From David Bernstein at the well-known Volokh Conspiracy blog:

Next time you hear someone criticizing Israel’s “checkpoints” for Palestinians, think about this: a surprise checkpoint set up Thursday prevented an Islamic Jihad terrorist from blowing up a children’s Hanukkah party in Tel Aviv. The checkpoints have many harsh consequences on innocent Palestinians, but the blame for these hardships lies with the terrorists who try to infiltrate Israel to murder innocents. And it shouldn’t need pointing out, but it unfortunately does, that before Palestinian terrorists starting using suicide bombings in response to the Oslo peace agreement, West Bank and Gaza Palestinians could come and go from Israel and within the territories rather freely, with over 100,000 Palestinians working in Israel proper (for much better wages than they could receive at home) daily.

Hat Tip: Ezzie, who also mentions the passing of Dr. Abraham Luchins, z”l. Dr. Luchins was a past member of the board of the OU. His son David Luchins was for many years the trusted aide of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of NY and remains active on behalf of the community — may he and the entire family have a nechama (consolation) among all those who mourn for Zion and Jerusalem, and may we share many happy occasions.

After so many articles in the Jewish media praising the latest fad, it is a relief to read one like “Pop Goes The Hipster Judaism Bubble” from The Jewish Week.

“There’s something really appealing about hipster Judaism, but it often seems to be substanceless,” said Bari Weiss, a Columbia University junior and the editor of The Current, a new journal of politics, culture and Jewish affairs. “ I don’t think any project can sustain itself on great marketing. … Cool T-shirts aren’t going to save the Jewish people. Good falafel isn’t going to make people think Israel has the right to exist.”

Portraying being Jewish as “hip” or “cool” may look good, but in the long run isn’t going to ensure our survival as a people. Count me among those who really didn’t expect the Jewish Week to confront that so bluntly — she is quoted as an authority, not a nay-sayer. But it gets even better:

Weiss wonders if today’s 20- and 30-somethings Jews are really so different from those who came before them.

I know that we’ve talked about Intelligent Design quite a bit already, but I think it worthwhile to reference the memo from Ed Sisson posted by Rabbi Adlerstein back in June before leaving the topic. It seems to answer many of the criticisms posted in recent comments. In order to cover them all, this turned into a much longer post than I intended… maybe I should have done one at a time? In any case, here it is.

Ed Sisson was the lead counsel at the Kansas hearings on Intelligent Design. I don’t know who was the defense counsel for the Dover School Board, but if it wasn’t Mr. Sisson, perhaps his presence might have changed the results. His memo explains to his colleagues at Arnold & Porter why he — and by extension, the firm — undertook pro bono representation of the minority position in the Kansas case. He, too, brings home the point that there is only one real difference between evolution and ID: evolution posits that “the origin of species” is the result of fortuitous coincidence; ID posits that the probabilities for chance origin are so remote as to be untenable, thus requiring an intelligent designer.

Many of the criticisms miscontrued ID as somehow contradicting the observed similarities of species. For example,

Though the economic crisis of the chareidi community in Israel is much discussed subject, that discussion typically focuses on the threat to our yeshivos or trumpeting the percentage of children under the poverty line to demonstrate the failure of the government’s social and economic program. Much less frequently discussed is the impact of poverty on our homes and families.

I know of no authoritative statistics on the number of gittin (divorces) in the chareidi community, but each one of us is privy to plenty of anecdotal evidence of the rise in divorce, in particular among young couples. Prior to the Gaza withdrawal, the black humor in at least one community with a high concentration of younger couples went: “Yehudi aino m’garesh Yehudi, aval Yehudi megaresh Yehudiah — A Jew does not expel another Jew, but a Jew does divorce a Jewess.”

Economic factors are rarely the only factors behind divorce. But no one would deny that economic pressures are adding new stresses to marriage, and that many marriages are not standing up to the strain. As Chazal say, “Arguments are not found in a man’s home, except as a consequece of [a lack of] grain” (Bava Metziah 59b).

