Month: February 2016

Healthy and unhealthy religion (continued)

~ The Accidental Rabbi ~ 2 Comments

Maurice here: just discovered this person who blogs at “The Evangelical Liberal.” Though the language and symbols of his or her faith are different than mine, I sense some kindred values and approaches to religion in general, and so I thought I’d re-post one of his/her posts (still trying to find out the name of the blogger)….

 

Continued from Healthy and unhealthy religion Characteristics of unhealthy religion Conversely, some obvious characteristics of unhealthy religion might include abuse, control, repression, coercion…

Source: Healthy and unhealthy religion (continued)

Talking Points from The Accidental Rabbi

~ The Accidental Rabbi ~ Leave a comment

I am hoping that, assuming she gets the Dem nomination (which seems likely), if Hillary ends up facing off against, say, Rubio and he comes at her with the standard GOP trickle down economics bs, her response sounds something like:

“You guys wrecked the economy. We fixed it. There’s more to do, but we fixed it. And now you want to break it again with the same policies that wrecked it in the first place.”

You broke it. We fixed it. You want to break it again. We want to protect it and build on our success.

Or maybe the metaphor should be medical?

“You guys made our economy so sick it almost died. We revived it and got it back on its feet. Now you want the chance to do the same things you did before that made it sick in the first place. We want to help it keep healing and getting stronger.”

Along those metaphoric lines: “your prescription for making this recovery spread faster to the middle class is to cut taxes for the rich and the big corporations, and to let the big banks to whatever they want? If you were doctors you’d have your licenses revoked! Our

The GOP’s Rx will make the patient sick again.

prescription is to do more for average Americans, to protect the things that have gotten better for them in this hard-fought recovery, and do even more to make this economy even healthier and stronger for everyone.”

 

And: “you fought us tooth and nail every step of the way as we tried to heal this economy, and despite you we’ve gotten our economy back on its feet. What we need to do now is keep strengthening the patient, by making sure average Americans get a fair deal, by making the system work even better for the middle class. We should build on Obama’s success reviving the economy, not pull the plug on what’s working and give the patient the same bad prescription that threw the economy into cardiac arrest!”

Am I any good at this? I don’t know, but I do enjoy thinking and writing this stuff…

 

Hillary’s not a right wing wolf in sheep’s clothing, Bernie actually is electable, and all the GOP candidates scare me silly

~ The Accidental Rabbi ~ Leave a comment

Since we live in an online media/social media era and more of us than ever have the chance to write up our takes on the political moment, I’ve decided I’ll join in the cacophony. Here’s my basic take on a bunch of stuff in no particular order:

One: Hillary Clinton is not the person that her haters say she is. This is true for her right wing haters, but right now I’m talking about her pro-Sanders haters, and there are quite a few out there. Is she the progressive’s progressive, the pure outsider who isn’t tainted by questionable concessions to power, or by ties to Wall Street and centrist elements in the Democratic party? Obviously not. But is she the right wing wolf in sheep’s clothing, the corporate shill, the warmongering neocon that her haters claim? No, that claim just makes no sense at all. It ignores so much of her professional and political history.

This is clearly a woman who is passionate about public policy as it affects children (Children’s Defense Fund); as it affects women in the workplace; as it affects working class and middle class families trying to make it; as it affects religious minorities; as it affects immigrants, undocumented and legal. She hasn’t hesitated to stand up for Muslim-Americans in the face of the racist intimidation that Trump & Co have put out there. She hasn’t hesitated to support the Dream Act and a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants. Her campaign has been out loud and proud in support of LGBT Americans, with impressively strong and unambiguous ads supporting Trans rights. And Hillary is also the person who, as part of Obama’s Administration, did a ton of hard work as SecState to put together the international coalition that produced the Iran Nuclear Agreement, preventing a neocon war with Iran that had tons of powerful interests behind it. And she’s the person who demonstrated that she could put personal pain aside and go to work for Obama after losing to him. She’s also the person who led a major effort to craft universal health insurance legislation in the early 1990s, then lent her political support to Obama’s successful effort to get the ACA passed, and now wants to preserve and expand what’s been gained.

Am I pretending that she doesn’t have a mixed record, that she doesn’t have political allies and friends on Wall Street, that she didn’t vote the wrong way on W’s war resolution? I’m not. I get it. She’s not 100% pure as a progressive, and she’s got such a wide range of friends, supporters, and connections that there’s more than enough fodder for just about anyone to paint a portrait of her as a right wing wolf in sheep’s clothing.

