RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/religion-holidays/2021/05/loss-discovery-

Hillel Halkin

Parent-child collaborations are extremely rare in literary history. Of grandparent-grandchild collaborations, I had never heard—never, that is, until the publication this spring of Reading Ruth: Birth, Redemption, and the Way of Israel, a slim book jointly written by the eminent American-Jewish thinker, author, Bible commentator, and Mosaic contributor Leon Kass and his granddaughter Hannah Mandelbaum. As told by Kass in a brief preface:

We did not start out intending to write a book. We began it, in the fall of 2015, to give comfort to each other following the death of our beloved Amy Apfel Kass—wife of 54 years to Leon, grandmother (“Gaga”) of sixteen years to Hannah. Leon was living, then as now, in Washington, D.C.; Hannah was living, then as now, in Jerusalem. The idea was Hannah’s, suggested in one of her daily calls: “Zeydeh,” she said, “perhaps you would like to read something with me.” Leon grabbed the offer: a log brought to a drowning man. We settled easily and quickly on the book of Ruth. Not only was it short and lovely. It also had special meaning for Leon. Some twenty years earlier, Amy and he had made a discovery in the book of Ruth that they thought might be the key to understanding its meaning, and they had spoken about working on it in the future. But that future never arrived, and Leon had forgotten the insight. He was therefore particularly keen to see whether, with Hannah’s help, it could be recovered.

And so one begins Reading Ruth with a set of questions. What was Leon and Amy Kass’s insight? Will Leon recover it? And how can Hannah help him to do this? It is almost like starting a suspense novel.

Although there are many ways of reading Ruth, they all fall into two basic categories.  One, more appealing to modern sensibilities, is to view it as a love story, the tale of a widowed young Moabite who tells her mother-in-law Naomi, a widow herself, “Whither you go, I shall go. . . . Your people is my people and your God, my God.” Ruth joins Naomi in returning from Moab to her native town of Bethlehem in Judea; lives there with her in poverty and isolation; catches the admiring eye of the unmarried Boaz, a kinsman of Naomi’s late husband Elimelech and a leading citizen of the town, when he notices her foraging for the grain left behind by the harvesters in his fields; is drawn to him in return; and, in the end, following a dramatic night of romantic confession, is happily wed to him and bears him a son who turns out to be the grandfather of King David.

The second and more traditional way of reading Ruth, best exemplified by rabbinic exegesis, is as a narrative of religious faith, personal virtue, and obedience to God’s commandments, for their exemplification of which Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz are rewarded with the ancestry of Israel’s greatest king. And since the Moabites, according to the Bible, are Israel’s bitter foes with whom it is forbidden to mingle, there are also two ways of thinking about Ruth’s Moabite identity. Its function in the story can be said to champion acceptance of the stranger, no matter how hateful his or her background, or to extol the determination of the proselyte who overcomes such a background in order to cleave to a new people and its God.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/10/patriotic-bore-god-and-country-at-yale/

A review of “Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes” by Steven B. Smith
(Yale University Press, 256 pages, $28)

This is a tough time to be a patriot. In “Conservatism’ is no Longer Enough,” Glenn Ellmers charges that “most people living in the United States today—certainly more than half—are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” Ellmers’ shocking yet compelling argument, further elaborated at American Greatness, is the sort of “extremism” that appalls Steven Smith, who also believes that patriotism is not enough and wants to save it from Ellmers as well as from those he deems the opposite extremes at the “1619 Project” and Black Lives Matter. The problem that haunts the book is whether Smith’s positioning himself in the middle reduces patriotism into a middling mediocrity, lacking passion, conviction, and persuasiveness. 

But Smith’s middle is the not-mediocre Yale University—the book is devoted to a recent past president of the university—where Smith has taught political philosophy for over 30 years. He laments that the inscription “For God, for Country, for Yale” is now but a “quaint reminder of a benighted past,” as is his former title of “master” of Branford College. Smith sees his challenge today as saving his readers at Yale and beyond from the regnant “dehumanizing” extremes of MAGA nationalism, on the one hand, and BLM, multiculturalism, and cosmopolitanism, on the other. 

In his view, neither extreme respects “the specificity of what it is to be an American and a patriot.” Since Yale is scarcely threatened by white nationalists—as much as some students there may fancy it is—one must understand his book’s mission to focus on cosmopolitan identity politics’ threat to patriotism and its repurposing of spiritedness and minds. He thus echoes the NeverTrump and establishment academic view of patriotism as reducible to belief in an American creed. 

“This book is for this moment,” the preface warns. Smith will conclude his book with “American patriotism is aspirational,” especially in the “enlightened” form on which his book is focused. He identifies patriotism as a form of loyalty, a feeling of care for others that all human beings need to display in order to fulfil their political and social natures. 

