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A Rabbi's World: It Took a While, But…

It's not a slow news time, to be sure, but after a conversation with my sister a few days ago, I know what the really big news story is in Israel.  It's not about Ehud Olmert, Tzippi Livni, or any other political or religious figure; it's about Paul McCartney.  Yes, Paul McCartney, whose forthcoming concert in Park HaYarkon on September 25 promises to be the biggest such event in Israel's history. 

As has been reported recently, the Beatles were supposed to visit Israel in the early sixties, but Yossi Sarid's father (how ironic is that!), who was then the Minister of Culture, vetoed the concert because the Beatles were considered to be a "bad influence" on the country's youth.  It's straight out of "Footloose."  Something of the anti-rock and roll sentiment from the Elvis years seemed to have rooted in Israel's socialist leadership back then, and they actually vetoed the concert.  When you think about Israeli artists today like Aviv Geffen, it's hard to believe exactly how puritanical the country was back then.  What a blown opportunity!

But in the spirit of "it's never too late" (although it obviously is, with two members of the band already dead), Paul is helping Israel redeem itself with a concert that has the country in a tizzy.  My sister, whom I remember well having posters of the Fab Four on her bedroom wall when we were kids, informed me that she spent five hundred shekel for a standing room ticket!  Five hundred shekel!  For standing room!  And there are expected to be countless thousands of people there, willing to pay that much and obviously much more.

Truth be told, were I there, I would pay it in a heartbeat.  With all the issues facing Israel, one more existentially threatening than the other, with all the sorrows and all the disappointments, people like my sister will get to be teenagers again for a few spectacular hours.  Already last Friday afternoon, one of the Israeli radio stations was playing a possible set list for the concert, fueling the frenzy.

September 11, Iran, political corruption, deep and painful worries about the future… Hearing "She Loves You" can only be what the doctor ordered.

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Political Insider: Rabbis for Obama

With Election Day now looking perilously close, the Barack Obama presidential campaign is ramping up its Jewish outreach in critical states like Florida.

And this week a group of rabbis - now approaching 400 - pitched in to make the Illinois senator's case.

In its initial press release Rabbis for Obama announced that it represents "every corner of the American Jewish community," but in truth the group, which was started by two Reform rabbis from the Chicago area is weighted heavily to the Reform and Conservative side of the Jewish spectrum.

Insiders say, though, that about twelve Orthodox rabbis have signed on.

"It began with me and Rabbi Sam Gordon," said Rabbi Steven Bob, spiritual leader of Congregation Etz Chaim in Lombard, Ill.  "We independently approached the campaign with this idea in June, and they were encouraging."

He said the group "started out with Reform rabbis, because that's who we knew," but that it has spread almost virally in recent days, with more than 40 signing on in the 24 hours after the group was announced.

"More importantly, we're getting a lot of rabbis, some of them retired, who are calling and asking if they can go out and speak," he said. "We're seeing a lot of spontaneous efforts by rabbis to get involved."

He said he believes this is the first official rabbinic group created to support a candidate.

The rabbis' effort comes as the Obama campaign prepares a wave of ads targeting the Jewish community nationwide, but with a special focus on the handful of key states where Jews could make a difference - starting with Florida.

Kean University political scientist Gilbert Kahn said the Obama campaign "wants to stay ahead of the curve on Jewish issues," and predicted the McCain camp will trot out its own list of rabbis - probably drawing more heavily from the Orthodox side.

Can a group like Rabbis for Obama sway voters?

"Among affiliated Jews, these kinds of efforts do get peoples' attention," Kahn said. "But non-affiliated Jews don't put much stock in what rabbis say, anyway. And knowledgeable people will dissect the list of signers to ascertain who's on it - and who isn't."

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Route 17: Politics & Jewish Values

The other day, Sen. Barack Obama's Jewish outreach director, Dan Shapiro, said the Obama campaign will emphasize to Jewish voters that the Democratic Party's values are "in sync" with "historic Jewish values," while "John McCain's values are not."

That is something we hear not only from politicians but also from Jewish journalists all year long, that liberal political positions are "Jewish," based primarily on the fact that more Jews vote for Democrats.

What most Jews do, though, is no the determinant of Jewish historical values. Most Jews don't keep strictly kosher but we can't therefore conclude that eating lobster is a Jewish historical value. Most Jews intermarry. Is that a value? Plenty of liberal Jews supported Stalin in the 1930s. What does that prove?

Shapiro mentioned Obama's views on the Supreme Court as being somehow Jewish. Obama, like most Democrats, believes that judges should legislate liberalism from the bench. In fact, too many politicians in both parties believe that a judge ought to be able to tell Congress, in advance of any actual case, how he or she would rule, particularly on abortion.

Obama has said, "We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old."

