In the end, despite pleas to spare Judaism’s holiest city the shame of a spectacle celebrating the rejection of Judaism’s moral code, the “Gay Pride” parade took place as planned in Jerusalem.

Had hundreds of thousands of Orthodox Jews from Jerusalem and across the country flowed into the Holy City’s streets, the event — which drew a mere 2000 participants — would have been quickly overwhelmed. The 7000 policemen assigned to keep order would not have had an easy time.

The Orthodox numbers, readiness and sense of outrage were certainly there. Tel Aviv has regularly played sponsor to such spectacles mocking the Torah, but Jerusalem is the focal point of Jewish prayers, and its population is heavily Orthodox to boot. Indeed, the Holy City was purposefully targeted by the parade organizers in order to assert their belief that no place on earth should be free from the promotion of licentiousness. [Well, almost no place; last year, one of the event’s organizers was asked by a reporter why the parade would not enter Christian or Muslim areas of the city and explained “We don’t want to offend them.”]

So, in the face of such an unmistakable provocation, all it would have taken to summon a massive Orthodox protest would have been a mere call from a handful of Orthodox religious leaders.

If a Jewish Rip Van Winkle (Rip van Finkle?) were to awaken today and read the papers, he would wonder if he had ever really been asleep. Names that were in the headlines when he dozed off years ago — Peres, Olmert, Barak — are still in the headlines. Despite their many errors and miscalculations, they remain in power. Nothing has changed.

Not so in other countries. In England, politicians who make serious mistakes resign from office. In the US, if the mistake is really bad, they apologize and go into re-hab. In Japan, they commit harakiri.

We are not advocating the Japanese way of expressing regret, but the British have a long history of parliamentary government, and their example should be of some guidance. If you fail in government, you resign and go home. But when Israeli politicians fail, they blame not themselves but everyone else around them, and — unfailingly — they manage to cling to office. Ours is a tradition of non-accountability. Our leaders never admit mistakes. They never apologize.

Instead, they run for office again, get elected again, or get appointed to high office. Being an Israeli politician means never having to say you’re sorry.

The savagery and brutality of the Hamas takeover of Gaza took some of us by surprise. We like to believe that even our bitter enemies are still human, and that in time, those benighted souls will be struck by the rays of enlightenment, and come to think like you and I. Alas, we are sometimes wrong.

Decades ago, Nobel laureate V S Naipaul cautioned the West about its naiveté in believing that all people were essentially the same. He spoke about cultures so different – inferior is what he was really driving at – that they did not sit on the same continuum as those that we value. Parts of the Arab world particularly provoked his ire. Since Edward Said despised him, Naipaul could not have been toם far off. (His analysis was adumbrated by the Rambam. In the Moreh, the Rambam speaks of beings who are called “demons” by Chazal. He explains that they have the intellectual ability of humans, but live completely outside the norms of civilization. They have the destructiveness of dangerous animals, and the human capacity of planning and strategizing their evil. Hence, they are fully demonic.)

Some were not surprised at all. Images of summary executions, mutilations of the dead, burning churches, and saving bullets by hurling Fatah members from tall buildings, did not faze some in the pro-Palestinian camp. Predictably, they blamed it all on Israel. (Some saw the occupation as the ultimate cause and justification for any and all evil committed by Palestinians against each other and against the dream of their own State; others claimed that Israel actively pitted Hamas and Fatah against each other. My guess is that it was the same group of Israelis who were responsible for 9/11 who choreographed the internecine butchery in Gaza. Must have.)

Surprisingly, a different group of people were unsurprised for a very different reason. In a June 16th op-ed, the Wall Street Journal offered this thought:

Last week we spoke about the steps we can take to avoid becoming prisoners of our bodies as we grow older. This week I’d like to examine the bright side of the inevitable physical decline that goes with age.

I’m still young enough to remember looking at older people — i.e., anyone over thirty — with a certain amount of pity, and imagining that they must be envious of my relative youth. Yet as I’ve reached each one of those milestones that I could only think about with dread when I was twenty, I’ve found myself reflecting on the satisfactions of advancing years rather than lamenting my lost youth.

Youth, it must be granted, has its particular charm: the sense of boundless potential. “The charm and insolence of youth is that it is everything in potentiality and nothing in actuality,” wrote the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset. It is characteristic of young people to hesitate in the face of the seemingly infinite possibilities before them; they know that walking through any door will foreclose others and signal the end of their infinite potential.

