Abrabanel: Musings on the Jewish condition

We’re on vacation, so things are coming slower this past ten days or so. We’ll be back in force after Rosh Hashanah. In the meantime, things you really shouldn’t miss if you read blogs like this one:

• Bill Clinton explains multiple times that he won’t campaign on the Jewish High Holidays. Yeah, we’re not sure what this means either.
• Yossi Melman of Ha’aretz argues that Russia’s anger at the West is bringing about the collapse of the sanctions regime against Iran. “Russia is strengthening the Iranian regime and signaling to it that the basic, though superficial, international consensus against it has ceased to exist.” Yossi Melman is a clever old hand in this business. His say-so is more significant than some New York Times foreign affairs columnist.
• A great review of an excellent new book on Maimonides.
• Oh, and the universe is, as always, more complicated than we once believed. Scientists have found an unexplained “drift” or “flow” of immense galactic clusters in a single direction, as opposed to motion in all directions as space itself expands. As The Daily Galaxy explains, “A black hole can’t explain the observations – objects would accelerate into the hole, while the NASA scientists see constant motion over a vast expanse of a billion light-years. You have no idea how big that is. This is giant on a scale where it’s not just that we can’t see what’s doing it; it’s that the entire makeup of the universe as we understand it can’t be right if this is happening.”

Representative Tom Tancredo last week presented HR 6975 to the House floor, a bill “To require aliens to attest that they will not advocate installing a Sharia law system in the United States as a condition for admission, and for other purposes.”

We understand the fear of sharia law, particularly in the context of the culture war in Europe over Muslim immigration, but we don’t understand the purpose of the bill.

If it’s about preventing any sharia-based lifestyles from taking place in America, it will fail. Those who wish to live through sharia can do so privately, through arbitration courts similar to the batey din that decide religious personal status issues for Jews. And why shouldn’t they?

If it’s about preventing a coup that replaces the Constitution with the Quran, we have to wonder if Tancredo, an obsessive campaigner on immigration issues, really believes this is a threat.

Hat tip: reason magazine.

The archaeological site that may be the Jewish Khazar capital Itil. AP offers pictures:

Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton both announced today that, in fact, they oppose Iran’s evil intentions vis-a-vis Israel. The silly stunt Hillary pulled of cancelling her appearance at today’s anti-Ahmadinejad rally in New York because Sarah Palin had been invited too – and the Jewish planners’ subsequent disinvite to all politicians, including Palin – was disheartening to those of us who genuinely believe the regime in Teheran is dangerous.

What is to prevent the Iranians from concluding that American politicians’ bold rhetoric is subservient to – so perhaps only meant for? – local consumption. Is Iran an American politician’s tool to court Jewish voters, or a matter of genuine concern and strategy?

From NBC’s FirstRead:

No Change To The Map: Although we saw the needle move in Obama’s direction after last week’s events — including McCain’s own stumbles — the newest NBC electoral map this week is essentially unchanged. Obama holds a slight 233-227 lead over McCain. Our only change was moving New Jersey from Likely Obama to Lean Obama after various polls showed him with a single-digit lead there.

According to NBC, the states stack up as follows:

Likely Obama: CA, CT, DE, DC, HI, IL, ME, MD, MA, NJ, NY, RI, VT (157 electoral votes)
Lean Obama: IA, MN, NJ, NM OR, PA, WA (76 votes)
Toss-up: CO, MI, NV, NH, OH, VA, WI (78 votes)
Lean McCain: FL, IN, MO, MT, NC (67 votes)
Likely McCain: AL, AK, AZ, AR, GA, ID, KS, KY, LA, MS, NE, ND, OK, SC, SD, TN, TX, UT, WV, WY (160 votes)

For Rosh Hashanah, a beautiful Orthodox call to generosity and humility:

God reminds us that the benchmarks of our being judged is made by ourselves.

The way we judge others determines the bar by which we shall be judged. By right, only God judges alone. Ruth 1:1 reminds us that the Messiah’s line continued “during the judging of the judges.” When human judges ignore the rules when judging those who are deemed to be not important, those judges become a nullity, and become impotent. My teacher, Rabbi Faur, teaches that Jewish courts that ignore Torah law are to be ignored. It is the din of the Torah and the policy of the judge that must be applied…

How are to judge others? Gently, generously, and with humanity. By judging others with kindness, we build the bar by which we are judged. By acting kindly toward others, we walk humbly before God.

This is particularly interesting:

Professor Menachem Kellner, an Orthodox scholar of the Medieval Jewish mind at Haifa University, has argued that a non-observant Jew who believes correctly regarding God and who is meticulous regarding ethics, is for Maimonides, the master of masora, tradition, a living example of the Israelite ideal. In other words, the more we judge others, the more we condemn ourselves.

