Monkeys, Marriage and Morality

Amid the ongoing avalanche of political conversions, punditry and testimonials on behalf of redefining marriage was a recent op-ed piece in The New York Times by a professor of biology, David George Haskell.

The professor’s contribution to the effort to bring public pressure on the U.S. Supreme Court as it hears two cases concerning the meaning of marriage was to note that some plants, lichen, snails and bees do not mate in ways that we would characterized as male-female pairs. In fact, Dr. Haskell informs us, even apes in the rainforest may form same-sex bonds.

Of course, that hardly constitutes “nature’s case for same-sex marriage,” the title that ran above the professor’s piece. At least not if society wishes to continue to disapprove of things like thievery, murder and cannibalism, all easily spotted in the wild. (There’s a reason, after all, it’s called the wild.)

To be fair, Dr. Haskell’s true target (despite his piece’s misleading title) is only the argument that, as the 18th-century English jurist William Blackstone wrote, marriage should be “founded in nature.”

That’s a straw man, though, and one that might benefit from a lit match. What is or is not “natural,” at least from a classical Jewish perspective, is not the measure of right and wrong.

Discussion of right and wrong these days in this land, at least where there is no obvious human victim of the action at issue, is complicated by the formidable church-state wall that has been erected over the years by our country’s courts. The First Amendment’s rule that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” has, for better or worse, come to mean to many that nothing based in the human religious tradition may have any impact on any law in the land. That construct, however, does not change reality, at least not as understood by Judaism.

The Jewish religious tradition consists of the G-d-given Written and Oral Torahs’ teachings as transmitted by the Jewish sages over the generations. While Jewish laws can be applied (by expert authorities committed to the Torah’s truths and impervious to the Zeitgeist) to different cases in different ways, they are not affected by societal mores or contracts.

The vast majority of the Torah’s laws are incumbent only on Jews. But there are seven fundamental laws that the Torah mandates for all human beings. They were known to and accepted by all people in antiquity – hence their appellation “The Laws of Noah’s descendants” (or “Noahide Laws”). Among them are laws prohibiting certain sexual unions, male-male ones among them.

That ancient moral tradition underlies many religions’ disapproval of homosexual acts. Judaism is not the only belief system that harbors such disapproval; so do many Christian churches, as well as Islam, Mormonism, Sikhism and the Bahai church, among others. And it is that moral tradition which underlay the broad societal disapproval of homosexual acts that informed the American public before the Stonewall riots in 1969 and the entertainment industry’s subsequent embrace, and eventual celebration, of “nontraditional” personal relationships.

Truth be told, although the legal meaning of “marriage” has already been changed by several states and is currently being discussed by the Supreme Court, most Americans, including most American legislators and jurists, would still consider things like incestuous unions or multiple-partner arrangements to fall far short of deserving the name “marriage.” That, despite the fact that the only grounds for disenfranchising such arrangements – or, for that matter, for refraining from killing compromised newborns or the terminal elderly – are the tenets of humanity’s moral tradition, the Noahide Laws.

Which leads one to wonder, and worry, about the future. The republic’s Founding Fathers were certainly wise to seek to prevent laws “respecting an establishment of religion.” But a societal embrace of the opposite pole, the dismissal of the very concept of a universal moral code is, or should be, deeply disturbing.

Musing: Obama’s Ode to Jewish History

The parts of President Obama’s remarks after disembarking in Israel that the media seem to have focused on were his declarations about how similar the United States and Israel are, and his insistence, once again, of the “unbreakable bond” between the U.S. and Israel.

To this set of ears, though, the most striking, and important, words he uttered were the following ones:

“More than 3,000 years ago, the Jewish people lived here, tended the land here, prayed to God here. And after centuries of exile and persecution, unparalleled in the history of man, the founding of the Jewish State of Israel was a rebirth, a redemption unlike any in history.”

Many Arab teeth were surely set on edge by that clear and deliberate statement. And Mr. Obama had to know that they would be.

All of us who care about Israel’s well-being and about Klal YIsrael need to stop a moment and acknowledge not only the import of the president’s words but his courage in uttering them.

Deconstructing Dayeinu

Much of our Seder-night message to our children, mediated by the Haggadah, is forthright and clear. Some of it, though, is subtle and stealthy.

Like Dayeinu.