Far more satisfying than preserving that sense of infinite possibility, however, is having made some choices and walked through one of those beckoning doors. Having actually done something, built a home with a life partner, and raised children is ultimately a lot more satisfying than fantasizing about whom one will marry or what one will do when he grows up.

A recent posting “Who is Really to Blame?” attracted a lot of comment, much of it concerning the late Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren and his actions in the Langer case. Before responding to those comments I wanted to reexamine the case, including listening to the shiur of Dr. Aaron Rakefet on the case. I have now done so.

After doing so, I regret describing Langer’s first husband, a Polish convert, as a shomer Torah u’mitzvos. I wouldn’t bet my last dollar on that proposition. On the other hand, I found no reason to prefer the psak of Rabbi Goren to that of at least four batei din that considered the mamzerus of the Langer brother and sister and/or Borokovsky’s status as a Jew, and whose members included some of the greatest poskim of the generation, including Rav Yosef Shalom Elyashiv.

In his lecture, for instance, Rakefet triumphantly holds aloft the report of a Tel Aviv social worker in which the social worker describes Borokovsky as a “goy,” and claims that this report is credible because the social worker was masiach lefi tumo. To me that makes no sense. Whether he was a “goy” or not is a halachic question, not a factual question, about which a Tel Aviv social worker has no particular expertise, whatever her credibility.

Moreover, the halachic issue was not the state of Borokovsky’s halachic observance a decade or more after his conversion in Poland, but whether he was ever observant, even if while living with his wife’s parents in Poland. If he ever was, then his subsequent lack of observance would be beside the point. As I wrote, geirus is forever, unless it can be clearly shown that there was no acceptance of mitzvos at the time of the geirus.

If you think you are having trouble with Daf Yomi these days, read what happened when both Henry VIII and the Pope tried to support their positions with citations from rabbinic treatment of yibum. Which shows, I suppose, that neither Neturei Karta nor the far-left Orthodox invented the art of mangling Torah sources. (What follows is excerpted from a weekly mailing by the Mir- and Cambridge-trained, often very independent-thinking British rabbi and educator, Rabbi Jeremy Rosen.)

Marriages between royal families were matters of alliances and balance of power! Katharine of Aragon was the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, the nasty fanatics who expelled the Jews. At the age of three, she was betrothed to Prince Arthur, the elder son of Henry VII of England. He became king after a long, divisive Civil War and needed to consolidate his position in a world dominated, at the time, by Spain. In 1501, shortly before her sixteenth birthday, Katharine married Arthur. But after less than six months he died. Henry needed to keep the alliance alive. So Katharine was then betrothed to Arthur’s younger brother, Prince Henry. When he became king in 1509, at the age of eighteen, he married Katharine.

Their marriage produced just one living daughter, Mary Tudor. Henry was desperate for a male heir and he was a notorious philanderer. He wanted Anne officially. In a religion where divorce was not allowed, the only option was an annulment. But as the Pope had sanctioned the marriage in the first place he had to be the one to annul it.

Henry tried all sorts of ways of getting the Pope to agree but the Pope was under political pressure from other quarters ( otherwise Popes usually found ways of giving rich people want they wanted, for a price). After several years of fruitless negotiations Henry declared religious independence. He set up the Protestant Church of England with him as the supreme religious head and got his way, at the expense of not a few clergymen who remained loyal to Rome and lost their lives.

Much in our world desecrates the name of G-d – in Hebrew, that is called “chilul Hashem.” Whether murder and mayhem in the name of religion or misbehavior on the part of religious individuals, actions that push holiness away from a world that so direly needs it are considered by Judaism to constitute a singular sin.

Recently, though, a quite literal desecration of G-d’s name unexpectedly came to my attention. A cataloger at a law school library, Mrs. Elisheva Schwartz, called with a disturbing discovery. She had come across an online vendor seeking to make a few dollars off the marketing of clothing and kitsch bearing the holiest Hebrew name of G-d.

The Tetragrammaton, to use its Greek appellation, is a four-character word (tetra means four; grammat, letter) that Judaism considers so holy it is forbidden today to pronounce or ever to treat in anything but a deeply honorable manner. According to Jewish law, a piece of parchment, paper, cloth or pottery bearing the Name must be carefully preserved or solemnly buried. Religious Jews refer to the word simply as “the specified Name” and when it occurs in the Torah reading or prayer service, it is not read as written; a less holy Hebrew word meaning simply “my Lord” is substituted instead.

