at Israelity:

Avigail Sperber, 33, is a film director and cinematographer. She has made several documentaries and a short movie, and is currently working on her first full-length film. Her father is Rabbi Prof. Daniel Sperber, who teaches Talmud at Bar-Ilan University and received the Israel Prize for his achievements in his field. For many years, he chaired the public council for state religious Jewish education. Sperber found it especially difficult to accept the disclosure of his daughter's sexual identity. However, his public position, Avigail stresses, was never a factor in her family's acceptance of her lesbianism. ...

For Avigail, the high point in her family's acceptance of her was reached a year ago, when her younger sister Shuli, who had become ultra-Orthodox, was to be married to a young man who had also become ultra-Orthodox. It was considered only natural to invite both Avigail and her present partner, film director Netali Baron (whose film, "Metamorphosis," about four rape victims, was screened this week on Israel Television's Channel 1). Hannah felt this was not enough and began inviting other lesbian friends of Avigail's whose families had severed contact with them. ("Some girls are no longer welcome in their own homes, even on holidays, even without their partner.")

Two years ago, Hannah started a support group for the religious parents of homosexual/lesbian children (fathers were invited, but only the mothers actually attended). Monthly meetings were held at the Sperber home in the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem's Old City. Over the past few months they have not met, but Hannah said this week that the controversy generated by the gay pride parade is a good reason to reactivate the group.

Hannah: "Initially, I attended a parental support group at the Open House [a center for the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender, or GLBT, community in Jerusalem]. However, some parents didn't like going there. That's why I launched the group in my home. There are various levels of attitude with respect to the children in this group. One mother, who's very extreme, said she wouldn't invite her daughter to the weddings or other occasions of her siblings. Another mother, a widow, moved me when she declared that she loved her homosexual son very much. Her greatest fear was that he would stop being religious...

Read the rest at the link.

At its best, Israel stands as a model of what a free and democratic society in the Middle East could be. It can, in effect, say to its Arab and Muslim neighbors: "This is what democracy looks like."

For all related posts, please go to this category archive: Jerusalem Pride 2006.

Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade Reconsidered

Last week, I argued against the Gay Pride parade in Jerusalem. In this post, I'm going to look at it from a different angle.

In my previous post, I asserted that

a gay pride parade in Jerusalem is a confrontational, provocative gesture. It will do nothing to improve the attitude of straight Israelis toward gay people.

My reasoning was that forcing the issue of a gay pride parade in Jerusalem would cause a backlash among moderate Israelis which would result in a net setback, rather than an advance, for gay rights in Israel. And this may very well be true.

But I think what was really bothering me about the parade was the knowledge that certain orthodox Jewish fanatics would resort to all kinds of thuggish tactics to protest the event. Last year, a fundamentalist fruitcake named Yishai Schlissel stabbed and injured three people at the 2005 Gay Pride event in Jerusalem. He was convicted of attempted murder. Yediot:

The Jerusalem District Court on Tuesday convicted Yishai Schlissel, a resident of the ultra-Orthodox community of Kiryat Sefer, of attempted murder and severe injury for stabbing and injuring three people at a gay parade. About nine months ago, Schlissel arrived at the Gay Pride Parade which was held in Jerusalem, carrying a knife. He stabbed three people, who suffered light to moderate injuries. “I came to murder on behalf of God. We can’t have such abomination in the country,” Schlissel said during his police interrogation.

JPost:

According to the charge sheet, the haredi assailant purchased the knife ahead of time in order to carry out the attack at the June 30 parade. "The accused displayed extreme fanatical behavior, and made up his mind not to let the parade end in peace at any cost," the judges wrote in their ruling. "He had no tolerance, not even minimal, toward the people who attended the parade because his worldview rejects any compromise. The accused was fully conscious and ready to pay a heavy personal price for his acts," the judges added.

Now this nutball was an extreme case, but not by far. As a Jew, I wince at this sort of thing. It means Jews looking bad in front of the whole world. And that was something I didn't want to see.

(Full disclosure: I was a practicing Orthodox Jew for a few years. And while I'm no longer frum, I do retain a considerable respect for the tradition of Rabbinic Judaism - as well as a certain sentimental attachment. There are, I can personally assure you, a great many sane and decent orthodox Jews in the world.)

But, you know what? The world does not revolve around what I want to see or don't want to see. Nobody expects the haredi Jews not to object to a gay parade in Jerusalem; that's a given. How they choose to express their disapproval, however, is up to them.

