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Rabbi Noah Weinberg: ‘Every Jew Is a Neurotic’

Next Year in Jerusalem, Conclusion

May 12, 2007  |  by 

 

A groundbreaking chronicle of spiritual search, originally published in Rolling Stone magazine, April 1977

Click here to read Part 1 and Part 2.

Click here for a pdf version of the entire article.

There began to be moments – usually early in the morning, before I forced myself to get up and face the day – when I was more inclined than not to believe that it was all true, that I was only resisting because I couldn’t stand the pain of admitting how wrong I was. What about the prophecies … and the way modern history seemed almost a conspiracy to drive the Jews back to Israel … and the Bible… Mike and I had been going over Genesis, along with the Rashi commentary, and I had had a sudden vision, like an acid flash, of a Garden, and a Presence … and my personality, my Sagittarian compulsion to aim straight at the cosmic bull’s-eye… “The blessing and curse of being a Jew,” said Reb Noach, “is that Jews are thirsty for God, for the absolute. A Jew can never have peace. Whatever he does he’ll be the best at, whether it’s being a radical or being a criminal. It’s all misplaced searching for God. Every Jew is a neurotic...”

Insanity, decadence, call it what you please, I could never be a traditional Jewish mother. But maybe I didn’t have to be.

And if I became religious, what would I do? Insanity, decadence, call it what you please, I could never be a traditional Jewish mother. But maybe I didn’t have to be. Actually only men were subject to a specific mitzvah to marry and have children. And not everyone took the Weinbergs’ hard line on procreation – according to one rabbi I’d met, a psychologist, the halacha permitted contraception when necessary to preserve a woman’s health, including her emotional health. Nor were the role divisions in the family absolute, no law actually forbade women to work outside the home, or men to share housework. Even within the bounds of Judaism I could be a feminist of sorts, crusading for reforms like equal education, perhaps contesting the biased halachic interpretations of male rabbis. And my experience would put me in a unique position to reach women like me and bring them back.

In private I could have this fantasy, even take it seriously. Which would not stop me, an hour or a minute later, from getting into a furious argument with a man. It was one thing to consider the abstract possibility that women’s role in Judaism was not inherently oppressive, another to live in a culture that made me feel oppressed. Once when Mike and I were dinner guests of another of his teachers I complained, “You know, it makes me feel like a servant when you sit there like a lump while I help serve and clean up.”

“It isn’t customary for the men to help,” Mike said, “and if I got up I’d make everybody uncomfortable, including the women.” He had a point – when in Rome and all that – but it was a point he was not exactly loath to make. The fact was that for Mike, moving from Western secular society to Orthodox Judaism had meant an increase in status and privilege; for me it meant a loss.

One night Mike and I got together with Dick Berger, one of his best friends at the yeshiva. Mike was very high on Dick, who, he said, was an unusually perceptive person with a gift for sensing someone’s emotional blocks. He had been encouraging Mike to get more connected to his feelings. I had met Dick once and he had told me a little about himself. He had been a newspaper reporter in Pittsburgh, had written an unpublished novel, had been into psychedelics and Transcendental Meditation. Later he had told Mike that he felt I had seen him only as material for my article. I didn’t think that was true, but I worried about it anyway. I hated it when people claimed to know my motives better than I did, but I always worried that they were right.

The conversation that night was pleasant enough until Dick and I got into an argument about men sharing child care. Dick suggested that 3,000 years of tradition shouldn’t be tampered with, and I started getting angry in a way I knew from experience led to no good. Then he really pushed the wrong button.

“You’re so emotional! Can’t we talk about this objectively?”

“You’re hardly being objective. It’s in your interest as a man to think what you think.”

“I’m feeling detached,” Dick insisted. “By that I mean attached to my basic essence. You’re reacting out of your conditioning in Western culture.”

“You’re reacting out of your male-supremacist prejudices, only you have 3,000 years of tradition on your side.”

“But I’m not being aggressive and hostile – you are!”