The vendor in question, for reasons unknown, had decided to print the holy Hebrew letters on an assortment of tee shirts, mugs, buttons and other articles, including underwear and dog sweaters.

How does one cope with the pain, sitting here in New York, while at this moment, thousands of miles away, our beautifully pure, and purely beautiful, Yerushalayim is being traumatized?

Yerushalayim, whose streets and alleyways — including Rechov HaMelech Dovid – have known the footsteps of prophets, kings, high priests, countless millions of spiritual heroes, known and unknown.

Yerushalayim, within whose embrace sits ge’on uzeinu, Rav Yosef Sholom Elyashiv, shlit”a, who, at this moment, is undoubtedly sitting and singing a melody over a sefer as he has for the last eighty uninterrupted years of toil in Torah, and who tends a flock of thousands and thousands of toilers in Torah and their families.

Could it really be that within those same boundaries unfolds a spectacle in which others — Jews! — exalt into a parade, a philosophy, a movement . . . what? What is it they pay homage to thus? What great truth, what powerful ideal must lie thereunder? At root, under the layers of repackaging and posturing, only the pettiest and basest of fleeting, animalistic urges.

Many years ago, my rosh yeshiva remarked of avid joggers: They are running in order to live longer. But they have no idea what they are living for.

In the secular world, we see many people who act as if swallowing sufficient Omega-3, eating a high fiber diet, and consuming lots of brightly colored vegetables will help them live forever.

Devoting all one’s energy to the Sisyphusean quest for immortality is draining.

That’s why the people one meets in health food stores tend to be a grim-looking lot, wrinkled and prunish in appearance. The guy slicing pastrami in the local deli is much more likely to sport a beaming countenance.

Let it be a matter of record. Responsible leadership took steps to prevent violence and chilul Hashem (desecration of G-d’s Name) associated with the protests of Thursday’s scheduled Gay Pride parade in Jerusalem. Degel HaTorah told yeshiva students not to take part in the protests. Their contribution should be through prayer and Torah study in the beis medrash. One can only wish that this attitude were adopted by all sectors of the community.

If the Supreme Court does not intervene on Wednesday, the eyes of much of the world will be riveted on the city holy to three monotheistic faiths. The organizers of the parade have long made it clear why they want a parade specifically in Jerusalem. Their march is a declaration that they have triumphed over the old strictures and an archaic morality. The values of personal autonomy and choice, the celebration of alternative sexualities and alternative lifestyles have supplanted outmoded thinking based on myth and superstition. This can be countered only by reminding the world of the dignity and humanity of the world of religion, not by a show of force. The antidote to the preachers of a new morality is to bolster the old. The voice of tradition must be associated with people who are seen as deeper, wiser, and more attractive role models than their competitors.

A display of unfettered anger and violence by religious protesters will make the day of those who hope to insinuate their agenda into the minds of the masses. They wish to convince the world that only small-mindedness and myopia stand in the way of their happiness. Visuals of hordes of over-dressed bearded folks torching garbage dumpsters and smashing street lights will be an added gift to their efforts. A contrasting scene that could do much good would remind people around the globe that the world of religion shares values that not only are foundational to our civilization, but can be used as forces of peace and moderation. In it, Jewish, Christian and Muslim leaders would march together, with thousands of peaceful followers in tow, suspending for a few hours the hostilities that divide them, and holding aloft banners affirming that some truths are eternal, and that G-d knows what He is doing.

It is not hard to understand the feelings and anger of those who are preparing to witness a direct assault on the holiness of Jerusalem. We Jews, however, are supposed to be a people committed to following our minds rather than our hearts when the two clash in irreconcilable differences.

It sure seems like the Borei Olam has a wonderful sense of humor.

Just as Dick Dawkins and his fellow best-selling nihilists were riding high, selling books like hotcakes the better to worship their highest being, Mammon, with, along comes Newton’s Secrets, a new exhibit at Hebrew U. revealing Isaac Newton, whom many regard as the father of modern science, to be a wild-eyed fundamentalist not altogether different from your average Brisker, right down to studying Rambam’s Hilchos Avodas HaKorbanos.