Having been trained to question premises and to challenge conventional wisdoms, I am often perplexed by seemingly intelligent and intellectually honest individuals who respond to another’s view with an intolerance reflecting not merely disagreement, but also indignation at the very contemplation of the alternative. Rather than engage in mindful exploration of fact or opinion, the response presupposes a full and final analysis, and indicates that the mere contemplation of a different conclusion results from the pathetic reliance upon faulty information, or, more likely, small mindedness. The appropriate role for the United Sates in Iraq, the nature and entitlements of a Palestinian people, the declaration of the Rebbe as Moshiach, or whether the Yankees are the premier franchise in sports history are among topics that simply cannot be raised among certain groups.

But is that wrong? Does intellectual honesty compel the listener to entertain any and all opinions, or at least desist from dismissing as frivolous views that are so apparently ludicrous? Or is there a distinction between what notions I am entitled to dismiss in my internal thought process and what ideas I may appropriately dismiss publicly when articulated by another? I suggest that the summary dismissal of another’s views is triggered by one of three general motivations.

First there is the “I need the conclusion” mode. This arises when a debatable idea has alternate, practical consequences, but the consequences of only one of those alternatives is tolerable under the circumstances . For example, after directing a young, distressed teenager either to abort or carry to term, one may find it difficult to entertain openly the justifications for the alternative view on abortion. Or after having spent decades compromising family and fortune to support a particular ideology, it may prove difficult to tolerate another’s view that the ideology is unjust or worse.

Then there is the “it’s one way to win a debate” approach. Dismissing as frivolous an opposing view is often utilized by those who have little foundation for their own position. When the discussion is more akin to a game than to exploring truths, one holding a losing hand can most easily avoid defeat by scattering the deck and declaring a foul. Closely related are those who care little whether the dismissive response will influence the party whose views are being obliterated since the response is intended for the ears of third parties, whom the debater is hoping to influence by declaring the foolishness of the objectional views. To the third parties, the blanket dismissal of the original view signals that the opinion is frivolous and unworthy of consideration.

I seldom disagree with Gil Student, whose Hirhurim is the only other blog I routinely look at. I don’t share his misgivings about the widespread use of a Hebrew legend invoking Hashem’s assistance – like BS”D – crowning the top of every scrap of paper people produce.

Gil points out that the Chasam Sofer and Rav Chaim Soloveitchik were apparently not in the habit of writing such a formula. Why, he asks, are we frummer than the giants of the past?

The answer, I believe, is in a Mishna in Berachos 54A, where Boaz is credited with a halachic innovation – apparently not practiced by the Gedolim of generations antecedent to his – of incorporating the Name of G-d while greeting people. The words of Rav Yosef Zev Lipovitz (Nachalas Yosef, Rus 2:4) are telling. He first explains that the practice seems to reduce the Majesty of G-d, by joining Him to the pedestrian and ordinary affairs of common folk. Of course, he writes, our mesorah actually insists on viewing Hashem as connected with the most mundane of our concerns and tasks. He continues:

Boaz and his beis din (court) were the first to incorporate this outlook into the Jewish life-style. They decreed that we should incorporate the Name of G-d in extending greetings to people, and to bless their handiwork with the Name of G-d. It appears that this was something that the times necessitated. They sought to repair breaches in the Jewish nation, and to offer a cure to the maladies of the times…

Rabbi Shafran sent me the following response to the comments on his article. I was pleased enough to get clearance from him to reprint a Jewish Observer article online (as compared to his Am Echad pieces). That he would respond to the comments is a pleasant surprise, and is probably about as close as Agudath Israel will come to engaging the blogosphere.

Thank you to all those who have sent in such well-thought-out, reasoned comments. I think it says a great deal that you helped create a high level of dialogue which a non-blogging-writer (and one with many demands on his time outside our little niche here) felt comfortable joining.