“You can afford to be ‘objective’ and ‘detached’! You’re happy with the system – I’m the one who’s being oppressed by it! Why shouldn’t I be hostile – what right do you have to demand that we have this conversation on your terms…” My sentence went hurtling off into the inarticulate reaches of un-God-like rage.

Another time, another friend of Mike’s: Harvey, a tall, dark, intense South African. “I’m not here because I want to be,” he said. “I want freedom and money and the pleasures of the body. I was happy in my non-religious life – I miss it. But once you know there’s a God…”

We started arguing about design and evolution. “Either there’s a God,” Harvey said, “or all this harmony and purpose is a coincidence.”

“Those aren’t the only possibilities…”

“And there are vast odds against coincidence. If you had a dart board that had lots of red and just a little white, where do you think your dart would hit?”

“That’s a silly analogy,” I said.

“What if you had to lay money on it?”

“I’m not going to play this game! It’s ridiculous! It’s irrelevant!”

“Answer me,” the prosecutor insisted. “Would you bet on white or red?”

“I’m not Pascal!” I yelled. “And I’m not about to change my entire life because of some abstract intellectual decision about what the odds are on there being a God!”

“The Torah isn’t only a carrot, you know. It’s a stick, as well. There’s punishment – you get cut off…”

And I’m not going to play your guilt game, either! You men are not going to cram your sexist religion down my throat!

There it was, the dirty little secret: I might be persuaded to return to Judaism – but not by a man.

* * *

V. EXODUS

You know her life was saved by rock and roll. – VELVET UNDERGROUND

Mike and I were walking in Mea Shearim talking about happiness. My revised departure date was nearly two weeks away, time for plenty of changes, but I knew that I would not, at least for the present, become an Orthodox Jew. My decision had involved no epiphany, no cathartic moment of truth; my doubts remained and perhaps always would. But to put it that way was looking at it backward. The fact was that only a compelling, inescapable moment of truth could have made me religious. Nothing less could shake my presumption in favor of a life that made me happy.

From Mike’s point of view, I was refusing to accept the truth because of a strong emotional resistance; though he too had resisted, his unhappiness with secular life had made it easier to give up. On the other hand, he kept suggesting, I might be a lot less happy than I thought.

“Dick sees you as a very unhappy person,” Mike said. “And Reb Noach thinks you’re really unhappy.”

Continue reading…

From Aish.com, here.

Why Do Hamodia and Mishpacha STILL Quote These Fools?!

Why Are These Professional War Peddlers Still Around?

Pundits like Max Boot and Bill Kristol got everything after 9/11 wrong but are still considered “experts.”

By Tucker Carlson
The American Conservative

February 16, 2019

One thing that every late-stage ruling class has in common is a high tolerance for mediocrity. Standards decline, the edges fray, but nobody in charge seems to notice. They’re happy in their sinecures and getting richer. In a culture like this, there’s no penalty for being wrong. The talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, and breaking things along the way. It happened to the Ottomans. Max Boot is living proof that it’s happening in America.

Boot is a professional foreign policy expert, a job category that doesn’t exist outside of a select number of cities. Boot has degrees from Berkeley and Yale, and is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has written a number of books and countless newspaper columns on foreign affairs and military history. The International Institute for Strategic Studies, an influential British think tank, describes Boot as one of the “world’s leading authorities on armed conflict.”

None of this, it turns out, means anything. The professional requirements for being one ofthe world’s Leading Authorities on Armed Conflict do not include relevant experience with armed conflict. Leading authorities on the subject don’t need a track record of wise assessments or accurate predictions. All that’s required are the circular recommendations of fellow credential holders. If other Leading Authorities on Armed Conflict induct you into their ranks, you’re in. That’s good news for Max Boot.

Boot first became famous in the weeks after 9/11 for outlining a response that the Bush administration seemed to read like a script, virtually word for word. While others were debating whether Kandahar or Kabul ought to get the first round of American bombs, Boot was thinking big. In October 2001, he published a piece in The Weekly Standard titled “The Case for American Empire.”

