Lech Lecha — Gnot Your Daddy

Lech Lecha isn’t just the start of Jewish history; it’s the moment human history fractures.  When God tells Avraham, “Go forth from your land, your birthplace, and your father’s house,” He creates not merely a nation but a new kind of being. From that command onward, Israel is destined to live the paradox of בָּדָד יִשְׁכֹּן וּבַגּוֹיִם לֹא יִתְחַשָּׁב — “a people that dwells alone, not reckoned among the nations.”  That verse describes more than isolation; it names the ontology of Jewish existence. The Jewish story refuses to dissolve into anyone else’s, and that defiance still drives the world crazy.

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The Ontology That Offends

Both ideological poles stumble on the same rock.

The hard right resents a people that insists on equality without conversion — Jews who say, “We’ll stand beside you, not beneath you.” Hence the fury of Christian nationalists from Nick Fuentes to Tucker Carlson, who see Zionism as arrogance rather than survival.

The hard left, meanwhile, despises a people that cannot melt into intersectional universalism. Jewish particularism — a nation defined by covenant and boundary — is a fatal contradiction in a creed that preaches salvation through sameness.

Both sides rage at the same thing: the refusal to be absorbed. The right wants the Jew to kneel; the left wants the Jew to melt. Neither can abide a people who are apart without being against.

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Two Temptations: Shevna and Zimri

Every generation breeds its Shevnas and Zimris.

Shevna, Isaiah’s court scholar, was “great in Torah” yet drunk on prestige. He led a “peace camp” urging surrender to Assyria while carving his own tomb like a Pharaoh. His sin wasn’t ignorance but vanity — intellect unmoored from covenant. Modern heirs preach that if Jews only apologize more, modernize more, soften more, the world will finally love them.

Zimri, in Parashat Balak, made rebellion into spectacle. Dragging a Midianite princess before Moshe, he tried to turn desecration into doctrine — sin as statement. Today’s versions wield body, identity, and protest as sacraments of self.

Shevna’s is the power-paganism of intellect; Zimri’s, of flesh. One worships influence, the other impulse. Both mistake self-expression for transcendence — and both end up consumed by the very fires they light.

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Avraham’s Bounded Chesed

Avraham, by contrast, practiced chesed — kindness with borders. He prayed for Sodom but didn’t move there; he rescued Lot but refused the king of Sodom’s spoils. His compassion was fierce but disciplined.

The Talmud imagines him at the gates of Gehinnom, rescuing all but those who “cast off the covenant.” That unsettling image captures Judaism’s moral realism: love that sanctifies, not love that erases.

Our culture confuses empathy with endorsement, compassion with collapse. Avraham’s mercy says otherwise: without moral geometry, kindness curdles into cruelty.

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The Horseshoe

Look at the political map and you’ll see the ends curving toward each other like a horseshoe. The far right and the far left, supposedly enemies, are united by their fury at Jewish distinctness.

The right dreams of a Christianized order; the left, of borderless utopia. Each demands redemption through erasure. And at the gap where the ends should meet stands Israel — the unerasable reminder that moral limits exist.

Judaism is the world’s cosmic contraceptive. It prevents humanity from reproducing its idolatries unchecked. Every empire that seeks to flatten difference — Rome, Moscow, Silicon Valley — eventually collides with the Jewish fact: there is one God, but many nations; one morality, not one monoculture.

Antisemitism is never really about Jews. It’s rebellion against accountability — the hatred of limit itself.

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Lech Lecha — Still Walking

Lech Lecha remains the command to walk away — from flattery, from fashion, from the ideologies that promise acceptance at the price of integrity. To “go to yourself” means to find the self measured by covenant, not by crowd.

Avraham is av hamon goyim — father of many nations — because he first learned to be no one’s son but God’s. The nations still want his ethics without his ontology, his compassion without his covenant. But the source cannot be severed from the spring.

So the command still echoes:

Walk away from the idols of the age.

Walk toward the promise that being different is the highest form of solidarity.

