The Mah Yofis'nikkes are out in force. First it was Harry Maryles giving me a full - and free - and unsolicited - psychoanalysis and telling me how wrong I am to think that Ms. Kagan's nomination to the SCOTUS will cause anti-Semitism due to her being the 3rd Jewish - and Liberal - judge. out of nine, mind you! Then, yesterday I get this comment from one E. Fink who tells me that my post inspired him to write one as well, on his blog. Everybody who's anybody has a blog these days, it seems. he too was appalled at me bringing up the idea that we're not as safe here as we think, especially with the economy in the tank. Why they haven't heard a single word in the mainstream media about the fact that she's Jewish ------- which sums it all up for the rest of us. His second "proof" that none of this matters was that during the recent economic crash he never heard Jews being blamed, despite the fact that Jews were heavily involved in many of the firms responsible for the crisis. You needn't be a Mar B'Rav Ashi to know why they didn't do it, especially when religion is VERY important to the very same people in the media when it's John Roberts that's up for nomination... I guess people like Harry think that all that matters is what he sees and hears and the people he speaks to. That's the beginning and the end of the world for him. Sort of like the people in the Upper West Side who can't imagine how Bush won the election when NOBODY they know voted for him...
STOP THE PRESSES! Harry's rethinking his position Re: Rubashkin!!!! and all it took was a little PBS...
What gets me about this attitude - and I might be wrong on the Kagan issue - is that these same people have issues with Jews in Postville being insular, sticking to their religion, not mingling with the locals. I guess Sholom Mordche should've known that he would need to kick back and enjoy some cold ones with Farmer Brown every now and then. Later on, coming to Postville and North Dakota and Cedar Rapids during the trials of Sholom Mordche was also terrible, they said. He should be there by himself, they said, why should we stick it to the goyim by coming out there and showing our support to him. It'll only make it worse for him, they said. We're being too pushy, they said. When they organized minyanim at the sentencing hearings and the pictures were broadcast over the news wires they told us that the guys should daven in a shul - in Cedar Rapids, mind you - and not infuriate the prosecution even more. Besides for the fact that I never thought that we'd be judged by the scene at the trial - excuse me for thinking that facts and evidence were the only factors - I cannot sit here and not bring to your attention the utter hypocrisy of those people who think that being insular is what causes Antisemitism, not disproportionate power. If you think it's not hypocrisy, but, rather, stupidity I'll agree to that. But what are they thinking?! These are supposed to be educated people with degrees from America's highest educational institutions, not boors like the Haredim who never stepped out of the Ghetto! Why don't they see what's so clear?!
25 comments:
So ummm, about that testimony in the child labor trial. Not turning your stomach yet? Comfortable with your own kids cleaning vats of ammonia and hauling 100 lbs of turkey carcasses?
ummm, last time I checked SMR didn't round them up at gunpoint, right?
SMR must be glad you are not his lawyer since making 14 year olds leave school to haul vats of carcasses until they cough blood is actually not ok, even if you dont threaten the 14 year old at gunpoint.
right. and he knew they were 14 and went down to Guatemala and basically forced them to work for him, since they had no jobs and needed to pay the smugglers. SO he should be tried for illegal transfer or minors across state lines as well....
Yeah you are right. Before SMR can be charged with the crimes he did commit, you need to invent fanciful imaginary crimes that he did not commit and acquit him of those. That is exactly how trials work in America.
"Everybody who's anybody"
they are both nobodies.
You worried about Harry M?
You gotta be kidding me. A bigger blowhard doesn't exist anywhere on the blogosphere. OK - maybe Neanderthal, but I think his own wife knows he a shvantz, but Harry M? Say it aint so. Just smile and remind him to take his meds.
harry maryles is an oicher yisroel, shoteh, gass ruach and baal gaavah. he would move to a pig farm in kansas if he knew what was good for him.
nobody brings more shame to r aaron soloveitchik than harry the fool maryles!
oy lerabo shelamdo tora umada
Then, yesterday I get this comment from one E. Fink who tells me that my post inspired him to write one as well, on his blog.
