Beshalach: Pharaoh vs Amalek--Two Party System?

A prominent USA rabbi was known to have said that America might not be our enemy, but they are not necessarily our friend.

The encomia for Pat Buchanan following his recent retirement illustrated that this tendency is still alive among out ostensible allies on the Right, if not as much as their counterparts on the left.  None of the tributes in journals that are usually sympathetic to genuine Jewish causes saw fit to mention Buchanan’s more than three-decade record of rabid antisemitism; one even went farther by mentioning how Buchanan convinced Nixon to airlift arms to Israel during the Yom Kippur war, as if Buchanan was an ardent Zionist.

It was vaguely reminiscent of this week’s parsha, Beshalach, with Pharaoh and the Egyptians’ apparent volte-face after releasing the Jews, now all hell-bent on returning them to servitude if not driving them into the sea: another erstwhile ally turned implacable foe.  That then brought up the question of whether the Pharaonic analog would also apply to our former President, one Donald J. Trump, who according to a significant portion of the punditry was the primary vehicle in making Buchanan’s once-fringe “America First” political philosophy and actual political reality.  

The Pharaonic analogy had been made before: Bernard-Henri Levy had once compared Trump to the Pharaoh of Parshas Shemos “who knew not Joseph”, though at the time that BHL made that assessment, Trump had not yet put in place his at the time groundbreaking philosemitic policies, including the embassy move to Jerusalem and the Abraham Accords, so until more recent events, it had looked like the Pharaonic analogies were wildly off base, though this write cautioned that there might later prove to be a more accurate analog, the Darius mentioned in the Babylonian Talmud Tractate Rosh Hashanah 3b-4a, who made sure when he allowed the Jews to rebuild the Temple to insist that the support beams be made of wood, so he could pull down the edifice in case of disloyalty; the Rabbis’ view of Darius’ ostensible philosemitism was rather jaundiced as a result.   I suggret that perspective is the correct one, at least as long as Trump doesn’t get back into office.

But who else could Trump be then, really?  

Esav?  Was his “kiss” a genuine attempt at brotherhood or a cover for something more sinister?   So did Trump really mean everything did with his ostenisbly philo-semitic policies, or was it just a prolonged Esav kiss?

In fact, his speeches that the Jews “owe” him sound less like Esav and more like Lavan’s “everything you see is mine”.  At least Esav said “let is what yours be yours”.  So he may be even worse than Esav on that score. 

Further, any “debt” we might have incurred was wiped off the books once he had a powwow with Nick Fuentes, Kanye West and Milo Yiannopolous, the three of who might be reminiscent of Pharaoh’s three advisers at the beginning of the Exodus story who advised him about how to manage his genocidal intentions.   Trump might have been under the impression that he had to choose between orthodox jews and the alt right and since he “gave us Israel”, we’d be disloyal by criticizing his association with the alt right.  The fact that Milo accused Trump of TLing the Jews — and that Trump is the one is debt to the alt right, and yet Trump would accuse the Jews of stabbing in the back—is a rather clear indicator of where Trump’s true loyalties ultimately lie.  

One might even draw—however loosely—a parallel between Trump and Martin Luther, who expressed sympathy for the way the Church treated Jews around the time of the Theses but who turned on them spectacularly when he realized a mass conversion was not imminent, possibly giving voice to what might have been a blueprint for a Holocaust.  One might even draw a parallel with another President, one Mr. Barack Obama, whose acolytes love to tout “Obama signed the $38B MOU” and “Obama funded Iron Dome”, while ignoring that the former was really the work of Congress and was laced with political “poison pills” by Obama and his Cabinet, and that Iron Dome was basically a method of control to keep the Israelis form taking what would have been completely justified if draconian defensive military actions but which were perceived by various hand wringers as disproportionate.  In the case of Trump, one wonder whether the Jerusalem Embassy move was really all the work of David Friedman and whether the Abraham Accords were ultimately Jared Kushner’s brainchild, for which their boss reaps all rewards.

Trump, of course, has absolutely no salient historical frame of reference due to what one might call self-imposed intellectual limitations, so all of this would be completely lost on him.  What shouldn’t be is that Friedman basically convinced Trump to not pursue his dreams of the “Deal Of The Century” because Mahmoud Abbas was unreliable, and that Jared—despite his efforts paying off with the Abraham Accords because of his connections in the Middle East—will never be good enough for Don because he was born Jewish.  (Don’t be fooled into thinking that Trump is any more or less philosemitics because of Ivanka’s conversion: as far as Don is concerned the marriage was another good business deal, and he probably hasn’t forgiven Ivanka for making him modify his second post-Charlottesville message in 2017.)