In other words, the facts of a given case must be weighed against the skin color, the sexual preferences, or the unhappy childhood of the plaintiff or defendant. It's like the Jets goofing on Officer Krupke in "West Side Story,"  "Officer Krupke, you're really a square; This boy don't need a judge, he needs an analyst's care! It's just his neurosis that oughta be curbed. He's psychologic'ly disturbed!" 

But according to Pirkei Avos [Ethics of the Fathers 1:8], that's not how you run a court. Instead, when serving as a judge "do not act as a lawyer; when the litigants stand before you, consider them both as guilty, [only] when they are dismissed from you, consider them both as innocent, provided they have accepted the judgment."

Which value is more historically Jewish, Obama's or Pirkei Avos'?

What about the value of teaching sexual abstinence?

Since Gov. Sarah Palin's ascendancy, many Democrats have mocked her advocacy of teenaged sexual abstinence. We've been told by many Democrats that abstinence doesn't work.

A blogger on the far left's Daily Kos wrote, "If Sarah Palin still supports abstinence-only sex education for public schools after this experience with her daughter, what does that say about her judgment as a policy maker?"

It says that Palin's judgment is in line with historical Jewish values. There are more than two-dozen Orthodox high schools for girls in the 11 counties of the New York metropolitan area, from Kiryas Joel to Riverdale to Long Island and New Jersey. Combined, there are as many students in these schools as in a mid-sized American city. Every single one of these Jewish schools advocates abstinence.

Sure, there are kids in some of these high schools that do "everything but," but that just goes to prove that they have been taught a sense of how far is too far, a sense that does not exist in most American public high schools.

Does teaching abstinence work? Last year there were zero unwed pregnancies among these thousands of Jewish teenaged girls.

Last time we checked, in American public schools where children are taught sex-ed detached from religion -- almost all of these schools run by municipalities with Democratic mayors and city councils, there were 140,000 unwed teenaged pregnancies.

Who do you think has a better handle on historical Jewish values, the religious schools with zero unwed mothers, or the schools with 140,000?

And what if a yeshiva high school girl gets pregnant, as did Bristol Palin? I don't really care to judge a case without the whole story, but even with several Bristol Palins, the statistics are still overwhelming in favor of abstinence.

And the issue isn't whether Bristol has "historical Jewish values," the issue is whether the Democrats can claim it.

What about charity?

Everybody can agree that charity is a historical Jewish value. Surely on this measure of compassion the Obama supporters will be "in sync" with Jewish values, rather than the McCain supporters.

Guess again. According to a study by a professor at Syracuse University, written about by George Will earlier this year, although liberal families average 6 percent higher income than conservative families, conservatives give 30 percent more to charity.

Conservatives also donate more time and more blood. Residents of states that voted for John Kerry in 2004 (how many homes do Kerry and his heiress wife Teresa Heinz Kerry have?) gave a smaller percentage of their income to charity than did residents of states that voted for George W. Bush, who carried 24 of the 25 states where charitable giving was above average.

There are plenty of reasons to vote for the Democrats, but when one party insists that they are more in sync with Jewish values, Jewish voters should do their homework.

Doing your homework is a Jewish value, too.

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Political Insider: Clergy Civil Disobedience on IRS Political Rules

Groups on the Christian right have long opposed Internal Revenue Service regulations barring pulpit endorsements of political candidates by pastors or overtly partisan activities at their churches.

This week the Alliance Defense Fund called for a day of pastoral civil disobedience on September 28.  And the guessing is it won't be Barack Obama who gets endorsed from the pulpits.

The idea is to conspicuously violate current IRS rules and force the agency to take action against the churches, setting up a legal test of the rules.

While it's hardly a secret that some rabbis skirt perilously close to the IRS-established line by making their partisan preferences known to their congregations, no major Jewish group is supporting the move.

Today Nathan Diament, political director for the Orthodox Union, noted in his blog that "while we favor robust engagement in politics by religious leaders, institutions and citizens we think turning pulpits into explicit political soapboxes is dangerous."

Dangerous or not, the McCain-Palin campaign, working to capitalize on the surge of evangelical support triggered by last week's vice presidential nomination of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, is expected to pull out all the stops to ensure a huge turnout of religious right voters on November 4.

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Route 17: Sarah Palin's Appeal Is Same As Chabad's

I'm getting a hunch the Republicans just might win for one reason alone, and it makes no sense, just like Chabad makes no sense to the Jewish elite.

That one reason is Sarah Palin. She reminds me of about a thousand different Chabad shluchot (the rebbe's women representatives). She's seems friendly, sexy (forgive me) in an Orthodox way, with that magnetism, optimism, and accessibility that has made Chabad shluchot successful in 5,000 different locales, even though they are almost always considerably more right-wing -- religiously and politically -- than their congregants and financial supporters.