“The September 11 attack was a result of insufficient American involvement and ambition,” Boot wrote. “The solution is to be more expansive in our goals and more assertive in their implementation.” In order to prevent more terror attacks in American cities, Boot called for a series of U.S.-led revolutions around the world, beginning in Afghanistan and moving swiftly to Iraq.

“Once we have deposed Saddam, we can impose an American-led, international regency in Baghdad, to go along with the one in Kabul,” Boot wrote. “To turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the oppressed peoples of the Middle East: Now that would be a historic war aim. Is this an ambitious agenda? Without a doubt. Does America have the resources to carry it out? Also without a doubt.”

In retrospect, Boot’s words are painful to read, like love letters from a marriage that ended in divorce. Iraq remains a smoldering mess. The Afghan war is still in progress close to 20 years in. For perspective, Napoleon Bonaparte seized control of France, crowned himself emperor, defeated four European coalitions against him, invaded Russia, lost, was defeated and exiled, returned, and was defeated and exiled a second time, all in less time than the United States has spent trying to turn Afghanistan into a stable country.

Things haven’t gone as planned. What’s remarkable is that despite all the failure and waste and deflated expectations, defeats that have stirred self-doubt in the heartiest of men, Boot has remained utterly convinced of the virtue of his original predictions. Certainty is a prerequisite for Leading Authorities on Armed Conflict.

In the spring of 2003, with the war in Iraq under way, Boot began to consider new countries to invade. He quickly identified Syria and Iran as plausible targets, the latter because it was “less than two years” from building a nuclear bomb. North Korea made Boot’s list as well. Then Boot became more ambitious. Saudi Arabia could use a democracy, he decided.

“If the U.S. armed forces made such short work of a hardened goon like Saddam Hussein, imagine what they could do to the soft and sybaritic Saudi royal family,” Boot wrote.

Five years later, in a piece for The Wall Street Journal, Boot advocated for the military occupation of Pakistan and Somalia. The only potential problem, he predicted, was unreasonable public opposition to new wars.

“Ragtag guerrillas have proven dismayingly successful in driving out or neutering international peacekeeping forces,” he wrote. “Think of American and French troops blown up in Beirut in 1983, or the ‘Black Hawk Down’ incident in Somalia in 1993. Too often, when outside states do agree to send troops, they are so fearful of casualties that they impose rules of engagement that preclude meaningful action.”

In other words, the tragedy of foreign wars isn’t that Americans die, but that too few Americans are willing to die. To solve this problem, Boot recommended recruiting foreign mercenaries. “The military would do well today to open its ranks not only to legal immigrants but also to illegal ones,” he wrote in the Los Angeles Times. When foreigners get killed fighting for America, he noted, there’s less political backlash at home.

American forces, documented or not, never occupied Pakistan, but by 2011 Boot had another war in mind. “Qaddafi Must Go,” Boot declared in The Weekly Standard. In Boot’s telling, the Libyan dictator had become a threat to the American homeland. “The only way this crisis will end—the only way we and our allies can achieve our objectives in Libya—is to remove Qaddafi from power. Containment won’t suffice.”

In the end, Gaddafi was removed from power, with ugly and long-lasting consequences. Boot was on to the next invasion. By late 2012, he was once again promoting attacks on Syria and Iran, as he had nine years before. In a piece for The New York Times, Boot laid out “Five Reasons to Intervene in Syria Now.”

Overthrowing the Assad regime, Boot predicted, would “diminish Iran’s influence” in the region, influence that had grown dramatically since the Bush administration took Boot’s advice and overthrew Saddam Hussein, Iran’s most powerful counterbalance. To doubters concerned about a complex new war, Boot promised the Syria intervention could be conducted “with little risk.”

Days later, Boot wrote a separate piece for Commentary magazine calling for American bombing of Iran. It was a busy week, even by the standards of a Leading Authority on Armed Conflict. Boot conceded that “it remains a matter of speculation what Iran would do in the wake of such strikes.” He didn’t seem worried.

