Posted on 09/13/2010 10:49:05 AM PDT by Inappropriate Laughter
WOLPE--This writers offers some interesting insights, but I'm not sure I agree with many of his assumptions. For one, he identifies liberalism with the state and statism. This is indeed the Jeffersonian/libertarian definition of the Left, but there are older sectors of the Right that are also statist--in fact one of the things the Right and Left share is an ability to fully choose between anarchism and statism. The Left was, after all, at one time anarchist and called for the abolition of the state (I believe even Friedrich Engels condemned the ownership of all enterprises by the "bourgeois" state as the "final stage of capitalism," whereas his "disciples" today define any state that owns all enterprises as inherently "proletarian" and "socialist"--which explains perhaps why our old Hamiltonian East Coast elites have drifted Left and why our Left is--almost uniquely in the world--opposed to revolution).
At any rate, Rabbi Chaninah said what he did not because he was a liberal, but because he believed the state existed in G-d's providence to prevent miscarriages of justice (as defined by G-d). The modern American conservative hostility to the state almost in principal seems to me to stem from the same "enlightenment" as the socialism they oppose. This is one reason I, as a Noachide, cannot in toto endorse the American ideology.
I also dispute the assertion that the Left is the home of alienation and the Right of "feeling at home." What is conservatism if not a profound skepticism of the ability of man to solve all problems? Is this not more "alienation" than the Left's insistence that the right people in charge would turn the world into utopia? Furthermore the Protestant notion of "inherent total depravity" certainly teaches a vast alienation unknown to more traditional religions. The world (and we ourselves) are so messed up that we cannot possibly fix it. The world is not at all what G-d intended; everything is out of joint. This isn't alienation???
I also wish to call attention to something Mr. Wolpe said which struck a particularly strong chord with me--while poor working class whites may be as poor and suffer as much as all the "politically correct" victims, they don't get the same sympathy because they think this is "their country." Is this an admission that for all liberals (not just Jews) no amount of suffering will entitle poor whites to the same sympathy and support as other suffering groups simply because they believe this is their "home?" That effectively dooms them to eternal, almost ethnic pariah-status.
What would it take for poor whites to gain liberal sympathy? How would they lose, or make up for, their feeling of America as "home?" What if they were to someday become a tiny minority themselves. Would they then merit liberal sympathy because they would no longer be "running the country" (and when have poor whites ever run anything?)? Or would a historical memory that this land was once their "home" continue to disqualify them? If so, by what right do "native Americans" and Hispanics merit liberal sympathy? Do not Indians/Hispanics claim that "Turtle Island" is their mystical motherland, that it rightfully belongs to them, and that white Europeans are "foreign devils" and interlopers? Why does nativism disqualify poor whites from liberal sympathy but not these other groups?
Alas, one of the curses of the poor redneck (along with bearing all the guilt and none of the fun of ever having run the country at any time) is this bizarre demimonde status of being "neither indigenous nor immigrant" but the oppressor of both? And if the white chr*stian "foreign devil" has not right to live on "Turtle Island," by what right to immigrants (or descendants of immigrants) from Africa or Asia get a free pass?
SARNA--I heartily agree that the genuine Jewish spirit is profoundly conservative. In fact, I read something not too long ago that points out that Jewish liberalism doesn't come from Judaism at all, but rather from the eighteenth century European enlightenment. Behold, Voltaire as Moses!
MEDVED--Michael's point is one he has made before, that the core of Jewish identity for American Jews is not Judaism but the rejection of the claims of chr*stianity (which he once observed was the only thing shared by both "the militantly secular and the militantly chasidic"). I can only agree with him and endorse his conclusion. Why else would things such as abortion and gay marriage, no matter how foreign to authentic Judaism, be defined as proceeding directly from "Jewish values?" This can be claimed only if "Jewish values" are severed completely from G-d, Torah, and Tradition and identified with "we're against whatever those awful people are for, and we're for whatever they're against." And that the "official" communal leadership of American Jewry is dominated by this idea is undeniable (as well a mark of its ignorance).