Do I regret my vote?  I didn’t vote for him in 2016; I voted 3rd party.  For most of his term, I was actually pleasantly surprised that he did carry out what he committed to do, especially after he forced Tillerson and McMaster out, and especially after the predictions of quislings like Peter Beinart that the embassy move would lead to a third intifada proved to be completely unfounded.  The shtadlanim like Friedman, Mort Klein at the ZOA et al have nothing to be ashamed of.  They did their jobs.  Some people did go overboard, mostly at the beginning, with what sounded like a near messianic lauding of then-candidate Trump, and there were more than a few admonitions that it was almost a mitzvah to vote for him, which—considering his being a policy neophyte at the time—was at the very least a questionable “psak”.  However, in 2020, one could find Orthodox-driven admonitions about it being a mitzvah to vote for Biden, so again, the Left has no moral ground to stand on here either.

Was Liz Cheney right?  No.  In fact, if Trump is Lavan, Cheney is Korach.  She voted with Trump 98% of the time, so January 6 couldn’t have been much of a shock for the spawn of the Patriot Act.  Her “principled” (in this case, “prin[sic]pled”) opposition was never about “democracy”: it  was about a perceived power vacuum, like Korach saw with Moshe after the meraglim, and she would move in to the top GOP spot in Congress and restore her daddy’s legacy after it had been trashed by Trump.  You don’t go on HaMaSNBC as a “conservative” unless it’s all about you.  So ultimately she’s just as “principled”  as she thinks Trump is.

What does that say about the Orthos who supported him?  Nothing.  It was shtadlanus, and it miraculously worked for a time.  Consider Yaakov was forced to run to Lavan.  We were forced to run to Trump.  Now we can better deal with the Esavs of the Democratic party who pretend to be our “achi”  (e.g. Obama proclaiming “I’m a liberal jew”; condemning Ye, but not Jay Electronica.)

What about the “I told you so’s”?  

Come off it.  Most of those come from people who either backed or wouldn’t criticize the Dems for working with the Squad—who remain more dangerous than even a Kanye or Milo or Fuentes, because they MAKE policy and are considered crusaders [sic] for freedom.  The “Torah Trumps Hate” people may have had a point for about 5 minutes in 2016, until they ran and kissed aoc’s hindquarters on twitter, proving it wasn’t about protecting Judaism, but about making wokeism a mitzvah.  If you didn’t like Trump in 2016, you didn’t vote for the equally or worse other side that photo-opted with Linda Sarsour, celebrated aoc and Ilhan Omar and never disavowed Farrakahn.  You could have sat out or voted for Johnson.  But no—you were ultimately as progressive as Trump was ostensibly “fascist”.   So you have no moral standing to complain either.

Now, there are thankfully viable GOP candidates who can win even by keeping the bulk of the good Trump policies but without the baggage.  So you can vote for them.

The one legitimate critique that can be leveled at Trump’s Orthodox Jewish supporters is that much as there was no hakaras hatov for some of the really Judeophilic Trump policies in quarters other than the Orthodox, there really was — even from the beginning — way too much willingness to view Trump in quasi-messianic terms, however remotely.  Hopefully that has now been cured. Ultimately, this may prove to be less of a case of “Esav sonei es Yaakov” more than “Al Tivtechu Bindivim”, which in any case is supposed to be the beauty of the American system.

In fact it isn’t the “Jews” that owe Trump.  He owes us for being his steadiest supporter in the face on some of what was at the time the worst adhominy in the history of politics, even if some if was invited and self inflicted.  He is actually the ungrateful one by turning on his most ardent supporters, as opposed to the Milo/Ye/Nick cabal who were trying to make him look bad while he still chasing after their approval.  He never thought we were the cool kids.  We were the nerds with yarmulkes who did his taxes.  He now deserves even worse opprobrium from us than anyone else.

Yayechi: When Mega Is Malign

Reading a few different articles on the parsha this past week, a piece about Yaakov Avinu on his deathbed by Rabbi Ari Kahn stood out: what was Yaakov’s biggest fear as all his sons all stand before him?

Yaakov thought: maybe some of my sons are like Yishmael and Esav?  

Why was Yaakov so afraid of this?  In a certain sense, the conflict between Yosef and his brothers almost mirrored what happened with Yaakov’s brother and uncle: they were permanently detached from the family’s mission because of an irrevocable split between siblings.

