Year: 2018

Have No Jews Ever Been ‘Money-Grubbing’? Oh, Gimme a Break!

Never Say “Jap”!

The Irrepressible Rothbard
Edited by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

By 

Poor Marge Schott! This lovably eccentric lady, owner of the Cincinnati Reds, is the latest American to fall victim to the piranhas of Political Correctness, Thought-Police division. One slip, her blood is in the water, and the rest is only a grisly mopping-up operation.

Marge Schott’s sin, so unforgivable as to be beyond redemption, was to use a few Incorrect Words and phrases. The fact that she committed these sins in private, and not even as the public television comments that brought down Al Campanis and Jimmy the Greek Snyder, apparently makes no difference. The Constitution may be held to guarantee the right of privacy in the bedroom, but never for Hate Thoughts. Then you’re finished. Sports commentators, who lead the jackal pack, assert that a huge fine and suspension from baseball, would not be enough; apparently no punishment meted out to Marge would be sufficient. They are backed by such as Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, who has no known connection with baseball, but who chimed in that Marge had “tainted and sullied baseball.” How about this, fellas: How about a public drawing-and-quartering of Marge on TV, accompanied by “We Shall Overcome”? Would that be enough?

What terrible criminal deeds did Marge commit? She either agrees, or does not deny, that she has, on occasion, used the words: “nigger,” “Jap,” and, about certain people, “money-grubbing Jews.” She also acknowledged keeping a swastika armband in her drawer at home. And that’s IT! Enough for capital punishment, right?

How did these terrible Hate Thoughts come to light? It seems that one Tim Sabo, who is neither black nor Jewish nor Japanese, was fired by Schott as the controller for the Cincinnati Reds. Sabo had the nerve to sue Schott for $2.5 million – nerve because Ohio is, fortunately, an “at will” state that allows an employer to fire any employee as he sees fit. (And why not? Why should anyone have a legal obligation to pay money to anyone else for a service the former no longer wants?) The suit was thrown out of court, as surely Sabo’s lawyers knew it would be. But, and here’s the kicker, part of Sabo’s suit claimed that one reason he was fired is because he disliked Marge’s “racial and religious slurs.” Poor sensitive soul, ethnically altruist to the core!

Obviously, the idea was to bulldoze Marge Schott into settlement, on the threat that her Political Incorrectness would emerge from the deposition that she was forced to make to answer Sabo’s vindictive charges. But, she didn’t bite, and as a result, her deposition, by some magic process, hit the public media like a firestorm. Her blood was poured into the water.

Poor Marge never realized what her deposition would get her into. “Nigger” was a joke term, she said, and she vigorously denied calling two of her players “million-dollar niggers,” because she admires and loves them. She denies being anti-Semitic, since one of her managers is Jewish and he “is like a son to me.” As for the swastika armband, she explained that she got it as a gift from one of her employees who had “taken it off a dead German” soldier during the war. As she explained: “It’s what they call, what, memorabilia? It’s no big deal. I keep it in a drawer with Christmas decorations.”

Poor Marge. All of these explanations, perfectly sensible as they are, would have been totally acceptable not too many years ago. Why aren’t ethnic slurs “joke terms,” especially if not made to the people involved? How indeed can one be anti-Semitic while having Jewish friends? Have no Jews ever been “money-grubbing”? And what’s wrong with keeping memorabilia of wartime? Do you mean to tell me that all those millions who have purchased virtually every book ever published about Hitler are all secret Nazis, worshiping the icons in private?

A final charge emerged during the process, as the bloodhounds descended upon Marge for interviews after her deposition was leaked to the press. Asked about Germany in the 1930s, where Marge’s family resided at the time, Marge opined: “Hitler was good in the beginning, but he went too far.” This statement is supposed to wrap it all up, and to warrant shipping her off to the guillotine. But after all, what’s so terrible about this sentence? Those who are unfortunately Keynesians might well state that Hitler, at the beginning, put the unemployed back to work, brought about prosperity, etc. And weren’t Hitler’s worst deeds committed in the latter part of his reign? It was during World War II that left-liberals at Columbia University told me that “we should learn from Hitler” about government planning of the economy.