On the surface, it is a simple song – a recitation of events of Divine kindness over the course of Jewish history, from the Egyptian exodus until the Jewish arrival in the Holy Land – with the refrain “Dayeinu”: “It would have been enough for us.” It is a puzzling chorus, and everyone who has ever thought about Dayeinu has asked the obvious question.

Would it really have “been enough for us” had G-d not, say, split the Red Sea, trapping our ancestors between the water and the Egyptian army? Some take the approach that another miracle could have taken place to save the Jews, but that seems to weaken the import of the refrain. And then there are the other lines: “Had G-d not sustained us in the desert” – enough for us? “Had He not given us the Torah.” Enough? What are we saying?

Contending that we don’t really mean “Dayeinu” when we say it, that we only intend to declare how undeserving of all G-d’s kindnesses we are, is the sort of answer children view with immediate suspicion and make faces at.

One path, though, toward understanding Dayeinu might lie in remembering that a proven method of engaging the attention of a child – or even an ex-child – is to hide one’s message, leaving hints for its discovery. Could Dayeinu be hiding something significant –in fact, in plain sight?

Think of those images of objects or words that require time for the mind to comprehend, simply because the gestalt is not immediately absorbed; one aspect alone is perceived at first, although another element may be the key to the image’s meaning, and emerge only later.

Dayeinu may be precisely such a puzzle. And its solution might lie in the realization that one of the song’s recountings is in fact not followed by the refrain at all. Few people can immediately locate it, but it’s true: One of the events listed is pointedly not followed by the word “dayeinu.”

Can you find it? Or have the years of singing Dayeinu after a cup of wine obscured the obvious? You might want to ask a child, more able for the lack of experience. I’ll wait…

…Welcome back. You found it, of course: the very first phrase in the poem.

Dayeinu begins: “Had He taken us out of Egypt…” That phrase – and it alone – is never qualified with a “dayeinu.” It never says, “Had You not taken us out of Egypt it would have been enough for us. For, simply put, there then wouldn’t have been an “us.”

The exodus is, so to speak, a “non-negotiable.” It was the singular, crucial, transformative point in Jewish history, when we Jews became a people, with all the special interrelationship that peoplehood brings. Had Jewish history ended with starvation in the desert, or even at battle at an undisturbed Red Sea, it would have been, without doubt, a terrible tragedy, the cutting down of a people just born – but still, the cutting down of a people, born. The Jewish nation, the very purpose of creation (“For the sake of Israel,” as the Midrash comments on the first word of the Torah, “did G-d create the heavens and the earth”), would still have existed, albeit briefly.

And our nationhood, of course, is precisely what we celebrate on Passover. When the Torah recounts the wicked son’s question (Exodus12:26) it records that the Jews responded by bowing down in thanksgiving. What were they thankful for? The news that they would sire wicked descendants?

The Chassidic sage Rabbi Shmuel Bornstein (1856-1926), known as the “Shem MiShmuel,” explains that the very fact that the Torah considers the wicked son to be part of the Jewish People, someone who needs and merits a response, was the reason for the Jews’ joy. When we were merely a family of individuals, each member stood or fell on his own merits. Yishmael was Avraham’s son, and Esav was Yitzchak’s. But neither they nor their descendents merited to become parts of the Jewish People. That people was forged from Yaakov’s family, at the exodus from Egypt.

That now, after the exodus, even a “wicked son” would be considered a full member of the Jewish People indicated to our ancestors that something had radically changed since pre-Egyptian days. The people had become a nation. And that well merited an expression of thanksgiving.

And so the subtle message of Dayeinu may be precisely that: The sheer indispensability of the Exodus – its importance beyond even the magnitude of all the miracles that came to follow.

If so, then for centuries upon centuries, that sublime thought might have subtly accompanied the strains of spirited “Da-Da-yeinu’s,” ever so delicately yet ever so ably entering new generations of Jewish minds and hearts, without their owners necessarily even realizing the message they absorbed.

© Rabbi Avi Shafran

Musing: When Hatred Deserves the Worst Label

The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles recently posted the offering of one Liami Lawrence, in which he celebrates the new Israeli government’s lack of “fat men in their black coats” who “write out blank checks for their rabbis and yeshivas” – yeshivas, he continues, whose students “sit back and pretend to study… and make babies.” He insinuates that charedim in Israel don’t pay taxes, that they “force” women to sit in the back of the bus in charedi neighborhoods and that their behavior can be characterized as “schnorring, lying and cheating.”

