Category Archives: News

The Price of Tea in Uzbekistan

As commuters made their way home from lower Manhattan last Tuesday evening, the police presence was strong, complete with heavily armed officers, helicopters and dogs. At that point, no one knew if the man currently charged with ramming a truck into people on a nearby bike path, killing eight and injuring twelve, was part of a larger terrorist plan or a lone wolf.

The show of vigilance may have made people feel safer. It may even have made them safer, since a broader police presence can, in the event of a terrorist act like last week’s, prevent worse outcomes. The unfortunate fact, though, remains that it is simply impossible to prevent evil people from doing evil things.

To be sure, we must make what reasonable efforts we can to prevent depraved people from entering our country, from plotting to commit violent acts and from carrying them out.

But the carnage caused by Uzbek immigrant Sayfullo Saipov is illustrative of how it isn’t really possible to prevent malevolent individuals – who proliferate so easily these internet days – from wreaking havoc when they choose to.

The accused Manhattan killer was in the country legally, holding a green card, a beneficiary of the “diversity visa lottery,” by which approximately one million foreigners have been awarded legal permanent residency in the U.S., despite having no relatives here or special skills.

President Trump was quick to blame that program for the recent attack, and claimed that New York Senator Chuck Schumer was at fault. The senator was indeed one of those who helped create the program in 1990. He was also, though, among senators who proposed to end it several years ago.

But the issue of the visa lottery has as much to do with what happened in Manhattan last week as it does with the price of tea in Uzbekistan.

The truck terrorist (I’ll drop the “accused”; the fiend has expressed joy over and pride in what he did) seems to have been radicalized after his arrival on these shores, apparently when he wandered from job to job and didn’t land the one he wanted. When he was chosen in the 2010 visa lottery, he was subject to the same vetting procedures as any immigrant, and raised no concerns. Someone approved to immigrate because of special skills or relatives here can also become radicalized.

As can someone born here. The nonpartisan think tank New America tallied the citizenship status of 418 individuals accused of jihadist terrorism crimes in the U.S. since 9/11, and found that fully 85 percent of them were either U.S. citizens or U.S. legal residents – about half of them born American citizens.

And then there is non-jihadi violence against innocents, like last month’s attack in Las Vegas, where a born American killed 58 people and wounded 489. The very day after the more recent terrorist act, a gunman (with no connection to Islam, much less Islamism) walked into a Colorado Walmart and nonchalantly killed three people. And then, this past Sunday, a man shot 26 people to death at a Texas church.

Some, frustrated at the lack of a good blamee (well, it should be a word) for last week’s attack in Manhattan, consider the company that rented Mr. Saipov a truck to bear some responsibility for his actions. But on what grounds should he have been refused? His name? His beard? His religion? His country of origin? Anyone with a valid driver’s license and a credit card can rent a vehicle. Did that fact facilitate last week’s violence? Surely. Can it be applied selectively without violating federal law? Just ask a lawyer.

Restricting immigration may be a good idea (though if Uzbekistan is blacklisted, that will affect the Bukharian Jewish community still there). Careful vetting of foreigners entering the country surely is. But neither notion is a solution to terrorism. Nor, although a fine idea whose time has long arrived, is tougher gun control.

I have come up with several theoretical but entirely workable ideas for sneaking weapons onto public transportation, including onto planes (no, I’m not telling). I imagine similar ones have been conceived by people inclined, as I am not, to killing or maiming innocents.

So what is the solution to terrorism? A secret: There is none. And no one, or thing, to blame when evil is wrought.

There are prudent steps to be taken, yes. But if we think any or all of them can prevent bad people from doing bad things, or that some policy or law is at fault when they do, we fool ourselves.

We might better ponder a passuk: “If Hashem will not guard a city, in vain does its guard keep his vigil” (Tehillim 127:1).

And recognize the import of its message.

© 2017 Hamodia

 

The Art of the Decertification

What does President Trump’s decertification of the Iran deal mean, and what does it mean?

That wasn’t a mistake. There are two questions here. What exactly it is that the president did, and what does it herald for the world’s future.

What he did:

Back in 2015, then-President Obama approved the international agreement to restrict Iran’s advancing nuclear program. But the deal wasn’t an actual treaty, which would have required Senate approval. Skeptical lawmakers wanted to assert some sort of control over the accord, and so Senators Bob Corker (yes, that one) and Ben Cardin helped pass bipartisan legislation, the Iran Nuclear Review Act (INARA), requiring the president to certify important aspects of the deal to Congress every 90 days.