“הֶן עָם לְבָדָד יִשְׁכֹּן וּבַגּוֹיִם לֹא יִתְחַשָּׁב.”

A people that dwells alone, not reckoned among the nations.

Not lonely. Just eternal.

Bereishis: We WERE Here First

The Torah famously opens not with the first mitzvah given to Israel but with a cosmic declaration:

“כֹּחַ מַעֲשָׂיו הִגִּיד לְעַמּוֹ, לָתֵת לָהֶם נַחֲלַת גּוֹיִם” (Psalms 111:6)

“He declared the power of His works to His people, to give them the inheritance of nations.”

Rashi famously explains on Genesis 1:1 that the Torah begins with this declaration so that if the nations accuse Israel of being “thieves” for taking the land of Canaan, the response is clear: the land belongs to God, who created it and gave it to whom He pleased. At one point He gave it to the Canaanites; then He took it from them and gave it to Israel. Crucially, this answer is not aimed at the nations of the world but at Israel itself — “koach ma’asav higid le’amo.” 

The point is to prevent moral self-doubt.

This becomes more pointed later in the text. On Genesis 12:6, Rashi comments:

“והכנעני אז בארץ — היה הולך וכובש את ארץ ישראל מזרעו של שם.”

“And the Canaanite was then in the land — he was in the process of conquering the Land of Israel from the descendants of Shem.”

Here the moral and historical frame is flipped on its head: the Canaanites are not the natives; they are the occupiers. The divine promise to Abraham is not conquest ex nihilo but restoration: the return of ancestral territory to its rightful heirs.

A number of modern rabbinic thinkers have stressed that Rashi’s opening comment is directed inward. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, Joseph B. Soloveitchik, and Shlomo Goren all emphasized that the pasuk is not hasbara for the United Nations. It is a theological anchor meant to prevent Jews from apologizing for possessing their own land.

Rashi on Genesis 12:6 adds a second layer. By noting that the Canaanite was already in the act of conquering the land from Shem’s descendants, the Torah presents Israel’s arrival centuries later not as an imperial act but as a rectification of a previous usurpation. This is more than a narrative flourish. It is a fundamental reframing of moral legitimacy: the Jews are not the conquerors but the heirs returning home.

This reading has had a long afterlife. In the modern period, three broad streams — religious Zionist, academic, and secular nationalist — all converged on this verse, each in its own register.

Religious Zionist thinkers such as Goren, Tzvi Yehuda Kook, Shlomo Aviner, and Yoel Bin-Nun have repeatedly cited Rashi on Genesis 12:6 to underline the moral asymmetry of the Jewish return. Aviner even borrowed halakhic language, likening Israel’s modern return to the Land to hashavat aveidah — the mitzvah of returning lost property. “This is not conquest,” he said, “but returning what was stolen from us.”

Academic biblical scholars — notably Yehezkel Kaufmann, Yair Zakovitch, Moshe Weinfeld, Israel Finkelstein, and Shmuel Ahituv — interpret the phrase “והכנעני אז בארץ” as a deliberate ideological marker. It frames the Canaanites as latecomers, not natives, and casts Israel’s conquest as the rectification of an earlier wrong. Even from a strictly historical-critical perspective, the verse is an anti-occupier polemic embedded in the biblical text.

Early secular Zionist leaders embraced this logic as well. David Ben-Gurion explicitly cited Genesis 12:6 in speeches from the 1930s through the early years of statehood: “We are not conquerors. We are returning to our ancient homeland. Others conquered it after us, but it was never truly theirs.” Berl Katznelson and A. D. Gordon likewise used “return” and “restoration” language rather than “conquest.” Ze’ev Jabotinsky, from the opposite end of the political spectrum, said essentially the same thing: “This land is ours — not because we conquered it, but because it was ours and was taken from us.”

For roughly the first half of the 20th century, this restorationist frame was a shared national narrative that transcended religious-secular divides.