Often, and rightly, bemoaned is the use of terms evocative of Klal Yisrael’s worst enemies in personal or political discourse where it has no place. Taking a hard line on defense or the budget should not render anyone open to being called a Cossack or a Nazi.

But then there are cases where, were a word replaced with “Jew,” the yield would be something recognizably Streicherian.

Mr. Lawrence’s eruption qualifies, I think, for that distinction. And the Jewish Journal bears responsibility for spreading the hatred here.

A Good Eye

One thing I was not prepared to find when I scanned the op-ed page of The New York Times this past Friday was reference to the perennial dilemma of what bracha, or blessing, to make on Crispix, the breakfast cereal whose morsels each consist of one side rice and one side corn. (No authoritative decision was offered; two separate blessings are the recommendation I’ve seen in more reliable sources).

That oddity (for the newspaper, that is; the Crispix question has been revisited numerous times in the Shafran home) was mentioned in the context of an article by columnist David Brooks entitled “The Orthodox Surge.”

Despite the nervous-making title – when I think “surge,” hurricanes and armies come to mind – the piece was a welcome respite from the sort of coverage of the Orthodox Jewish community more commonly found in the media. Orthodox-related happenings regarded as news fit to print usually consist of actual or alleged criminal acts committed by individuals in the community, or practices the paper’s readers are likely to find socially illiberal or bizarre. Even reportage of wonderfully positive happenings, like the gathering of 90,000 Jews this past summer at MetLife Stadium to celebrate Talmud-study, are carefully tarnished with negativity.

The Times’ article about the Siyum HaShas was peppered throughout with things like the substantial cost of the mechitza (curtain separating the men and the women present) at the event, and the fact that Orthodox women don’t traditionally study Talmud. Instead of interviewing any of the tens of thousands of such traditional women of all ages present at the event who fully embrace the concept of religious gender roles, the reporter managed to ferret out the rare feminist Talmud-student instead to quote at length. The piece deserved a prize, the “Agenda-Driven Journalism Award.”

Back, though, to Mr. Brooks. As a columnist – not to mention, an uncharacteristically conservative one for the paper – he does not have to toe any liberal line. And so he was free to approach his subject, the growth and values of the Orthodox community, without the usual mud-colored glasses.

Taken by his guide, Rabbi Meir Soloveitchik, to a large Brooklyn supermarket catering to the Orthodox, he found the religious safari enlightening.

He describes being impressed by how Orthodox Jews hew so carefully to their “collective covenant with G-d,” by how, “deep down,” observant Jewish life “is based on a countercultural understanding of how life should work.”

“They go shopping,” he writes, “like the rest of us, but their shopping is minutely governed by an external moral order.” Their religious laws “give structure to everyday life… infuse everyday acts with spiritual significance… build community… regulate desires… making religion an everyday practical reality.”

All in all, a straightforward, accurate depiction of the community and its values. And so, predictably, it stuck uncomfortably in the craw of some, chagrined that Mr. Brooks had dared focus only on beauty and not warts.

And it wasn’t only the usual bloggerei who simmered, but even as accomplished and respectable a person as Jane Eisner, the editor of the Forward. Ms. Eisner complained that the Brooks column hadn’t noted that “ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn, while experiencing an enviable surge in population, is also weighted down by increasing poverty, enhanced by the large families and devotion to pure Torah study that Brooks extols.” And she didn’t miss the opportunity to remind the paper’s readers that scoundrels exist among the Orthodox as elsewhere, heralding accusations of improprieties in the community – and, of course, her paper’s brave dedication to ferreting out and publicizing them.

Graciously acknowledging that, indeed, “there are magnificent aspects to the devout practice of religion,” she made it clear, though, that there are “troubling ones as well,” and that Mr. Brooks did a disservice to his readers by presenting only “one gauzy moment.”

I’m reminded by the Talmud’s teaching that one can gaze upon something or someone with either a “good eye” or a “bad eye,” with benevolence, that is to say, or with something else. It is unfortunate, but some of our fellow Jews seem ill-disposed toward us Orthodox. Part of the reason may be that the image of halacha-committed Jewish life inherently discomfits them, makes them wonder if traditional Judaism’s core belief system may still be relevant, even… Divine. Another part, perhaps, is simple fear, of something else Mr. Brooks notes, that the Orthodox community’s growth is positioning it to be “in a few years… the dominant group in New York Jewry.”

