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Yes, Jewish and Christian spiritual leaders have been shown to harbor a certain number of sexual predators, but the Internet too harbors its share of people psychologically and spiritually twisted in other ways who use the power and lack of accountability built into the medium to hurt or humiliate, with no proper journalist's regard for truth. If we can believe that rabbis and priests do terrible things, we can also believe that anonymous Internet users would use blogs to strike at clergy members (or whole religions) they hate, using this most hideous of accusations, including for reasons that have nothing to do with sexual abuse.

There are a lot of crazy, spiteful people out there, and a whole lot more who are eager to pass on rumors and innuendo if it suits their prejudices. Very tragically, rabbis and priests cannot any longer be assumed to be reliable. But neither can people who write on the Internet, especially when they do so anonymously or pseudonymously.

The choice of Selichot night, a solemn occasion, struck me as significant. No one outside the community would know it was anything special. So did the misspelling of Reich. Would a real neo-Nazi get that wrong? And painting simply the word "Nazi"? This doesn't quite add up. The neighborhood around the two shuls is predominantly Jewish and African-American. Somehow I don't see black youths painting Nazi iconography. In turn, the synagogues are out of the way, not well known in Seattle, geographically isolated, and quite hard to find. An odd choice, all around, for a genuine anti-Semite.

For what it's worth, my prediction is that if the culprit is found, he will turn out to be Jewish. It reminds me of my own experience growing up. In our Reform Hebrew school class, the boys routinely doodled swastikas and SS insignia on their notebooks. When the befuddled, ineffectual teacher turned his back on us, boys would be jumping up and giving him Nazi salutes. Let's see if my guess turns out to be right.

My own answer is that the Jewish community suffers from a worldview crisis. There's too little discussion of the big questions that Judaism address, the answers to which the Torah deputizes the Jewish people to serve as priests in promulgating to the world. 

We've sold ourselves to the Enlightenment's promise of liberation through secularism. On the liberal end of the Jewish community, the sell-out to secularism is complete and entire. On the traditional end, we are too intimated to look Judaism's vision for us directly in the face, because that vision demands that we confront the secular world with its view of men as animals. 

This is the painful irrelevance of Orthodox Judaism. It's demoralizing in every sense of the word. I'm able to write about it with some authority because I feel the effects of that demoralization myself.

I don't know how accurate the reporting is, but it almost doesn't matter. We representatives of Orthodox Judaism give little reason to the rest of humanity to think that we've got other, more important matters on our agenda.

I struggled briefly with whether even to mention this to you. Part of me wants only to be inspiring or edifying, or at least informative or provocative about serious Torah-related matters. But the only reason I'm here doing this at all, inadequate Jewish scholar and inadequate Jew in general that I am, a mere journalist, is that so much of the rest of Orthodoxy has effectively given up on our once universally agreed upon mission to stand publicly for ultimate truths as transmitted by the tradition of Moses. Instead, we are bickering about a corn puff. 

Rabbi Lapin, who is Orthodox, thinks for himself -- to put it mildly. That is one reason I've admired him so much since we first got to know each other. So while other Jewish leaders indignantly turned down the speaking invitation over the Messianic issue, Lapin explained that while he too found Messianic Judaism to be "dishonest," he was going to go ahead and speak.