By the late 20th century, however, this framing had largely disappeared from mainstream Israeli discourse. Historians and legal scholars have identified several reasons:

Secularization of political language: Post-1948 leaders like Moshe Sharett preferred legalistic and civic nationalism to biblical language. The restoration claim, associated with Genesis and covenant, was seen as too religious and “unmodern.”

Temporal narrowing: After 1948 and especially after 1967, the world framed the conflict around contemporary events — wars, armistice lines, occupation — not 3,000-year-old claims. Israel responded within that narrowed frame, letting the ancient narrative fade from view.

Legal pragmatism: In diplomatic and legal forums, appeals to Bronze Age ownership have no standing. Israeli legal teams emphasized Mandate history, defensive war, and sovereignty — pragmatic arguments that sidelined theological or historical rhetoric.

Ideological polarization: After 1967, biblical language became coded as belonging to the Religious Zionist right (e.g., Tzvi Yehuda Kook, Gush Emunim). Secular centrists recoiled from using language that now felt sectarian, even though the same verses had been invoked by Ben-Gurion a generation earlier.

The result was a kind of rhetorical amnesia: what had once been a powerful shared national narrative — “you were never the original owners” — was no longer part of the mainstream conversation. Internationally, the debate flattened into symmetrical claims: “ours” versus “ours,” as though both peoples stood on identical moral footing.

Here lies the irony. Moshe Sharett and the early diplomatic establishment deliberately avoided biblical language out of a desire to sound pragmatic and modern. But in doing so, they abandoned the single most powerful asymmetric claim available: that Jewish presence in the land is not merely a competing claim but a prior claim, rooted in both sacred text and national memory.

Had they followed the logic of the first Rashi — “Koach ma’asav higid le’amo” — they might have realized that this was never primarily a foreign-policy argument. It was a narrative for themselves: a way of framing their own return without apology or embarrassment. A people that stops telling its own story leaves the stage for others to tell it for them.

Two Rashis — one on Genesis 1:1 and one on 12:6 — contain a remarkably sophisticated land claim. The first teaches that Jewish moral confidence comes from knowing that possession of the land is not theft but divine allocation. The second reframes history: Canaanite occupation was itself an act of conquest, and Israel’s later arrival was an act of restoration.

For centuries this was understood as theological argument. In the early Zionist period, it was secularized into a national-historical narrative that unified religious and secular leaders alike. But in the post-1948 era, that language was gradually abandoned in favor of pragmatic, legal, and security-based rhetoric — a shift that unintentionally weakened Israel’s moral narrative on the world stage.

The irony is striking: the first Rashi, so often read as a religious apologetic, may in fact have been the strongest secular rhetorical asset early Zionism ever had. By ceasing to use it, the movement inadvertently flattened its own claim. The result was not modern sophistication but a self-imposed amnesia — one that reduced a 3,000-year story to a mere border dispute.

Perhaps it is time to listen again to Rashi’s opening line, not as prophecy, but as political clarity:

“כח מעשיו הגיד לְעַמּוֹ”

The point was never to convince the nations.

It was to remind ourselves who was here first.

Va’eschanan: Peor-gressivism

“You saw with your own eyes what G-d did in the matter of Baal-peor, that your G-d wiped out from among you every person who followed Baal-peor” 

“I’m sorry, I’m afraid the Jews were right” 

As the war in Gaza has taken a different turn with the change of US Presidential administrations and the just punishment meted out to the intransigent loyal civillain subjects of Hamas rule intensifies, the virulence of the blood libeling that started even before October 7 has gotten exponentially more inflammatory as the battles rage on.   What might be unique about this recent conflict is the prominence of those who not only identify as Jews raising their voices to try to be the loudest in this Dantean chorus, but also who claim to do so based on their proclaimed adherence to Jewish values.

 

They should foll no one, really.  This mindset goes back to the days of the Sadducees, who outwardly professed a loyalty to the Written Law and a disdain for the Oral Tradition, but who, as Maimonides explained, were ultimately almost completely Epicurean — they truly believed in nothing legitimately Jewish, their Bibliolatry being a marketing tactic.