We’re sorry. We’re really not trying to take over, of course, any more than Jews as a people are aiming at world domination, as some anti-Semites contend. We’re just trying to live our lives as we believe G-d wants.

I think there’s a takeaway for us Orthodox Jews from Mr. Brooks’ recent column: Despite the determination of some to portray our community in dark hues, and despite the fact that there will always be individuals in our own midst who will provide them fodder, if the rest of us – the vast majority – endeavor to just live our lives in consonance with what our religious tradition teaches is G-d’s will, at least an objective observer will see the verdant forest for the occasional sickly tree – will see our community for what it actually is.

Dos Yiddishe Mensch

If you’ve noticed a little less dignity, geniality and nobility in the world of late, it may be because we no longer have Reb Yosef Friedenson here with us.

Reb Yosef’s humble bearing, good will and astuteness would have been remarkable in any man. But for a veteran of the Warsaw ghetto and a clutch of concentration camps to have emerged from the cauldron of the Holocaust as so shining a model of calm, forbearance and fortitude is little short of amazing – and something that deeply impressed all who had the privilege of knowing him.

I am among those fortunate souls, and I had the additional honor of working in the same offices as he, at Agudath Israel of America. There were times here and there when he would ask me to do some minor research for him. I tend to overschedule my days and, especially if I’m in a cranky mood, I sometimes feel put upon when asked to do something I hadn’t included on my day’s agenda. But when the asker was Reb Yosef, no matter how grumpy I might have been a moment before, the very sound of his voice, which transmitted his modesty and eidelkeit (sorry, there’s no English word that can do the job), melted any cantankerousness I might have been nursing. I was happy and honored to help him in any way I could. Because of the person he was.

He was known as “Mr. Friedenson” but in fact was a wiser man and more of a rabbi by far than most who coddle that title. He was not into titles but into work, on behalf of the Jewish people.

For more than a half-century – beginning in the Displaced Persons camps after the war’s end – Reb Yosef edited a Yiddish publication, which became the monthly “Dos Yiddishe Vort” – “The Yiddish [or Jewish] Word” – produced under Agudath Israel’s auspices. Even as the periodical’s readership dwindled with the loss of Holocaust survivors over the years, he forged ahead and, until virtually the last day of his life, worked hard to produce the glossy monthly that regularly offered Orthodox commentary on current events, historical articles and rare photographs from the pre-Holocaust Jewish era and the Holocaust itself. He approached his editing duties carefully and professionally, in the beginning of the venture recruiting top-notch writers and doing his own top-notch writing. He once said about his father, Eliezer Gershon Friedenson, who edited the pre-war Agudath Israel newspaper in Europe, that he was “bristling with energy and ideas.” It was an apt description of himself.

During his final years, Reb Yosef did much of the writing for Dos Yiddishe Vort himself, often under pseudonyms that were transparent to most everyone who read the publication. (No one cared; his own recollections and writings were deeply appreciated by readers.) And the issues increasingly focused on rabbinical figures who perished during the Holocaust, and on pre-war Jewish communities. Special editions were devoted to the Jews of Lodz or Lublin, to the Gerer rebbe or the Chazon Ish. And throughout, there were personal recollections of the war years and accounts of spiritual heroism during that terrible time.

That, in fact, was Reb Yosef’s overriding life-mandate: to connect new American generations with the world of Jewish Eastern Europe. He didn’t harp on Nazism or anti-Semitism. That there are always people who hate Jews was, to him, just an unfortunate given. It didn’t merit any particular examination.

What did, though, was the decimation itself of European Jewry and the horrifying toll taken by the upheaval of the Jewish people on the Jewish dedication to Torah. When he would reference the Germans it was usually to note their perceptive realization that Torah is the lifeblood of the Jewish nation. They tried to drain that figurative lifeblood along with their pouring of so much actual Jewish blood. But – and this was what yielded Reb Yosef’s victory smile – they failed. He saw the ultimate revenge on the Nazis and their henchmen in the reestablishment and thriving of observant Jewish life, yeshivos and Bais Yaakovs on these shores and others.