Listed in one place, Boot’s many calls for U.S.-led war around the world come off as a parody of mindless warlike noises, something you might write if you got mad at a country while drunk. (“I’ll invade you!!!”) Republicans in Washington didn’t find any of it amusing. They were impressed. Boot became a top foreign policy adviser to John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2008, to Mitt Romney in 2012, and to Marco Rubio in 2016.

Everything changed when Trump won the Republican nomination. Trump had never heard of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He had no idea Max Boot was a Leading Authority on Armed Conflict. Trump was running against more armed conflicts. He had no interest in invading Pakistan. Boot hated him.

As Trump found himself accused of improper ties to Vladimir Putin, Boot agitated for more aggressive confrontation with Russia. Boot demanded larger weapons shipments to Ukraine. He called for effectively expelling Russia from the global financial system, a move that might be construed as an act of war against a nuclear-armed power. The stakes were high, but with signature aplomb Boot assured readers it was “hard to imagine” the Russian government would react badly to the provocation. Those who disagreed Boot dismissed as “cheerleaders” for Putin and the mullahs in Iran.

Boot’s stock in the Washington foreign policy establishment rose. In 2018, he was hired by The Washington Post as a columnist. The paper’s announcement cited Boot’s “expertise on armed conflict.”

It is possible to isolate the precise moment that Trump permanently alienated the Republican establishment in Washington: February 13, 2016. There was a GOP primary debate that night in Greenville, South Carolina, so every Republican in Washington was watching. Seemingly out of nowhere, Trump articulated something that no party leader had ever said out loud. “We should never have been in Iraq,” Trump announced, his voice rising. “We have destabilized the Middle East.”

Many in the crowd booed, but Trump kept going: “They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none.”

Pandemonium seemed to erupt in the hall, and on television. Shocked political analysts declared that the Trump presidential effort had just euthanized itself. Republican voters, they said with certainty, would never accept attacks on policies their party had espoused and carried out.

Republican voters had a different reaction. They understood that adults sometimes change their minds based on evidence. They themselves had come to understand that the Iraq war was a mistake. They appreciated hearing something verboten but true.

Rival Republicans denounced Trump as an apostate. Voters considered him brave.

Trump won the South Carolina primary, and shortly after that, the Republican nomination.

Republicans in Washington never recovered. When Trump attacked the Iraq War and questioned the integrity of the people who planned and promoted it, he was attacking them. They hated him for that.

Some of them became so angry, it distorted their judgment and character.

♦♦♦

Bill Kristol is probably the most influential Republican strategist of the post-Reagan era. Born in 1954, Kristol was the second child of the writer Irving Kristol, one of the founders of neoconservatism.

The neoconservatism of Irving Kristol and his friends was jarring to the ossified liberal establishment of the time, but in retrospect it was basically a centrist philosophy: pragmatic, tolerant of a limited welfare state, not rigidly ideological. By the time Bill Kristol got done with it 40 years later, neoconservatism was something else entirely.

Almost from the moment Operation Desert Storm concluded in 1991, Kristol began pushing for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. In 1997, The Weekly Standard ran a cover story titled “Saddam Must Go.” If the United States didn’t launch a ground invasion of Iraq, the lead editorial warned, the world should “get ready for the day when Saddam has biological and chemical weapons at the tips of missiles aimed at Israel and at American forces in the Gulf.”

After the September 11 attacks, Kristol found a new opening to start a war with Iraq. In November 2001, he and Robert Kagan wrote a piece in The Weekly Standard alleging that Saddam Hussein hosted a training camp for Al Qaeda fighters where terrorists had trained to hijack planes. They suggested that Mohammad Atta, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was actively collaborating with Saddam’s intelligence services. On the basis of no evidence, they accused Iraq of fomenting the anthrax attacks on American politicians and news outlets.