To liberal American Jews the Bible doesn't exist. Jews never conquered, never enslaved, never slaughtered (certainly not in the name of G-d), never punished violations of cultic disloyalty with death--was never "theocratic." To American Jewish liberals chr*stianity "invented" theocracy, and Jews didn't even exist until chr*stian "Bible-thumpers" started "oppressing" others. And even then they existed only as victims in a long martyrology leading to final redemption by the Enlightenment and a "rational," religion-free world. The Holocaust almost serves as a Calvary-event in this passion play--the Jews die to redeem the world from religion. Small wonder that it is to liberal Jews the absolutely unique central (and redemptive) episode in human history which must be meditated upon with all the fervor and frequency of a medieval peasant meditating on the stations of the cross. And small wonder its denial is a criminal offense. After all, without the Holocaust there is no Redemption and nothing whose lesson will ultimately lead to a better world. (This is not an excuse for Holocaust deniers, but I do maintain that the exaltation of the Holocaust above everything that came for or will come after is every bit as much a form of supersessionism as chr*stianity).
What American liberal Jews will never understand is that to rural American chr*stians who never have any contact with Jews in everyday life, their image of Jews doesn't come from the Weimar Republic or medieval mystery plays but from the Book of Joshua. In short, this country is full of sincere people who naively assume that everyone who calls himself a "Jew" has a worldview utterly unaltered from the Theocratic warrior-shepherds of the TaNa"KH. Rural rednecks actually read about these Jews and find them to be not very unlike themselves (other than polygyny and a few similar things). It is liberal American Jews--people who have erased the Book of Joshua from their collective memory--who are obsessed with the Jew as outsider, the Jew as foreigner, the Jew as iconoclast, the Jew as "alienated from nature," etc. Shoot, I'm sure there are American Fundamentalists who simply assume that today's Jews raise and sacrifice sheep just as their ancestors did.
Before any liberal, or even merely secular, Jewish leader presumes to make any declaration about the primitiveness of the rural American Heartland, let him first read the Book of Joshua. Then we'll talk.
KRISTOL--I'm pleasantly surprised to agree with William Kristol. Forget winning Jews to conservatism or Republicanism and win them to TORAH. The rest will take care of itself. Davening is indeed destiny. Furthermore, it is not the Jewish mission to endorse every aspect of every host society, no matter how accommodating. There is indeed a Jewish mission to criticize and improve the nations of the world. Unfortunately, this attitude is at present associated with the decadence of the Jewish left. But the Jewish People represent something Objective to which every nation and every individual must bow--A-mighty G-d. True, Jews must do this tactfully and pragmatically, but they must not allow the destructiveness of Jewish liberals to make them afraid to instruct the nations among whom they live in the truths of G-d. I am not among those FReepers who attack moslems because their worldview conflicts with the enlightenment libertarian worldview of Thomas Jefferson (the moslems are nearer right than Jefferson is), and I most certainly do not call for some American civil religion or tradition to be adopted by all who live here. There is One and only One Standard, and that is G-d, who is represented by `Am Yisra'el. They must teach us, we must humbly learn. George Washington did not create the universe. The G-d of Israel did.
JACOBY--The saga of Jewish universalism is a miraculous thing. Just as Jews who flee the Talmud are reviled as Talmudists and Jews who intermarry are reviled as clannish, it seems that the more abstract and universal Jews become, universalism simply becomes defined as a distinctive Jewish trait. So literally, the less Jewish they attempt to become, the more Jewish they stay. Even the absence of a distinctive mark is transformed by G-d into a distinctive mark in a miracle that makes transubstantiation seem like pulling a rabbit out of a hat in comparison. How can anyone not see the hand of G-d in this and a vindication of the unique mission of Israel?
GERLERTNER--He makes an interesting comparison of American Jews with Northwestern Europe (their supposedly Nordic bane!). Other than this (and because I've been typing this a long time now and am worn out with a case of strep throat with which I brought in the new year) I have nothing more to say.
I'm pooped. I apologize for any mistypes. Later.
Interesting hypothesis, can’t say I agree with it.
The lesson of Rabbi Chanina in Pirkei Avot became the dominant political motif: “If not for the government, people would eat each other alive.”
then modern Jews need to examine the context of the state and status of "government" when Rabbi Chanina made his observation (1st century "Palestine").
Some say that what the Rabbbi actually said was:
“For if not for fear of it, a person would swallow his fellow live.” http://blog.thefoundationstone.org/tag/pirkei-avot/
And in the commentary about that it is said:
That the Rabbi believed the Jewish Monarchy and the Roman Government provided a stability without which would have been a much more hazardous chaos. There is still more danger from other people who would “swallow us alive,” than from the Roman government. http://blog.thefoundationstone.org/tag/pirkei-avot/
So, in the context of the government of his day, what was the Rabbi really talking about? Was he talking about the government as the solution-provider for daily life? No. He was simply talking about THE RULE OF LAW.