First and foremost, let me thank all of you who cared enough to both read my Jewish Observer article, which Rabbi Menken was kind enough to post on Cross-Currents, and to comment on it. The reason I write articles is largely to elicit such thoughtful responses, and I want you to know that your reactions, positive and negative alike, are deeply appreciated.

Due to the constraints on my time (and the experience of spending dozens of hours going back-and-forth on Moment’s reader feedback post-board after my article on the Conservative movement several years ago), I seldom enter discussions about things I have written. I felt, though, that the topic of teleology, and the philosophical idea’s social ramifications, are so important at this point in history that I wanted to at least comment on the remarks offered thus far. I don’t foresee that I will be able to engage in an ongoing discussion, but thought that I would at least acknowledge everyone’s reactions with my own to them.

I’m still gathering my thoughts after a wonderful Shabbos at the annual West Coast Orthodox Union Torah Convention. That’s a lot of words for one title, and it generated experiences and memories commensurate with its fullness.

For my wife and myself, it was an opportunity to spend much time with OU personalities we don’t get to see often. It was no less than thrilling to be around people who are bright, deep, well thought-out, and - how should I say it? – normal about their Yiddishkeit. Between Rabbi and Mrs Tzvi Hersh Weinreb, Dr and Mrs David Luchins, and Rabbi Chaim Eisen, we feasted on stories about Modzhitz and Rav Tzaddok, machshava of Rav Ahron Soloveitchik, and attempts to synthesize Maharal with Moreh Nevuchim.

There were some less-than-stellar moments as well, such as a panel discussion on pluralism, which I couldn’t bring myself to attend. It produced the risible prediction by the single leftist on the panel (forcefully rejected by the other panel participants) that it was simply a matter of time before the Orthodox world welcomed female rabbis to its midst. Two weeks earlier, the same rabbi called on Orthodoxy to move beyond “traditional parameters,” and heed the call to join heterodox rabbis on cooperative boards and in joint exploration of the Torah. This challenge was met with a no-nonsense rejection in an official letter signed by the OU’s President and Executive Vice President, and published in the Jewish Journal the very day the Convention began. One has to wonder whether the far left of Orthodoxy will have the courage to constitute itself as its own, separate denomination (it already has its own seminary), rather than continue its craving for the recognition by the Orthodox center that it cannot and should not be given.

The most painful moments, however, were reserved for the folks who had to endure my guest derasha (sermon) Shabbos morning. I spoke about cycles of history, including the Maharal’s approach to the trajectory of the four exiles as challenges to four parts of our being (emotions, body, intelligence, and the sum of the parts), and the Shalah’s understanding of the tension between Yosef and Yehudah. Two parts of my presentation went unpresented – one because I forgot, the second because it was far too long, although it silently animated my remarks.

Prof. Albert Alschuler of the University of Chicago is blogging his reactions to the ID decision (as noted by Michael Hobson).

Most of the Dover opinion says in effect to the proponents of intelligent design, “We know who you are. You’re Bible-thumpers.” The opinion begins, “The religious movement known as Fundamentalism began in nineteenth century America as a response to social changes, new religious thought, and Darwinism. Religiously motivated groups pushed state legislatures to adopt laws prohibiting public schools from teaching evolution, culminating in the Scopes ‘monkey trial’ of 1925.” When the Fundamentalists (the court often capitalizes the word) found themselves unable to ban Darwinism, they championed “balanced treatment,” then “creation science,” and finally “intelligent design.” According to the court, the agenda never changed. Dover is simply Scopes trial redux. The proponents of intelligent design are guilty by association, and today’s yahoos are merely yesterday’s reincarnated.

If fundamentalism still means what it meant in the early twentieth century, however — accepting the Bible as literal truth — the champions of intelligent design are not fundamentalists. They uniformly disclaim reliance on the Book and focus only on where the biological evidence leads. The court’s response – “well, that’s what they say, but we know what they mean” – is uncivil, an illustration of the dismissive and contemptuous treatment that characterizes much contemporary discourse. Once we know who you are, we need not listen. We’ve heard it all already.