But loyalty tests the heart as well as the head. Such loyalty resembles that of a family, with “both good and bad” creating a distinct ethos—Lincoln’s “mystic chords of memory.” Americans’ loyalty is to those twin principles of equality and liberty that make up the American creed. Yet at the same time loyalty also requires grounding in place and shared sentiments. Patriotism is thus both love of the Good and love of one’s own, it involves both philosophic striving and familial rootedness, meaning there will be both profound debates and irksome squabbles, a neverending odyssey and utter devotion to the homeland. Here the book dissolves into inchoate impressions, for it doesn’t consider America as embodying the best regime, as Harry Jaffa has urged: “The unprecedented character of the American Founding is that it provided for the coexistence of the claims of reason and of revelation in all their forms, without requiring or permitting any political decisions concerning them.” 

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/04/turgenevs-fathers-and-sons-a-novel-for-today/

Even without the COVID-19 epidemic, the Western world has been going through turbulent times, economically, socially, politically and culturally. All times are turbulent, perhaps, and we just happen to be so constituted as always to think that our present turbulence is unprecedented and greater than that of any in the past. It is only in retrospect that some or other period of the past seems peaceful and placid to us, which it never did to those who lived through it; nevertheless, there seem to us to have been periods that we are pleased to call normal, that is to say times when most important questions seemed to be settled and all problems were either minor or susceptible of easy solution.

Past travails, however, illuminate present travails. Historical analogies are never exact—that, after all, is why there are analogies rather than repetitions—and the lessons of the past are always disputable; moreover, there is no human experience from which the wrong conclusions cannot be drawn. Perhaps one of the ironies of our present conjuncture is that, while multiculturalism is extolled and treated almost as an unimpeachable orthodoxy, so many people lack historical imagination and cannot enter mentally into a world in which people had a different scale of values from their own. The past for them is not another country where they do things differently; it is the same country where they were not as enlightened as we.

Karl Marx was quite right when he said that men make their own history but not just as they choose: from this well-expressed truism, however, he drew the false conclusion that there existed historical inevitability. In his view, men could have free will only if they were free of all constraining circumstances whatever, but this is not only to invoke an impossibility, but to mistake the nature of infinity. It does not follow from the fact that some choices are closed to me—I cannot, for example, be King of England—that the number of choices before me is not infinite. A grammar limits what can meaningfully be said, but it does not limit the infinitude of what can be said.

The great Russian writer Ivan Turgenev was an exact contemporary of Karl Marx. They were born and died in the same years, 1818 and 1883. These were not the only parallels in their lives. They both came under the influence of Hegelianism in Berlin, and they were in the same place when the revolutions of 1848 broke out.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/05/05/author_qa_the_kennedys_in_the_world.html

I recently interviewed Lawrence J. Haas via email about his new book, subtitled “How Jack, Bobby, and Ted Remade America’s Empire” (Potomac Books). The exchanges have been edited for length.

Larry, hundreds of books have already been written on Kennedys, so what inspired you to write this one?

I knew a bit about Jack and Bobby from my readings over the years, and I watched Ted up close while I worked as a journalist in Washington. I became intrigued when I noticed how involved Ted was with America’s global role because, after all, he’s known overwhelmingly for his domestic achievements (civil rights, labor, health, and so on). I became further intrigued when I took a closer look at what Ted was doing on foreign affairs, which was sometimes consistent with what Jack and Bobby did and sometimes quite different. So, I began to do some research, and I discovered a new, rich, fascinating story about all three brothers.

Everybody knows that Joe and Rose Kennedy groomed their boys for success. But what nobody seems to know is that Joe and Rose pushed them toward a particular kind of success: not just to attain power, but to look beyond America’s borders — to learn about the world, to care about the world, and, once they attained power, to shape America’s role in the world. Joe and Rose led discussions about the world with the boys over breakfast and dinner; Joe invited prominent people, like Charles Lindbergh and Henry Luce, to dine with them and enrich the conversations; Joe wrote to the boys about global events when he or they were away; Joe sent them to travel overseas when they were old enough; Joe arranged meetings for them with the world’s leading figures; and Joe secured jobs for each of them as foreign correspondents when they were overseas so they could position themselves as global thinkers.

And, over time, the brothers developed a deep understanding of the world’s different peoples, and cultures, and ideologies; a keen appreciation for the challenges they presented for the United States; and a strong desire to reshape America’s response to them. Once the brothers assumed power, they each applied what they had learned from their education about the world, and their travels, to put a distinct mark on the American empire. They each shaped broad issues of war and peace as well as America’s response to almost every major global challenge of their times.