No small exhibit, this; Newton’s theological writings, here on public display for the first time, number close to three million words. Here’s how the Associated Press describes their contents:

Three-century-old manuscripts by Isaac Newton calculating the exact date of the apocalypse, detailing the precise dimensions of the ancient temple in Jerusalem and interpreting passages of the Bible — exhibited this week for the first time — lay bare the little-known religious intensity of a man many consider history’s greatest scientist.

A few weeks ago, a reporter for the Florida Times-Union called with a few questions about sheitels, the wigs worn by married Orthodox women to cover their natural hair. The result is this morning’s column in their ongoing series called “Dare to Ask,” and I am frankly impressed with how accurate and how friendly the coverage turned out to be.

From the title alone, “These wigs reflect code of modesty,” you see the reporter isn’t out to mock or degrade. It’s very easy to imagine how negatively this article could have gone, and which stereotypes could have been perpetuated. Instead, I and the others interviewed had the opportunity to rebut and dismantle those mistaken impressions, and thus paint a far more favorable picture of what, to the secular viewer, initially appears to be an arcane and even repressive practice.

Modesty, of course, isn’t about repression but moderation. Our community keeps private what others broadcast, and that was apparent in the article. Reporter Phil Milano posed challenging questions provided by his readers, such as the following from the accompanying podcast: “Yeah, but these wigs look so great nowadays that it almost defeats the purpose!” We then had the opportunity to point out that even a well-made sheitel isn’t natural, and is usually immediately distinguishable to the practiced eye.

Wonder of wonders, the whole Indian hair thing didn’t even make it into the article. And not only that — he closed with my best line. What more could we ask for?

To judge from opinion polls, most Israelis would be hard-pressed to name one action of the Olmert government that they support. Well, I can: the appointment of Professor Daniel Friedmann as Justice Minister.

The appointment of Friedmann, a Israel Prize-winning jurist, to head the Justice Ministry hopefully sets a precedent for more cabinet ministers appointed on the basis of expertise. One of the great weaknesses of our coalition governments is that cabinet posts are divvied up as political spoils.

In addition to bringing real expertise to his position, Friedmann is on the side of the angels when it comes to defining the “rule of law” in Israel. On one side of the debate are those who equate the “rule of law” with maximizing the power of the Supreme Court. The enemy of the “rule of law,” in their view, is “politicization,” i.e., anything that confers power on the elected branches of government, both of which are inherently suspect.

The other camp would substitute for politicization the word democracy. In their view, the rule of law in a democracy means that the law-making power rests with the elected representatives, and the role of judges is to apply statutes enacted by the legislature. When courts rewrite statutes according to their lights or impose a set of legal norms that have no basis in statute, the result is not the rule of law, but, in former Justice Menachem Elon’s trenchant formulation, the rule of the judge.

by Rabbi Elchonon Oberstien

Haaretz, the newspaper of Israel’s Ashkenazi elite, is worried about the future of Kibbutz Mizra. What is so special about Mizra? Kibbutz Mizra’s meat processing plant is famous for its high-quality pork products. Now, the future of pig raising in Israel is in doubt because Arcady Gaydamak, the Russian Jewish billionaire, has decided to purchase the Tiv Taam supermarket chain and make it Kosher. Tiv Taam owns 75% of Maadaney Mizra meat products. Thus, the kibbutz may no longer have an easy outlet to sell its pork products.

“I believe that in a Jewish State, in which there is a large Muslim minority, selling pork is a provocation,” the Russian-Israeli billionaire told Army Radio. To quote the article in the Haaretz Internet Edition entitled “Will Mizra still be able to bring home the bacon?” by Eli Ashkenazi:

Exactly 50 years ago, Kibbutz Mizra founded a meat processing plant. Over the years it became identified with high-quality pork products, although it produced other meats as well. For the secular public, Maadaney Mizra’s stores were the only place to buy non-kosher meat. For the religious, it became a symbol of impurity and the casting aside of religious tradition.

What if the Palestinian lobby threw a party, and no one came?

They did, and that’s pretty much what happened. The fortieth anniversary of the Six-Day War was supposed to be marked last weekend by large protests in cities around the world. They were hoping for massive crowds. Instead, the scheduled mass hate-fest against Israel could better be described as a wake for serious Palestinian support.

