Sunday linkfest

After a slow week, I figured I'd throw together some links.

1. The media mocked Bush, and an pro-Sadr Iraqi journalist threw shoes at him, but the troops he sent to Iraq gave him a tremendous welcome. It's got to be heard to be believed. (via HotAir)

2. Ronald Radosh on Bush and the Jews.

3. From November, but still timely: Don Feder on the Jewish vote.

4. Almost as old but not quite: Mark Steyn on the murders at Chabad in Mumbai.

5. Coming soon to the Mets' bullpen: J.J. Putz. Next headline: "Some Putz blows the lead." Bonus: New York Times uses the P-word, the clinical term, in its article.

6. Gallows humor.

7. Mocking Time magazine may be easy, but it's still enjoyable.

8. This semi-earnest discussion of the grammar to be used when mixing a certain bad word with Gov. Blagojevich's name is quite amusing.

9. Invest in skateboards?

10. Well, at least Obama will receive excellent advice from his new science advisor. Just tell the Messiah not to invest with him. (via HotAir)

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Knives out for Rahm on the left?

I've been getting a lot of hits today for my post about whether Josh Bolten, Bush's chief of staff, is Jewish.

I'm guessing the sudden interest is related to the fact that Obama has now chosen Chicago thug Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff. Rahm is Jewish, too, so you can stop your frantic googling right now.

But it turns out that for rabid Obama supporters on the left, being Jewish is NOT A GOOD THING AT ALL. As Omri Ceren explains at Mere Rhetoric (via Ace),

Pro-Carter shill MJ Rosenberg is asking the far left to eschew anti-Semitic attacks on Emanuel. Not because anti-Semitic attacks are wrong per se - what would the contemporary DNC ever do? More because Emanuel is apparently one of those "good Jews" that DKos cretins compare to "Likud German/Jew Fascists" like Joe Lieberman.

(More from Soccer Dad.) In my experience, a lot of liberal Jews think pretty much everyone to the right of them politically is either an anti-semite or a Jesus freak, which is probably about the same thing to them. To me, this is nuts. On the right, I've come across a small number of anti-semites, but I've been astounded at how many philo-semites there are, given that, politically speaking at least, the Jews are not terribly appealing to them.

In contrast, many Jews seem oblivious to the outright hostility toward Israel and, in many cases, hostility directly toward the Jews themselves that radiate from their allies on the left. So the way I see it is that if the Obama presidency, with Rahm as chief of staff, tests anything, it'll be the willingness of Jewish liberals to continue to turn a blind eye toward "progressive" anti-semitism.





And no, I'm not suggesting Obama himself is an anti-semite. But it would be nice if he told his anti-semitic supporters to put it where the sun don't shine.

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I'm still here

I'm still here, but I've been quiet for the past couple of days because of (a) work; (b) a computer that's uncooperative, if not outright hostile; and (c) a bout of weltschmertz.

So meanwhile, I invite you to do the following:

1. Consider my proposed new benchmark for the Jewish vote, written in November 2004. Am I way off base?

2. Look at the speech Sarah Palin would have given at the anti-Ahmadinejad rally, had she not been unceremoniously "disinvited," and tell me how much the Jewish Democrats have harmed the cause of American Jews and Israel, using a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is not at all and 10 is utterly and irreparably.

3. Read this article ("Clinton: 'I get why Palin is hot'") and watch this clip at HotAir. Then tell me whether Bill Clinton has read my most recent photo comic or, alternatively, whether his behavior is so obvious that I had little trouble getting it down to the last, er, electoral vote.

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A walk through the WJW

The Washington Jewish Week is a pathetic little rag that arrives every Thursday. It makes a half-hearted effort to provide some political balance, but mostly it just provides unintentional humor.

Its resident political commentator, "nationally syndicated columnist" Douglas Bloomfield, has never met a tired, shopworn idea go unwritten, and when it comes to Republicans, especially conservatives, everyone's an enemy, including Jewish conservatives. This week's amusing column blames "neocons" for tutoring Palin for her ABC interview, in which, according to Bloomfield, she gave Israel a green light to bomb Iran.