This from the World Jewish Congress:

The German government will release a list of 600,000 Jews who lived in the country during the Nazi period. The material will be given to the archives at Yad Vashem in Israel, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, the Jewish Claims Conference and the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany, to aid in genealogical searches. More than half of the Jews who lived in Germany when the Nazis assumed power in 1933 had emigrated by 1939, but many were trapped later in the countries they thought were safe havens. Following World War II, some 20,000 Jews were living in the country, but few of them were of German origin. Most were Eastern European Holocaust survivors who had ended up in German displaced persons camps in 1945. Privacy laws prevent the full release of the list to the public as yet.

Germany’s federal archive prepared the list using deportation records, and city and federal archives. Funding for the project, which reportedly cost US$ 2.4 million, was provided by the ‘Remembrance, Responsibility and Future’ Foundation, which was established with money from the German government and industry as a form of atonement for the use of slave labor during the Nazi era. Gunter Saathoff, executive chairman of the foundation, said that the list would help document the suffering of Jews in Germany.

Allegedly, Iran’s violent, messianic regime is a threat to the West, its terror organizations a threat to Jewish communities worldwide. According to every Jewish organization that fund-raises, this is an existential threat.

So why, one wonders, is the upcoming anti-Ahmadinejad rally in New York drawing so much partisan bickering? First the Conference of Presidents invites Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton – assuming, apparently, that this is the bipartisan thing to do. Then Hillary cancels on them, assuming that appearing together before the election could seem to be legitimizing the candidacy of Palin. Then the National Jewish Democratic Council calls on Jewish groups to cancel the appearance of Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee.

Maybe this isn’t so crazy… six weeks before an election everything else is meaningless. But let’s not be fooled next time Jewish activists talk about the importance of the Iranian threat. When something real is at stake – for political Jews, elections are more important than fundraising – Iran becomes just one card in a larger deck.

Take, for example, this Orwellian logic from the NJDC:

Monday’s protest against Ahmadinejad is too important to be tainted by partisanship. Unfortunately, the campaign of Senator John McCain is much more interested in scoring political points than insuring there is bipartisan solidarity around the anti- Ahmadinejad efforts. Therefore, we call upon the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations to withdraw the invitation to Governor Sarah Palin and we applaud Senator Hillary Clinton’s decision to not attend the rally after the attendance of Palin was announced.

So: because the Ahmadinejad rally is too important for partisanship, we applaud Hillary for withdrawing and reject the conference organizer’s decision to invite, um, the Republican.

An interesting YNet poll of Israelis crowned Kadima leadership hopeful Meir Sheetrit “as closest to tradition and Judaism.” Second in line was Shaul Mofaz, then Tzipi Livni and finally Avi Dichter.

The order has nothing to do with the popularity of the candidates. Sheetrit is unpopular in Kadima, with the race to replace outgoing PM Olmert essentially tied between Livni and Mofaz (with a slight lead for Livni).

But while the Sheetrit’s commanding lead (58%, compared to Mofaz’s 24%) is unconnected to his likelihood to win tomorrow’s Kadima primary, it does correspond to his Sephardi image. Sheetrit’s Moroccan accent is the strongest Eastern accent among the four, followed by Mofaz’s slight Persian lilting “r.” The Ashkenazic Livni and Dichter, in contrast, speak a more boring unaccented Hebrew.

There is little anti-Sephardic prejudice left in Israeli politics, but there are still many stereotypes associated with one’s ethnic heritage. Moroccans are hot-heads, Americans are wealthy fools, Germans are efficient, Russians are heavy drinkers. Not all the stereotypes are bad. One of the most pervasive regarding Sephardi Jews is related to their connection to Jewish tradition, which is considered to be especially strong compared to the European secularism of Ashkenazim. This seems to be a strong view this election season.

We just came across the latest Islam Online article on Israel’s haredi modesty patrols. The opening is jarring, if misspelled:

OCCUUPIED JERUSALEM — Wearing black coats and wide-brimmed hats, Israel’s ultra-orthodox vigilantes roam the streets, harass women dressed in “immoral” clothing and attack music shops.

“I don’t know why I was treated this way. What has my life got to do with those guys,” M., who just two weeks ago became the latest victim of the Jewish morality squads, told Agence France Presse (AFP) on Monday, September 15.

The 28-year-old woman, who refused to tell her name for fear of reprisal, was brutally gagged and beaten at the hands of two members of a Jewish modesty patrol.

“They beat me up, tied me up and threatened to kill me,” M. said, holding back her tears.

Compare this to an article last week in Abu Dhabi’s The National newspaper.

This seems strange. The modesty patrols, like the settler vigilantes, have grown into a problem, but they are being dealt with by law-enforcement agencies. Why would Abu Dhabi’s media focus on something so remote to their experience?

Obviously, because it deflects from the Muslim world’s own attitudes toward its women, evidenced in the unbelievable restrictions Saudi women face just to leave their house, and in the horrific punishments regularly meted out by Arab governmental and tribal justice to, for example, homosexuals and women accused of adultery.

In the end, the Muslim world’s solution to the bad press it gets for the status of its women is to compare themselves favorably to Israel’s most extreme criminals. This doesn’t seem like a winning strategy.