Looking back, I notice that I used the word "provocative". Well, of course we should try to avoid "provoking" people, right? But the idea of a "provocation" has a funny way of shifting the burden of responsibility. One must, after all, agree to be provoked. I'm not going to start talking about those Danish Mohammed cartoons, because I think you get the point.

So, if gay people march in Jerusalem, it will get ugly. Well, life is ugly. We have to deal with it.

I'm going to be following the Jerusalem Pride controversy closely here at Dreams Into Lightning. Stay tuned.

For all related posts, please go to this category archive: Jerusalem Pride 2006.

Against the Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade

UPDATE: My thinking on this issue has changed since this post was written. I am supporting the event. Please read Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade Reconsidered for my current views.

Original post begins here:

I'll keep this short and to the point. I'm in favor of fairness and equality for lesbian, gay, and transgender people, and I believe queer folk have every right to be visible, both individually and as a community. But I'm against the planned Gay Pride parade in Jerusalem. Here's why.

Jerusalem is not only the capital of the State of Israel; it is also the single holiest city in the Jewish world. It is home to thousands of devoutly religious Jews, whose faith forbids homosexuality. I wish there were more understanding in the Orthodox Jewish world toward lesbian, gay, and differently gendered people; and I wish there were more understanding in the queer community of what it is that traditional Jews believe. But that's not the reality in the world right now.

The reality is that a gay pride parade in Jerusalem is a confrontational, provocative gesture. It will do nothing to improve the attitude of straight Israelis toward gay people. It will only provide opportunities for religious fanatics to cause trouble.

The argument has been made by gay advocates that "in a (liberal) city like San Francisco or New York or Tel Aviv we don't need a gay pride parade - it's in places where there's not so much acceptance that it is needed." I agree with this in principle, but I don't agree with the application.

This reasoning presumes that a Gay Pride parade is what is "needed". I don't agree with that premise. Parades may have their place, but what matters is what actually works. And what works is the slow, steady, and unglamorous work of reaching out to the straight world on a daily basis.

I know from personal experience that the documentary "Trembling Before G-d" had a strong impact on the religious Jewish world, both from the effect of the film itself and from the individuals who were inspired to "come out" because of the film. I also know of young people in the queer community (who could by no stretch of the imagination be called "gay conservatives") who feel that gay parades with half-naked men and women walking down the street are both tasteless and counterproductive.

If you drive through Meah She'arim with your radio blasting on Shabbat, or if you walk though Meah She'arim in a bathing suit, are you accomplishing something grand and wonderful? No, you're not.

Gay Pride parade in Jerusalem? To celebrate what? Something that does not yet exist - understanding between the traditionally religious world and the gay world. Such a parade, it seems to me, would only alienate potential allies among the moderates in the straight world, and give the anti-gay fanatics more attention than they deserve.

Gay Pride parade in Jerusalem? No. Wrong place, wrong time, bad idea.

And finally, because I can't resist, one last comment: The gay community wants to "push the limits" in Israel because it knows Israel is a tolerant, liberal, Jewish state. It is, if you'll pardon the expression, the low-hanging fruit.

You want to really accomplish something?

Let me know when you're having that Gay Pride parade in Mecca.

Here's a roundup of news coverage:

Gay.com:

A riot erupted Tuesday night in Jerusalem as hundreds of ultra-Orthodox Jews marched to protest a planned Pride march later this month.

Members of the Haredi sect created a massive uproar, blocking roads, setting trash cans on fire, and throwing rocks at police officers. Protestors were led by leaders wearing sack cloths, a Biblical sign of bereavement, and carrying placards slamming homosexuality that said "Jerusalem will not be like Sodom and Gomorrah."

Arutz Sheva:

Labor Party presidential candidate Colette Avital has called on Open House officials to find another location for next week’s Gay Pride Parade.

Avital stated that it is obvious that holding the parade in Jerusalem will result in violence and moving it to another city can prevent confrontation. She stated everything possible must be done to avoid violence.

Edge New York:

Ultra-Orthodox Jews, or Haredim, in Jerusalem are threatening to strike a Gay Pride parade scheduled to take place in Jerusalem in two weeks, prompting police to reevaluate the permit issued to parade organizers.

Ynet News reports that most recently, Jerusalem Police Chief Maj. Gen. Ilan Franko met Sunday with Haredi leader Yitzhak Tuvia Weiss.

According to Ynet News, Franko asked to learn about the stance of Haredi rabbis who declared their intent of a ’Million Man Protest’ against the parade.