Heeding the advice of his foreign-policy advisers, President Trump did so twice. When the third deadline arrived this month, though, he opted not to, claiming that Iran is violating the terms of the agreement – or, as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson clarified, its “spirit.”

While United Nations inspectors, the other parties to the deal and even top Trump administration officials (including Mr. Tillerson, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joseph Dunford) maintain that there haven’t been substantive Iranian violations of the deal, and that Iran’s nuclear program has been halted for now, the president, who repeatedly denounced the deal during the presidential campaign, concluded that, nevertheless, the time has come to force its renegotiation.

He could have just pulled the U.S. out of the deal – a president created it, and a president can extinguish it – but instead opted to simply not certify the agreement, punting its fate, at least for now, to Congress.

And so we’re brought to the second question: What does the president’s recent action mean – for the future?

It’s not hard to make a case that, despite its abiding by the terms of the deal, the Iranian regime is belligerent and dangerous. It has gone full speed ahead with its ballistic missile program (which falls outside the nuclear agreement) and is deeply involved in murderous mischief in places like Syria and Lebanon. It has harassed American ships in the Persian Gulf and underwritten Hezbollah’s operating budget. It credibly competes with North Korea for first prize in the category of malevolence.

Still, insisting on major new concessions from Iran – which President Trump wants Congress to do – or pulling out of the Iran deal altogether, as he has threatened to do if Congress fails him, could result in a colossally sticky wicket. Right off the bat, it will provide Iran an excuse to fully resume its nuclear weapons program. The mullahs have already gone ballistic in the literal sense with their missile program; they might well be expected to do the same in the phrase’s figurative sense.

Iran’s “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has already announced that “If the U.S. tears up the deal, we will shred it.”

A mere two years ago, U.S. and Israeli intelligence measured the breakout time for an Iranian nuclear weapon in weeks. Currently, due to the deal, that can is kicked down the road at least 15 years (by which time Iran may have a new, less lunatic leadership; and, if not, the military options considered two years ago can be reconsidered). Should the deal be abrogated, though, we’re back to 2015.

Then there is the expected fallout from the U.S. reneging on an agreement, even one that isn’t an actual treaty. Russia and China, as signatories of the Iran deal, will question whether the United States can be a reliable negotiating partner, at a time when cooperation among the major powers is vital in fighting radical Islam. And if there currently exists any hope that diplomacy might mitigate North Korea’s designs, there won’t be then.

So the president is taking a serious gamble, with much at stake.

Ironically, though, the very recklessness that Mr. Trump seems to project could win him the endgame here. Because it is at least conceivable that Iran’s leaders, for all their bluster, in fact feel endangered by a seemingly unrestrained American leader who openly threatens his country’s enemies with utter destruction.

Part of what propelled Mr. Trump to the presidency was his proclaimed success as a dealmaker. Might his Iranian gambit turn out to have been a shrewd move that yielded not World War III but long-term security for the civilized world?

We must hope it will and, more important, be mispallel that lev melech here will be firmly b’yad Hashem (Mishlei 21:1).

© 2017 Hamodia

Two Apologies, One Disagreement and a Reiteration

In an article for the Jewish feminist group JOFA, Dr. Noam Stadlan objects to what I wrote in the Forward about the Orthodox Union’s stance on women being appointed as Jewish clergy.

His objections are several, and I will respond briefly to each below.  But, as explained a bit further below, the doctor glosses over the most salient, central point of what I wrote.

Dr. Stadlan is correct that I did not acknowledge the fact that there are Orthodox circles where women study Talmud. My apologies for that omission, but what texts are appropriate for formal teaching of women was not my topic.

Whether any recognized poskim consider it proper for women to speak before men was likewise not my topic. My en passant reference to women speaking to women was written from my personal experience (though not only in “haredi” shuls), and I apologize here too if it inadvertently insulted anyone.