Read more here and here.

In the article from Reuven Hammer that I quoted last week, he criticizes the adherence to halachic standards of conversion with the following statement:

This perversion of Judaism by placing unnecessary stumbling blocks before potential converts is particularly painful when one considers the fact that the number of Jews in the world is shrinking. If we have people who are eager to join us, why are we pushing them away?

In other words — we’re losing the battle with assimilation, and if we accept these converts we’ll keep our numbers up. This is the same argument that Reform leaders make in favor of patrilineal descent, just in favor of taking in the children rather than the parents themselves.

The latest Bnai Brith magazine makes this claim even more bluntly, with an article entitled “Hidden in Plain Sight” — but featured on the cover as “Lost Tribes: Can They Save The Jews?”

In most every area of computer science, the world has seen far more progress than we ever imagined possible back in 1950. Computer vision and control is so precise that we can launch a cruise missile from hundreds of miles away, and choose which window it will use to enter a building. We edit documents with point-and-click, not to mention creating them with voice dictation. Anyone familiar with the old Star Trek series knows that we already have computers that sound far more human than we expected, back in 1966, that they would sound in several centuries.

You are also reading this at a computer far more powerful than those that took humans to the moon, or even that launched the space shuttle. The method by which all our computers are communicating is certainly not something envisioned back in 1950, or even 1970, when in “Colossus: The Forbin Project” two supercomputers took hours to learn a common language that they could use.

In 1981, Bill Gates famously remarked that “nobody will ever need more than 640K of RAM!” Today, users with 1000 times that amount could increase computer speed and productivity with even more.

Now for the notable exception: Artificial Intelligence.

Hot off the presses (of this month’s Jewish Observer) is Rabbi Avi Shafran’s take on the Intelligent Design controversy. Some of his arguments you may have seen here before, but much else is new. Since the JO has no web site, this is a true Cross-Currents exclusive.

For the record, I’ve only skimmed it thus far, and don’t always agree with him — but I thought his consideration of the topic was worth republishing for a broader audience.

It has just come to my attention that the Green Party has recently called for a boycott of the State of Israel. Here is the wording of the resolution:

Green Party Resolution to Divest from Israel

Adopted by the Green Party of the United States,
November 21, 2005

The Green Party of the United States (GPUS) publicly calls for divestment from and boycott of the State of Israel until such time as the full individual and collective rights of the Palestinian people are realized

So the government has been intruding into our private lives by listening in to our telephones and our emails. The howls of protest are inevitable, but we need to remember that this transcends the legal issue of constitutional rights of privacy. We are at war — and with an enemy that will destroy us if we do not defend ourselves by every possible means. I, for one, am willing to give up some of my liberties temporarily so that all of my liberties in this blessed land are not destroyed permanently.

The current flap about eavesdropping bears in it a lesson for me. As believing Jews, we know that nothing is private or hidden from the One Above. Everything we do is seen, heard, and recorded. Kol ma-‘asecha basefer nichtavim, say the Sages in Avot II:1. “All of your deeds are recorded in a Book.” And not only deeds: words as well. There are no conversations and no communications that are hidden from the One Above. ‘Ayin ro-ah, ozen shoma-‘at, says that same Mishnah. “An Eye sees, and an Ear hears….”

How different our lives would be if we took that seriously. An Ear hears: if we really believed that, the heretofore impregnable fortresses of gossip, slander, and character-assassination would soon crumble. It would exponentially increase the incidence of honest speech and radically reduce truth-stretching and outright lying. And an Eye sees: the conviction that Someone is looking at our public and private behavior could make righteous tzadikkim of us all . The very concept of being listened to and observed via a transcendental sound camera surely concentrates the mind.

That we continue to talk and behave as if no one is listening or observing us is a commentary on the true state of our belief in a personal Gd.

A long and thoughtful comment to my earlier post about the Dover court decision on Intelligent Design begins: “I’m a molecular biologist at UCLA, and after linking here from slate I hope to offer comments…”

Did he say “linking here from Slate?” Apparently, he did. I really didn’t expect that; I’m happy he found us.