Don't hog all the credit. My post
http://innate-differences.blogspot.com/2010/05/one-picture-worth-1000-kikes.html
had something to do with it as well. Also you forgot about DBs post which was the most eloquent of the three bashing us.
http://dovbear.blogspot.com/2010/05/open-letter-to-some-of-kagens-jewish.html
It's not often that you and i and Neture Karta are mentioned in the same breath.
Tuvyeh Bloy in an interview to Bais Moshiach!!!
Again , proof that Meshichisten and the so called "real" Chabad are one and the same!!!!!
And you are, as usual the kool-aider and apologist.
Seen the new bio on the Rebbe?
I haven't yet, but I"m sure that you and yours as the kool-aided robots u r are going to criticize the book, which is your right,BUT, as usual you guys won't even read it, and still have the chutzpah to criticize it.Just like you and yours did to Bergers book!
Good shabes
Josh
do you have proof that SMR knew that this shorties were 14 year olds? since you are a professional Mosser call the Iowa AG Yemach Shemoi to help him out.
Oh, right, the laws of Mesirah include the hidden siman that says that watching a debacle of a trial makes you a mosser.
Gotta watch out for the hidden semanim in shulchan aruch.
Theyre a bitch.
So far the kiddie liars are being demolished on the stand. 100 pound turkeys is what they are, though most probably weighed more than that when they managed to earn a little money by Agri to pay off the coyotes.
New bio on the Rebbe, anyone???
Comments?
Josh
You are such an optimist.You actually think you"ll make these drones think for themselves?
Still, I hope SMR gets out of this horrible mess.He has learned a hard lesson and he is not a bad man.
I wonder how Harry puts up with the dirt you allow about him here.Supposedly he and your dad even go back??
I guess Lubavitchers and the people attracted to cult personality see these things as normative.
Reminds me of the kid who ratted his father out to Stalins regime and was used as an exemplary example.
Lubavitch ubber alles!!!
ah, Shlomo, more drivel from you...
1) him and my father know each other from way back. They don't "go way back." they haven't spoken in over 40 years.
2) He has allowed ALOT worse to be posted about me, even going as far as allowing the outing of myself on his site. I guess with him the excuse is he's doing it for journalistic freedom reasons, right? and with him you find no faults, I assume.
Shlomo uber alles, right, ferd?
"1) him and my father know each other from way back. They don't "go way back." they haven't spoken in over 40 years."
Oh, so now it's ok,right? (btw, I was surprised that Harry would have anything to do with your dad since Harry is a bright articulate individual who is a truth searcher and you are anything but, something I guess as "brah kareh de'avuhah" you picked up from dad, though thankfully I have not made his acquaintance to verify that)
I don't know what he has "allowed" about you.I find it difficult to believe you, though, since Harry is very makpid about profanity and ad hominems.Maybe you are talking before the comments were moderated.
Anyway, since you are so "proud" of your attraction to Lubavitch and it's personality worship, why would you mind if someone "outed" you?
It would probably get you "shishy" on shabbes and a raise from the Lubab p.r department
I see. so you're upset at me for allowing negative comments about HM and you show your displeasure by making ad hominem attacks against myself and my father?
and that's supposed to make you look honorable and well-meaning?
am I missing something here, or am I just not as intellectually capable as your mighty self to understand the deep meaning of your so-brilliantly put comment?
Like I said: ferd.
"I see. so you're upset at me for allowing negative comments about HM and you show your displeasure by making ad hominem attacks against myself and my father?"
---------------------------
Sooo totally off.
I"m not "upset" at you.I was just surprised at Harry's patience and "savlonus".From you I did not expect better.It's par for the course for you and Lubavitch inc.You've allowed the most monstrous charges against real rabbonim on your blog, for example.