The problem is that in order to paint that portrait, you have to cherry pick the things you talk about. You have to list her moments of political compromise, expediency, or even lack of courage in a row while ignoring all of her impressive, hard-fought, progressive, and determined stands and accomplishments. I didn’t support Hillary in 2008, and as Obama moved into position to win the nomination, I admit that by that time I had come to seriously dislike her. But the way she handled herself after that defeat, and the way she served as SecState seriously impressed me. She rebuilt the U.S.’s international reputation as a country that is capable of diplomacy, not just cowboy militarism. She re-established our good name in the international community, and she advanced Obama’s foreign policy objectives with effectiveness and intelligence. She got China and Russia to agree to form a single negotiating team with the U.S. to confront Iran, culminating in the Iran Nuclear Deal, which has probably prevented us from being back at war on a massive scale in the Persian Gulf. So I’m not buying the hate from the left of the left.

Two: I’m also not buying the claim that Bernie shouldn’t be nominated because he’s “un-electable” because he’s a Democratic Socialist. I know that’s frequently put out there by HRC supporters and by the MSM as a reason to give Dems pause before supporting Bernie with a primary or caucus vote. But the polling that exists so far, and my sense of the zeitgeist, tells me that there’s not really good evidence to support this argument. I think the truth is that whether Bernie’s Democratic Socialism (or his older age or his Jewishness or his outsiderness) make him un-electable is something we just don’t know. He presents us with an unknown. What appears to be true is that public attitudes towards socialism are more nuanced than they were a couple decades ago, and that adults under 40 in particular don’t generally think of Bernie’s association with socialism as a deal breaker, though they’re not necessarily sold on Democratic Socialism either. I think the reality is that if Bernie were to win the nomination, and if HRC endorsed him, and the party really got behind him, his chances would depend a lot on who the GOP nominates. If they nominate Trump or Cruz, I would bet on Bernie to win. If Trump isn’t nominated and runs as an independent, I think Bernie would win the general handily. So would Hillary. If it were a Trump vs Sanders vs Bloomberg election, I’d still give the edge to Bernie. So yeah, he’s electable, partly cuz social attitudes have changed, partly cuz the middle and working class folks are feeling left out of the recovery and he represents the idea of them finally getting their share, and partly because of how the other party is (horrifically) proceeding with their own chaotic awful nomination process. I think Dems should vigorously support Bernie or HRC but resolve to support the Dem nominee no matter who wins.

Three: The thing that scares me in this election cycle is the Republicans, period. Not Hillary’s lack of progressive purity. The fact that the “moderates” among them are doing so poorly makes me take seriously a Trump or Cruz nomination as a possibility. If it ends up being a Rubio nomination, at least he’s not insane, though he reminds me of W in that I don’t think there’s a whole lot there beyond the surface, and he seems like a ready-made puppet for the Karl Rove /neocon crowd to manipulate. That also scares me plenty. Kasich and Bush seem to be the most reasonable / moderate, and – it kills me to write this – but Bush actually seems more moderate than Kasich. The Jebster at least has repeatedly argued against Muslim-bashing, and he’s not parroting the same awful lines on immigrants as Trump and Cruz. He also has experienced America as a multi-cultural place, in both his family life and in his political life in Florida, one of the most culturally and racially diverse states of all. Like I said, I cringe writing this, as I have so much stored up bitterness over W and over the Iraq war and the SCOTUS people he appointed, not to mention what he did to the economy and what Cheney did along with him. But there is no Jon Huntsman among the GOP candidates this cycle, and there’s nobody the likes of candidates like former Republican senator John Danforth or even Bob Dole – people I respected even though I disagreed with them. In the 1996 campaign, I saw TV footage of Dole on the campaign trail one day, in which one of his supporters used extremely disrespectful and hostile language as she referred to Bill Clinton. Dole interrupted the person and said, “Let me make something clear. President Clinton is my opponent, not my enemy.” I remember my respect for him jumping up a bunch of points that day. That’s called having a sense of what it means to do politics in a civil society.

So, to recap: Hillary is a solidly liberal, superbly qualified Democratic standard bearer who is smart and compassionate and has withstood incredible adversity. She is not secretly the devil. Bernie’s campaign is awesomely helping shape American politics, and yes he could win the general. The GOP candidates are awful, their front-runners are intensely dangerous, under the right circumstances they could win the general, and if one of them does win the White House we’re going to see a bunch of really bad stuff happen fast. Dems and progressives should support who they prefer in the primary race, but come together behind the nominee and campaign hard in November, because we have so much to lose and, potentially, a lot of Obama-era progress to build upon. I’m glad we’ve settled all of this. Now I fully expect everyone out there to accept my opinions and act positively based upon them, and I thank everyone for that in advance :).