I strongly disagree, though, with Dr. Stadlan’s stark judgment that it is somehow out of bounds for someone like me who looks to haredi poskim for guidance to offer an opinion about a challenge faced by a “Modern Orthodox” organization committed to halacha. I think, on the contrary, that it reflects a feeling of concern for other halacha-respecting Jewish communities than one’s own.  (Incidentally, as the bio at the end of my Forward piece indicates, I wrote my piece as an individual Jewish blogger, not in the name of Agudath Israel, which is mentioned only afterward for identification purposes.)

Most important, Dr. Stadlan seems to misunderstand the essence of what I wrote.  I did not set out to make a halachic case “against the ordination of women.”  I am not qualified as a posek, and would never arrogate to write as one.  It may well be the case, as some writers cited by Dr. Stadlan assert, that a “halachic case can be made for the ordination of women.”

What I wrote – and this is the central point Dr. Stadlan somehow misses – was that the question of women rabbis, which may be a legitimate one and is certainly one of great societal import today, was responsibly placed by the Orthodox Union before poskim to whom it looks for halachic guidance.

There is, pace Dr. Stadlan, no Jewish concept of halacha divorced from recognized poskim qualified to apply halachic principles (and, yes, meta-halachic principles no less, which have always been and remain very much part of reaching authoritative halachic decisions).  Whom one turns to for a psak is one’s own business, but acknowledging that there are widely recognized and respected poskim in various communities (be they “centrist”, “yeshivish”, or any particular flavor of Chassidic) is not a “no true Scotsman fallacy”; it is the very essence of how halacha has been applied over history to new circumstances – and how it must be responsibly applied today.

Sullied Reputation

The rioting last month in St. Louis following the acquittal of a white former police officer who killed an African-American man, like all rioting in the wake of unpopular verdicts, was ugly and unjustifiable.  While the majority of protesters were peaceful, some hoodlums broke store windows and threw rocks at police.

The city’s acting police chief, Lawrence O’Toole, came under fire for stating, after calm was restored, “I’m proud to tell you the City of St. Louis is safe, and the police owned tonight.” Georgetown law professor Paul Butler retorted that if “the police actually are in charge, if they actually own the night, that’s a police state, not a free country.”

He’s wrong. Empowered police are essential to a free country.

The Mishnah (Avos 3:2) teaches that governments are what prevent anarchy, and thus deserve our tefillos. And law enforcement officers are the front line of maintaining the peace.

What spurred the largely peaceful protests, though, shouldn’t escape our attention.

The police officer acquitted of murder, Jason Stockley, and his partner chased a suspected criminal, Anthony Smith, who had fled in a car.  The officers slammed their SUV into the suspect’s car. Officer Stockley got out and fired five shots, killing the suspect. A handgun was taken from the car after the shooting.

The police vehicle’s dashboard camera, however, shortly before the chase ended, captured Mr. Stockley seeming to say that he was “going to kill this [expletive].” At trial, the officer said he could not remember saying that.

Prosecutors also argued that the presence of Mr. Stockley’s DNA – and the absence of Mr. Smith’s – on the retrieved gun proved that Mr. Stockley planted the weapon on the suspect’s person. (More than 40 criminal cases have been dropped in Baltimore alone after police body cameras show officers there allegedly planting evidence.)

The judge, though, noted the lack of any direct evidence of wrongdoing; cited court testimony that the absence of someone’s DNA on a gun is not conclusive; and opined that for a person engaged in criminal activity to “not [be] in possession of a firearm would be an anomaly.”

I won’t second-guess the judge.  He heard all the testimony and saw all the evidence, and I didn’t.  But it’s understandable why the outward facts of the case led some in St. Louis to voice their displeasure.

Police officers facing criminals they believe are armed need to make split-second decisions, and cannot be expected to pause to meditate on their situation. Still and all, police misconduct happens.

Like it did in the bloodless but still deeply disturbing case of Fred Watson, who was sitting in his car in a Ferguson, Missouri park in 2012 when a police officer approached, searched the man’s car without permission and wrote him more than half a dozen tickets.  Among them was one for not wearing a seatbelt, even though the car was parked; and one for offering a false report – because Mr. Watson identified himself as “Fred” instead of the “Freddie” on his license.

Mr. Watson, a Navy veteran and cybersecurity expert, is black. According to his account, when he protested the citations, the white officer pulled out his gun and told him: “I could just shoot you right here and no one would” care.