He would sometimes call attention to a line from a prayer said on Mondays and Thursdays, the long version of Tachanun. “We [Jews] are like sheep led to slaughter,” he would quote, and know well how true that has been over the course of history. But, Reb Yosef would continue, the operative words, the secret to Jewish survival and Jewish identity, lie in the supplication’s subsequent phrase: “And despite all that, we have never forgotten Your name.”

Reb Yosef never forgot G-d’s name, not in the ghettos, not in the camps, not in the office where he toiled for decades to remind others of the Jewish world that was, and that can be again.

And we, for our part, will never forget either him or his message.

Lies, Statistics and News Reports

It’s rare for light to be cast on the origins of a rumor. But a recent revelation about a charge made against Chuck Hagel before his confirmation as Secretary of Defense does that – and might provide us all some illumination too.

(Contrary to what some have surmised, I didn’t and don’t feel there is enough hard information about the now confirmed Defense Secretary on which to make a judgment of his attitude toward Israel. As attacks mounted on nominee Hagel, though, I suggested that Jews should think twice and thrice before attacking a public figure for animus to the Jewish state on the basis of pickings as slim as those gathered to criticize him.

Several people, including some pseudonymic letter-writers to a magazine that published my article, took my suggestion that bandwagons are best inspected before being leaped onto as support of Mr. Hagel. I explicitly wrote, however, that he might well not make a good Defense Secretary, and that I can’t claim to know one way or the other. All that I pointed out was that, despite a maladroit phrase Mr. Hagel once used – for which he apologized – and unsubstantiated claims of a similar sin, there was no actual evidence for the charge made by some that the man is “anti-Israel” or “anti-Semitic.” I pointed out, too, that a Secretary of Defense does not make U.S. foreign policy, and that it behooves us American Jews, in a world containing all too many all too real enemies of Jews, to not imagine, or inadvertently create, new ones.)

An edifying postscript to the Hagel hubbub emerged this week. In the midst of all the sturm und drang over the nomination, a conservative website (a “news source,” as it happens, that the angry letters to the editor suggested I consult for my education) reported suspicions that Mr. Hagel had received foreign funding from a group called “Friends of Hamas.” The story, of course, spread across the blogosphere with the speed of a brazen lie, which is precisely what it was. There is no such group.

And this week, the tale of how the charge came about was told – by the fellow who originated it, albeit unwittingly.

New York Daily News reporter Dan Friedman explained how, digging for a story, he had asked a Republican aide on Capitol Hill if Mr. Hagel’s Senate critics knew of any controversial groups that he may have addressed. Had the nominee perhaps “given a speech to, say, the ‘Junior League of Hezbollah’… or the ‘Friends of Hamas’?” the journalist jocularly queried.

Not realizing that politicians and their aides can be humor-impaired, Mr. Friedman compounded his little pre-Purim joke with a follow-up e-mail to the aide, asking if anything had turned up about that “$25K speaking fee from Friends of Hamas?”

Before Mr. Friedman could say mishenichnas Adar, the website had its scoop.

“Senate sources told Breitbart News exclusively,” the report, by one Ben Shapiro, informed its readers, “that they have been informed one of the reasons that President Barack Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, has not turned over requested documents on his sources of foreign funding is that one of the names listed is a group purportedly called ‘Friends of Hamas.’”

And so, other websites immediately ran with the fiction. For good measure, Mr. Shapiro tweeted the link to his nearly 40,000 Twitter followers. Countless inboxes welcomed the “news”; countless heads nodded knowingly.

Whether or not Mr. Hagel turns out to be a happy surprise or great disappointment, one thing is undeniable: Anyone who values truth – the “signature” of the Divine, in the Talmud’s description – must make painstaking efforts to be objective, and eschew the siren-call (to mangle a metaphor) of the bandwagon.

Lies, overt and subtle, large and small, are, unfortunately, the fertilizer (in both senses of the word) of politics today. They are regularly foisted upon us all from every political corner and by both major parties’ “activists.” We are being gently misled and manipulated whether our source of information is right-wing talk radio or NPR, Rush Limbaugh or Diane Rehm. True objectivity and fair-minded discussion are as rare as Yangtze River dolphins.

And so, if we really insist on having opinions about political matters, we do well to absorb different perspectives, to weigh them fairly and to realize, constantly and deeply, that not everything portrayed as obvious or fact is necessarily either.