Arutz Sheva:

The police announced last night (Tuesday) that they were planning to deploy in top-level strength for the event - a declaration perceived by some to be a salvo in the public-opinion war over whether or not to allow the march. One internal police source said the announcement was publicized merely to stir up anti-march sentiment; official police sources denied this.

Hareidi-religious affairs commentator Yossi Elituv said, "The fight against the march has knocked down all barriers in the hareidi and religious camps. The Hassidic sectors - Belz, Gerrer, and others - together with Litaim (non-Hassidic), as well as the Sephardi-hareidim and the religious-Zionist sectors - all are standing together against this parade."

UPDATE: Ah, I see the parade is fostering constructive dialogue already:

There is another act of spitting in G-d's face, a pagan provocation painted up as a "gay pride parade". An event like this has historic significance in New York; there it commemorates an actual occurrence where homosexuals refused to tolerate police harassment. But in Jerusalem, it is merely spitting in G-d's face, purposely pursuing the kind of event that would take place in a pagan temple in His holy city. Briefly, what I am getting at (and this is a very controversial assertion to make) is that it was normal to have sexual orgies of various kinds in pagan temples in Canaan, and it was this behavior that was targeted in the Torah.

...

Forces of Darkness uniting against pride parade - I’d like to say that I’m surprised but I’m not. The ultra orthodox in Israel are parasites and freeloaders in the society there. Their closed minded mentality is exactly in line with the Islamofascists that I rail on about on this blog. The ultra orthodox have no use for modern democratic society and make no contribution to it.

Yeah, this is just what we all need.

For all related posts, please go to this category archive: Jerusalem Pride 2006.

Bereshith

Rav Kook wrote:

The Tree of Knowledge also combined two opposing qualities, knowledge of good and evil. Adam could not grasp how one tree could encompass two contradictory traits. In truth, this combination is the very foundation of our world. The universe could not exist without combining Justice with Mercy. Adam's sin was in separating between the two, thus transforming the Garden of Eden into a broken, disjointed world.

I think the union of different ways of knowing is one of the most important tasks facing our generation.

In my story The Rose of Paradise, I envisioned the Tree of Knowledge as a device which allows Eve and Adam to see - and therefore partake of - the forbidden Tree of Life. In this interpretation, the Creator's warning (Genesis 2:17) is not a misstatement, as the Serpent claims (Genesis 3:4-5), but rather a statement about the indirect consequences of the action.

We make our choices in life based on what we know. But we also must choose what kinds of knowledge we expose ourselves to. And this brings us back to the idea of different modes of consciousness. Mystical interpretations see this as the hidden message of the story of Eve and Adam in Genesis.

Citing traditional sources (see also Rashi on Genesis 1:27), Rabbi Lori Forman writes in The Women's Torah Commentary,

The talmudic rabbis were also bothered by an overly literal interpretation of the verses in chapter 2. Carefully reading verses 20 and 21, they suggest that the word tzelah [tzela'], most commonly translated as "rib", derives from the Hebrew word meaning "side". Thus, they declare that Eve was not created from Adam's rib. Rather, Adam was a bisexual [i.e. hermaphroditic], double-faced being - neither male nor female. During the sleep that fell upon this first human, its male and female sides were separated, creating man and woman as we know them today. Thus, man and woman came into being not one after another, but simultaneously; in fact, joined together as one. This first story (chapter 1) relates to the cration of this androgynous being, while the second story (chapter 2) relates to the creation of gendered beings - man and woman. The mystics take this talmudic interpretation one step further, suggesting that when men and women fall in love, their yearning is none other than the primeval desire to reunite into the one being that was bifurcated in the Garden of Eden so long ago.

There's much more that I'd like to write, but that's all I have time for now. Shabbat shalom.

Creation

Rosh ha-Shanah comes this weekend, and although we won't be reading the creation story in Genesis (parashath Bereshith) until next month, it's not too early to start pondering the meaning of Creation and the role of G-d in the universe. After all, Rosh ha-Shanah is "the birthday of the world".

About a month ago, Richard Fernandez posted his essay A Reason to Believe at Pajamas Media. As anyone who reads this site knows, I'm a big admirer of Fernandez and a daily reader of The Belmont Club, but I found myself shaking my head when Fernandez cited Ann Coulter:

Ann Coulter claimed that “if a Martian landed in America and set out to determine the nation’s official state religion, he would have to conclude it is liberalism, while Christianity and Judaism are prohibited by law.” Liberalism, Coulter argues, is a religion in all but name with its own sacraments (abortion), holy writ (Roe v. Wade), martyrs (from Soviet spy Alger Hiss to cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal), clergy (public school teachers), churches (government schools,) and creation myth: Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Fernandez adds somewhat lamely that "Coulter’s comparison is provocative, but fails in one essential respect: unlike “early revolutionary Communism”, liberalism is neither visionary enough nor sufficiently disciplined to qualify as a fighting faith."