That is a great thing, but IT DOES NOT PREDICATE EITHER A LOVE OF GOVERNMENT ITSELF, AS THE ALL-KNOWING SOLUTION PROVIDER, AND IT DOES NOT PREDICATE AGREEMENT WITH GOVERNMENT RUN SOCIALISM EITHER.
The lesson of Rabbi Chanina in Pirkei Avot became the dominant political motif: “If not for the government, people would eat each other alive.”
then modern Jews need to examine the context of the state and status of "government" when Rabbi Chanina made his observation (1st century "Palestine").
Some say that what the Rabbbi actually said was:
“For if not for fear of it, a person would swallow his fellow live.” http://blog.thefoundationstone.org/tag/pirkei-avot/
And in the commentary about that it is said:
That the Rabbi believed the Jewish Monarchy and the Roman Government provided a stability without which would have been a much more hazardous chaos. "There is still more danger from other people who would 'swallow us alive,' than from the Roman government." http://blog.thefoundationstone.org/tag/pirkei-avot/
So, in the context of the government of his day, what was the Rabbi really talking about? Was he talking about the government as the solution-provider for daily life? No. He was simply talking about THE RULE OF LAW.
That is a great thing, but IT DOES NOT PREDICATE EITHER A LOVE OF GOVERNMENT ITSELF, AS THE ALL-KNOWING SOLUTION PROVIDER, AND IT DOES NOT PREDICATE AGREEMENT WITH GOVERNMENT RUN SOCIALISM EITHER
“I think part of it is because they associate Republicans with Christianity.”
Given the “moral majority” flavor the media gave to the GOP in the 1980s (a “flavor” that I might add many social Conservatives did not reject), it is really not so strange that some Jews began to associate the GOP with the “fundamentalist” Christian groups that flocked to the GOP in that period.
Maybe what many Jews failed to realize was the positive issue for them and for everyone else was not WHO was promoting a more Conservative GOP but WHY - an antipathy toward an all-intrusive government.
And maybe many of us who supported a more Conservative GOP waived our own religious banners higher than the banner of Liberty itself; even though Liberty is the political agenda for all of us, regardless of our faith.
“The modern American conservative hostility to the state almost in principal”
This is either your mis-statement, or your misunderstanding of the “American conservative hostility to the state”; which you equate to a hostility “almost in principal” which it is not.
It is a “hostility” to an UNBRIDLED state, a government without limits to its powers; a limitless “state” power.
You are ignoring that we Conservatives look very much to those who founded this “state” - the United States; so our Conservatism is hardly an outright rejection of that “state” but to what it has morphed into under modern onslaught against its limited-government foundations by the Left.
“What is conservatism if not a profound skepticism of the ability of man to solve all problems?”
Again, either on your own or with the academic Left’s great assistance, you either do not understand Conservatism or you knowingly falsely state what Conservatism is.
Conservatism is not the “skepticism of the ability of man to solve all problems”, but Conservatism does incorporate the understanding that man, in his imperfections (his knowledge is always somewhat imperfect and his ambitions are seldom fully divorced from greed and ambition), does not reach “perfect” solutions (a chimera) and, therefore his ability to force his “solutions” on other men must not be unrestrained, or else, even in the name of benevolence, he will produce a tyranny and call it Utopia.
The above is neurotic, but if one acts like they do not belong eventually they will be treated that way.
The Bronx....Tremont Temple..in what was then an overwhelmingly Jewish neighborhood. Alas, the Bronx, and the city, and changed, and my old temple has now found new life, as a ..mosque....
Do such people exist? I imagine they do, somewhere, but only in someone's fantasy could anyone imagine "this country is full " of such people.
"Rural rednecks actually read about these Jews and find them to be not very unlike themselves (other than polygyny and a few similar things)."
You seem to think (misguidedly) that term "rural rednecks" is totally equivalent to and interchangeable with either "fundamentalist Christians" or "evangelical Christians". The only thing this idea is based on is ignorance. Most "evangelical Christians" and most "fundamentalist Christians" are city dwelling and educated and a majority of "rural rednecks" are not regular churchgoers, and thus not regularly exposed to weekly doses of stories about those "those bad old testament Jews"; and as residents, in the main, of the nations urban and suburban areas, most evangelical and fundamentalist Christians know enough Jews in their local experience to not have the misunderstanding that you attribute to them.