Abusive Journalism

A number of years ago, a neighbor of mine, a business professional, shared a secret and a request. He told me that he had been found guilty of a crime – a dishonest financial reporting to the federal government – and was awaiting sentencing. He fully admitted that he had acted wrongly and offered no excuse for what he did. My neighbor is a kind, reasonable, family-oriented and charitable person. I drew on what thespian talents I had cultivated many decades earlier in high school, and feigned not being shocked.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” was all I could say. Then came the request. “Could you write the judge a character reference letter?” he asked.

“Of course,” I answered, without hesitation. My neighbor’s punishment would have great impact on his future, his family and his friends. Here was a good man who did a bad thing. The judge knew about the bad thing; the least I could do was describe the good man.

And so I did, the next day. I’ll never know whether my letter, which acknowledged the crime and sought only to provide an honest assessment of my neighbor as a person, had any effect. He was sentenced to a year in prison and served his sentence.

What brought that memory to mind was the most recent example of “creative” reportage in a Jewish newspaper. “Orthodox Rabbi Defends Jewish Psychiatrist Convicted in… Assaults” read the headline of a report in the Forward on February 8.

Now what kind of stupid fellow, I thought, would defend the abusive actions of a doctor? When I saw the name of the rabbi, however, I realized that the headline had itself probably been abusive, of the truth.

Rabbi Yisroel Miller is well-known as a caring, sensitive, accomplished and respected leader of a congregation in the Western Canadian city of Calgary. He previously served a congregation in Pittsburgh and has been honored with rabbinic leadership awards by the Orthodox Union and the National Society for Hebrew Day Schools; he received a special award from the United Jewish Federation too, for his work to build bridges among diverse groups of Jews. He has authored four well-regarded books of essays on Jewish thought.

Ah, I thought, and now he’s defending the indefensible? No way.

No way, indeed.

Upon closer inspection, the Forward piece exposed itself as an example of something less than responsible journalism. Oh, pshaw, let’s be straightforward: it was make-believe muckraking.

What Rabbi Miller did, it seemed, was just what I did for my neighbor – and what innumerable rabbis, priests and ministers (not to mention friends, relatives and others) have done out of a sense of mercy and propriety: ask a sentencing judge to take their impressions and information into account when deciding the punishment for someone guilty of a crime.

And yet the article was not only headlined to make it seem as if Rabbi Miller had defended the criminal – which he hadn’t done; his letter is explicit and clear about that – but led readers to imagine that he had minimized the crime. The rabbi is introduced in a sentence recounting how the defense attorney characterized his client’s crimes as “minor offenses” and how he “then proceeded to read aloud from a letter from… Rabbi Yisroel Miller…[of] Calgary’s Orthodox synagogue.”

Perhaps, I thought, the article’s writer had just somehow neglected to quote whatever part of Rabbi Miller’s letter “defended” the accused. I searched in vain. The Forward report included details about the 74-year-old defendant’s conviction, and angry comments about him from various people. But the only portions of the letter quoted were the rabbi’s plea to the judge for leniency in sentencing the defendant, including his experience of the man as having always possessed a “humble manner,” the observation that “The bad does not erase the good” and the fear that “a prison term would be a death sentence” for the doctor (who was reported to be frail and in the early stages of dementia).

So I contacted Rabbi Miller directly, and asked to see the letter myself. He readily sent it to me and it was, as I had expected, nothing more than a plea for leniency. In it, he explicitly declares himself unqualified to opine about the defendant’s guilt or innocence and, equally explicitly, acknowledges the “darkness of the human soul” to which even otherwise good people can succumb. At no point in the letter does Rabbi Miller try to minimize the seriousness of the charge against the defendant; at no point does he in any way “defend” him.

I asked the rabbi how he feels about being maligned by a national newspaper. “I myself don’t blame the Forward too much,” he responded, kind soul that he is. “After all, it’s their parnassa [livelihood].”

Iron and Irony

A typical offering included a close-up of the deformed face of a Jewish man above the legend “The Scum of Humanity: This Jew says that he is a member of God’s chosen people.” Another displayed a cartoon of a vampire bat with a grotesquely exaggerated nose and a Jewish star on its chest. In yet another, a Jewish butcher was depicted snidely dropping a rat into his meat grinder and, elsewhere in the issue, the punctured necks of handsome German youths were shown bleeding into a bowl held by a Jew more gargoyle than human. At its peak in 1938, print runs of Hitler henchman Julius Streicher’s vile tabloid Der Sturmer ran as high as 2,000,000.