A couple of thoughts.

First: If Ann Coulter is the only thing standing between us and islamist fascism, then G-d help us all.

Second: Note that Coulter's statement is not an argument - that is, a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition - and Fernandez doesn't try to claim that it is. It is simply rhetoric, and I think it fails on a lot more than "one essential aspect".

I don't intend to expend a lot of energy arguing with Ann Coulter, but I do want to zero in on the implicit assumption that there's a fundamental dichotomy between "religion" (which, under this assumption, strictly implies a literalist, six-day scriptural belief in creation) and "secular science" (which dogmatically rejects any role of the Divine in the evolution of the universe and the Earth).

Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook was one of the great religious leaders of the 19th and 20th centuries; he was Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem and of what was then "British Palestine", and a founder of what we now know as religious Zionism. His life was spent walking the highwire between intellect and spirituality, the religious and the secular, Israel and the nations. He is one of my personal heroes.

I am by no means qualified to interpret Rav Kook's teachings, but let me share this with you, from no less a source than Arutz Sheva:

The Torah does not come to negate scientific knowledge or theory. In fact, science can often expand our understanding of Torah ideas. Nonetheless, it must be noted that unlike religious truths, scientific knowledge is constantly being challenged and changed.

Rabbi Kook, in a series of letters that address the thrust of your question, gives us an encompassing approach to this issue.

Concerning the story of the world’s creation, Rabbi Kook writes:

“The Torah certainly obscures the meaning of the act of Creation and speaks in allegories and parables, for indeed everyone knows that the stories of Genesis are part of the Kabbalah. If all these narratives were taken literally, what secrets would there be? The Midrash states, ‘To reveal the power of the act of Creation to mankind is impossible, and therefore the text, In the beginning, is worded vaguely.' What is important about the act of Creation is what we learn in regard to the knowledge of G-d and the truly moral life.”[citation in original post]

The Zohar underscores the importance of this deeper understanding:

“Rabbi Shimon said, Alas for a man who regards the Torah as a book of mere tales and everyday matters…. The stories of the Torah are only the outer garments, and whoever looks upon those garments as the Torah itself, woe to that man for he will have no portion in the World To Come….Wine cannot be kept save in a jar – so too the Torah needs an outer garment. These are the stories and narratives, but it behooves us to penetrate beneath them.”[citation in original post]

Rabbi Kook continues:

“There is no contradiction whatsoever between the Torah and any of the world’s scientific knowledge. We do not have to accept theories as certainties, no matter how widely accepted, for they are like blossoms that fade. Very soon, scientific technology will be further developed, and all of today’s new theories will be derided and scorned, and the respected wisdom of our day will seem small-minded - but the word of G-d will remain forever.”[citation in original post]

Go to the link for the rest. For further reading, here's a discussion of the issue at an Orthodox Jewish site, Hirhurim:

R. Avraham Yitzhak Kook also wrote of the possibility of accepting the theory of evolution. In two letters published in Oros Ha-Kodesh (pp. 559, 565) and translated into English in Challenge, R. Kook discusses the matter:

The evolutionary way of thinking... has caused considerable upheaval among many people whose thought had been wont to run in certain regular, well-defined paths. Not so, however, for the select, hard-thinking few who have always seen a gradual, evolutionary development in the world's most intimate spiritual essence. For them it is not difficult to apply, by analogy, the same principle to the physical development of the visible world.

R. Kook goes on to say that those who are reluctant to accept evolution as a possibility have hesitations but "[t]hese hesitations have nothing to do with any difficulty in reconciling the verses of the Torah or other traditional texts with an evolutionary standpoint. Nothing is easier than this. Everyone knows that here, if anywhere, is the realm of parable, allegory and allusion."

There's much more at the link, and it's a fascinating and illuminating read.

I do not think the present conflict requires us to choose between one fundamentalism and another. Nor do I believe that we must choose between faith and reason. I would wholeheartedly agree with Richard Fernandez' main point, that we must find within us the strength and the wisdom to counter the terrorist enemy with something deeper and nobler. I would submit that the belief in an all-present Divinity, working eternally and unseen according to an unknowable plan, is a part of that something. So, too, is the belief that humankind are called to be co-creators with G-d - a belief that is deeply rooted in the Jewish tradition.