The DC gathering – hyped for months in advance – was a complete bust. Reports from sources sympathetic to the pro-Palestinians claimed attendance at 5000, which would have been pitifully insignificant. People who were there (and some subsequent pro-Palestinian reports) claimed that the more accurate figure was below a thousand, which is risible. Photos and eyewitness reports support the smaller number. It looked like a high-school reunion for baby-boomers who were coping with early-onset senility by joining ANSWER, cheered on by the usual assortment of Communist and Socialist Party lifers.

The turnout in London, although higher, amounted to just a few thousand. The papers, not too many of which are exactly friendly to Israel, did not seem to mention it. If events scheduled in other parts of the world – Rome, Brussels – even occurred, no readers (at least English language ones) found out about them.

[I was recently privileged to address the commencement ceremony of Bais Yaakov of Baltimore, an Orthodox girls school founded in 1942. Below is an edited version of my remarks to the more than 100 high school graduates, their families and friends.]

Back in the day – the day when I was in grade school, that is – we were taught the “3 R’s” – Reading, Writing and ‘Rithmetic (that’s math to you, and yes, we didn’t spell so good back then). Of course, you’ve all learned those things and more. And as students of a school like Bais Yaakov, you have also learned the really important things for meaningful life.

Among them, I think, are another “3 R’s.” At this special moment in your lives, please permit me to briefly review them.

The first one is Recognizing – specifically, recognizing the good, the precise translation of the Hebrew phrase hakarat hatov. Its simple sense – gratitude – is something you graduates surely feel this evening – toward your parents, your teachers and your classmates, for all that they have given you. But the term’s deeper meaning is to recognize – with a capital “R” – the good that is always present in our lives, all the things with which we are constantly blessed. Because everything we have is a Divine gift. We’re called Jews after Judah – so named by our foremother Leah because of her gratitude – hoda’ah – that G-d had given her “more than her share” of sons. We Jews are always to see what we have – whatever it may be – as “more than our share.”

Note: This post contains what some may regard as more than their minimum daily requirement of sarcasm. Personally, I regard this as healthy facetiousness towards deserving recipients. But if you are facetiousness-sensitive (or have any other relevant allergies), by all means, skip this post. I don’t get paid by the reader (or, come to think of it, any other way).

The April 27th edition of the Forward featured a story entitled “Al Jazeera Gathering Draws a Full Minyan To Heart of Arab World,” which appears below with minimal deletions of mine, including removal of the last names of the Jewish participants:

Doha, Qatar - Some participants at the third-annual forum of the Arab satellite network Al Jazeera were sorry they didn’t bring matzo with them — had they known how many fellow Jews were attending the media conference, they would have made a Passover Seder.

“We could have used the hotel wine to fill our cups,” Mark L. said only half-jokingly. A professor of Middle East studies at University of California in Irvine, L. was one of several Jewish participants who attended the invitation-only conference in Doha, organized by Al Jazeera.

Barry Goldwater, famously declared in his acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican convention, “. . . [E]xtremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! . . . [M]oderation in hte pursuit of justice is no virtue! Widely pilloried at the time – I still remember a Bill Mauldin cartoon showing two bank robbers with guns aimed at the pursuing police and saying, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” – those words have born the test of time.

Indeed Goldwater’s defense of extremism was preceded by the Chazon Ish. In Igros Chazon Ish (III, 61), the Chazon Ish identifies extremism as deriving from the quest for perfection, and writes that without extremism perfection is impossible. Those who are forever proclaiming their disdain for extremism, he writes, “will inevitably find themselves consorting with counterfeiters [of Torah] and the feeble-minded.”

The Chazon Ish goes on to castigate those groups who are always declaring their moderation and opposition to anything smacking of extremism, while insisting that their faith in Torah and the words of Torah is quite adequate. Of such claims, the Chazon Ish writes caustically, “Just as there is no such thing as a lover of wisdom who loves just a little bit of wisdom, but hates too much of it, so there cannot be one who loves Torah and mitzvos, but hates too much of it.”

Those words of the Chazon Ish should give pause to all of us who find ourselves complaining at one time or another of the extremism or kana’us of the Torah world. Such criticisms take many forms, some more valid than others. But it is incumbent upon the critics to constantly ask themselves if underlying their criticism might not have its source in too little love of Torah and words of Torah. It is, after all, always easy to be moderate if nothing very important is at stake.