“All our struggles are in vain,” Streicher told a Nazi student organization in 1935, “if the battle against the Jews is not fought to the finish. It is not enough to get the Jews out of Germany. No, they must be destroyed throughout the entire world so that humanity will be free of them.”

We approach the Jewish holiday focused on the blessedly ill-fated plans of a Jew-hater of old, the Amalekite whose name we will greet with raucous noise each time it’s read from Megillas Esther on Purim. Even a passing familiarity with the Purim story is sufficient to know that its villain’s downfall is saturated with what seem to be chance ironies; Haman turns up at the wrong place at the wrong time, and all that he so carefully plans eventually comes to backfire on him in an almost comical way – a theme Megillas Esther characterizes with the words v’nahafoch hu, “ and it was turned upside down!”

Such “chance” happenings are the hallmark of the defeat of Amalek, the would-be nemesis of the Jewish People – a fact reflected in the “casting of lots” from which “Purim” takes its name. Chance, Esther teaches us, is an illusion; G-d is in charge. Amalek may fight with iron, but he is defeated with… irony.

As was Julius Streicher. In the days after Germany’s final defeat, an American major, Henry Plitt, received a tip about a high-ranking Nazi living in an Austrian town. He accosted a short, bearded artist, who he thought might be SS Chief Heinrich Himmler, and asked him his name.

“Joseph Sailer,” came the reply from the man, who was painting a canvas on an easel.

Plitt later recounted: “I don’t know why I said [it, but] I said, ‘And what about Julius Streicher?’”

“Ya, der bin ich,” the man with the paintbrush responded. “Yes, that is me.”

When Major Plitt brought his serendipitous catch to Berchtesgaden, he later recounted, a reporter told him that he had “killed the greatest story of the war.” When he asked how, the reporter responded “Can you imagine if a guy named Cohen or Goldberg or Levy had captured this arch-anti-Semite, what a great story it would be?”

Major Plitt recalled telling the reporter “I’m Jewish” and how “that’s when the microphones came into my face and the cameras started clicking.”

Another happy irony in Streicher’s life involved the fate of his estate. As reported in Stars and Stripes in late 1945, his considerable possessions were converted to cash and used to create an agricultural training school for Jews intending to settle in Palestine. Just as Haman’s riches, as recorded in Megillas Esther, were bestowed upon his nemesis Mordechai.

There is a good deal more of interest in the life of Julius Streicher to associate him with Jewish traditions about Amalek. But one of the most shocking narratives about him concerns his death. Streicher was of one of the Nazis tried, convicted, and hanged at Nuremberg in 1946.

During the trial, Streicher remained true to ugly form. When the prosecution showed a film of the concentration camps, a spotlight was left on the defendants’ box for security reasons. Few of the defendants could bear to watch the film for long. Goering nervously wiped his sweaty palms. Schacht turned away; Ribbentrop buried his face in his hands. Keitel wiped his reddened eyes with a handkerchief. Only Streicher leaned forward throughout, looking anxiously at the film and excitedly nodding his head.

Although no proof was found that Streicher had ever killed a Jew by his own hand, the tribunal decided that his clear-cut incitement of others to the task constituted a war crime; and so he was sentenced, along with ten other defendants, to hang.

And hang he did. But not before taking the opportunity to share a few final words with the journalists present at the gallows. Just before the trap sprang open, he blurted out: “Purim Feast 1946!” – an odd thing to say in any event, but especially on an October morning.

The “Amalek-irony” of the Nuremberg executions doesn’t end there, either. The Book of Esther recounts how Haman’s ten sons were hanged in Shushan. An eleventh child, a daughter, committed suicide earlier, according to an account in the Talmud. At Nuremberg, while eleven men were condemned to execution by hanging, only ten were actually hanged. The eleventh, the foppish Goering, died in his cell hours before the execution; he ingested a cyanide capsule he had hidden on his person.

Even more striking is something reportedly noted by, among others, the late Belzer Rebbe, the Kedushas Aharon. In the Megilla, the names of Haman’s sons are written in two columns, an unusual configuration. Odder still, three letters in the list are written very small, and one very large. The large letter is the Hebrew character corresponding to the number six; the small letters yield the number 707. If the large letter is taken to refer to the millennium and 707 to the year in the millennium, something striking emerges. According to Jewish reckoning, the present year is 5773. The year 5707 – the 707^th year in the sixth millennium – was the year we know as 1946, when ten sworn enemies of the Jewish people were hanged in Nuremberg, like ten others in Shushan more than two thousand years earlier.