Best wishes for Rosh Hahannah. L'shanah tovah tekatvu ve' techatmu.

Why are Jews liberal? A response to Dennis Prager. (Part 1 of 2)

In an earlier post I promised a full response to a column by Dennis Prager, "Why are Jews liberal?". Here it is.

Dennis Prager's column makes six assertions about Jews and liberalism, which I'll take in order.

1. Judaism is indeed preoccupied with social justice (as well as with holiness and personal morality), and many Jews believe that the only way to achieve a just society is through leftist policies.

Here Prager's on solid ground. He agrees with Jewish liberals that there is a connection between authentic Judaism and social justice; the weak (or disputed) link in the chain is the question of whether "leftist policies" are a valid means of achieving a "just society". It would also be appropriate to point out that while social justice is an important part of Judaism, it is not the whole of it; that is, it is a necessary but not sufficient element. And so Prager (again rightly, in my view) finds some truth in the quip that "There are two types of Jews -- those who believe Judaism is social justice and those who know Hebrew."

2. More than any other major religion, Judaism has always been preoccupied with this world.

Quite so.

3. Most Jews are frightened by anything that connotes right-wing -- such as the words "right-wing" and "conservative."

Now, here's where we start running into problems. This statement is both hyperbolic and tautological. Why are Jews liberal? Because they're not conservative! No, wait - they're not just not conservative, they're afraid of conservatives! In fact, they're frightened by the very word "conservative".

Just plain silly. But it only gets worse, as Prager tries to answer the question without really answering it:

Especially since the Holocaust, they think that threats to their security emanate from the Right only.

I want to say, "This statement is both true and false", but I have to ask myself, "Which statement? The Jewish perception of threats from the Right, or Prager's perception of that perception?" Prager evades addressing the question of anti-Semitism on the Right directly.

In fact, Prager has an important point here - many liberal Jews do perceive anti-Semitism as coming "from the right only". But how would they get that idea?

Here's how Dennis Prager answers that question -

(It is pointless to argue that Nazism stood for National Socialism and therefore was really a leftist ideology. Whether that is theoretically accurate doesn't matter; nearly everyone regards the Nazis as far Right, and, therefore, Jews fear the Right.)

- or rather, doesn't answer it. Instead, he quibbles about the "right-wing" designation of the Nazis. What a pointless display of content-free verbiage. A more honest and courageous approach would have been to acknowledge that the Nazis did purport to represent certain "conservative" ideals - nationalism, tradition, discipline, and of course anti-Communism - and to take the barbarity of the Nazi regime as an object lesson in the dangers that may lie in the perversion of these ideals. (Just as the honest liberals of today must acknowledge that Communism claimed to represent the "liberal" ideals of equality, secularism, and ... yes, social justice.)

Anti-Semitism is neither a stranger to the Right nor to the Left. But what Judith, Patti, and other Jewish liberals have been noticing in recent years is the leftward migration of anti-Semitism's center of gravity. Here's Judith, way back in 2002, on the positive side of Jewish liberalism:

Judaism is the original social justice religion - every Shabbat in shuls all over the world some Bar Mitzvah kid is chanting a selection from the Prophets. Jews stand out as the one ethnic group in America which keeps voting liberal as it grows more prosperous. Jews have made up a large percentage of the labor and socialist movements of the early 20th century, and their children became "Red-diaper babies": Freedom Riders, SDS members, libertarians, feminists, ACLU members, experimental artists and their patrons. In the Jewish world 2 degrees of separation is more common than 6, so most "conservative" Republican-voting Jews have family affiliated with these groups and attitudes, and many are proud of their activism if not their exact views.

After all, compassionate rules of war, tithing, sharing wealth as an act of justice rather than charity, challenging God ("Yisrael" means "God-wrestler"), respecting other religious paths, intellectual debate, raising children to value study and intellectual exploration, mandating pleasurable sex as a wife's right, speaking truth to power - all these attitudes are hard-wired into our religious practice and mythology. Even totally secular Jews are very conscious of and proud of the social justice part of our heritage. ...

Go read the whole thing at the link as soon as you get the chance.

Now here's Patti at White Pebble in February 2005:

Another article which makes me realize that I never so much changed my views away from liberalism — it’s that liberalism itself moved.

