Apocalypse I: McCain’s Ringtone for the Christian Right

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Let’s update political jargon. Writers still use “dog whistle” for a political message heard clearly by one audience but entirely missed by everyone else. That’s so twentieth-century. Please update to “teenage ring-tone”: Young ears hear it. Older ones don’t. Students yes, profs no. You can pick the tone that will be heard by the age group you want. But be careful: Some people have young ears.

The political equivalent is John McCain’s invidious “He’s the One” ad. Ostensibly, it merely suggests that anyone who inspires people must be a poor leader. (Well, don’t expect a Republican to remember FDR or JFK. But what about Churchill?)

But the message is really intended to ring loudly for dispensationalists, the subset of conservative evangelicals who are looking forward to the Rapture, the Tribulation, the whole timeline of approaching apocalypse.

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Finally, Jewish Law for the Real World

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It is a sign of bad times when a clergyman stating an obvious moral truth is big news. So we live in bad times. Nonetheless, Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld deserves great praise for his op-ed this week in the New York Times on the scandal of the kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, where:

News reports and government documents have described abusive practices at Agriprocessors against workers, including minors. Children as young as 13 were said to be wielding knives on the killing floor; some teenagers were working 17-hour shifts, six days a week…

Herzfeld asserts what should be obvious: that producing “kosher” meat in this way is a desecration of God’s name, and that the leading Orthodox organizations have failed to respond properly. He also asserts that the kashrut of the meat produced in Postville is questionable.

For this he offers a couple of arguments. By his reasoning, if the Agriprocessors company was willing to ignore U.S. law and basic employer ethics, it cannot be trusted to pay attention to Jewish dietary laws. Here, I think, Herzfeld has aimed too low, and accepted the obsessive-compulsive focus of some in the Orthodox community on ritual requirements. His stronger argument is

there is precedent for declaring something nonkosher on the basis of how employees are treated.

That is, food produced through abject exploitation of human beings should be seen as treif even if every other technical detail of kashrut has been observed.

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The Educator Who Can’t See Arab Blood

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Moshe Hagar is an ex-colonel who now heads the religious pre-army academy, or mekhinah, at the settlement of Yatir south of Hebron. Such academies provide a year of study after high school, before army service. The idea is to increase motivation and develop leadership skills. The Hebrew web-page for Hagar’s academy (on a government website) says that its purpose is to encourage students

to internalize Judaism in various planes of life and to prepare them for meaningful army service that includes maintaining both a religious and nationalist lifestyle, and to take upon themselves the personal obligation to make a meaningful motivation during and after military service.

The curriculum, says the site, includes studying “Jewish faith” and musar (ethics).

Last Wednesday, Hagar was interviewed on Israel Radio about the religious right’s protests against the withdrawal from Gaza three years ago. His comments provide an insight into his view of faith and ethics. The key comment:

In the end, the disengagement passed with zero casualties…*

That the disengagement protests passed without casualties would surprise the residents of Shfaram, an Arab town in northern Israel. They’ve just marked the third anniversary of the terror attack carried out in their community by Eden Natan Zada, a far-right soldier who’d gone AWOL in protest against the disengagement. Natan Zada killed four people in Shfaram. (Natan Zada was himself killed by Shfaram residents, who will reportedly be charged with lynching him.)

Two weeks later another disengagement opponent, Asher Weisgan, killed four Palestinians who worked at the West Bank settlement of Shilo. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to four life terms. A report on his sentencing noted:

Weisgan, a settler from Shvut Rachel, said his objective had been to prevent the disengagement from proceeding.

For Moshe Hagar, it seems, the blood of Arab victims was invisible, unnoticed at the time, unremembered.

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Biking the 401–Crested Butte, Colorado and the Jewish Question

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Ilana was eyeing a silk-print wrap-around skirt as a present for a friend when a retirement-age Jewish mom with an eastern accent started up a conversation with me. When you wear a kipah, everyone assumes you are Israeli.

We spent this morning at the summer arts fair in Crested Butte, Colorado, a town of 1,600 or so permanent residents that forms a half-moon of built-up area in the midst of a plain between high mountain ridges that still boast patches of snow at the beginning of August. Four hours from Denver, it’s not the kind of place you expect to find a Jewish community, but the woman told us that the local synagogue, the cleverly-named Bnai Butte, counts 60 families among its members. If you add to that the Jews for whom Bnai Butte is the shul they refuse to enter, we must be one of the town’s leading denominations and ethnic groups.

Like other minorities, Jews in outlying places either form insular groups or try to beat the locals at their own native culture. The latter was most evident over our weekend in Crested Butte. A dark-complexioned, kinky-haired young mountain biker wearing devil-blue Duke duds (that’s my alma mater) eyed my tzitziot and smiled a greeting as he passed by me on the street on Shabbat, and a heavily tatooed, long-haired country banjo man called out “Shalom” from his street-musician perch.

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A Stamp for Letters to the Edge of Madness

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Gershom Gorenberg

The Israeli Post Office has issued a stamp commemorating the settlements of Gush Katif in Gaza – the settlements evacuated by the Israeli goverment in 2005. Gush Katif commemorative stampThe stamp shows an orange ribbon, originally the symbol of the furious protest movement against the withdrawal. Today the ribbon is the icon of those who have never forgiven the state for evacuating settlements from occupied territory. Below the images of greenhouses and the little kids happily jumping rope is the biblical verse, “And they shall no more plucked up out of their land…” (Amos 9:15), which in context can be read as a promise that no more settlements will be evacuated.