Under ordinary circumstances, Bill Kristol would be famous for being wrong. Kristol still goes on television regularly, but it’s not to apologize for the many demonstrably untrue things he’s said about the Middle East, or even to talk about foreign policy. Instead, Kristol goes on TV to attack Donald Trump.

Trump’s election seemed to undo Bill Kristol entirely. He lost his job at The Weekly Standard after more than 20 years, forced out by owners who were panicked about declining readership. He seemed to spend most of his time on Twitter ranting about Trump.

Before long he was ranting about the people who elected Trump. At an American Enterprise Institute panel event in February 2017, Kristol made the case for why immigrants are more impressive than native-born Americans. “Basically if you are in free society, a capitalist society, after two, three, four generations of hard work, everyone becomes kind of decadent, lazy, spoiled, whatever.” Most Americans, Kristol said, “grew up as spoiled kids and so forth.”

In February 2018, Kristol tweeted that he would “take in a heartbeat a group of newly naturalized American citizens over the spoiled native-born know-nothings” who supported Trump.

By the spring of 2018, Kristol was considering a run for president himself. He was still making the case for the invasion of Iraq, as well as pushing for a new war, this time in Syria, and maybe in Lebanon and Iran, too. Like most people in Washington, he’d learned nothing at all.

Tucker Carlson is the host of Fox News’s Tucker Carlson Tonight and author of Ship of Fools: How A Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution (Simon & Schuster). This excerpt is taken from that book.

From The American Conservative, here.

Da’as Torah: Trust, But Verify

Da’as Torah or Advice?

by R. Gil Student

Many religious Jews today ask rabbis life questions–whom to marry, where to live, what career path to follow–and take their answers as authoritative rulings. In one sense, the modern world is based on autonomy, independent choice. Submission to a rabbi’s authority on these major decisions is a wholesale rejection of the modern enterprise. If this is what the Torah requires then so be it. However, according to the Vilna Gaon’s tradition, this is not the Torah approach for life choices.1

Every person has a different path in life but finding one’s direction is often difficult. The Vilna Gaon (Commentary to Mishlei 16:4) explains that in ancient times, Jews would ask prophets for guidance. With his access to divine insight, the prophet would show each person where the nature of his soul and body direct him. But prophecy is long gone.

In theory, we should each be able to utilize our own access to ruach ha-kodesh, the divine spirit, to discover our own paths but we face too many obstacles to successfully achieve that. Instead, the Vilna Gaon says, we must observe the commandments. God wants our Torah study and observance. In return, He will show us our paths in life.

Note the lack of a Torah scholar in this discussion. Apparently, the Vilna Gaon thought that Torah scholars play no unique role in each individual’s search. His student, R. Chaim Volozhiner, saw this subject slightly differently.

No human has the power to see into our souls or to predict the future

Hillel says (Avos 2:7): “The more counsel, the more understanding.” In his commentary on this (Ruach Chaim, ad loc.), R. Chaim Volozhiner quotes a common saying he endorses that you should seek advice but then do what you think is best (she’al eitzah va-aseh ki-rtzonkha). Why, he asks, bother asking for advice? He answers that other people do not grasp all the fine details of the issue. If you ask many people, each will see some of the details. After listening to all the different perspectives, the individual will have the best idea of how to deal with the situation.The Vilna Gaon recommends waiting for divine inspiration based on Torah study and observance. In contrast, R. Chaim Volozhiner advises consultation with multiple people. Neither suggest going to a single Torah scholar and following his advice.

The Netziv, a grandson-in-law of and successor to R. Chaim Volozhiner, takes a third approach. In his Torah commentary (Ha’amek Davar, Deut. 29:8), the Netziv states that one finds the right counsel in the merit of Torah study. In this, he follows the Vilna Gaon. In his commentary to Koheles (Eccl. 8:1), the Netziv points out that a Torah scholar’s mood will affect his advice. Additionally, not everyone can always predict the future. Therefore, a questioner has to use his own judgment to decide whether to follow any advice he receives. According to the Netziv, you can ask a Torah scholar but then decide whether to follow his advice.