A case of “he said, he said”?  Maybe.  But the officer’s record shows that he pistol-whipped a 12-year-old girl in the face in 2006, and in 2007 struck another child in the face with something metal before falsifying a police report.

Meanwhile, Mr. Watson said that the city’s five-year-long prosecution caused him to lose his security clearance, resulting in his being fired from his well-paying cybersecurity job. Last month, without explanation, Ferguson prosecutors dropped all charges.  Better late than never.

It isn’t always white on black mistreatment, either. This past July, a black police officer in Coney Island ordered a white man, Raymond Crespo, to pick up a cup his friend had knocked from his hand. When Mr. Crespo didn’t, the officer threw him against a door and then threw him down and dragged him along the ground – all captured by a surveillance camera. Mr. Crespo filed a complaint.

The next day, Mr. Crespo says, the officer, in plainclothes, sought him out, asked him why he had made the complaint and, revealing a gun in his waistband, said, “Do you know what I’m going to do to you?”

There is no inconsistency in both wholeheartedly supporting police and being deeply distressed by police misconduct.  Quite the contrary, for those of us who truly value the dedication of law enforcement personnel, the irresponsible yechidim in their ranks are all the more loathsome, for they only sully the good reputation of the vast majority of police, unfairly but surely.

© 2017 Hamodia

Truth Gone Missing

It made many people very happy.

Especially dentists.

“It” being the report widely circulated over recent weeks that an ice cream breakfast will make you smarter.

The claim first appeared on a Japanese news site, citing a study by Professor Yoshihiko Koga at Tokyo’s Kyorin University. According to the story, Professor Koga found that people who ate ice cream for breakfast had faster response times and more brainwave activity than a control group. “Break out the Klein’s!” was my personal brain’s first, spirited reaction.

The wonderful news, which, of course, runs counter to virtually everything nutritionists believe about a healthy first meal of the day, made its way to the British newspaper The Telegraph, and, from there, to media like Newsweek, CBS broadcasts and The Washington Times.

Before you plan on a scoop of mint chocolate chip to start tomorrow, though, please note that the control group didn’t eat a “normal” breakfast. In fact, its members didn’t eat breakfast at all. So, playing Sherlock Holmes, we might suspect that the reason the ice cream eaters did better was because they actually ate breakfast (and sugar, which in excess contributes to a host of serious medical problems, indeed provides at least a short-lived boost to brain function).

In the words of Reading University researcher Katie Barfoot, “A possible explanation [for the increased alertness]… is the simple presence of consuming breakfast vs. not consuming breakfast.” Possible, yes.

The original report of the study, by the way, mentions, en passant, that the research was conducted in partnership with an unnamed sweets company. Watson, I believe we have a motive.

Less mouth-watering and more potentially dangerous than even excessive consumption of sugar was some other material disseminated last year but whose extent has only recently come to light.

Back in June, former F.B.I. director James B. Comey testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee that there was “massive” Russian interference in last year’s presidential election. “There should be no fuzz on this whatsoever,” he declared. “The Russians interfered in our election during the 2016 cycle. They did it with purpose. They did it with sophistication. They did it with overwhelming technical efforts.”

Among those efforts, it is now known, thanks to an investigation by The New York Times and research from the cybersecurity firm FireEye, that last year a Russian-controlled cyberarmy of impostors created counterfeit social media accounts aimed at influencing the election.

The Russian information attack included the hacking and leaking of Democratic emails, and a torrent of stories, true, false and in-between in Russian media like cable channel RT (“Russia Today”) and the news agency Sputnik.

More insidious still was Russia’s hijacking of American social media to present information, and misinformation, behind cybermasks. Electronic means used by millions were repurposed as engines of deception and propaganda.

Take Melvin Redick of Harrisburg, Pa., for example. In his photo, he smiled broadly, wore a backward baseball cap and held a young child on his lap. He urged others to check out a brand-new website.

“These guys show hidden truth about Hillary Clinton, George Soros and other leaders of the U.S.” he wrote on June 8, 2016. “Visit DCLeaks [a website]. It’s really interesting!”

Mr. Redick, however, doesn’t exist. His ostensible photo was in fact of an unsuspecting Brazilian, “borrowed” without permission. The site purporting to be his was linked to the Russian military intelligence agency.

It supplied private information stolen by hackers and presented to discredit the Clinton campaign and its supporters.