And she links to this article by Daniel Pipes:

Developments since World War II and the Holocaust have been especially fast-paced and portentous. Here are four of the most significant shifts:

From right to left: For centuries, anti-Semitism was the hallmark of the right and merely episodic on the left. To take the ultimate examples of these trends, Stalin's Judeophobia was peripheral to his monstrous project, but Hitler's was central to his. Even a decade ago, this pattern still basically held true. But recent years have witnessed a rapid and global realignment, with the mainstream right increasingly sympathetic to Jews and Israel and its leftist counterparts cooler and more hostile. ...

And in September 2004, Judith followed up her earlier post this post about Party A and Party B:

I have defended this honorable legacy to long-time conservatives, vociferously and in great detail. But it's not 1940 anymore. The global initiatives of that legacy, as well as the will to justify and defend that legacy, have been picked up by the neo-conservative movement and is now being carried forward by the other party. Change comes hard to any minority group which has so wholeheartedly identified its salvation with a certain ideology. (Blacks have this problem too, and are shifting their alliegances just as gradually.)

Recent immigrants don't have the burden of this ideological legacy. The huge Russian Jewish community in NYC is overwhelmingly voting for Bush, and Eastern European immigrants in general have fond feelings for Republicans, based on the party's support for entrepreneurship and Reagan's facing down the Soviet Empire.

Go read it all. It's an excellent pre-buttal (is that a word?) to Prager.

I Am a Jew and My Father Was a Jew

My father described his father as mildly anti-Semitic, "not an Archie Bunker type" but not without his prejudices either. Dad was born in 1920 and grew up in the New York area, spending some years in New York City. He would later write of his early curiosity about "the people my father spoke of with such contempt." In his later years, he enjoyed reading the memoirs of Aflred Kazin; I believe he was intrigued by the experiences of a man of his own generation, who had grown up in the same area as himself, but on the other side of the ethnic divide - a New York Jew.

My father? Picture a cross between Albert Einstein and Captain Kangaroo, and you begin to get the idea. I remember him as a kindly man, soft-spoken and very precise in his speech. He recalled the Depression years vividly, and spoke bitterly of the humiliation of watching his father search desperately for work. During World War II he served in the Army, in Battery A, 136th Field Artillery, 37th Infantry Division. He spoke of the war occasionally, but only occasionally.

Like my mother, Dad grew up in a fundamentalist Christian home; like her, he started looking for answers on his own as a young adult. They met in a Unitarian Universalist church in Connecticut, and found they shared a fondness for the poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson. They were married in 1958.

My father held a master's degree in literature from Wesleyan, and taught high school English for many years before moving on to a new career on the editorial staff of Choice Magazine - a position he held from my early childhood until very late in his life. He had an unappreciated gift for oratory, I think, and enjoyed reading aloud. When he spoke, he always chose his words carefully; losing this gift with the onset of Alzheimer's must have been a very cruel fate for him.

Both of my parents were liberals, but I think Dad was more of an idealist than my Mom, in the sense of being a perfectionist about the future. He didn't share my mother's driving rage (which could be directed against anyone, at any time), but he did have a deep-seated mistrust of anything that smacked of snobbery or elitism. (His war memoir recalls vividly his indignation at being evicted from the unoccupied officers' club aboard a certain ship; he seems almost to have taken it as a personal insult. That's my Dad.) He respected Senator Lieberman, but found him too conservative: "He votes like a Republican," Dad once grumbled.

Looking back, I do not know whether my father ever flirted with communism or socialism in his younger days, but it would not surprise me. From what I know of his life and character, he would have been just the personality type to be vulnerable to the seductions of the lady in red. Born in 1920, he was old enough to remember the Depression vividly, and the inexorable decline of his family's fortunes during those years. He would sometimes speak of some socialist politician with a secretive admiration. And not long ago, I found an old copy of Ten Days that Shook the World - John Reed's breathless account of the Russian Revolution, with an approving foreword by none other than V. I. Lenin - among his books. (To be fair, it was a book club edition.)

On the other hand, I know for certain that my mother was no friend of Communism. She was at least my father's equal intellectually, but she was also cynical enough about human nature to know how easily, and how badly, the loftiest dreams can go wrong. Like my father, she opposed the Vietnam war, but never sympathized with the enemy. She despised Jane Fonda. She loved Russian literature and admired the Soviet dissidents. A philo-Semite like my father, she was sharply attuned to anti-Semitism in the Soviet world: her admiration for Solzhenitsyn evaporated when rumors of his anti-Semitic attitudes became persistent. One dissident she never stopped admiring, and whose name was often heard in our house in the 1970s, was a Soviet Jew then known by his Russian name - Anatoly Shcharansky.