 

We find something similar nowadays.  Jewish pundits pretending to descriptively warn of a breaking point between American Jews and Israel while platforming accused terrorist stateside organizers and supporters who openly proclaim that Hamas has to execute October 7 to prevent a deal with Saudi Arabia that would preclude the Palestinians.  

 

The events of the mass Peor worship that are fleeting referenced in this week’s reading gives an open window into the mindset of these members of our tribe who engage in this public act of mass defection amid possibly the worst sustained level of overt antisemitism that has been seen since 1945.  The fact that a lot of their motivation is stated to be in service of an ersatz Judaism echoes a number of point in the narrative of that incident as related mostly in TB Sanhedrin 82b.

 

Call it Peor-gressivism.

 

To boils down that narrative to essentials, the prophet/soothsayer Bilaam — having found himself frustrated in his attempts to curse the Jewish people even to the point of eradication — advises Balak that a mass seduction employing a huge portion of his female population as honey traps to seduce the Jews into Peor worship might succeed in incurring Divine wrath in a way that Balaamic curses failed to do.   Tragically, the plan is wildly successful to the point that approximately 180000 Jewish males of military age engage in the sordid evacuatory rite of Peor worship and are either wiped out by execution or plague.

 

A closer look at how they succumbed to the seduction technique indicated how they were pathetically ensnared: when the honeytrapper had inflamed the passions of her target to the point that he would demand “Yield to me”, she would remove a mini-Peor and say “this first”, to which he would reply “but avoda zara”, to which she would reply “all you gotta do is evacuate to it” (taking advantage of the lack of knowledge that this was the actual form of worship), to which he would comply, along with a submission to her demand that he “repudiate the Torah of Moses”.  One might not have to expend too much mental effort to imagine that one ensnared in the rite, the honeytrapper wasn’t dispensing any honey, and the now disgraced quisling would attempt to slink back to his own camp an try to hide his treason only — pace Rashi — to face execution when the Clouds of Glory part from atop all the guilty parties who are ultimately executed for their treason.

 

A further parallel to current event might be the vicious irony in the eminent possibility that in an event that is renowned for mass licentiousness, the only individual who ever got to actually commit “license” as it were -- was Zimri.  No one else got farther than evacuating themselves to Peor before their honeytrappers simply evacuated them, having achieved their mission to induce treason.

 

That might illustrate one element of this growing tendency to mass defect: a rather pathetic and gross attempt to cleave to a culture at large that shows less and less tendency to hide its Judeocidal hostility while ultimately gaining nothing, and in fact literally soiling themselves in the attempt.  This could be exemplified by the recent post by a leader of In Our Lifetime complaining about how the antizionist Jew are beginning to “colonize the movement” the way the Jews have “colonized Palestine”, or how an observer in the Middle East notes that of all the Jews hated in that region, it is the publicly antizionist Jews who elicit the greatest feelings of utter contempt and disgust.  

 

But it doesn’t stop there.  The pressing need of members of this quisling clique to couch their self-righteous cause in Jewish terms harks back to the two most prominent offenders in the narrative:  Bilaam and Zimri.  Bilaam, whose prophetic ambitions and possible talents thinly mask a fierce loathing of any moral or other boundaries, professes at one point that he desires the “death of the righteous”.  Zimri and his tribal cohort begin to defend his public liaison with Kozbi with a pseudo-“shailah” to Moses, and finally are duped into proclaiming “these abstainers [perushim] have now declared the matter permissible” when Phineas fools the Simeonites into thinking he’s joined them, which is how he gains access to Zimri to slay him and stop the carnage.