Elections, alas – I hope you’re sitting down – are less influenced by intelligent analyses of issues and candidates’ records and statements than they are by selective information, real or otherwise, in context or out of it, offered to the public in a way that stirs bile, not brains.

So, whatever the truth, or truthiness, of the material that was proffered by the non-existent Mr. Redick and literally thousands of thousands of social media ads devoid of context and promoting divisive social and political messages over the course of the months leading up to the election, the meddling of a foreign (and far from benign) power is meaningful.

Chazal teach that, when the “footsteps” of Moshiach are close, ha’emes tehei ne’ederes, “truth will go missing” (Sotah 49b).

The contention that ice cream is a good breakfast idea is a relatively easy untruth to discern. That an supposed person is in fact not a person at all, or that purported “news” media are in cahoots with a foreign autocrat, a good deal less so.

So, as you sit down, I hope, to a healthy breakfast tomorrow, ponder the fact that today, in news as in the marketplace, caveat emptor, let the consumer be aware.

© 2017 Hamodia

Kashering Elephants and Donkeys

I appreciate that my friend of many years Rabbi Menken ( http://hamodia.com/2017/09/12/one-mans-ceiling-another-mans-floor/ ) agrees with me that treating political affiliations like sports teams is wrong, as is attaching ourselves to political positions (or parties, as I wrote in the piece he critiques) to the point of justifying the unjustifiable.

We disagree, however, about whether, as he claims, only “one political party” can rightly be supported by Torah-conscious Jews. He asserts that “to be a mainstream Democrat today, one must support” things like redefining marriage. Such redefinition, however, is no longer an issue, as it is, for better or worse (worse), not only the Supreme Court-established law of the land but embraced by many Republicans, simple citizens and legislators alike.

Rabbi Menken also attributes to the Democratic Party an “increasing” belief that Jews are stealing Palestinian land, and, by extension, its reflection of ancient anti-Semitic canards.

I don’t know what he has in mind, but what I do know, as should he, is that both sides of the aisles in both houses of Congress are staunch and proven defenders of Israel’s security needs. And that during last year’s presidential campaign, attempts by Bernie Sanders and Jim Zogby to insert “occupation” and other “evenhanded” language in the Democratic platform were summarily and effectively quashed by the Democratic mainstream; and that the Democratic platform explicitly opposed the BDS movement.

It did endorse the eventual goal of a two-state solution, but if that constitutes some sort of updated Jew hatred, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, along with some other very fine supporters of Israel, would qualify as anti-Semites.

But I don’t want to be put in a position of doing precisely what I decried in my original article, singing the praises of any party. My entire point was that mindless partisan politics and Torah-consciousness do not mix. Or should not. There are times when “conservative” values serve Klal Yisrael best, and times when “liberal” ones do; issues regarding which one party best reflects our concerns, and issues about which the other one does; and individual legislators who are on our side regarding some issues but not others. What is more, representatives of either party may themselves hold different positions from their own colleagues. What should matter alone to us is what is best for Klal Yisrael. And indiscriminate partisanship does not serve that goal.

As to Charlottesville, the “Unite the Right” gathering was explicitly billed in its promotional literature as a show of “white” strength; its official poster, in fact, was clearly modeled on Nazi posters, complete with birds pointedly reminiscent of the Nazi eagle darting through the sky, with Confederate flags in the place of the swastikas.

And actual swastikas were held aloft by rally participants, as many hundreds of them marched at night with torches, chanting angrily “Jews will not replace us!” and “Blood and soil!” – an English rendering of the Nazi “blut und boden.”

The counter-protest, by contrast, was organized by a coalition of peaceful rights groups: Peoples Action for Racial Justice, Together Cville and Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice. According to their advertising, their march was to be “a peaceful protest against all forms of white supremacy, racial intolerance, and discrimination.”

And it largely was just that. Some violent elements also crashed the protest and police didn’t seem to make efforts to stop violence between them and similar elements among the supremacists. But in no way was the counter-protest a mirror of the supremacist rally. The vast majority of the former were demonstrating against hatred; the vast majority of the latter were expressing it.

And no number of “first hand” anecdotes, no matter how compelling, can obscure that fact.