In general, I prefer not to write pieces in the form “see the difference between my son and the son of my father-in-law.” For one thing, what is sometimes known as Orthodox triumphalism seldom serves any purpose. A stance of superiority is rarely conducive to influencing the one whose behavior is being criticized or drawing him or her to our point of view. In addition, self-congratulation too often distracts us from the self-criticism that is necessary for our own spiritual growth.

Sometimes, however, the contrast provides important insight.

The egregious behavior of secular Israeli high schools students in Poland – long a source of embarrassment – has now reached such a crescendo as to threaten Polish-Israeli relations. The May 25 Jerusalem Post quoted the Polish ambassador to Israel, “[H]igh level relations are not in danger, but the image of Israel in Poland is.” And the Israeli ambassador to Poland went even further saying, “the relationship between Israel and Poland is in danger.”

The latest in a long-line of scandals involving the behavior of Israeli teenagers on visits to Poland was triggered by a report in the Polish paper Prezekroj accusing Israeli teens of tearing apart their hotel rooms, playing soccer in the hallways of their hotels in the middle of the night, engaging in the lowest imaginable behaviors, and of humiliating the flight attendants on Lot Airlines, the Polish national carrier. The Prezekroj article was, unfortunately, not the first such report to surface in recent years.

Only once during my childhood did a television ever violate the sanctum of our family dining room. For the two weeks leading up to the Six Day War, a small TV stood on the buffet, and we all sat riveted during dinner listening to the U.N. debates. (Abba Eban’s speeches at the U.N. no doubt contributed to my lifelong fascination with the power of the well-spoken word.) The presence of a TV in that place from which it had heretofore been barred alerted my brothers and me to the tension in the air, like that of the Cuban Missile crisis six years earlier.

When my mother came into awaken us on the morning of June 5, she was crying. ” Israel is at war, and I’m taking all the money out of your bank accounts to buy Israel bonds,” she informed us. Our paltry savings were not likely to turn the tide, but the lesson was clear: All were expected to contribute to Israel’s survival.

That day in high school, I could not think about anything other than getting home to listen to the news. I debated asking my driving education instructor whether he would mind turning on the car radio. And I marveled that my fellow students seemed to be getting through the day pretty much as usual.

Thinking back, I find it strange how much more vivid are my memories of the tension during the two weeks leading up to the War than of the War itself. Certainly I don’t remember any of the euphoria described in Israeli accounts of the post-War period.

There are several, actually. The proposed British boycott of Israeli academicians has backfired to the point that even the Palestinians were taken by surprise. The aftermath has been a PR bonanza for Israel, with shows of support from government officials, friendly editorials in newspapers around the globe, threats of devastating lawsuits by the indomitable Alan Dershowitz, and friendly bills introduced in Congress. (This is not to minimize the potential damage of the boycott movement. More on that later this week.)

My favorite morsel of good news is a throwback to the way I was raised as a child – to take intense pride in Jewish accomplishment. Even when I face the reality that much of that accomplishment is devoid of immediate Torah content and context, I cannot help but feel that even secular Jewish triumphs owe to the Hand of Providence providing us with the needed tools to survive an increasingly complex galus.

If you feel the same way, you will get nachas from the list of signatories to the petition begun just a few days ago by Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. When people obey the instructions, those signing are supposed to be restricted to people with real academic credentials. Moreover, they do not just record their dismay at the British effort. They pledge that if the boycott against Israeli dons and researchers moves along, they will consider themselves Israelis as well, taking themselves out of the give-and-take of international academic partnerships. Given the number of Nobel laureates on the list, this could have a chilling effect on global progress, turning the entire academic world into something on par with the intellectual productivity of the great universities of Riyadh and Kabul.

You will find an expected mix of Israeli academicians, profs from around the world with very Jewish-sounding names (leftists, rightists, atheists and believers, all banding together on this one), and some very non-Jewish ones. It restores a bit of faith in humanity to see apparent non-Jews in Singapore, Poland and Bangladesh affix their names, along with an occasional professor of Islamic Studies. It is thoroughly confusing to contemplate the number of signatories whose reason has survived their appointments to an outpost that makes the British boycott people look reasonable: Berkeley, California.