These three approaches are hardly contradictory. They all reflect the inherent human difficulty of seeing the future and even the innermost present. No human has the power to see into our souls or to predict the future. At best, they can make educated guesses. Some people will try to independently decide their own paths. Others will ask many for advice. And still others will seek guidance from a Torah scholar. No one will argue that a wise rabbi is somehow excluded as a source of wisdom for seekers simply because he is a rabbi. However, because no one today can access the divine knowledge of inner truths, each individual has to use his own best judgment in deciding his life path. Advice is just that, an input from a (hopefully) wise person to be applied by the individual to his circumstances.

I never had the merit of speaking with R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik because he was ill when I entered Yeshiva. However, in my many conversations with some of his students, I noted that they have (almost) never told me what to do.2 They consistently discuss the issues from various angles, providing insight and not even advice. Even when the conclusion is obvious, they always leave it to me to reach the conclusion, to make the appropriate decision. I believe that this is the tradition of the Vilna Gaon, which is uniquely appropriate to the modern world where autonomy is so important.3

  1. We are only discussing advice for life choices. Halakhah and fundamental beliefs are a separate discussion.
  2. With two exceptions: 1) One rabbi told me not to send my children to schools with religious outlooks that are very different from my own, to avoid forcing my children to choose between their teachers and their parents. 2) The same rabbi also told me to stay away from someone who seemed dishonest. He did not merely discuss the issues but specifically said to do or not to do something. They stand out for me as understandable exceptions.
  3. All these sources are found in R. Moshe Zuriel, Otzeros Ha-Netziv, sv. eitzah.

From Torah Musings, here.

Cannabis: Cruelly and Cynically Criminalized by All CHAREIDI Parties, Too

Cannabis Potential and the Cronies: By Moshe Feiglin

The threat was loud and clear. “If you continue to pressure (about cannabis) you will not be a Knesset Member any longer,” MK Oren Hazan’s father threatened me.

Now you can understand why Oren Hazan is fighting so hard against legalization.

“MK Feiglin is falsely accusing us,” cried the General Manager of the Sarel Company. “If he did not enjoy parliamentary immunity, we would sue him now for libel.”

“At this moment I remove my parliamentary immunity,” I answered. “You are welcome to sue me.”

Of course, no libel suit ever surfaced from the Sarel Company of insiders and cronies, which enjoys a permanent exemption from competing in tenders for furnishing supplies to Israel’s government-owned hospitals. The well-connected and cynical company fully understands the gold-mine potential of the Israeli cannabis market.

As an MK, I managed to insert some changes in the cannabis “reform”. But instead of opening the market so that the ill could get their medicine, instead of allowing Israeli agriculture to thrive and instead of affording Israel’s citizens the liberty to decide for themselves what they would like to smoke – the reform ultimately concentrated all of that potential in the hands of one Mafioso group.

Imagine if 20 years ago, someone had understood the potential of the up-and-coming high-tech industry and would have established a “reform” that would allow only insiders to enter the field. Imagine if they would have formed special police units to prevent the development and export of Israeli high-tech without a license (which of course, would only be given to an insider group).

How would Israel’s economy have looked today? How would Tel Aviv’s skyline have looked?

Cannabis is a health and economic potential of the same caliber. Israel was already researching and developing thousands of strains specific to various illnesses. Most of this potential has already migrated overseas. This is a huge export potential that could create tens of thousands of jobs in smart cannabis farms in Israel’s outlying areas.

Above and beyond everything else, these strains of cannabis can save the lives of cancer patients – sometimes literally curing them – and provide relief for many serious medical conditions. These medicines are currently cruelly and cynically barred from Israel’s ill.

The ZEHUT party will continue to fight for legalization.

When ZEHUT will be the decisive factor in the formation of the next government coalition – there will not be a new government formed without legalization from the very start of the new Knesset term.

From Zehut, here.