In any case, the comment that followed is only one in a series of very sharp and well-done critiques of Intelligent Design, and my defense of the idea. There is more to discuss here, and much food for thought. As Slate put it, I think ID is an “inchoate” theory, meaning not well-defined. That could certainly be used to characterize my thoughts at this point on the various comments, but here are some reflections.

Here’s a proposal anyone who believes in the value of Jewish education should agree with: the Jewish community should, as a priority, provide free schooling to every Jewish child.

As Miriam Shaviv said, coming up with the money will be an issue — but I disagree with her that the challenge is necessarily insurmountable, or represents “wooly thinking.” If this is being suggested not by charedim, but by Ismar Schorsch of JTS– as it has been by philanthropist Michael Steinhardt (who is hardly a great fan of the Orthodox) — that increases the likelihood that federations and other Jewish foundations will pay serious attention.

If the Reform and Conservative movements were to either stop opposing tuition tax breaks for those offering their children non-public education, or offer to make up the difference for Jewish parents, that would make a huge difference right there. Orthodox parents would not be saddled with unreasonable combinations of tuition and taxes, and more parents overall would choose Jewish day schools.

The benefits are so vast that even if the goal looks unreachable at present, Schorsch deserves only praise for broaching this idea.

A judge decided yesterday that Intelligent Design cannot be taught in the Dover school district in Pennsylvania. Agudath Israel’s response is terse, and reads as follows:

The judge determined that the “Intelligent Designer” behind “Intelligent Design” is G-d. In this respect, he is right. If our Constitution, however, is to be understood as forbidding any mention in public schools of even the possibility that the universe was brought into being by the Creator, that should deeply trouble all Americans.

Rabbi David Zwiebel

Frankly, it’s not just a matter of the judge’s determination. The school board members advocating for the concept were quite probably trying to do as the judge claimed — find a way to sneak Creationism into the classroom. As the judge put it, “It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.”

In our society, lawlessness can take many forms. Sometimes, the person extorting money from you isn’t a man with a gun, but a person with a neatly-pressed suit and a PR agency explaining why what he’s doing is right and just. Roger Toussaint and the members of the Transport Workers Union are currently extorting from the City of New York, with the ongoing threat of damage to the tune of $420 million per day.

A system of laws is designed to protect us from all sorts of criminals. The strike is illegal, and designed to extort a pay raise of 8% per year for the next three years out of the citizens of NYC. Note that the strikers currently earn between $47,000 and $55,000 a year — before overtime — to drive buses and subways. The drivers are already earning far more than the median income of those who rely on public transportation to get to work — and now they are demanding a huge increase, and resorting to illegal action to get it.

The Torah has what to say about this as well. There are economic laws in the Torah about laborers and property owners. The overriding principle is one of fairness. A person is not allowed to ignore his or her obligations in order to get what he or she wants.

There are apparently 30 applicants for every new opening at the MTA. Those applicants are currently riding those buses and subways to get to their current, lower-paying jobs. The people hurt most by this strike are not those who get to work by car, limousine, or Internet connection. They are the very people currently making far less than the guy (or gal) who drives the MTA vehicles that get them to work, who would gladly take their jobs if given the opportunity — and do them just as well.

Joe –

You came closer than anyone to denting my argument. (UCLA Law has done well by you. You are hereby entitled to an extra piece of kugel next time you come for Shabbos.)

Close, but not close enough.