 

Either way, you now have the spectre of various organizations “Jews for ____”, “Jewish Voice for ____”, even a “Halachic Left” — basically Jews for anyone/anything else BUT Jews.  (In 2018 one such aspiring high-school age peor-gressive complained that her formally nondenominational institution suffered from “Judaism First” for refusing to participate in a gun control march led by a notorious antisemite).  The need to legitimate peor-gressivism through misappropriation of classic Jewish concepts dates back to Bilaam — a non Jewish gun for hire — and his biggest public “catch”, a tribal prince who had once offered one of the original sacrifices at the Inauguration of the Tabernacle.

 

A few ostensible Orthodox theologians have either been gaslighted or have joined in the gaslighting surrounding the now proven false and staged imagery of starving Gazan civillains, on some occasions going as far as asking “Did our hands not shed this blood?”  I remind said theologians of the verses from last week’s Haftara in Isaiah 1, where after the prophet laments “we were like Sodom”, prompting the Divine response “Harken, Sodomite Officers!!”  Fair warning—you’re may get what you wish for: being held responsible for the dual Hamasian attempted genocides, those being to ongoing crime associated with the atrocities of October 7 and the autogenocide Hamas continues to perpetrate against its own ostensible civillain population with aid and comfort from media, pop culture, most governments and NGO’s — and the peor-gressives who adhere to the narratives dictated by those implacably Judeomisic entities. 

 

Further, in New York, you have the spectre of Zohran Mamdani leading among Jewish voters, despite fearing that their safety might be compromised as a result,

as if they follow the lead of the mesis umediach who, when asked about their persistence in enticing their fellow tribesmen to idolatry, can only answer: kach hi chovesenu kach hi yafa lanu, this is our obligation, this is good for us.  These are the coprophiliac quislings of Shittim who have been contemporarily recast as the coprocephalic quislings of Gaza, those who “do the deeds of Zimri and seek the reward of Phineas”.  

 

So the only response:  make sure they have no reward at all.  Peor-gressive  asajews—who can’t be made into non jews as was done with the Cutheans—can be labeled unJews, especially as a communal matter:  for example, take IfNotNow at their word—you can’t really threaten to leave the community if you’ve already left.

 

There are many paradigms for this in Jewish history — the ostensibly 80% who never left Egypt and the perpetually unwelcome wicked guest at the seder— but the peor episode involving almost a quarter of military age males disappearing in a very short period of time after exemplary military success and on the verge of entering the promised land is instructive.   We just have experienced a series of major successes in Lebanon and Iran, and we’re about to actually win and the peor-gressives can’t stand it so they join the blood libelers in taking down as many Jews as they can before the end, like Bilaam’s advice to Balak and the Nazis in 1945.  

 

Like the neurotic who knows 2+2=4 but can’t stand it, the biggest fear of the peor-gressive unJews is that “they’re afraid the Jews [are] right”.

Matos: The Horseshoe Within

There has been much attention recently paid to “horseshoe” phenomenon as it pertains to antisemitism, as the point where the far-right and far-left converge to almost jointly express their virulent hostility to all things Jewish. Parshat Matos indirectly highlights where that horseshoe might manifest from inside our community, two internal battles that the Israelites were fighting within their own camp: one against the “As-a-Jews,” exemplified by Zimri, and one against the “Only Jews,” exemplified by the spies (meraglim).

In 1997, Sephardic Chief Rabbi Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron caused a firestorm when he suggested Zimri was the first “Reform Jew.” Whether or not that label was appropriate, a more accurate statement would have been that Zimri was the first “As-a-Jew” of the post-desert generation: a rebel who cloaked his actions in religious justification. 

Indeed, signs of “As-a-Jew” behavior predate Zimri. Much of the rebellion and unrest during the wilderness years were attributed to the Erev Rav (mixed multitude), whose Jewish lineage was uncertain; but consider the “native” “As-a-Jew” hall of fame: the spies (meraglim), Korach, Datan (especially his audacious retort to Moshe in Shemos after Moshe had saved him), and even Bilaam—who, though not Jewish, trafficked heavily in Jewish themes and famously declared a desire to “die the death of the righteous.”

