RUTHFULLY YOURS

We all know that Jewish life on many North American and European college campuses today has become a living hell: Jewish students are lambasted on all sides for affiliating proudly with the Jewish people and with its revived, historic homeland, the State of Israel. This predicament, although more severe than ever, is not a new one.

I furiously scribbled the following essay in the space of a single evening and night in the Fall of 1990 while attending graduate school at Columbia University, and I re-issue it here in the hope that it may furnish succor — and throw up a challenge — to our young comrades in arms battling it out on the front lines from Berkeley to Brown.

The starting point of the essay involved a lecture delivered on the Columbia campus by a professor of African studies to whom a number of anti-Semitic slurs had been attributed. The piece pulls no punches and will unquestionably anger some readers, but hey: I’m used to that…

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Last Monday night Leonard Jeffries came to Columbia, and I went to hear him speak. Seldom have I experienced such a welling-up of nausea, such an onslaught of disgust, such a feeling of helplessness in the face of unbounded ignorance, such a feeling of hopelessness for the predicament of my people, as I did that night. Yet strange to say, all those gut-wrenching, heart-searing emotions converged upon me before the esteemed professor began his demagogic discourse, indeed, before I even entered Ferris Booth Hall. For it was there, standing in line on that building’s patio, that I had the misfortune to witness one of the most saddening and despair-inducing spectacles I have seen in a good while.

There on the grass opposite were my fellow Jews, pleading with the crowd to understand that hating Jews is bad, and that (even worse) it has “no place in multiculturalism.” They were there “to express our anger, and our fear” (our fear!). As I listened to these members of my supposedly proud family begging the gentiles (who for the most part ignored them, busy chatting away amiably enough): “We appeal to you, look into our faces, see our pain,” my revulsion soared to unprecedented heights; as I watched these representatives of my supposedly creative community standing silently (!) behind a fence (!!) holding up signs rehearsing the same old useless platitudes, I felt ashamed; and when I heard the pathetically comical “dialogue” between one group of retreating Jews half-heartedly crying, “We want Jeffries fired!” (quite the maximalists, aren’t we?) and another group frenziedly hushing them (no doubt the chant was deemed inconducive to the all important “image” the second group was so “responsibly” and “moderately” seeking to evoke — after all, the “Spectator” might get the wrong idea!) — when my ears caught this finale of idiocy, which produced its share of chuckles and smirks from those standing in line, I confess that I bowed my head and thanked the Lord that next year I will live in Jerusalem forever, and never again have to subject myself to the flagrant manifestations of the ever-new lows to which some diaspora Jews will descend.

1. The US connection: Columbus Day is celebrated around Sukkot. According to “Columbus Then and Now” (Miles Davidson, 1997, p. 268), Columbus arrived in America on Friday afternoon, October 12, 1492, the 21st day of the Jewish month of Tishrei, the Jewish year 5235, the 7th day of Sukkot, Hosha’na’ Rabbah, a day of universal deliverance and miracles. Hosha’na’ Rabbah is celebrated 26 days following the beginning of the Creation, and 26 is the numerical value of Jehovah (יהוה). Hosha’ (הושע) is the Hebrew word for “deliverance” and Na’ (נא) is the Hebrew word for “please.” The numerical value of Na’ is 51 (נ=50 and א=1), and Hosha’na’ Rabbah is celebrated on the 51st day following Moses’ ascension to Mt. Sinai, which marks the conclusion of the repentance process (of Yom Kippur).

2. Sukkot – the 3rd Jewish pilgrimage, following Passover and Shavou’ot (Pentecost) – is a universal holiday, inviting all peoples to come on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, as expressed in the reading (Haftarah) of Zechariah 14: 16-19 on the first day of Sukkot: “Then, the survivors from all the nations that have attacked Jerusalem will go up [to Jerusalem] every year to worship the Lord Almighty and to celebrate the Festival of Tabernacles.” According to the Sukkah tractate of the Mishnah (the oral Torah), the 70 sacrificial bulls of Sukkot represent the pilgrimage of 70 nations to Jerusalem; a demonstration of universal solidarity and comity. Sukkot expresses the yearning for universal peace, highlighting the Sukkah of Shalom (peace). Shalom is also one of the names of God. Shalem (שלם) – wholesome and complete in Hebrew – is the ancient name of Jerusalem and of 32 towns (Salem) in the USA.

I presume that I am to feel honored that a Jew, one Roger Cohen, during the break from synagogue services in London on Yom Kippur this year, penned, without breaking his fast, an op-ed for the New York Times entitled “Jews as Far as Possible” the whole point of which was to focus on my residency in Shiloh and to defame me as a “Messianic Jewish settler”.

His title originates in a phrase of Maimonides he quotes:

“We have freed ourselves of our previous deeds, have cast them behind our backs, and removed them from us as far as possible.”

The phrase is from Maimonides’ “Guide for the Perplexed”, Book Three, Chapter 46 in discussing the sacrificial goat to be sent off to Azazel:these ceremonies are of a symbolic character, and serve to impress men with a certain idea, and to induce them to repent; as if to say, we have freed ourselves of our previous deeds, have cast them behind our backs, and removed them from us as far as possible.

Cohen may have seen it in Rabbi Sacks’ April article. Cohen’s conclusion is that

Jews, as I said, are a practical people. Their interest is in the feasible not in magic wands.Possibly short of words, he again quotes, this time Stefan Zweig, who defined Jews as“the ever-recurring — since Egypt — community of expulsion,”

So short of words was Cohen we know because his op-ed of last October carries the same theme and the same title, The Community of Expulsion. At that High Holiday season he was upset that his Rabbi had not mentioned the Gaza hostilities of last summer. Zweig’s quotation is found in his memoir sent to his publisher a few months before doing what, presumably, Cohen perhaps thinks as practical: he and his wife committed suicide. His Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday, in which you can read this: “The real determination of the Jew is to rise to a higher cultural plane in the intel­lectual world.”) reflects at one point on the situation the Jews of Austria found themselves during the Hitler ascendancy and the persecution that followed and it readsonly now, for the first time in hundreds of years, the Jews were forced into a community of interest to which they had long ceased to be sensitive, the ever-recurring — since Egypt — community of expulsion. But why this fate for them and always for them alone? What was the reason, the sense, the aim of this senseless persecution? They were driven out of lands but without a land to go to.”

“As heaven knows, good cannot overcome evil unless both are acknowledged and only one fought for.”

As his five-day visit to the United States comes to an end, Pope Francis continues to receive the undivided attention of audiences as major in number as in stature.
It is not clear whether the head of the Holy See is worried about the danger of succumbing to the sin of pride from having his ring kissed so readily by so many illustrious figures.
Something for which the leader of the worldwide Catholic Church ought to hang his head in shame, however, is his repeated sins of omission.
While Christians across the Middle East are being terrorized, tortured, sold into slavery and slaughtered, the pope spoke before the U.S. Congress, the United Nations, at Ground Zero and other venues about peace and justice.

Bill Clinton blasts media for overblowing Hillary email scandal: ‘Never seen so much expended on so little’

President Clinton isn’t buying into the scandal swirling around his wife’s use of personal emails during her time as Secretary of State.
In an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, the 42nd President of the United States said the controversy is merely “catnip” that the Republican Party is tossing at his wife in order to distract voters from the real issues like student loan debt, income inequality, mental health care and more.
“I actually am amazed she’s borne up under it as well as she has; I’ve never seen so much expended on so little,” Clinton said.