Hyehudi.org

A long and interesting article on “Mosaic” here.

Here is an excerpt:

Samuel Sandler, an aeronautical engineer and head of the Jewish community in Versailles, France, announced a few weeks ago that he’d had the local synagogue registered as a national landmark. “My feeling is that our congregation will be gone within twenty or thirty years,” he told friends, “and I don’t want the building demolished or, worse, used for improper purposes.”

…

An even longer sense of history might take one back to late-18th-century France, the cradle of the Enlightenment, and to the moment when, during deliberations over the civic enfranchisement of French Jews, the liberal nobleman Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre rose in the National Assembly to declare: “To the Jews as individuals, everything; to the Jews as a people, nothing.” Citizenship for the Jews was to be purchased conditionally, at the price of an end to their communal apartness and to many of their religious traditions.

For the most part, in France and throughout Western Europe, that price was fully and willingly paid. Generations of Jews eagerly pledged their allegiance to the ideals of democracy, patriotism, and religious tolerance, pouring their prodigious talents and energies into making Europe a better place. Over the centuries, in fair weather, the bargain held; in foul, the price would be successively raised, the conditions of acceptance revised, the bargain hedged, until at last the offer was finally, brutally, rescinded in wholesale massacre.

Now, busily building monuments and museums, Europe ostentatiously engages in celebrating and mourning its lost dead Jews of yesterday, whose murder it variously perpetrated, abetted, or (with exceptions) found it could put up with. Meanwhile, it encourages and underwrites the withering of Jewish life today. Once again, Jews are accepted on condition: that they separate themselves from their brethren in Israel and join the official European consensus in demonizing the Jewish state; that they learn to accommodate the reality that so many ethnic Europeans hate them and wish them ill, and that Islamists on European soil seek their extinction; and that in the interest of justifying their continued claim to European citizenship, they accept Europe’s proscription of some of the most basic practices of their faith.

To the dead Jews of yesterday, everything; to the living Jews of today, little and littler.

Read the rest here…

Let’s analyze using a current item from the Forward:

The Jewish Week reports that the hip, super-stylish Soho restaurant is being made to undergo a rebranding as a result of its seeking kosher certification from the OU. Paying homage to a 9th century B.C.E. queen of ancient Israel who built temples to pagan gods and negatively influenced her husband King Ahab, may have worked until now. After all, the restaurant touted its “decadent” atmosphere on its website.

But now that it has decided to try to attract more traditional kosher diners, Jezebel is being thrown out (though perhaps not as violently as the actual biblical queen was).

“We felt the name Jezebel does not represent a person who has a positive reputation in the Tanach [Bible] and was not a name we want to promote,” said Rabbi Moshe Elefant, the head of the OU’s kashrut division. Notably, this is the first time that the OU has insisted on the renaming of a restaurant.

It sounds like the OU rabbis don’t want their own brand to be harmed. And perhaps something else here was left unarticulated. The name-change is about ensuring the owners (previously touting their establishment’s “decadent” atmosphere) have the right mindset (like how potential Jewish converts are made to move, etc., etc.).

In general, private organizations should be allowed to discriminate, fire customers at whim, or make demands, just like their customers do to them, and let the market decide who wins and who loses. But of course, the modern State’s “laws” are always purposely biased toward any then-existing institutions in many ways, so…

It can’t hurt to remind ourselves of the Torah’s blessings we take for granted.

I once protested a non-observant Jew using unclean language when upset.

Insulted, he thoughtfully countered: “Well, maybe you and your kind don’t say those words when you are frustrated, but you do still think them!”

He appeared quite taken aback when I honestly revealed to him this was not true.

One can homiletically say this was true of modest Shaul Hamelech, as well. The pasuk opens saying his words were left unsaid (שמואל א’ כ’ כ”ו, ולא דבר שאול מאומה ביום ההוא), yet he used the negative expression of “not pure”. But only homiletically, since the actual proof Rabbi Acha brings in Pesachim 3a, כי אמר מקרה הוא בלתי טהור הוא כי לא טהור is Scripture does so when recording Shaul’s thoughts.

(By the way, the truth is, unspoken thoughts usually transcend language. Still, there is a difference between thinking X and not thinking X. There is even a difference between the thought-equivalents of positive [profane] and negative [not pure].)

 “… the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.”

P.J. O’Rourke