Let’s say, arguendo [Note to real people out there: legal beagles like to throw Latin around. Inter alia. You know], that Tookie was guilty of the exact crime he was executed for. Justice is served; the law behaved exactly as it was designed. So what? Essentially, I was making two points. Firstly, the law may have worked, but it is a bad law according to HaKadosh Baruch Hu’s voiced directives on how a non-Jewish court should operate. Egregious violators of the law should not have a voice in the court, period. You asked me what standard I would employ – you’ve got it. That’s what halacha says, to the best of my knowledge. Tookie’s accusers may never have been shown to be liars, but that is beside the point. Evildoers don’t belong on the witness stand. They will be unreliable in other cases. This is enough to ban them in all. Using them cheapens the conduct of the court, and the way it is perceived by the people. (Again, I am not arguing that the court may decide to use an extralegal standard for the protection of society. I presented Rabbi Bleich’s hesitations about even that, and admitted to Rav Moshe’s seeming acceptance. But this doesn’t tell us which standards should be relaxed. Professor Broyde suggested that some kinds of circumstantial evidence be admitted when they would rise to the level of acceptability of proof in monetary matters in halacha. The ballistics test on Tookie’s gun would never do. Who said he fired it? Neither would placing him at the scene. That was not the issue. Who fired the gun was. Compare this to Sanhedrin 37B, and the mother of all umdena demuchach (overwhelming circumstantial evidence) cases. There, the perpetrator chased the victim into a closed room, and was found over the body, with the bloody knife in hand.)

My Chanuka post drew a comment pointing out that the Chanuka victory of the Maccabees over the Greeks was not very long-lived, because the Chashmonaim (Maccabees) betrayed their own cause in the end:

And don’t forget how the story ends: Within a generation the Macabees were Hellenized -complete with Greek names. Very, quickly, they became exactly the sort of people the family founders had fought against.

I responded that the Sages of the Talmud indeed considered these descendants of the Maccabees to have been traitors and sinners — who caused their people untold grief and suffering, defeat and exile.

But I left unanswered an implicit question that I would now like to address:

If you’re rich enough, you can command an audience for virtually any nonsense. So when mega-philanthropist Michael Steinhardt recently told a group of 50 graduates of Yeshiva University that the Orthodox were not fulfilling their communal, moral and religious obligations to the rest of the Jewish community, Gary Rosenblatt, editor of the largest-circulation Jewish-Anglo weekly, The New York Jewish Week, devoted a column to spreading the news.

This wasn’t the first manifestation of Steinhardt’s problem with the Orthodox. He once performed his own version of a Jewish minstrel show, dressed in full hassidic regalia, at a farewell dinner for outgoing Hillel director Richard Joel.

Nor is the source of his Orthodox problem hard to locate. Steinhardt has probably donated more money to Jewish continuity than any other philanthropist in recent decades. Yet he remains a frustrated man. Again and again he has come face to face with the fact that his particular mix of atheism and fierce Jewish pride cannot be transmitted to the next generation, including his own children. Ethnic identity does not travel well.

From time to time, recognition of the futility of his own efforts has led Steinhardt to lash out against the Orthodox - the one group, as he acknowledges, that has a proven track record of passing its Jewish values to the next generation.

There may not be many articles in Ha’Aretz that charedim would agree with, but here’s one that all can… well, scratch that. Ashkenazic Jews aren’t particularly known for enjoying spicy foods, either.

There are exceptions, though. A friend of mine grows hot peppers in his back yard, and a year ago at Sukkos time he gave me a horseradish jar filled with his home-brewed hot sauce. Although I use it pretty frequently, the fill level is down less than an inch — what can be served on the end of a toothpick is enough to make a bowl of soup hot. The peppers he grows have names like “Orange Explosion” and “Trinidad Birds,” and are marketed by heat level — with a scale of one to eight bombs on the label. Aficionados (and those who read the article) will know that they are measuring the amount of capsaicin usually found in each variety of pepper.

Mark Frankel writes that “You Can Thank BTs for Kosher Sushi,” meaning that Baalei Teshuvah (those who adopted Orthodoxy) brought their tastes with them, resulting in the demand for sushi among Kosher consumers. I suppose that’s true — I acquired a taste for sushi in Hawaii as a ninth grader, and recall a school’s annual dinner about seven years ago where I was seated with a group of Rabbis who looked on with a mixture of awe and, well, some other expression, as I enjoyed a plate of maki rolls.