I was the older of two children. My sister, younger than me by a year and a half, was an amazingly gifted writer whose poetry and fiction earned her numerous awards during her teen years. Stephanie never had any interest in formal religion, but her writing is deeply and exuberantly religious. (I often wonder what she would be doing if she had lived; her life ended shortly after her 28th birthday, from the accumulated effects of drugs, alcohol, and anorexia.)

Curious about religion and the Bible, I began studying Hebrew in my mid-teens. After a year or two, I started attending services at the synagogue, and so did my father. When I left home to join the Air Force in 1981, neither of us had officially converted but we were both leaning in that direction. I converted with a Reform congregation in Tucson in 1984, and eventually had an Orthodox conversion in San Francisco in 1988.

What we both saw in Judaism was a balance of opposites: nationalism and universalism, feeling and intellect, mysticism and rationalism, tradition and growth. For both of us, too, it was a gateway into a community, an older and richer one than we could have known otherwise. We liked the way social activism and Jewish values went hand-in-hand. My father was also interested in the theological debates: the encounter with modernity, the problem of evil. He devoured books on liberal Jewish thought by people like Jacob Neusner, with whom he corresponded. (Myself, I always found the scholarly stuff a bit dry. I loved Soloveitchik, but in general I skipped the philosophizers.) Dad's real passion, though, was Jewish music. He collected recordings of the great cantors (another taste I'm afraid I didn't inherit) and in the last few years of his life he became active in the choir at the Conservative synagogue. I'll always remember the joy it gave him to be involved in the community that way - and his sorrow at not having started earlier.

I'm hard pressed to say how much I'm like my father. I do not know whether I resemble him a lot or a little. Sometimes I think I take after my mother more. She was obsessed with the quest for truth. She wanted to peel back the layers of illusion and find the secret that lay at the core of reality. Not formally educated (but with an IQ most college professors would envy), she read books on science, history, Gnosticism, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. I believe she was deeply changed by the newsreels of Germany that she must have seen as a young woman. I don't think she ever forgave G-d for the Holocaust.

Illness came upon my father quickly. He'd been healthy all his life, but things started going wrong all at once: heart trouble, cancer, Alzheimer's. He had to leave a holiday performance in the synagogue because he was too ill to continue. He died quietly in his sleep in October of 2000, on the second night of Rosh Hashanah.

Mom lived on a little longer. She rarely left the house, being in poor health herself, but she enjoyed the company of her caretaker and her next-door neighbor, who also had an interest in Judaism. I don't know whether she ever made her peace with G-d. She died in 2003, on the second night of Passover.

After her death, I learned that she'd had her hospital records changed to list her religion as "Jewish".

Shavu'oth

The Jewish holiday of Shavu'oth (also spelled Shavu'ot, Shavu'os, etc.) begins tonight. It commemorates the revelation of the Torah - the body of Jewish teaching - at Mount Sinai. The Hebrew name of the holiday literally means "weeks" which is rather cryptic unless you know that Shavu'oth culminates the seven-week countdown from the beginning of Passover. Kesher Talk, your source for all things Jewish, has more on Shavu'oth:

Shavuot was one of the three harvest festivals, when we brought offerings to Jerusalem. It was the only festival which did not have an event or commandment from Torah associated with it, so later on the rabbis decided to associate it with the giving of the Torah on Sinai, which makes sense since Pesach was only seven weeks before.

I strongly recommend reading Judith's full post.

I will just touch on a few of the main points of the holiday here. Uniquely among all the Jewish holidays, there is no distinctive symbol, ritual, or "thing" associated with Shavu'oth. There is a tradition of eating dairy meals for the holiday (rather than meat, which cannot be consumed together with dairy), and a tradition of staying up all night to study the Torah. But there's nothing concrete, like the Seder and unleavened bread at Passover, or the blowing of the Shofar (ram's horn) at Rosh ha-Shanah, or the familiar menorah at Hanukkah. In other words, there is nothing to distract from the essence of the holiday, which is none other than the Torah itself.

Shavu'oth is intrinsically connected with Passover. The Omer count serves to remind us of this connection, and with good reason. Passover represents the Jewish people's historic liberation from tyranny and slavery; Shavu'oth represents our acceptance of the commandments of the Torah. Figuratively speaking, Passover is to the Declaration of Independence as Shavu'oth is to the Constitution. That is to say: it represents the responsibility and moral autonomy that we accept as free people.

I will be taking a break from posting for Shavu'oth and the Sabbath. Meanwhile, you might wish to read the thoughts or Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook on this holiday. Have a great holiday if you celebrate it. See you next week.