Zimri, however, takes the crown: his rebellion was uniquely cloaked in religious language. As recorded in Sanhedrin 82b, he challenges Moshe: “Is this woman forbidden to me when you married a Midianite yourself?” Later, with his tribe guarding him, Zimri brazenly brings Cozbi into his tent. Pinchas approaches under the guise of joining in, tricking Zimri’s guards. They proclaim, “Even the religious ones [prushim] now permit it!”—a clear indication that this act was couched not as rebellion against Judaism, but as an expression of Judaism.

This is what makes Zimri the paradigmatic “As-a-Jew.” He didn’t just sin—he claimed his sin was Torah. He misappropriated Judaism to justify treason. And that’s a pattern still visible today—not just among those with denominational disagreements, but among those who use the language of Torah to justify siding with our enemies.  We could— and should— name names: even just in New York—Nadler, Schumer, Lander, any Mamdani voter—and many more who mask their betrayal as religious or moral imperative (Jews for ____, Jewish Voice for _____, Rabbis for _____ etc).

Meanwhile, at the other end of the horseshoe, one might argue that certain ultra-Orthodox factions today, who continue to demand blanket exemptions from army service, reflect a theological hybrid of the meraglim—insisting that their specific lifestyle of Torah learning is too spiritually pure to be disrupted by national responsibility, as the true pillar of the existence of the nation—and the biryonim,  threatening to tear the system down if their exact demands aren’t met (at least the biryonim insisted everyone should fight the Romans), famously declaring recently they’d rather be ruled by Arabs than compromise on their draft status.

At this point, one wonders whether the endless tantrums around military exemption are simply a manifestation of this theological two-front—and whether some sort of governmental upsherin (a traditional symbolic haircut at age 3) might finally settle the matter. After all, even within ultra-Orthodox circles, there’s occasional quiet acknowledgment that compromise might be necessary, but there seems to be little inclination to follow through on that ostensible commitment.

In Matos, the horeshoe may not get buried, but it is finally significantly marginalized.  Pinchas leads the military campaign against the Midianites and their women—who, as “honey traps,” had caused the deadly plague at the end of Parshat Balak and the Zimri rebellion. Bilaam, the mastermind behind the scheme, is killed in the process. Meanwhile, the tribes of Reuven, Gad, and half of Menashe pledge to join the conquest of Canaan, assuaging Moshe’s fear that their request to settle east of the Jordan echoed the sins of the meraglim.  Still, there is backlash against Pinchas, which also echoes today: critics claimed his lineage made him unworthy, as he “descended from idol-worshippers” and had “slain a tribal prince”, an attempt to employ adhominy to delegitimize Pinchas’ action that was ultimately literally and sanctioned by G-d Himself.  There is elitist resentment against Pinchas resmbling the “As-a-Jew” Zimri camp, and the echoes of the mergalim in the “Only Jews” camp that is only resolved with the military pledge on the part of the two and a half tribes.

Some may object that now, during the Three Weeks, is not the time to raise such criticisms at the cost of Jewish unity or because it might lead to the spread of sinas chinam, the baseless hatred that led to the destruction of the Second Temple and the subsequent long exile.  However, it is precisely during this period that we are meant to reflect on the historical sins that led to our destruction. The rebellions of the meraglim and biryonim are central to that story as told in TB Gittin 55-58, and the Parshos of Pinchas and Matos are always read during the Three Weeks.

In fact — for all the focus on the ostensible humiliation of Bar Kamtza that kicks off the narrative and serves as the time-worn education paradigm of unjustified humiliation and baseless hatred as the cause of the exile—the more telling and even more explicit maxim laying blame for the churban comes later in the narrative: “Rabbi Yoḥanan says: The excessive humility of Rabbi Zekharya ben Avkolas destroyed our Temple, burned our Sanctuary, and exiled us from our land.”   A case can be made that there might be some parallels between this excessive humility and the current phenomenon of “suicidal empathy” that  hamstrings our efforts to fight an existential war against a resolutely explicit Judeocial enemy which would love nothing more than the engineer another churban—making that parallel very timely.