There are, of course, no longer any “joke terms” that violate the increasingly rigid canons of Political Incorrectness. Left-liberals are a crew as serioso and humorless as Robespierre or some KGB administrator of a Gulag. The only “humor” permitted now is nasty insults directed at white Christian males.

Indeed, left-liberals have managed to redefine “obscenity,” urging taxpayers to subsidize art that used to be called obscene, while substituting a new category of the Verboten. In the late 1960s, a young libertarian graduate student, now a distinguished investment newsletter editor, formed the Filthy Speech Movement, an offshoot of the Free Speech Movement, at Berkeley. The height of his radicalism came when he challenged the obscenity law as follows: getting up in public in the outdoor political speech area on campus, and starting, slowly and portentously, uttering words on a spectrum of titillation, each one increasingly closer to the obscene. Finally, when he uttered a word that Went Too Far, he was hauled away by the polizei to the pokey. He had made his point about the silliness of words being a jailing offense.

So that’s what we should do with the new Hate words. Start, for example, with the French “negre” (for Negro). Then “Negro.” Still OK? Then “ni-gra.” And then, finally, the ultimate shiver: “nig-ger.” Oooh, wow! Many years ago, the militant black comic Dick Gregory, taking his cue from Lenny Bruce, published a book entitled Nigger, explaining that anyone who used the word from then on was advertising his book. How about treating the whole trumped-up issue with humor?

But the most idiotic charge of all against poor Marge is that she habitually uses the word “Jap.” As in: gifts that she had received from “the Japs” while touring Japan with some Reds players. As the serioso sports reporter Ira Berkow wrote wonderingly in a lengthy piece on Marge in the New York Times (Nov. 2), “she made the comment (about gifts from the “the Japs”) without a seeming concern or understanding of its pejorative implications.” Marge insisted that she didn’t mean to insult the Japanese, that she loves and respects them. Berkow deserves to explain to us further; just why is “Japs” pejorative? Tell us, Ira.

Because here the PC brigade has Gone Too Far: they are interfering with a practice that every American stubbornly considers as his birthright: contraction. The American contracts: he doesn’t say “Pep-si Co-la”; he says “Pepsi.” He doesn’t insist on “Bud-weiser,” he says “Bud.” And now he can’t say “Jap”? You mean he has to dutifully say “Ja-pa-nese”? Rubbish. They’ll never get away with it. On “Japs” they lose one.

Back to the Negro Question. The PC blacks have been leading us a merry chase for many decades. Every ten or twenty years we have to learn a new term, because the older one has suddenly become “racist” and “Uncle Tom.” When I was growing up, the good people of my parents’ generation all referred to them as “the colored.” (I don’t know what the Bad Guys, the racists, called them in those days, since I had never met one: perhaps, after all, “nigger.”) But us younger progressives regarded “colored” as racist and Uncle Tom, for some reason that I’ve never grasped: we used the Good word “Negro.” No sooner had “Negro” swept the boards, however, and “colored” been vanquished, when the radical blacks of the late 60s denounced the good old word “Negro” as racist and Uncle Tom and insisted on the word “black.” (Although, oddly enough, in older decades, “black” was considered terribly racist and pejorative, referring as it did to color.) Finally, after a sharp but short fight, “black” was triumphant, and “Negro” sent to the brig, beyond the pale of civilized people.

From the point of view of the average American, the word “black” had a great advantage: it has only one syllable. But, a couple of years ago, the black leadership put their heads together and decided that “black” was now racist and Uncle Tom, and that the only satisfactory term is “African-American.” No guys, no way. No way that a word of seven syllables “Af-ri-can A-mer-i-can” is going to replace a word of one syllable. Never. There are still some verities that the average American holds to with great firmness; and contracting syllables is one of them.