The president, on two occasions, seemed to pointedly equate the supremacists and the anti-hate group. For that Rabbi Menken offers his “gratitude.” That, though, is precisely the sort of blunt partisanship and hero worship I consider so harmful. One needn’t be an opponent of Mr. Trump to acknowledge the inaptness of his apparent comparison. In fact, among the myriad groups that did so was the Republican Jewish Coalition. Rabbi Menken seems here to be, as they say, “more Catholic than the Pope.”

The president’s comments were not merely “politically” misguided, they were morally wrong. That does not make him a bad person or an enemy, chalilah, but neither does it make him a hero.

I do not understand the pertinence of Rabbi Menken’s mention of media that tried to connect car attacks by Muslim terrorists in Europe with the supremacist who drove his car into a peaceful crowd in Charlottesville, but I certainly join him in his skepticism about that assertion.

Nor do I fathom the relevance here of the contrast between Israel’s humanitarianism and her Arab enemies’ celebration of murder. I have, in fact, written about that staggering contrast on several occasions.

And so, my bottom line remains what the first lines of my original column contended: We American Jews who are faithful to Torah must advocate our interests and our ideals, but judiciously. We must not fall into the contemporary trap of becoming partisan cheerleaders instead of prudent champions.

© 2017 Hamodia

Statues of Limitation

It’s safe to say that many of us are less than exercised over the public debate about Confederate-era statues on public lands. It may animate those with a dog in the race, so to speak, like African-Americans, some wistful white Southerners and pigeons. But the conventional community wisdom is that it is hardly an issue that need concern us.

Before explaining why I disagree, some facts (always a good idea):

While those who oppose the removal of public-space statues honoring Confederate leaders assert that only a tiny minority of radical, “progressive” elements wish to take down the stone tributes, a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll showed that more than a quarter of all Americans favored removing the statues. Another 19% said they were conflicted.

The statues, moreover, their advocates maintain, are merely meant to honor brave Civil War heroes who fought for their vision of the United States.

The vast majority of the controversial statues, however, were erected well after the end of that war, and in fact peaked in the early and mid-1900s. Just when, as it happens, many states were enacting Jim Crow laws to disenfranchise black Americans.

Historians don’t consider that confluence of events to be meaningless. As James Grossman, the executive director of the American Historical Association, observed: “These statues were meant to create legitimate garb for white supremacy. Why [else] would you put a statue of Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson in 1948 in Baltimore?”

Moving from facts to assertions, the statue-protectors claim that history will be threatened by the monuments’ removals, as the statues are reminders of the war that split the nation during the early 1860s.

History, though, is safe, preserved as it has been and will continue to be, by more effective means than stone figures, things like history books and school curricula.

Finally, those who oppose tampering with the monuments point out that there will be no end to such undertakings. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, after all, were slave owners. Shall we dismantle their memorials too? As President Trump asked rhetorically at his August 15 press conference, “Where does it stop?”

That latter argument seems reasonable at first thought; but at second thought, less so. The statues that many citizens feel don’t belong on public land are of men who championed or symbolize slavery, not those who simply, like countless Americans, took advantage of the institution when it was a regrettable but accepted social norm.

And, contrary to the view of a handful of suddenly popular revisionist historians, while the Civil War was fought for a number of reasons, like states’ rights and economic independence, slavery was, in the words of the Confederate vice-president Alexander H. Stephens, “the immediate cause of the late rupture and the present revolution” of Southern independence. Stephens continued by explaining that the Confederacy rested “upon the great truth that the negro [sic] is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.”

There was a reason, after all, that all of the Confederate states were slave states, and that all of the free states remained in the Union.

Why, though, should we care about the statues? The answer, in a word, is empathy.

Leave aside the very real implications here of darkei shalom – which is not, as some “scholars” suggest, some “meta-halachic” novelty but the expression of an essential Torah concept. Feeling the pain of another is a central mussar goal. And while it may most directly have impact on the pain of fellow members of Klal Yisrael – our own “family” – the middah itself stands on its own as an ideal, one to be cultivated and internalized.

That millions of fellow human beings are offended by towering reminders of their dreadful history in our country should at very least make us consider “what is hateful,” to use Rabi Akiva’s formulation, to us, to wonder how we would feel were there a swastika monument, or a statue of American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell – who merely hated and didn’t really harm Jews – on the front lawn of a courthouse or in a public park.