In the prologue, you relate an obscure incident from September 1939. Just days after World War II began in Europe, a British passenger ship was torpedoed by a German sub, killing 112 people and stranding some 300 Americans in Ireland and Scotland. The U.S. ambassador to the U.K. sent his 22-year-old son to console the Americans? What was Joseph Kennedy thinking?

Well, he certainly wasn’t thinking about who was the best, or most appropriate, person to send. Jack Kennedy, who was working for his father, the ambassador, in London at the time, was just 22, he looked even younger than that, and he held no official government position. So, all he could do was listen to the survivors and promise to relay their views to his father. To them, his arrival was as much insulting as reassuring.

But, as his highest priority, Joe Kennedy wasn’t all that interested in finding the best person to greet the survivors. He saw an opportunity to continue grooming Jack, as he would Bobby and Ted, for prominent roles on the world stage. As it turned out, Jack did a nice job as his father’s emissary. He visited the survivors in hotels and hospitals, and he charmed them with his warm smile and soft touch. The London newspapers labeled him the “schoolboy diplomat” and an “ambassador of mercy” who “displayed a wisdom and sympathy of a man twice his age.” After Jack returned to the embassy, he kept working for the survivors and clashed with the bureaucrats who didn’t seem to share his sense of urgency. Eventually, Joe Kennedy arranged for the survivors to return home safely on a U.S. merchant ship. 

In 1937, shortly after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s second inauguration, the two youngest sons, Bobby and Ted, along with the five Kennedy sisters, met Franklin Roosevelt in the White House. Did those children grow up with an expectation of having that proximity to power?

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/aldous_huxley_foresaw_our_despots__fauci_gates_and_their_vaccine_crusaders.html

In 1949, sometime after the publication of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World (1931) wrote to Orwell who by then was living in California.  Huxley had briefly taught French to Orwell as a student in high school at Eton.  Huxley generally praises Orwell’s novel which to many seemed very similar to Brave New World in its dystopian view of a possible future.  Huxley politely voices his opinion that his own version of what might come to pass would be truer than Orwell’s.  Huxley observed that the philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eight-Four is sadism whereas his own version is more likely, that controlling an ignorant and unsuspecting public would be less arduous, less wasteful by other means.  Huxley’s masses are seduced by a mind-numbing drug, Orwell’s with sadism and fear. 

The most powerful quote In Huxley’s letter to Orwell is this: 

“Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.”

Aldous Huxley

Could Huxley have more prescient?  What do we see around us?  Masses of people dependent upon drugs, legal and illegal.  The majority of advertisements that air on television seem to be for prescription drugs, some of them miraculous but most of them unnecessary.  Then comes covid, a quite possibly weaponized virus from the Fauci-funded-with-taxpayer-dollars lab in Wuhan, China.  The powers that be tragically deferred to the malevolent Fauci who had long been hoping for just such an opportunity.  Suddenly there was an opportunity to test the mRNA vaccines that had been in the works for nearly twenty years.  They could be authorized as an emergency measure but were still highly experimental.  These jabs are not really vaccines at all but a form of gene therapy.  There are potential disastrous consequences down the road. Govenment experiments on the public are nothing new.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/05/03/five-books-that-culturally-aware-citizens-should-read-this-summer/

EXCERPT:
 ‘Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters’

The transgender issue has taken the world by storm with head-spinning speed across the globe, sucking up nearly all the oxygen in the culture war room.

Few people are writing on this development with the kind of razor-sharp incisiveness as writer Abigail Shrier. In “Irreversible Damage,” Shrier details an extremely troubling and anti-human trend that has developed in the last few years with our girls — and it’s more than just about the trans issue.

Increasingly, girls suddenly don’t want to be girls anymore and important power centers are taking incredibly dangerous and ill-advised medical steps to help them actively destroy their physical and mental womanhood. It’s not even that they want to become boys, but that disturbing numbers of them want to be “nothing.”

Shrier explains these girls “want to be seen as ‘queer’… They flee womanhood like a house on fire, their minds fixed on escape, not on any particular destination.” So what’s happening here?

Shrier is highlighting the trans craze, not as merely a curious and trendy hop across the river from female to male or vice versa, but a wholly new kind of misogyny. The words of one leading therapist caring for gender dysphoric patients are emblematic of what Shrier has been witnessing. The young girls this therapist sees at her clinic are in great emotional pain.

“A common response that I get from female clients is something along these lines: ‘I don’t know exactly that I want to be a guy. I just know I don’t want to be a girl,’” she explains. Something very profound and troubling is happening to what it means to be one essential half of humanity. We would do well to get to the bottom of it and root it out.

“Irreversible Damage” is a chilling examination of this troubling development among our girls and a pointed challenge to the irresponsible ways far too many adults are uncritically responding to it.