Rabbi Kahn details why the fear might have manifested itself: Esav and Yishmael each exemplified a particular corruption of as aspect of the mission represented by the first two Avos, and Yaakov Avinu thought that corruption might have filtered into the shevatim.

To wit:

Avraham Avinu represents chesed; Yishmael represented the corruption of chesed, using chesed to seduce women, who ostensibly “owed” him the “chesed” of “free love”.   According to one medrash hunted and abused both single and married women, and may have even abused [or attempted to abuse] a very young Yitzchak [based on the term “metzachek”].

Yitzchak Avinu represents Din and gevurah; Esav, as Rabbi Kahn explains, corrupted din by twisting self control into control of others, including his penchant for murder and rapine, which itself turns “gevurah” into crude strong-arming.  It made sense that Esav married Yishmael’s daughter: he had a lot in common with his father in law.

Esav and Yishmael came to mind with the recent arrest of mega-influencer Andrew Tate, the revelations that he seems to have backed up his proudly proclaimed misogyny by allegedly engaging in human trafficking, and the further disturbing revelations that he’s amassed a cult-like following among school age males seem to indicate that not only does Tate represent a modern day-“marriage” of Biblical Esavic and Yishmaelite tendencies, but his cult-like persona recalls some of the worst tendencies of  of Bilaam, and pagan tendencies of the “Voluptuaries” of Bamidbar 11 and 12.

Let’s start with the paganism first, as that was how Tate got caught in the first place: aside from Tate’s penchant for lauding his financial wealth and his sexual conquests, Tate was apparently so obsessed with his collection of Bugattis that he felt compelled to tweet at a girl half his age about how many he possessed and their “enormous emissions”.  Rav Joseph Soloveitchik [“The Rev”] used to refer to the incident at Kivrot Hataa’vah as “The Graves of the Voluptuaries” which he asserted was a paradigm of paganism: in the people’s frenzied collective attempt to collect heaps of quail, “infinite gathering became an end in itself”.  

The persistence of Tate’s paganism might be more ironic considering Tate’s recent public religious conversion and his professions of “women are precious” in the face of his alleged rapine and slavedriving.  These are reminiscent of the fake religious persona Esav presented for his father Yitzchak [“How do we tithe straw”?]  It also matches with the sentiments of Bilaam: “tamus nafhsi most yesharim” —let me die the death of the righteous [as long as I don’t have to live like one.  St. Augustine—before he became a “ba'al teshuva”—once said “Give me chastity, but not yet.”  Tate apparently never planned on getting that far.]  While some of Tate’s new co-religionists—female ones, particularly—have seen through the ruse of his his ostensible spiritual transformation, others—especially those who celebrate terrorism and theofascism—have celebrated it, and he himself has sung the praises of the Taliban enough that they expressed “worry” about his arrest.  Again: a perfect marriage of Esav and Yishmael.

And another: Esav and Yishmael were both hunters; Tate has parlayed his MMA championships into his career as a violent exploiter of women, as well as his expressed sentiments in interviews that ultimately violence is the only solution to anything.

One more look between Tate and Esav is how Esav admired [to a point] his father, so much so that Chazal occasionally hold up Esav as a model of “kibud av”.  However, Esav also was known to hate his mother, despite the fact that—as Rashi notes—he trusted his mother more than his wives. Tate admires his father: what about his mother who raised him after their parents divorce? [Esav Harasha and Andrew Tate: serious mommy issues?]

Further, take both Esav's and Yishmael's penchant for rapine, and Yishmael's aforementioned possible tendency toward exploitation of children: taking into account both Tate's statements about younger women and the allegations that he may not even drawn the line that high, and we have yet another parallel.

Finally, Tate’s cultic following on and off the internet brings to mind “Bilaam”, the “worldly” prophet sought out by everyone for his presumed powers who essentially set himself up as the “guru” or amorality in his time. The Talmud [TB Sanhedrin 106] notes that “any possible explanation you can derive to Bilaam’s detriment, always derive to his detriment”.   It is imperative that one derive what can about Tate to his absolute detriment in a Balaamic sense.  Too many adult men—and, more disturbingly, too many school-age males—admire this man and have been manning the barricades to defend him.  The man has no redeeming qualities, and it must be made apparent that if you admire him to the point that you think he can help you with your life, you’re a sucker, and if you genuinely admire his ideology and way of life, you have a serious character issue.   For starters.

I guess the one thing we might be be gald about is that while Tate manifests the tendencies of Esav, Yishmael, Bilaam, and the erev rav of at Kivros haTaavah, he hasn't shown his full Amalekite side.

Yet.