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Prayergate: Ma’ariv Denies Denial

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An afterword on Ma’ariv publishing the note that Obama put in the Wall: McClatchy correspondent Dion Nissenbaum brings the newspaper’s most recent comment on the affair. It doesn’t improve the Ma’ariv’s journalistic rep:

Maariv received the note last Thursday and, after realizing it contained no personal or intimate content, decided to publish it.

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The Bounds of the Human: Holocaust, Army Service, and the Importance of Clean Underwear

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In the Holocaust, the Jews were, uniquely, the victims of a horrible, unprecedented crime. In the Holocaust, the crime committed by the Germans against the Jews shows how fragile the boundary between humanity and beastiality is and how human beings are capable of committing unimaginable crimes. Both those statements are true, but a difference in emphasis is characteristic of the dialogue on the Holocaust between American Israeli Jews–as was brought home to me in a discussion the other day.

An American participant in this discussion of the Holocaust criticized Israeli author David Grossman’s novel See Under Love, for depicting a Nazi concentration camp commander with human depth. In the third part of that novel, the commander and one of his victims share memories of children’s stories.

I responded that, in my reading, Grossman used this device to show that, however deep into inhumanity the Nazis had sunk, they were still human beings. While the Nazi evil represents a decay of natural human morality far deeper than any other in the modern age, the Nazis were nevertheless human beings and their actions represent an extreme to which any human being, and any nation, has the potential to reach.

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The Freedom To Be Religious: Wins and Losses

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Gershom Gorenberg

Religious freedom is often confused in our parts with freedom from religion, and atheism is mistakenly equated with liberalism. For the state to be secular – so goes the thinking – everyone who lives in it should secular too. As political scientist Yaron Ezrahi once said to me, “The Israeli secular community lacks the understanding that you don’t have to secularize individual identity to evolve a secular state.”

Ezrahi made the comment to me when I was writing a story on Gil Kopatch, a stand-up comedian who for several months in the late 90s appeared on a Friday night TV show and presented a pointed, often-ribald commentary on the weekly Torah portion. Kopatch was attacked by the ultra-Orthodox for his supposed blasphemy. But he confused his secular supporters when he insisted “I’m a believing Jew” and expressed “love of Torah.” Secular MKs presumed that in defending Kopatch’s freedom of expression, they were also attacking religion as such. The idea that freedom of expression includes religious expression was beyond them.

Ezrahi’s comment fit the American model: secular state, religious society. But “liberal” Israelis aren’t alone in assuming that for the state should impose secularism. Here are several recent stories, starting with the most important:

Journalism Lesson: Obama’s Note, The New Republic’s Goof

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Gershom Gorenberg

“Is Anything Sacred?” was the title of a post a couple of days ago on the New Republic’s blog, The Plank. The subject: Publication of the note that Barack Obama placed in the Western Wall when he visited last week. The daily Ma’ariv ran that “scoop,” and immediately found itself under intense criticism – from rabbis, talk-show hosts, and a lawyer who began organizing a consumer boycott of the paper – for violating Obama’s privacy and Jewish religious sensibilities.

But the Plank’s Zvika Krieger wasn’t aiming his question at Ma’ariv. He was asking if Obama considered anything sacred. For in responding to the firestorm, a Ma’ariv spokesman had told various Israeli papers (English here, Hebrew here): “Barack Obama’s note was approved for publication in the international media even before he put [it] in the Kotel…” Krieger accepted that statement. A fairly early version of his post (via Google’s cache) said:

Obama may be above politicizing our troops, but if his campaign did approve the note for publication before he placed it, then I guess he isn’t above politicizing religion.

Clever: A snarky reference to Obama’s canceled visit to wounded U.S. soldiers, casting doubts on his reasons for canceling, as prelude to a statement that the candidate was willing to trash Jewish sensitivities for politics’ sakes. Truly, Obama had hit the trifecta: apostate Muslim with radical Christian preacher desecrates Jewish holy sites. But by writing the story this way, Krieger actually doubled down on Ma’ariv’s failed journalistic judgment. At least he has been doing a somewhat better job of backtracking.

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Israel in the First World, U.S. in the Third

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My mother liked to think that everything was better in America. She didn’t want to hear that we’d bought a German dryer because it was the best one in the shop. She was sure that she got the best health care in the world because she lived in America. The idea that by running off to some Third World country in the Middle East I might get better care was beyond unbelievable to her.

As an American, she certainly paid more, lots more, for medical care than Germans, Canadians or Israelis. But she got less for her money.

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The Waste Land: The Problem With Space

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American suburbia is like an SUV. It’s big. It’s spacious. It can be beautiful, quiet, and well-kept up. But it’s such a waste.

Ilana and I always have opposite reactions when we visit America’s great suburbs. This last Shabbat in southern New Jersey was typical. Ilana gets dreamy about having her own lawn, house, garden–all that elbow room, all that green. And I get antsy–why should I want to live in a place where you have to drive half an hour to buy a pair of socks?

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Obama in Israel: Political Implications

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Gershom Gorenberg

Obama stopped through for two nights and a day, as if he were writing one of the New York Times travel pieces about how to spend 36 hours in some locale. At first glance, the trip was purely about photo-ops, gathering footage for later campaign ads that will air in south Florida. But there were some hints of real political content, as I explain in my new article at The American Prospect. Here’s one piece:

Hamas Walks It Back: On Wednesday morning, Israel Radio reported responses to Obama’s arrival, including this one: “A Hamas spokesman said, ‘The American senator is trying to reach the White House via Tel Aviv, at the expense of the Palestinians.'”

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