Guest columnist Rabbi Ethan Seidel wants us to feel the Palestinians' pain, because "a precondition to peace -- whether between nations at war or between individuals in conflict -- will be an ability, a willingness to understand the pain of the other." News flash: We already do, but we've given up one-sided compassion. Wake me up when the Palestianians begin showing compassion for their own people, let alone for us.

And Amotz Asa-El, of the Jerusalem Post, writes that Obama and Palin have different world outlooks. (Funny how he picked up the Obama campaign's effort to make it Obama vs. Palin.) He recognizes that Obama leans to appeasement, but he uses Palin's time in Alaska to imply that she's an isolationist. The man needs a crash course in American politics.

And the silliness even infects the choice of letters to the editor. A fellow Rockville resident (second letter) accuses the WJW of being too pro-McCain. I kid you not.

If I want to read positive, sugarcoated articles about Sarah Palin, I will look in The Washington Post. [??? -- ed.] Instead of trying to sway the election with only positive statements about Palin, I would prefer to see balanced, unbiased articles. These articles might have helped McCain gain a few votes, but they just made Washington Jewish Week lose a loyal reader.

Plus, a letter about Agriprocessors from a representative of PETA (last letter). Yes, PETA, the organization that compares chicken slaughter to the Holocaust. These people deserve no ink in the Jewish press.

Did I say humor? I take it back.

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Another day, another environmentalist rabbi

I'm not going to say much about this Torah commentary from the Jewish Theological Seminary (Conservative Judaism's rabbinical academy), because it's really a self-parody. The commentary was written by Rabbi Abigail Treu, described as the director of Donor Relations and Planned Giving for the Sem. That is, she's a fundraiser, but a rabbi at the same time.

To give you the flavor of the commentary, in case you don't want to click on the link, here's the opening paragraph:

Golda Meir famously quipped: “Let me tell you the one thing I have against Moses. He took us forty years into the desert in order to bring us to the one place in the Middle East that has no oil!” Well, the folks living atop the Marcellus Shale have the opposite gripe. Underneath this formation, which stretches from the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York through Pennsylvania and Ohio to Virginia, there is oil. And with the price of oil being what it is, the oil companies have new incentive to drill there and have come calling. Which presents the farmers and landowners in this four-state stretch with a dilemma: what is more important, the beauty and health of their land or their economic security?

I know! Call on me! The farmers should preserve the beauty of their land, despite their relative poverty, so that rich liberals can enjoy the natural beauty.

Oy, vey! Rabbi Treu's commentary goes on to discuss what she sees as environmentalism in this week's Torah portion, culminating in her tribute to the idealism of Jewish law (about which see my discussion of the prosbul).

Most of us curmudgeons are strong believers in conservation, but that's not what we're talking about here. In case you were still doubting that the great project of environmentalism is to destroy the economy and reduce our standard of living, consider the way Rabbi Treu closes her commentary. We should learn, she says, from the mistakes of the Children of Israel in the wilderness, adding:

We too are poised on a threshold, contemplating how to react to our own scary reports of an uncertain future. We would do well to take the mantle of tikkun ‘olam onto our own shoulders, so that our children may be blessed to recite one hundred blessings a day, and live in a world in which the lack of oil is a source of celebration, not regret.

What's really scary is that the head of fundraising for the Sem is so clueless about why donors have money in the first place: They have money because they engage in commerce. Of course, if she had her way, there would far less commerce. I wonder whether she would then declare that the ensuing drop in donations to the Sem was a source of celebration, not regret.

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The use and misuse of Tikkun Olam

My old quip: "When I hear the words 'tikkun olam,' I reach for my wallet."

"Tikkun olam" is the Jewish concept of repairing or perfecting the world. It's been misappropriated by the Jewish left as a justification for trying to impose certain left-wing doctrine and policies on the rest of the world. (Hence, the reason for concern about theft of my wallet.)