Dennis Prager: Why are Jews liberal?

Dennis Prager at Townhall:

1. Judaism is indeed preoccupied with social justice (as well as with holiness and personal morality), and many Jews believe that the only way to achieve a just society is through leftist policies.

2. More than any other major religion, Judaism has always been preoccupied with this world. The (secular) Encyclopedia Judaica begins its entry on "Afterlife" by noting that "Judaism has always affirmed belief in an afterlife." But the preoccupation of Judaism has been making this world a better place. That is why the Torah (the Five Books of Moses) is largely silent about the afterlife; and it is preoccupied with rejecting ancient Egyptian values. That value system was centered on the afterlife -- its bible was the Book of the Dead, and its greatest monuments, the pyramids, were tombs.

3. Most Jews are frightened by anything that connotes right wing -- such as the words "right-wing" and "conservative." Especially since the Holocaust, they think that threats to their security emanate from the Right only. (It is pointless to argue that Nazism stood for National Socialism and therefore was really a leftist ideology. Whether that is theoretically accurate doesn't matter; nearly everyone regards the Nazis as far Right, and, therefore, Jews fear the Right.) The fact that the Jews' best friends today are conservatives and the fact that the Left is the home of most of the Jews' enemies outside of the Muslim world have made little impact on Jews' psyches.

4. Liberal Jews fear most religion. They identify religion -- especially fundamentalist religion and especially Christianity -- with anti-Semitism. Jews are taught from birth about the horrors of the Holocaust, and of nearly 2,000 years of European, meaning Christian, anti-Semitism. They therefore tend to fear Christianity and believe that secularism guarantees their physical security. That is what animates the ACLU and its disproportionately Jewish membership, under the guise of concern with the Constitution and "separation of church and state" (words that do not appear in the Constitution), to fight all public expressions of Christianity in America.

5. Despite their secularism, Jews may be the most religious ethnic group in the world. The problem is that their religion is rarely Judaism; rather it is every "ism" of the Left. These include liberalism, socialism, feminism, Marxism and environmentalism. Jews involved in these movements believe in them with the same ideological fervor and same suspension of critical reason with which many religious people believe in their religion. It is therefore usually as hard to shake a liberal Jew's belief in the Left and in the Democratic Party as it is to shake an evangelical Christian's belief in Christianity. The big difference, however, is that the Christian believer acknowledges his Christianity is a belief, whereas the believer in liberalism views his belief as entirely the product of rational inquiry.

The Jews' religious fervor emanates from the origins of the Jewish people as a religious people elected by God to help guide humanity to a better future. Of course, the original intent was to bring humanity to ethical monotheism, God-based universal moral standards, not to secular liberalism or to feminism or to socialism. Leftist Jews have simply secularized their religious calling.

6. Liberal Jews fear nationalism. The birth of nationalism in Europe planted the secular seeds of the Holocaust (religious seeds had been planted by some early and medieval Church teachings and reinforced by Martin Luther). European nationalists welcomed all national identities except the Jews'. That is a major reason so many Jews identify primarily as "world citizens"; they have contempt for nationalism and believe that strong national identities, even in America, will exclude them.

Just as liberal Jews fear a resurgent Christianity despite the fact that contemporary Christians are the Jews' best friends, leftist Jews fear American nationalism despite the fact that Americans who believe in American exceptionalism are far more pro-Jewish and pro-Israel than leftist Americans. But most leftist Jews so abhor nationalism, they don't even like the Jews' nationalism (Zionism).

Remarks: I want to do a full post in response to this, but let me give my initial reactions here:

First, I generally agree with Prager's points and his analysis. The question of why Jews are liberal has been raised a number of times in the post-9/11, neoconservative era. (LaShawn's question and my response; Patti at White Pebble citing Daniel Pipes; Judith at Kesher Talk; and this anonymous Jewish New Yorker have dealt with this issue. See also my post here.)

Prager is arguing from an explicitly conservative perspective. Where his analysis is weakest, I think, is where it is most partisan: Prager glibly throws up 'every "ism" of the Left. These include liberalism, socialism, feminism, Marxism and environmentalism' as examples of figurative "golden calves" pursued by wayward liberal Jews. I would object that this is not wholly wrong but it is simplistic. Can one be (for example) a good Jew and a feminist, a good Jew and a liberal? Dennis Prager appears to believe one cannot. I respectfully disagree.

That's all I have time to post now; I'll return to this topic soon. Have a good Shabbat.