-----------------------------------
"am I missing something here, or am I just not as intellectually capable as your mighty self to understand the deep meaning of your so-brilliantly put comment?"
----------------------------------
I"m far from brilliant, but you are correct in (cynically)stating the fact of your intellectual shortcomings.You are a intellectual midget and a mindless drone.
"I"m not "upset" at you.I was just surprised at Harry's patience and "savlonus".From you I did not expect better.It's par for the course for you and Lubavitch inc.You've allowed the most monstrous charges against real rabbonim on your blog, for example."
Are you for real? If want to see "the most monstrous charges against real rabbonim" you should take a gander at the UOJ blog or DovBear blog.They attack rabbonim,rabeim and roshei yeshivos of every hue and color and their far,far from being PR men for Lubavitch.
This is for you Vodka is KOOD...?????
Part one
Book review from the Jewish Week
‘The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson” by Samuel Heilman and Menachem Friedman (Princeton University Press) fills a considerable void in the biography of one of the towering religious figures of the 20th century. But on reading it, one wonders whether the object of the biography is the same Lubavitcher Rebbe the world came to know and admire for pioneering Jewish outreach in the modern age and for being arguably the figure most responsible for the global resurgence in Jewish affiliation.
Full disclosure: I consider myself a student and chasid of the rebbe, and thus cannot be completely objective of what is essentially a critical biography of a man whom I revere as a spiritual guide and teacher.
Heilman and Friedman’s central thesis is that Menachem Schneerson, son of a renowned rabbinic scholar and scion of a distinguished chasidic family, was never completely engaged by his chasidic upbringing, preferring instead the modernizing and secularizing influences that made such significant inroads among young Jewish intellectuals in early 20th-century Russia and Europe. The rebbe’s dream was to live the life of a bourgeois European intellectual and become an engineer, they contend. He yearned not for the chasidic study halls of Warsaw or Lubavitch but for the intellectual cafes of Berlin and Paris. As such, he chose, according to the authors, to trim his beard, wear modern suits, and distance himself from the chasidic community in Paris, where he and his wife, the daughter of the previous Lubavitcher Rebbe (whose place Menachem Schneerson would eventually fill), lived after their marriage.
The rebbe’s ultimate career goal, the authors maintain, was to be a successful engineer. However, after fleeing Hitler to the United States and the court in Brooklyn of his father-in-law, Rabbi Joseph Isaac Schneerson, he gradually accepted the undeniable facts that he was a forty-something immigrant with little English and less chance of making significant inroads as a successful secular professional. Hence, after his father-in-law passed away in July 1950, he reluctantly accepted that a career as a chasidic rebbe would have to do.
I don’t buy it.
I watched the rebbe lead Lubavitch since I was 9 years old. It was a herculean undertaking with responsibilities that would boggle the mind. It meant keeping up with and responding to sacks of personal letters each week, overseeing a global empire of thousands of Chabad synagogues, schools, teaching colleges, orphanages, and drug rehabilitation centers, most of which the rebbe, through his emissaries, built. Each week he met in the middle of the night with individuals privately to discuss their most personal issues, giving a weekly (and sometimes twice weekly) public oration that lasted, on average, for four hours through which the rebbe gave masterful scholarly discourses without a single written note. Well into his 80s he stood on his feet every Sunday for hours giving thousands of visitors a dollar for tzedakah in order to meet them face to face and inspire them to do good acts.
Are we really to believe that a man who utterly transformed the face of Judaism worldwide and who, by the authors’ own admission, changed Chabad from a small chasidic group which had been decimated by Hitler into a global powerhouse of Jewish outreach, achieved all these things by reluctantly choosing this life because he couldn’t be an engineer?
Heilman and Friedman explain how the rebbe, rather than his older brother-in-law, Shmaryahu Gurary, unexpectedly ended up as leader of Chabad. In an early chapter they explain that the rebbe, who was largely an unknown quantity to the chasidim, won them over through his wide-ranging scholarship of the great Jewish texts in general and Chabad chasidism in particular. But the authors make no effort to explain how the rebbe acquired this encyclopedic knowledge or went on to publish more than 106 scholarly volumes of his writings.