However, more to the point regarding the aforementioned horseshoe, the moral confusion and handwringing exemplified by R Zekharya tying his own hands AND everyone else’s— he was too pious to either allow a one-time suspension of sacrificial rules or prevent Bar Kamtza from continuing his treason, all from fears of what “people will say”—illustrates the possibility of paralysis in face of existentially threats from within and without when trying to fulfill all moral criteria—even contradictory ones—simultaneously.  This is not the time for “excessive humiiity”: this is the time to call out the threats .  Otherwise the kingdom will be lost because of a horsehoe.

Easy stock response to NK supporters of Hamas

NK Facebook comment:

"Abraham was not from the land of Israel"

Response:

Avraham was mizar'o shel Shem, and also learned in his Bes Medrash, as did his son and grandson]. The Canaanites were the original occupiers, having been bequeathed nothing but servitude from Noach but then somehow went and conquered the land from Shem [cf. Rashi, Gen,. 12:6]. The land was already ours before it was ours; Joshua just took it back. Additionally, any defense of the population currently occupying Gaza--especially after 10/7--make said defender not only an accessory after the fact to murder, rape and Judeocide, but also maskim in maa'aseh eretz Mitzrayim and ma'aseh Eretz C'naan.

Post-Purim Post-Part(y)m

Note/Disclaimer:  for some reason, this piece, which was published in 2010, ended gp getting bounced all the way to 2024.  Suffice it to say that now I'm way more jaundiced in my view of the former President whom I refer to alternatively as Farrakh Obama or Son of Stan.  He's on the level of a Bilaam more than an Achashverosh, and should be regarded accordingly.

So here's what I wrtoe in 2011.

As I did last year, I spent the bulk of the past three weeks expending my journalistic energies writing and producing the local Purim Shpiel, basically our version of the State of the Upper West Side. Unlike last year’s production however, I did manage to slip in a political statement of sorts, almost partly unwillingly: during our “Purim Update” [modeled on SNL’s “Weekend Update”], I came onstage as the President for a mock interview, in oversized ears…and a kaffiyeh draped around my shoulders.

I had actually run this by a few people around the neighborhood during the scripting phase of the shpiel and I was surprised by the number of people who seemed to be find the notion offensive…not so much the physical alteration [grudgingly admitting that I was not, exactly, employing a caricature analogous to blackface], but the implication—or implications—regarding the President’s perceived religious and Judeophobic inclinations. It occurred to me that, obviously, some Orthodox Jews with more liberal political inclinations who voted for Obama may feel somewhat defensive about their electoral choice, as if they are trying to pre-empt accusations of placing personal sentiment over communal responsibility [as you will see below, I would not nearly go that far], and my costume was another reminder of how they felt. It also occurred to me that, like the New Yorker cover of the Obamas as, respectively, an African Muslim and an Angela Davis clone, my costume may have been a slight dig at those in my community who actually believe the absolute worst about the President.

As can be evidenced by my writings in this [and my other] blog, I have had serious misgivings about this President and his Administration, not only [but certainly not least] due to his Middle East policies—although, again, I have been fully open about that particular “bias”. However, I have been equally uncomfortable with the tactics of the far-right tarring the President as either Muslim, or a terrorist, or a communist. [V’hki teima that he’s a socialist—well, keep in mind that at a recent CPAC conference, Newt Gingrich quoted Camus and Orwell to warn against the dangers of socialism, forgetting that both Camus and Orwell were democratic socialists. Lomed mikol adam, indeed.] This may be due to my LEFTOVER goyish college-nurtured liberal sentiments. It also might be because, sometimes, extremism in defense of anything is a vice, as can be evidenced the damage done to cause of anti-communism by Joe McCarthy.

However, should one need more “traditional” evidence, one need only look at the Purim story.