What’s more, the Megilla inexplicably refers to the hanging of Haman’s sons in the future tense, as if to presage some hanging… yet to happen.

The Holocaust was the tip of an unimaginable iceberg of evil, stretching far and deep into the past. The evil, of course, persists today. But a time will come when Divine irony will end it forever.

An End to the Occupation

Like the repeatedly pummeled victim of depraved bullies who decides it might just be best to stay away from the schoolyard during recess, Israel recently opted to not show up to be judged by the United Nations Human Rights Council, a body with venerated members like Congo, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Uganda, Malaysia and Qatar.

The UN body and a number of individual countries, including the United States, pleaded with Israel to not be the first country to refuse to appear for an HRC “Universal Periodic Review.” But the Israeli government, in its chutzpah, decided to just say no to presenting itself for assault yet again by a group that has demonstrated a deep and troubling fixation on one political dispute in a world in which, elsewhere, authorities routinely amputate body parts, blithely murder citizens, incarcerate innocent people without trial and look the other way as human beings are enslaved and sold like sides of beef.

The New York Times, predictably, did its own huffing, munificently conceding that the HRC is “not without faults” but asserting all the same that the Middle East’s only stable and free democracy was showing “an unwillingness to undergo the same scrutiny as all other countries” and depriving itself “of an opportunity to defend against abuse charges” – as if anything Israel might possibly say in its defense could magically turn deranged, hateful people into reasonable ones.

An HRC panel’s findings, just released, were telling. The panel, made up of representatives of France, Pakistan and Botswana, contended that the establishment of Jewish settlements in “occupied” disputed territories violated the Geneva Conventions and constitutes a war crime.

“In other news,” as they say, the Washington Post, to its credit, issued a correction to a news story it ran last month that identified the Western Wall as “Judaism’s holiest site.” After being cajoled by the vigilant folks at the watchdog group CAMERA, the paper conceded that the wall, rather, is “the holiest place Jews can pray” but that “Judaism’s holiest place is the Temple Mount.”

The Post’s error is a common one. The BBC has made the same mistake, as have a number of other news organizations. It’s an error worth parsing.

Obviously, the Muslim world has its own narrative, but the history accepted for centuries before the founder of Islam’s great-grandfather was born has it that the Temple Mount, as its name testifies, was the site of Judaism’s central holy structure, first built by King Solomon a millennium before the advent even of Christianity. Hope for the restoration of the Temple as a place of Jewish worship has been a major element of Jewish prayer for the nearly 2000 years since the Second Temple was destroyed by the ancient Romans.

When Israel captured Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount, from Jordan in 1967, Jews and others flocked to the Western Wall; copious tears were shed and prayers prayed, as they still are there to this day. But Israel made clear that the Temple Mount itself would remain under the jurisdiction of a waqf, or Islamic authority.

It remains under that waqf’s authority to this day, and while some fringe nationalistic groups demand that Israel assert its dominance over the Temple site, Israel ensures that no such group can take any step to advance its cause. And no respected Jewish religious leader, whether haredi or national-religious, advocates for any imposed change to that status quo.

But every believing Jew knows that, through no military or political effort at all, one day Judaism’s holiest site will no longer host either a mosque, as it does today, or a church, as it did at other points in post-Jewish-Temple history, but a Divinely constructed Third Temple. The one we pray for thrice daily: “And may our eyes see Your return to Zion in mercy” and which will bypass – and undoubtedly come as a surprise to – the United Nations.

In the meantime, however, Jews are enjoined to accept the facts that the Messiah hasn’t yet arrived and that – as if it weren’t obvious – we live in a world often inhospitable to us. We are also enjoined to realize that, in order to merit the Messiah’s arrival, we must turn inward and become the best Jews we can be, kind, charitable and observant – sincerely dedicated, in other words, to the Torah’s laws and teachings. We would also do well, though, to remind at least ourselves, although the thought might confound the Human Rights Commission, that if any piece of Middle East real estate ever deserved the epithet “occupied,” it’s the one just beyond the Western Wall.