I'm sure there are American Fundamentalists who simply assume that today's Jews raise and sacrifice sheep just as their ancestors did.
And this ASSURANCE comes from where?
There is indeed a Jewish mission to criticize and improve the nations of the world.
And you think that no Christian sects see themselves and their faith as possessing the same mission? Or, in your own religious bias maybe you just deny any legitimacy to their view of that mission?
"But the Jewish People represent something Objective to which every nation and every individual must bow--A-mighty G-d.
Exactly what one hears in an Evangelical or fundamentalist Christian church.
Abortion.
If the authorities of a religion teaches,from childhood on, that social justice,altruism, statism, and socialism is moral. And, if they also teach that acting to achieve one’s own personal happiness, rather than the happiness of others, is immoral, and that one should feel guilty about it, then it should be no surprise that most of the followers of the authorities will be libtards.
I’d like to see a source for that number. The usual figures cited are 25-40% of American adults see themselves as evangelical Christians.
His father's parents were Jewish. Barry was an Episcopalian.
Harry Golden, a popular Jewish writer of the day famously said, "I have always thought that if a Jew ever became President, he would turn out to be an Episcopalian."
Barry's second wife was Jewish (and liberal), though.
From an article on his views towards the end of his life:
On the Clinton health care proposal: "If you made it law, it would cost as much as the whole country is worth. I would have to sell my automobile, my house, my property, everything, and contribute it to that, and you know that's not going to happen."
When the senator's comments on health care are repeated to Susan Goldwater [his second wife], she says, "He's so ill-informed about it, and he shouldn't even talk about it."
Must have been some marriage.
However, 1)I am myself a rural Southern redneck, which to me is merely an ethno-cultural label which I apply to myself and people like me. Unlike when used by liberals and outgroup members, it carries no negative connotations.
2)I am not Jewish. I live in the rural Upper South. We feed wild raccoons on our back porch (or does that make me a "left wing nature worshiper?").
3)I am a former chr*stian. I have been Fundamentalist Protestant and Roman Catholic and studied Eastern Orthodoxy and (via the Armenians) the Non-Chalcaedonian churches. While I no longer am a Fundamentalist Protestant and understand some of the things about them that drive folks bonkers, I nevertheless prefer them to the ancient liturgical churches and I have defended them steadily for the eleven years that I have been here. If you want to fight redneck-haters, stand in line. You sure have no cause identifying me with such an attitude.
4)While I am no longer a Fundamentalist Protestant, I am still very much a Fundamentalist, which at its base is someone to whom religious truth is factual--not folklore, not subjective philosophic speculation, but just as factual as 2+2=4, and while I acknowledge the limitless mysteries we will probably never fathom either in this world or the next and the ways in which they are alluded to and embedded in the Bible, I categorically reject the modern reduction of religious stories to myth and symbol. The Torah was written by G-d and while it contains profound mystical and allegorical truths it is also true in the simple sense as well.
5)I am a Noachide. Look it up.
6)I am a Theocrat. The only laws are G-d's laws. The only justice is justice as defined by G-d and not by man. There is no "natural law"--only Divine commandments. I am not here to restore the eighteenth century enlightenment philosophy that got us here in the first place. I await the day when G-d will turn the clock back three thousand years, baby!
Have a nice day. :-)
Lol! I feel you, but the thoughts of the symposium members are really good and worth a read. Honest they are.
As I told NNY, the thoughts of the distinguished members of the symposium are well worth a read.
Only Barry's father was Jewish, which means Barry himself was never Jewish to begin with (he was honest about this).
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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When you consider a scale ranging from liberalism to socialism to communism to absolute dictatorship, it’s very evident that any left-leaning choice reflects abject stupidity. The only people who prosper under a system like that are the ruling elites, who are allowed to keep their money, so you can begin to understand the motivation behind someone like Soros, Obama, Biden, Reid, or Pelosi, who even though they earned their fortune via capitalism, embrace socialism.
But why anyone who isn’t wealthy would lean toward the left and support the aforementioned power freaks is completely inexplicable. And make no mistake: If this country goes socialist - and that’s only a way-station on the road to a totalitarian dictatorship - all people other than the ruling elites are slaves.
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