In the new issue of Commentary magazine, July-August 2008, Hillel Halkin writes an extremely important article about this phenomenon: "How Not to Repair the World." Commentary usually makes its content available while it's current, but the magazine just came out and this is not yet available online. If you've been around Pillage Idiot long enough to read my rare serious posts, you'll realize I tend to understate things. But I don't want to understate this. The Halkin article is important enough for you to go out and buy the dead-tree version of the magazine, or at least, to go read it in the public library. Assuming a link becomes available, I'll update this post with it. [UPDATE: Sorry to report that Commentary is making only an abstract available, a short part of the opening of the article. UPDATE: Soccer Dad points out that many libraries have online access to Commentary if you have a library card.]

Halkin takes off from a collection of essays by Jewish leftists, many of whom invoke tikkun olam in support of their goals. But Halkin explains that there are several concepts of tikkun olam in Jewish thought, none of which supports the leftists' version. First, there's a religious, messianic version in the aleinu prayer, which is recited near the end of the morning, afternoon, and evening prayers. We pray that eventually, all the people of the world will recognize God's will. "We hope for the day when the world will be perfected under the Kingdom of the Almighty."

The second version of tikkun olam is a more pragmatic version found in the Talmud, a version Halkin describes as equivalent to the Jewish public interest. An example of it is the talmudic rule that if you are ransoming a kidnapped hostage, you must not, for reasons of tikkun olam, pay an excessive ransom. If you pay an excessive ransom, you'll "jack up the price" that others must pay to ransom their hostages. The public interest overrides your own.

Yet a third version is a spiritual one that was offered by the kabbalists of the 16th century. The idea was that the world was fractured at creation, and that individuals, through prayer and other spiritual activities, can help to repair it. As Halkin explains, this concept of tikkun olam is appealing to the political left, because it is open to reinterpretation.

Halkin then analyzes the essays I mentioned above, which he says are easy to caricature, because many of them caricature themselves. "They represent the ultimate in that self-indulgent approach, so common in non-Orthodox Jewish circles in the United States today, that treats Jewish tradition not as a body of teachings to be learned from but as one needing to be taught what it is about by those who know better than it does what it should be about."

There is much, much more of interest in this article, but I want to close the way Halkin closes, with a discussion of the prosbul, a subject I've ruminated about often and even written about myself. The prosbul (Halkin spells it "pruzbul") was a pronouncement from the great rabbi Hillel that created a huge loophole in the Torah's law of remission of debts. Halkin quotes a source I'd been unaware of, and he puts the entire issue into perfect clarity for me.

The Torah (Deuteronomy) states that in the sabbatical year, all debts will be cancelled. The sabbatical year is earth-centered, not loan-centered, so this doesn't mean you can always have six-year loans. If you lend in the sixth year of the cycle, the loan is cancelled the following year. The Torah itself recognizes that this is an idealistic law and contrary to rational economics. Deuteronomy 15:9-10 states:

Beware lest you harbor the base thought, "The seventh year, the year of remission, is approaching," so that you are mean to your needy kinsman and give him nothing. He will cry out to the Lord against you, and you will incur guilt. Give to him readily and have no regrets when you do so, for in return the Lord your God will bless you in all your efforts and in all your undertakings.

In an attempt to make this law cancelling debts work, God Himself issues a threat (you will incur guilt) and makes a promise (He will bless you) in order to motivate people to overcome their natural and rational economic behavior. But even when God speaks, the law doesn't work. People don't want to lend money in the sixth year.

So the law, which was clearly designed to protect the poor from incurring permanent debt, had the unintended result of hurting the poor by totally drying up credit as the sabbatical year approached. (You don't have to have a vivid imagination to note the parallel with modern social legislation.) Hillel's prosbul allowed the loan to be assigned to the court so that it could be enforced past the end of the sixth year, in spite of the remission of debts in the seventh year.

What I didn't realize until reading Halkin's article was that the Talmud described Hillel's prosbul as having been enacted "for the sake of tikkun olam." Imagine that: The great idealistic legislation of the Torah, which was supposed to benefit the poor, was changed (or, I suppose, more accurately, was "loopholed" out of existence) by a pragmatic rule that seemed to favor the wealthy but actually helped the poor. And the justification for that change was tikkun olam, in the pragmatic sense of the Jewish public interest.

It is critical to keep this in mind whenever we hear the modern Jewish left invoking tikkun olam.

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