I see signs on the horizon that “African-American” might already be obsolete, and that a new phrase is coming onto the horizon. Get this, it’s: “people of color.” So: after a hundred years of putting us through the hoops the upshot is almost the same phrase with which we started, oh so long ago. Except that for the two syllable “col-ored” we now have the five-syllable “people of co-lor.” I suppose some would call that “progress.”

From Lewrockwell.com, here.

Vaccination Skeptics – Let’s Hear Them Out First

A reader sent me two semi-pseudonymous pamphlets (by “P.E.A.C.H: Parents Educating & Advocating for Children’s Health”) promoting varying degrees of vaccine skepticism. I reproduce these materials here for public perusal, but Hyehudi.org does not necessarily endorse the claims within.

As the writers say themselves:

“The information… is for educational purposes only. It is not intended to replace your relationship with a healthcare professional.”

The Vaccine Safety Handbook – An Informed Parent’s Guide

Download (PDF, 10.6MB)

All Your Vaccine Questions ANSWERED

Download (PDF, 4.36MB)

For a more Halachically focused discussion of vaccines, see here by Rabbi Szmerla.

As always…

THIS WEBSITE PROVIDES THE INFORMATION ON THIS WEBSITE “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND. YOU AGREE THAT THIS WEBSITE SHALL NOT BE RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY CONTENT FOUND ON THE THIS WEBSITE. IN NO EVENT SHALL THIS WEBSITE , ITS OFFICERS, DIRECTORS, AGENTS AND WORKERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY LOSS OR INJURY, DIRECT OR INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, SPECIAL OR EXEMPLARY DAMAGES, OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER ARISING FROM THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS WEBSITE OR FROM ANY INFORMATION, SERVICES OR PRODUCTS PROVIDED THROUGH THIS WEBSITE, EVEN IF THIS WEBSITE HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

Machon Shilo: Aspiring to a Full and Authentic Expression of Torah

Machon Shilo: Interview with R’David Bar-Hayim

machon-shilo

 

 

 

My final interview for the week was with Rabbi David Bar-Hayim, the founder of Machon Shilo, a center of Jewish learning in Jerusalem dedicated to the exposition and dissemination of Torath Eretz Yisrael, the Judaism of the Land of Israel.

Rabbi Bar-Hayim defines his vision as “laying the groundwork for a restatement and reconstitution of Jewish thought and practice, based on the Written Law and the Oral Tradition (Tora ShebiKhtav and Tora SheBa’al Pe), in order to facilitate the realization of the Jewish nation’s divinely mandated purpose and duty to establish “a nation of priests, a holy people” (Exodus 19:6).

For Rabbi Bar-Hayim the crucial issue of our day is the reconstitution of the Jewish Nation. “In order for the Jewish people to realize its true potential and destiny and live up to HASHEM’s expectations of His people, it is crucial that we cease to define ourselves as Hungarian, Russian, Polish, Moroccan, Tunisian or Yemenite Jews…and begin to see ourselves simply as Jews. Or more precisely: as Jews privileged to dwell in our ancestral homeland in which we aspire to live according to a full and authentic expression of Tora.”

Rather than relying exclusively on the traditions of Rabbinical authorities in the Exile who studied and lived Judaism within the historical context of a minority residing in a foreign land under non-Jewish sovereignty, R’Bar-Hayim’s school encourages the study and implementation of the traditions and rulings found in the ancient sources of Land of Israel. For instance, Machon Shilo tends to privilege the methodology and rulings of the Talmud Yerushalmi, compiled in Tiberias in the 4-5th centuries, rather than the Talmud Bavli, compiled by rabbinic authorities in Babylon some 200 years later.