Reform, Conservative and other Orthodox Jews don't get it. How is Chabad is so successful in places where there are no Chasidim? Why do liberal Jews on the Upper West Side want to send their kids to Chabad pre-schools? Why do many hundreds of non-Chasidic, even non-Orthodox students at Harvard and SUNY Binghamton want to spend Friday night meals with these Chabad Sarah Palins rather than the more mainstream, liberal Jews down the road? It makes no sense.

Don't get it, do you?

Who would you rather have a cup of coffee with on a bungalow porch, a cup that can turn into a three-hour conversation, Sarah Palin or Nancy Pelosi?

Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton come across like the Queen of Spades of a nanny state; school marms of a school you don't want to go to. Pelosi, in particular, seems like one of those Sisterhood program chairs from a suburban temple whose calls you don't want to answer.

Sarah Palin seems like one of those Chabad women who don't have enough chairs at her table for all the non-Chabad women who'd take a plane or a subway to attend the next shluchot convention in Crown Heights.

Something's happening and you don't know what it is, do you, Nancy Pelosi?

And another thing: There are plenty of logical, rational reasons to abort America's relationship with Israel, the far left tells us, but Chabad doesn't abort and evangelicals (such as Palin) don't either.

Rabbis who can't stop quoting Heschel or Soloveitchik don't get it.

Americans and Jews don't need another genius. We don't need another Herr Rabbi Doctor. We have enough "scholars," believe it or not.

We don't have enough human beings who'd rather rock a Down Syndrome baby to sleep than abort it; human beings who can relate to a flunking child or the stuffiness of the sophisticates, parents who don't give a damn who's in the top shiur or who made law review.

We have too many of the best and the brightest, the wise and the brilliant, who can't communicate (and who, in the end, maybe aren't really the best or all that brilliant.)

The genius of Chabad is delivering their message in a down-home way, much as Sarah Palin did at the convention.

There are others outside of Chabad who know how to do it, too. Blu Greenberg, for one, the godmother of Orthodox feminism, is as smart and wise as anyone I've ever met, but like a Chabad woman she doesn't enter a room like she wants you to know what she got on her SATs (or BJEs). Her voice and manner are gentle, her visions for Judaism are prophetic and compelling, all the more so because her Judaism is poetic (she's a published poet, after all), not like Judaism's angry left whose religion has all the appeal of a term paper, all about "J," "P," Deutero-Isaiah; the kind who can't look at any biblical verse with being "troubled" by it.

Chabad women know what really troubles people, and it ain't Deutero-Isaiah.

In 1950, all American Jews heard of liberal Judaism (that's Conservatives, too) but almost no one heard of Chabad. Chabad seemed a relic of history. Liberal Judaism was ascendent, inevitable. The rebbe's Chabad was as fringe religiously as Sarah Palin's conservative anscestors were then on the fringe politically.   

Who would have figured that in 2008, liberal pews in most of America would be emptier than their rabbis would like, while everyone has now heard of Chabad? Men and women from Chabad are all over the continent, all over the planet, raising fortunes (without charging shul membership fees), getting men to put on tefillin, getting women to go to mikvah -- men and women who, if not for Chabad, wouldn't. It makes no sense.

Chabad women, like Sarah Palin, don't look at Judaism, or the United States, and then look at the world to worry "why do they hate us?" They don't blame Judaism or America first. They are happy warriors. They don't think "bitterness" is what motivates religious people, as Obama said with condescension. You come away feeling that these kind of women understand religion, they love America and religion like they love their kids, troubles and all, feeling blessed every step of the way.

The high-salaried great scholars of the other denominations, none of whom went to the University of Idaho, are very good at conducting studies, at going on high-priced retreats, at developing goalposts that can be moved to allow past failures to score.

Chabad women don't conduct studies. They cook a chicken (or, Sarah Palin, a moose) and invite you over on Friday night. And college students, middle-class families, international businessmen want to be there.

At the beginning of these successful relationships between Chabad and their guests, theology and politics having little or nothing to do with it. A lot of Palin's appeal has nothing to do with her theology or politics either.

The other party and denominations are trying to figure it out. Maybe if they could get a grant. Maybe if they could find someone with whom they can dialogue.

Chabad women and Sarah Palin don't dialogue. They talk. And they don't talk down.

They win. Makes no sense, does it?

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A Rabbi's World:  What Will We Talk About?

Let's see… the Olympics are over.  The political conventions are over.  Other than what sounds like endless hurricanes making their way towards the east coast, we've run out of the big topics!

Well, not quite.  The conventions may be over, but now comes two solid months of unending bombardment with commercials, debates, op-eds, blogs (can't complain too much there, I guess), and what Seinfeld would undoubtedly refer to as just so much yadda.  It's time to hunker down.