If one’s answer to that question is “eh, no big deal,” then unconcern for the hundreds of public tributes to proponents of the enslavement and mistreatment of a people is at least consistent.

But if one’s answer is that a stone swastika or a Nazi on a pedestal, his hand outstretched in tribute to his vision, is offensive, then we need to recognize, and appreciate, why others are irritated by very real tributes to very real racism.

© 2017 Hamodia

The Peril of Partisanship

Among contemporary American life’s many negative influences on Torah-conscious Jews is a subtle one that is generally overlooked.

We don’t need reminders of the pernicious impact of the surrounding society’s denial of eternal truths, embrace of immorality, lack of any semblance of tznius or obsession with material comforts and possessions. Well, actually we do need such reminders, and receive them from our manhigim.

But we seldom hear about a spiritual ill that, at least to my lights, seems to be running wild among even Jews who are otherwise committed to Torah: Political bandwagon-jumping.

I’m not referring, of course, to responsible shtadlanus, whose primary and most responsible practitioner is the organization I am privileged to work for (but, I remind readers, in whose name I do not write in this space), Agudath Israel of America.

The judicious and delicate execution of shtadlanus, interaction with government officials – which was pioneered in the U.S. by the likes of “Mike” Tress and Rabbi Moshe Sherer, zichronom livrachah – is vital, although not a simple thing. People like my esteemed colleagues Rabbi Chaim Dovid Zwiebel and Rabbi Abba Cohen, with the guidance of Gedolim, admirably carry on those pioneers’ work in a duly careful and conscientious manner.

My concern is with something else, what might best be called the “political sports team mentality” popular with so many simple-minded Americans, but which has been seeping, heavily of late, into the Torah-dedicated world as well.

Otherwise intelligent individuals gleefully glom onto particular political parties or politicians, usually for some (at least arguably) rational reason, but then, when faced with the championed party’s or person’s wrongheaded actions, words or behavior, are unable to let go. The fans bend over backward to justify the unjustifiable, because, well, it’s their player or their team.

And, conversely, the “opposing team” is a no-good bunch of bums, and can do no right. A leader or legislator can act laudably but, if he is on the wrong side of the designated partisan divide, will be criticized for being hypocritical, having a hidden agenda or just for not having done more.

Is this what our community has come to, a quieter but no less mindless version of the rowdy crowds who heartily chant “Yes, we can!” or “Lock her up!”?

Something’s gone missing in parts of our community and some of its organs’ political positions and commentary. Actually a few things. One is humility.

That is to say, there are seldom simple answers to complex political issues – which most political issues are. Yes, there are certainly occasions when it is clear that a particular piece of legislation or political candidate is worthy, or the opposite.

But in most cases, things are not entirely as they are portrayed by either the New York Times’ editorial page or talk radio personalities. And only a careful hearing-out and honest consideration of all sides of an issue, be it immigration or free trade or Confederate statues or even a potential peace process in the Middle East, has a chance of yielding an informed, objective position. Mindless team spirit is no path to emes. Sometimes, even, as conservative columnist David Brooks recently observed, “The truth is plural.”

Thoughtful, truth-consistent positions come from research and objective analysis, not the rantings or self-righteousness of partisan players. Assertions, even if one hears them shouted on the radio or sees them, as the wry joke goes, “on the internet!,” are not necessarily actual facts.

An actual fact is that, at the “Unite the Right” rally earlier this month in Charlottesville, one side was entirely composed of white supremacists of varied stripes but the other was mostly comprised of non-radical, non-violent opponents of white supremacy. And that the former group contained no very fine people. And, on the other hand, that neither Steve Bannon nor President Trump is an anti-Semite.

An actual fact is that it wasn’t “the media” alone that was disturbed by the president’s seeming comparison of the two groups, but also leading Republican lawmakers, staunchly conservative periodicals, commentators like Charles Krauthammer, members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman and, lihavdil, a number of respected Rabbanim.

An actual fact is that, as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell recently observed, “Most news is not fake.”

Mr. Brooks made another observation about political “zealots.” They turn politics, he wrote, “into a secular religion.” In our case, actually, it’s much worse. They turn religion – ours – into political tools, and even attempt to utilize statements of Chazal and divrei Torah to buttress their partisan positions. That’s indefensible.

As is the entire “sports team” mentality in politics.  We are, or should be, better than that.

© 2017 Hamodia