One aspect of this approach explains Rabbi Bar-Hayim, is the reintroduction of Nusah Eretz Yisrael, the format of prayer and liturgy used by the Jews of the Land of Israel until the first Crusade (1096-1099), at which time most of the Jewish population of Eretz Yisrael was either massacred or fled the country. This calamity, explains Rabbi Bar-Hayim, sealed the fate of Torath Eretz Yisrael, with the result that by the 12th century the Halakhic rulings, customs and liturgy of the Babylonian Jews had become the norm throughout the Jewish world. It should be noted that the liturgies in current use – the Ashkenazic, Sephardic and Yemenite rites – are all based on the Babylonian custom and liturgy.

R’Bar-Hayim asserts that there is a qualitative difference between the study and practice of Judaism in Eretz Yisrael as opposed to the Galut (exile), a fact stressed in several Talmudic sources. While many of the ancient and contemporary rabbinic authorities also assert such a difference, he takes them rather seriously. What is needed at this juncture of history, he argues, is a reconstituted Halachic Judaism which is in step with and complements the modern reality of the sovereign Jewish people living in their ancestral land.

Here the Rav explained to me that there is no such thing as Judaism without a halachic system at its base; that Judaism only exists in its present form today because of this system put into place 2500 thousand years ago by chazal (the foundational rabbinic authorities). From this perspective, both Reform and Conservative Judaism are flawed concepts from the outset. The former because it was founded on a rejection of Halachah as a basis for religious practice, and the latter because of its efforts to pick and choose Halachic interpretations as convenient for social integration into the diasporic milieu.

However, Orthodox Judaism too is flawed, according to Rabbi Bar-Hayim, as it was by definition a response to the rise of Reform Judaism in the early 19th century. Responding to the Reform movement’s complete disregard for traditional practice and established religious jurisprudence, the new and reactionary “Orthodox Judaism” (a previously unknown term) adopted an extreme and opposite approach, viz. that the Ashkenazi Jewish practice which had evolved in Europe until that time should be enshrined, denying the possibility of any change whatever, even where such change is mandated by the Torah itself.

In this sense, the anti-Zionist approach of the most Haredi sects like the Satmars who reject the legitimacy of the state of Israel is in fact the most orthodox of all. It was their forefathers’ custom to not live in the Land of Israel or to seek redemption of the land through human efforts. So too will they not engage in the building of the state or its society. They simply take the logic of orthodoxy as originally formulated to its most logical conclusion. As such, orthodox Jewry of today is fighting the “war” of religious practice in Israel today using the weapons of 200 years ago.

This is not and never was the intent of Halachic Judaism. The Rav argues that the rabbinical authorities of the past, Chazal, the Geonim, and the Rishonim, always understood the need and were willing to take stock of the realities of the present, to allow changes for the better. They were always redefining and reinventing certain elements of halachah, even changing well-established practices to suit the different circumstances and needs of the Jewish people in their times.

Now, with the creation of the State of Israel as a homeland for the Jewish people and a territory under its political sovereignty, there is a need for just such an adaptation. Rav Avraham Yitzchak Kook, the first chief rabbi of the State of Israel, understood this concept well, arguing that a newly reformulated, updated, and refreshed halachic system must be put in place in Eretz Yisrael. This as a means to become “more Jewish and more able to connect to Torah in Eretz Yisrael in the present historical context.” This need may not be pressing for those Jews who still live in galut, but he believes it is absolutely necessary for those who have returned to the land.

Why are we here? One of the reasons that the Jewish people who live in Israel need R’Bar-Hayim to complete and publish a Siddur Nusach Eretz Yisrael (a Jewish prayer book based on the liturgy and customs of Eretz Yisrael), suggests one of his students, is because we do not have a picture of our own reasons for living in the land. As long as Ashkenazi Jews continue to follow the customs that came from 12th century Germany and Sephardi Jews do the same with traditions from Spain, there will exist a psychological barrier between who they are and who they aspire to be.

As for the sources on the basis of which Nusach Eretz Yisrael can be reconstructed, R’Bar-Hayim explains that many snippets of the nusach are quoted in the Talmud Yerushalmi, Midrash Bereshit Raba, Vayikra Raba, Siphre, etc. In addition, the many thousands of manuscripts found in the Cairo Geniza towards the end of the 19th century, many dating from the 9th -12th centuries, have provided a wealth of material from a community where the nusach was still in use as recently as two or three generations ago.