One of the best treatments of Megillas Esther I have seen is Yoram Hazony’s The Dawn, which is basically a political analysis of the sefer. One of the points Hazony makes is that Mordechai’s refusal to bow down before Haman was not necessarily just a religious statement [although Rabbi Howard Jachter’s Why Did Mordechai Refuse to Bow Down to Haman? basically covers the issue of Haman’s questionable status as Avoda Zara], but also a political statement: Mordechai was essentially protesting Achashversosh’s dispensing of the political process and instituting a totalitarian dictatorship through Haman in a specific response to Bigsan and Teresh’ assassination attempt.

With regard to my point about an extremist ad hominem approach to opposing Obama and his policies, my points from the Esther story would be this: one, we see that Mordechai’s response was measured, in that it took nine years from the assassination attempt to the genocide decree; two, his refusal to bow down was not even unanimously approved by the rabbinnic authorities of the time; and three, as the gemara points out, Achashverosh was as much an eliminationist antisemite as Haman, but Mordechai never takes any political action against him.

I don’t think anyone can characterize Obama as an eliminationist anti-Semite, and although I would certainly agree that his foreign policy is on the whole not friendly to Israel, I can think of at least three other Presidents whose policies were even less favorable [Carter, Bush I, and Eisenhower]. I think any communal effort expended at painting Obama himself as an anti-Semite on the level of, say, Bin Laden or Ahmadinejad only serves to hurt our credibility in our fight against the real antisemites. The story of Mordechai’s political machinations may teach us this: mistakes will be made, possibly even ones of life or death; but we must always be judicious and never prejudicial.

Tazria-Metzora: Houses

(Originally published in 2010.  Not sure how it ended up here.)

This series of double parshiyot that deal with what might be considered the simultaneous signs of physical and spiritual decay, and their sometime attendant internal exiles, being with a most interesting version of internal exile: birth. A new mother is immediately tamei on the level of a nidah and, depending on the sex of the child, is barred from entering sanctuaries for either 40 or 80 days.

As was discussed last week, even the most sublime simchas have elements of pain built into them; this is another example.

Yet while the bulk of these parshiyot deal with insults to one's physical body, towards the end of Metzora we are introduced to the nig'ei habayis, which can cause either removal from one's residence [another from of exile], or even the destruction of the building.

Rashi notes that these occasional demolitions were blessings in disguise: they would lead to the revelation of riches hidden by the Emorites in anticipation of the Israealite invasion of Canaan. Yet, Rav Dessler brings down a Rambam in Shlach that notes that one of the "ruses" used to convince Moshe Rabbeinu to send the meraglim--or, what was touted as the most salient reason--was that they needed to find these purported riches, or there would be a chilul hashem involved in the possible perception of a false prophecy. And it worked.

This brings two inyanim full circle: the "blessing" of one internal exile [the negaim] indirectly leading to a longer exile [the 40 years in the midbar], and said "blessing" that was [usually] deemed to be a corrective to lashon hara leading--however tortuously--to what was is presented to us as one of the pardigmatic cases of lashon hara, the report of the meraglim. [And, since the chet took place on tisha b'av, it led to the ultimate demolition[s]: the churbanos.]

This ostensibly bizarre series of loosely connecting patterns are further indicative of the circular, rather than linear, nature of spiritual battles and the rewards and correctives inherent in them. However, one might find an even more interesting angle. Inherent in much of chassidus is the notion that one really doesn't have bechira chofshis, in line with the insistence that G-d is the direct force behind even the smallest leaf movement. [As far as I'm concerned, the conflict between hakol tzafui and reshus nitna has been largely reconciled, but bear with me.]

The element of bechira tha IS left according to chassidus is in the moral realm: in other words, in every occurrence is an opportunity--or, taken to another level, THE opportunity--to decide which side you're on, or possibly, just to give some import to the event that one might not perceive to be there.

Regardless of chassidus, one doesn't necessarily enter the realm of human choice to see the point. Rather, one can [see gemara in Berachos 9th perek on bracha al tova me'ein rahaand vice versa]