A reader sends this New
A reader sends this New York Times link in with the comment, “Here's why it's so freakin' weird over there…”
Amen. That's the point I was making on Friday (below) about Thornton's piece. Look at this quote from the article, uttered by Moshe Yurovich, a 22-year old yeshiva student from the Orthodox Beit Yisrael neighborhood, in response to repeated bombings there: "When someone who loves you hits you, you don't get angry." Referring not to terrorists…but to God.
Never mind what such an attitude may indicate about Orthodox attitudes towards wife-beating. Some of these Orthodox folks believe that their God, the paternalistic and (apparently) lovingly violent God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is arranging to have them blown up in order to get them back in line. "If we behave better, the troubles will end,” says another Orthodox student.
Now, I'm all for that sentiment if by “behaving better” he means treating all people with respect and recognizing their common humanity in the sight of God. But, what he really means is "We have to study and follow the Torah, keep the Sabbath, and love one another," and by “one another” I am fairly certain he doesn't mean Gentiles, particularly Arabs.
A case in point is currently idling by the curb a block away from my office here in New York: the Chabad Lubovitch Mitzvah Tank. It's an RV that's driven around the city by Orthodox devotees of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, whom they call Messiah or Moschiach. Klesmer music is piped from a little PA horn speaker on the RV's roof. The Mitvah Tank serves as a mobile outreach to members of the Jewish faith, encouraging them in the observance of the Mitzvot, or commandments of the Torah. Along the side, the Mitvah Tank reads: “Torah Education…Holy Books…Sefer Torah…Tefillin…Torah…Shabat Candles…Kashruth…Charity…Family Purity…Love Your Fellow Jew…Mezuzah.”
Not “Love Your Fellow Human Being,” or even “Love Your Fellow Man.” Love Your Fellow Jew. The rest of us, it seems, will have to make do without the Rebbe's Charity.
The Mitzvah Tank is a gasoline-powered representation of an ethnically-based eschatological worldview in which the end of history is rapidly approaching. Such a viewpoint doesn't bode well for the prospects of peace…after all, when the Messiah comes, it will all be moot, won't it?
The Islamists would force compliance with Sharia for everyone, Muslim and infidel alike. The Orthodox, it seems, only truly care about their own relationship with God, and merely suffer the existence of the rest of Gentile mankind. That's not the same thing by any stretch of the imagination, but still carries with it the unpleasant sense of a people set apart from the rest of humanity.
I can only hope that the fundamentalists among the Muslim and the Jewish peoples fail to achieve any more influence within their respective communities. They're both flip sides of the same corrupt coin, and it is the responsibility of the majority within both faiths to decry such prejudices.