One of the comments on Mark’s site suggests that “sushi is just one symptom of … ‘let’s be like everyone else in the world, but kosher.’” I disagree — sushi is hardly comparable to “glatt cruises.” Sushi (especially made with vegetables or cooked fish) is both healthy and tasty, and there’s no reason to look askance at those who didn’t check their food tastes at the door when they became frum — or at those Orthodox individuals who have looked beyond traditional European staples.

Mrs. Katz’s post about pluralism today reminded me of something from the Jewish Week’s description of highlights from the USCJ Convention. Here are the two relevant paragraphs:

An address by Rabbi Menachem Creditor, the spiritual leader of Temple Beth Israel in Sharon, Mass., became an unlikely focal point of the conference when, after urging the movement to ordain gay clergy, he said that allowing non-egalitarian synagogues under the Conservative umbrella was immoral and tantamount to “institutional misogyny.” …

Some conference-goers grumbled that the non-egalitarian Conservative congregations should be forced to secede from the USCJ in light of Rabbi Creditor’s remarks. Those fears were allayed when Rabbi Epstein, in a plenary session, reaffirmed the movement’s commitment to pluralism.

I don’t want to focus upon what Rabbi Creditor said. It’s clear that he and the Torah have some differences concerning what is or is not moral, but that’s a topic for another day. Rather, what caught my attention was Rabbi Epstein’s statement that pluralism demanded acceptance of non-egalitarian congregations [for argument's sake, we'll define "egalitarian" as they do, namely having both men and women perform the additional obligations placed by the Rabbis upon men].

With Chanuka coming in a few days we can be sure that along with the Chanuka tree and the Chanuka wreath, we will have the annual round of phony newspaper stories about Chanuka being the holiday of religious freedom.

The usual story (American version) goes something like this: There were these bad guys, the Greeks/Republicans/Christian Right who persecuted the good guys, the Jews/Democrats/pluralists. The bad guys tried to impose a theocracy and do away with the Bill of Rights. Then there was like a total unbelievable miracle and these Jews who are normally peace-loving pacifists got up the gumption to stand up for the principle of Separation of Church and State and multiculturalism. And the good guys won! The theocracy of the Greeks was overthrown, and the Jews established instead a liberal democracy with religious freedom for all.

Of course this story is total nonsense. What was really going on was that the Greeks persecuted the Jews because they couldn’t stand the Jews’ uppityness in declaring that they had the only true religion and the only real G-d. The Greeks believed in lots of gods and would have happily welcomed Buddhists, Wiccans, Gaians and whoever else wanted to join — as long as they didn’t claim to have the One Exclusive Truth. That claim to truth really stuck in their craw.

Well those pesky, intolerant Jews went around saying that idols in the Temple or pigs on the altar were somehow a “defilement of the holy” and the Greeks weren’t having any of that. They were going to put those snooty Jews in their place once and for all.

Rabbi Reuven Hammer, head of the Rabbinical Court of the Masorti Movement and the Rabbinical Assembly of Israel, has an op-ed on JPost.com which relates directly to my post of yesterday evening.

Officially, the Conservative movement also has high standards for a convert. There is no way they would, or should, accept a conversion-by-correspondence course, with or without Miami seminar. But (to the chagrin of some of the more serious members and Rabbis) all you hear from them in Israel is that all conversions should be accepted.

The Orthodox Batei Din should be commended, not criticized, for upholding their standards — even when the charlatans performing trivial ceremonies claim Orthodox ordination. But you won’t hear that from Rabbi Hammer. Instead, you see him note that according to Maimonides, “after the fact, even the lack of a formal acceptance of mitzvot is not enough to void the conversion (Issurei Biah13:17). The picture that emerges from a careful study of the sources, then, is one of great leniency. The authorities were concerned that the convert be sincere, but they were also eager to ease the way into Judaism and were loath to invalidate a conversion so long as the individual had undergone the technical ritual requirements.”

It’s hard to express how painfully dishonest this is.