Rabbi Eliyahu Stern: March 2008 Archives

There are few times in this blog’s history when I have felt that Rabbi Grossman was one hundred percent correct in her criticisms of my ideas. However, a few weeks ago she called me out for citing a few crack websites on Barak Obama’s advisors. She was right. I never should have cited those websites--they were wrong and I apologize to my readers for my misstep.

As I intimated in my first post the notion that Obama is somehow bad for the Jews is absurd based on what we know and what we have seen. All we as a community should be focused on is what the person has said and what he has done. While I am still unsure about a few issues and disagree with him on a few others, the more the campaign continues, the more I like what I hear and see from Obama. Many have already praised his talk on race as being indicative of the type of nuanced and complex yet straight and simple kind of thinking that this country needs, I would like add just a few points that have not been addressed.

My Dad had a terrific insight on the lessons learned from the Spitzer fiasco and the rise and tarnishing of his successor, David Paterson. In Ethics of our Fathers we are told that Hillel “once saw a man’s skull floating on a body of water: whereupon he said: Because you drowned others, you shall be drowned and ultimately those who drowned you they themselves will also be drowned.” (2:7)

There were far too many people gleefully cheering at Eliot Spitzer’s downfall. They were mimicking Spitzer’s own glee, but ultimately the ones who had the biggest joke played on them were the people themselves. For only a few hours after the honorable David Paterson took the oath over the Bible and was inaugurated in as Governor of New York, he admitted to having his own infidelity problems. And so who really is the joke on? Of course Paterson’s and Spitzer’s situations are radically different but the point remains the same: When we go on witch hunts the hunts will eventually come to our own doorsteps.

The other night my friend, Jewish media guru Steven I. Weiss, asked me to go with him to hear Bernard Henri Levy's State of World Jewry lecture at the 92nd street Y in Manhattan. Levy can be very entertaining and so I decided to join him for the lecture. Perhaps the most comical part of an otherwise serious presentation came when the French philosopher went on a rant about the transforming face of anti-Semitism. In the medieval period, Christians accused Jews of killing their God, then in the modern period enlightenment thinkers accused Jews of creating the God they wished to kill, then when race came in style, Jews were accused of originating from a deformed race. You get the point. Whatever was the idiom of the day, it eventually became a weapon to use against the Jews.

A Palestinian gunmen today walked into Merkaz Harav Yeshiva gunning down eight boys in the middle of prayers. This horrible act of terror is but another sad chapter in this 60-year war. Yet, it represents an emerging trend in the sorry state of relations between Palestinians and Israelis–one based in the house of study. As this war continues, it's bloodying and blurring the lines between what is politics and what is theology, what is sacred and what is profane, and what is holy and what is secular. A 60-year battle is being re-turned into an eternal war.

To understand the significance of this act one needs to understand who and what is Merkaz ha-Rav. Simply put, the act is nothing short of a Jew walking in to Al-Ahzar University or Notre Dame and wantonly killing Christians taking the Eucharist or Muslims prostrating themselves to Allah. Mercaz is the leading religious Zionist learning center. It is also a hotbed of settler ideology and the recent events will only further radicalize the student body.