Somewhere beneath all the mountains of excess verbiage that we are about to experience, there are some serious issues to be discussed.  For all the excesses of both conventions, all the hyperbole and all the demonization of the other that makes up political discourse in this country, I still have the vaguely positive feeling that two thoughtful people are running for president, two people capable of reflection and possessed of admirable qualities.  This is not a time for a president of the United States to govern from the gut- something that President Bush raised to a not-so-fine art.  From  a country of some three hundred million people considered to be among the most powerful in the world, we have a right to expect that our president be someone endowed with intellectual curiosity and broadness of vision, and an appreciation of subtle areas of gray as much as of absolutes.  I think- I hope- that both Senators Obama and McCain fit that qualification.

But both conventions left me with questions- serious questions- that I hope the next two months will help me answer.  I'd like to know what in the world qualifies Sarah Palin to be a heartbeat away from the presidency other than her obvious folksy appeal to the "average American" and her ability to deliver a well-written speech (well-written by someone else). 

Aside from her policy positions, many of which I find deeply disturbing, I'm still stuck on the fact that she didn't have a passport until two years ago!  Am I missing something here??  She didn't have a passport??  She hadn't been abroad? 

And am I really supposed to be impressed by the fact that she hunts moose?  Not much moose hunting involved in the executive branch of government.

Just to be fair, I'm not so convinced that Senator Obama has the kind of experience that justifies his meteoric rise, either.  He wrote his own speech, and there are few better speakers out there.  He's obviously a cerebral man, and an impressive one.  But in terms of pure experience and expertise, Joe Biden's credentials are far more impressive than his.  And what exactly is "change that we can believe in?" 

And while we're on the change issue, how can John McCain warn the powers that be in Washington that "change is coming" when his own party has run the government for the last eight years?   If a Republican candidate adopts the mantra of change, isn't that a virtual admission that the last eight years were deeply troubling- in itself a justification for a democratic victory? 

Fasten your seatbelts… it's going to be a bumpy ride.

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Political Insider: Biden Hits Bush Mideast Policy, Pokes AIPAC in the Eye

Since becoming the Democratic vice presidential nominee last month, political observers have been wondering whether Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) - known for his outspoken and unpredictable ways - would curb his tongue.

After all, he's no longer just a senior senator but the junior partner in the highly disciplined Barack Obama campaign organization.

A Wednesday teleconference with Jewish reporters provided a partial answer. 

Biden, known as both an ardent supporter of Israel and a supporter of more active U.S. peace efforts in the region, used the occasion to take some swipes at the pro-Israel lobby and blast current U.S. policy on Iran.

Asked what an Obama administration's Mideast policy might look like, he said this:

 "I can tell you one thing for absolute certain: we're not going to be bystanders. The first four or five years of this administration, it just stood on the sideline.  You and I know the catalyst for being able to deal with bringing together the Palestinians and Israel has always been the United States,, it has always been hard work, it entails risks and it entails somebody on the ground who everybody knows, who has the ear of the president of the United States."

He said the fact that President Bush waited seven years into his administration to go to Israel communicates "the notion that we are not ready to take some real hits in terms of our support for Israel."

And he telegraphed what has become a key part of the Democratic pitch to Jewish voters - that the Bush administration has put Israel in jeopardy by a range of Mideast policies.

"The fact is, Israel is less secure today than it was eight year ago," he said, citing what he said was the Bush administration's failure to support Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, its insistence on Palestinian elections that ended up strengthening Hamas and missteps in Lebanon.

He called administration opposition to Syrian-Israeli negotiations "absolutely mindless."

Then he jumped into really treacherous waters when he was asked about times when he has opposed policies of AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby.

"AIPAC does not speak for the entire American Jewish community," he said bluntly. "There are other organizations as strong and as consequential. AIPAC does not speak for the state of Israel, no matter what it insists on."

He said his disagreements with AIPAC have always been "tactical," not on basic goals, but then he got a little more personal.

"AIPAC has a tendency, like other organizations do, of thinking they know the senate better than I do," he said. "They don't know the Senate better than I do, and they don't know to get things done in the Senate better than I do."

He also flayed the Bush administration for its Iran policy.

"Since this administration has come into office, with all the bluster and all the talk, we've seen the circumstance in which Iran has moved closer to a nuclear weapon. We have seen the circumstance where Iranian proxies - Hezbollah and Hamas -- have grown in their political significance as well as their military capability. We have seen a circumstance in which the rest of the world has been increasingly reluctant to go along with us."

But asked if an Obama administration would oppose a military strike against Iran, he said "Israel has an absolute right to defend itself, it doesn't have to ask us anything. We'll always stand by that right of Israel…. I have faith in the judgment of the democracy of Israel; they will arrive at the right decision as they view their own interest."

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