Part two
"Indeed, this omission constitutes the book’s fatal flaw. Any biography of the rebbe is necessarily a study in scholarship and leadership. But the authors offer little insight in explaining how a man who never attended formal yeshiva ended up with what I believe to be a photographic memory of Judaism’s vast works that would later mesmerize the educated masses that came to hear him.
Aside from insisting that the rebbe’s messianic agenda largely spurred Chabad’s global growth, the book does not deal with how the rebbe created what is arguably the most influential movement in modern Jewish history.
The authors insist that from his earliest years as leader the Rebbe was already promoting his own messianic pretensions. In his inaugural chasidic oration on Jan. 17, 1951, he spoke of how the seventh shepherd (he was preceded by six Chabad leaders) is the one most responsible for bringing God’s presence down to earth. The authors cite other allusions from the rebbe’s public orations as well that suggest messianic parallels to himself.
But I was personally present on Oct. 20, 1984, when the Rebbe sharply rebuked Rabbi Sholom Dovber Wolpo, who had written a book asserting that the rebbe was the Messiah, ordering that the book never see the light of day. Beyond that, I contend that most great leaders believe they are anointed for some great redemptive purpose, from politicians to religious figures, and the rebbe was no exception.
Surely the authors don’t deny that Messianism is central to Judaism and surely the rebbe’s global effectiveness made him as much a possible candidate as anyone else during his lifetime. What the rebbe never did was declare himself the Messiah, which is why the authors must comb through hundreds of speeches to force allusions.
I cannot help but harbor the belief that the authors started with a particular agenda — that the rebbe portrayed himself as obsessed with Jewish observance when, in his younger years, he was himself not all that passionate — and then rummaged through a mountain of arbitrary facts to support their thesis. The book’s central premise is built on the assumption that an authentic chasidic life and secular intellectual engagement are incompatible.
None of this means that Heilman and Friedman’s biography is without merit. On the contrary, I welcome their humanizing portrait of the rebbe. I was edified to discover many of the facts of the rebbe’s sojourn in Berlin and Paris and how he integrated himself into intellectual European life. This forward-looking embrace of modernity would later constitute the principal reason for Chabad’s unprecedented success, a unique synthesis of uncompromising Jewish adherence matched with a passion to utilize all modern means by which to propagate a Jewish message.
Whereas other chasidic groups — most notably Satmar — dismissed the modern, secular world as utterly devoid of redeeming merit, the rebbe saw its unqualified Godly potential. To be sure, there are misguided members of Chabad who almost deify the rebbe and raise him to a level of perfection. But people like me followed the rebbe because of his thorough understanding of, and engagement with, the modern world.
Fortunately, Heilman and Friedman attempt to separate fact from fiction in the rebbe’s life, countering some of his followers’ attempts at hagiography of their leader as miracle-worker or Messiah. Most striking to me was the rebbe’s devotion and humanity, seeking to inspire children and making himself available to people like me when we came to him with our shattered hearts.
He was a man of great humility, utterly lacking in materialistic impulse or personal gain. Perhaps the most powerful rabbi in the world, able to influence Israeli elections from across the Atlantic, he spent the last years of his life living, literally, in his tiny office, and never in 40 years of leadership did he take a vacation or a day off from his work."
He said on the radio that he can't believe that the Rebbe's motivations weren't pure, c"v, because the Rebbe sent him on a shlichus of some sorts, and if what the book says is true, it means he got duped by the Rebbe. He said that since he doesn't want to believe that he was duped, must be the book is wrong.
I don't know who he was trying to "get-to" with that tayneh. Most of us don't take the book seriously and know the Rebbe only had selfless motives. Obviously, someone who thinks that that is not muchach (thinks there is a possibility it isn't the case) and might believe the book, is not gonna be convinced by is whinning. It makes no sense
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