 

Enough with the genes stuff. You’d think we’d have learned our lesson by now.

~ The Accidental Rabbi ~ Leave a comment

So, I’m on FB and I see this post:

ashkenaz

Despite the worried look on the Orthodox Jewish man in the photo accompanying the post, I don’t think it’s particularly surprising to find out that after Jews lived in Europe for many, many centuries, their genetic heritage includes significant European components. Even in Ancient Israel, Jews were never a racial group or a hermetically sealed ethnic group. Israel is at the geographical meeting place of three continents, and empires based in all three of those continents conquered and intermingled with the ancient Judeans over a long period of time. The reason I presume that Jews who’ve lived in very different parts of the world over time have come to physically resemble the people in the dominant cultures in which they’ve lived is that there has always been a certain degree of intermarriage and of conversion. Also, as this article points out – as far back as 2600 years ago, with the Babylonian exile of a large part of the Israelite population, there’s been a sizable Jewish diaspora throughout different parts of the Middle East. Greek and Roman domination of ancient Israel also facilitated movement of some Jews to the big cities and ports of the Mediterranean.

What worries me about these genetic studies is how quickly they tend to get used, in the form of ideologically motivated pseudo-science, to make absolutist “racial” claims about whether or not the Jews have a national connection to the land of Israel, or whether or not the Jews are “really Jews.” But who says that blood and genes are what defines the Jewish people?

I think it’s fair to say that ethnic/religious communities get to decide for themselves how they define themselves. In the case of the Jews, there have been several ways that people have become part of “the tribe.” For 1000 years or so, the children of Israelite fathers, not mothers, were considered Jews-by-birth. Roughly around the time of the Romans, the early rabbinic community facilitated a shift to defining Jewish identity by birth to the mothers. But people could always convert, and at different times during the very long sweep of Jewish history, significant numbers of people did.

And no, I’m not referring to the whole meme about the entire Kingdom of the Khazars converting en masse in the Middle Ages, which has become a trope in an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that basically argues that Ashkenazi Jews aren’t “real Jews” because they almost all descend from the (utterly unproven) “Khazar conversion,” and therefore the Ashkenazi Jews of the world maintain a public lie about their very identity, and then – the conspiracy theory tends to go – use that lie in order to justify their support for the state of Israel.

The conversions into Judaism by meaningful numbers of people that I’m referring to took place in many different lands where Jews lived in Diaspora communities. In Rome, in what is now Turkey, in Persia, in Egypt, in Greece, etc. Jews aren’t and have never been a racial group. People have not needed to be born into the group to join the group, and the transmission of Jewish identity from generation to generation has been more about community, shared beliefs, shared ritual and cultural practices, and a shared sense of history and destiny than the “purity” of bloodlines. As Rabbi Jack Cohen, z’l, once wrote:

“Throughout the long age from the destruction of the 2nd Temple in 70 C.E. [until the modern era, the Jews were] a unique, spiritually motivated and united trans-territorial society.”

So the genetic stuff is interesting, but it doesn’t tell us all that much, nor does it qualify or disqualify real people from their understandings of their own identities.

 

Al Regel Achat / Judaism on One Foot

~ The Accidental Rabbi ~ Leave a comment

I’m thinking about possibly starting an online Jewish education venture that would involve me creating a series of 4 to 6 minute long YouTube videos offering a quickie overview of different Jewish texts, historical figures, etc.  I know that there are already a few things out there, like the fabulous G-dcast, but I think there’s a niche I could establish that would help a lot of people and possibly generate some good career opportunities for me.

A couple years ago I was monkeying around with this concept and I created this “Overview of Sacred Jewish Texts” video, which is too long, muddled, and visually uninteresting to quite fit the bill.

I like the idea of creating videos that make Jewish texts, from the different books of the Torah to various rabbinic texts, accessible to the general public. My vision is to create videos that are not dumbed down, but that remain committed to high degrees of comprehension from viewers who are newcomers. Each video would end with a screen shot of recommended links to other online resources that viewers can use to expand upon what they’ve learned in my videos. I’d call that the “Now go and learn…” feature, echoing the ancient sage, Hillel, who is responsible for both the “on one foot” and the “go and learn” memes in Judaism.

I’m interested in what kinds of grants I might be able to apply for. Perhaps I should go ahead and create a starter set of these videos and then seek additional funding. I don’t know. Interested in others thoughts in the comments here or privately.

Here’s another example of a video I created that seeks to help people use a structured method to writing a d’var Torah (a sermon) on the weekly Torah portion.

Again, I feel it’s a bit dry, but I wonder if anyone out there would be willing to comment or send me private feedback as to whether something like this would be useful.

Thanks everyone!