Following the argument that a different form of Jewish practice is needed in the Land of Israel, we discussed what is religiously required of Jews in terms of taking control of the land. R’Bar-Hayim explained that there are three concepts which are of primary importance: kibbush eretz yisrael, yishuv eretz yisrael, and yeshivat eretz yisrael or in English, inheriting/conquering the land, settling the land, and residing in the land. While the second two obligations are individual in nature, the first is necessarily collective. Yet all three are intertwined.

To engage in kibbush requires that the land itself be already substantially Jewish in character. In order for the Jewish people to achieve sovereignty in their land, it is essential that the Jewish population first achieve a certain critical mass. This can only be achieved through both yishuv and yeshiva. This is precisely how, in practice, the Zionist movement laid the foundations for the eventual state.

To engage in yishuv, settlement, is primarily a concept of property ownership. A Jew can fulfill the mitzvah of yishuv eretz yisrael simply by buying property in the land, even if that individual never resides in or develops that property. The importance here is to increase the amount of property in the land which is under Jewish control. This was long the primary mission of the Jewish National Fund, which in the pre-state British Mandate, collected funds from abroad for purchase of land in Israel. Arguably organizations like Ateret Cohanim, who buy property from Arabs in Jerusalem, are engaged in the same practice.

So important is this mitzvah that the Talmud declares (Talmud Bavli Gittin 8b, Bava Qama 80b) that should a Jew be approached on Shabbat, when financial transactions are forbidden, by a non-Jew wishing to sell him land in Israel, certain Rabbinical prohibitions are waived. Specifically, the Jew may turn to a gentile and ask him to write up the contract and conclude the deal to guard against the seller changing his mind.

To engage in yeshiva, however, requires that an individual physically relocate his life and livelihood to the Land of Israel, preferably on a permanent basis. The Halakha does not obligate a Jew who visits Eretz Yisrael to remain. Similarly, a Jewish resident may visit countries outside Eretz Yisrael. It is, however, true that a Jewish resident of Eretz Yisrael is not permitted to uproot himself and move to another country on a permanent basis unless certain extenuating circumstances apply (see Rambam’s MT Melakhim 5:11 seq.).

Both mitzvot incumbent upon the individual are necessary preconditions for the fulfillment of the collective mitzvah of kibbush eretz yisrael, the conquest and control of the land. When there are sufficient numbers of Jews living here who own sufficient property to establish institutions of state and society, only then would they would have the capacity to exercise complete control over the land. This is the purpose of secular Zionism as understood by early religious Zionists like R’Kalisher and later R’Kook. Once Jewish control in a significant part of the land was achieved, strength could be built to serve the complete redemption of the land, as in the vision of R’Tzvi Yehudah Kook and the Gush Emunim movement. “Unfortunately,” notes the Rav, “the Gush Emunim movement, and R’Tzvi Yehudah Kook, did not correctly assess the task before them. This is a long discussion in itself.”

From a kabbalistic (Jewish mystical) and arguably haredi perspective, the moshiach (messiah) will come appointed by heaven to lead the Jewish people back to the Land of Israel and herald a prophetic end of days. From the perspective of many religious Zionists, R’Bar-Hayim, and even of the Rambam, this is not the vision of moshiach. The moshiach, R’Bar-Hayim suggested, is someone who will be the political leader of the Jewish people and who will succeed in his aims. If this person does not achieve the central aims of the Jewish people in the land of Israel, then he cannot be moshiach.

Political leadership of any kind, let alone Jewish political leadership, does not exist in a vacuum. There cannot be a king without a nation behind him and so too there cannot be a moshiach without a people ready to go into battle, literally or figuratively, for the cause for which he fights. This “realist” perspective of redemption has important political implications for a religious understanding of the fulfillment of the promised biblical borders of the Land of Israel.

Continue reading…

From Ariel Zellman, here.