I already have a title: “Ferry Tales.” Now all I need is the time to write the book in my head about the interesting things I’ve witnessed over the years on my daily commute aboard the Staten Island Ferry.

Not long ago on the boat, for instance, I was trying to concentrate on a page of Talmud. The din of nearby conversations doesn’t disturb me; the voices commingle and provide a sort of white noise actually conducive to withdrawing into a difficult text. But when someone enamored of the right to free speech and animated by a cause undertakes to pace the aisles and loudly share his convictions, well, it’s a little harder to focus.

Usually he is of a religious bent, orating about heaven and elsewhere. (One memorable fellow brandishing a New Testament was fond of referring to one of the ferry’s termini as “Satan Island”).

Not, though, this guy.

The renaming of the national treasure of the Jewish people may prove to be a breach of kedusha (holiness) that will make the Gay Pride parade look like a Tehilim rally.

Unbelievably, it is the National Religious Party which is sponsoring a bill making Sunday a day of rest, and officially allowing some public transportation on Shabbos, as long as it is for entertainment and the like, rather than for ordinary work schedules. By adding an hour on to the work day the rest of the week, the bill also provides that Sunday should become a day of rest, giving observant families more time together, according to Zevulun Orlev, the bill’s sponsor.

The account in Haaretz (5/16; seems to have disappeared from the archive) is worse yet.

The name of the draft law is an eye-opener - “The Sabbath - a day of culture and rest.” The religious-Zionist rabbis are not proposing a religious Sabbath, or a holy Sabbath; they are seeking a cultural Sabbath, a Sabbath of rest. A stranger would not understand that the word “culture” is a rude word in certain religious contexts. The only time this word appears in the Bible is in the phrase, “the culture of people who sin.”…The contents of the draft law reveal it is strikingly distant from the world of religion. From the point of view of Jewish traditional law, there is no difference between desecrating the Sabbath by “industry, commerce and services,” by operating public transportation in “a vehicle whose capacity exceeds 12 places,” and desecrating the Sabbath in a manner of “culture, entertainment and leisure,” by having public transportation in a smaller vehicle. The rabbis are proposing to exchange the religious status quo for a new Israeli Sabbath arrangement, one not based on religious principles, content and norms…The rabbis of the cities and the heads of the yeshivas have taken it upon themselves to further an all-Israel agenda that is not a religious agenda. They have exchanged the aspiration for religious legislation with the aspiration for Jewish legislation that is not based on reasons that are basically religious…The inner core of the proposal shows us that the rabbis are interested in maintaining the Jewish face of the State of Israel even outside the framework of halakha. “Judaism” is also a unique culture as well as a national framework. “Judaism” is not merely the observance of the 613 religious precepts but also a system of social values, a social stance and a tapestry of joint historical memories. Halakha is a strong spice in a Jewish dish, but it does not say everything there is to say about it.

On May Day 2002, hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen marched to protest the presence of Jean-Marie Le Pen, head of the right-wing National Front, on the second round ballot in the presidential election. When Le Pen was soundly defeated, Alain Finkielkraut, one of France’s leading public intellectuals, the son of Polish Jews, whose father was deported from France to Auschwitz, was relieved. But he did not celebrate with the anti-Le Pen forces. He already knew that the most dangerous of Europe’s future haters were to be found in the camp of the celebrants and not among the remnants of the Vichy faithful.

In a series of essays, books and lectures over the past few years, Finkielkraut has offered the most compelling explanation for the rise of left-wing hatred of Jews in Europe. It is often said that today’s Europe was “born in Auschwitz.” Ironically, the primary consequence of the obsession with Auschwitz has been to turn Auschwitz’s victims once again into the objects of European hatred.

The memory of Auschwitz has transformed Europeans into permanent penitents, constantly on guard against themselves. Europeans intellectuals are forever on the look-out for anything that smacks of the Nazi dehumanization of the Jews, the transformation of the Jew into the Other lacking a shared humanity.

And, in one of history’s great ironies, the Nazis’ chief victims have become the prime suspects precisely because of their victimhood. Because the Jews have nothing about which to be penitent — or so the theory goes – they are the most likely to turn another people into the Other.

Note: This is the little-awaited sequel to “Who Is That Masked Fundamentalist?,” which I posted on May 8 (and what a master of suspense am I!)

So who is that masked fundamentalist? Why, it’s the same fellow who unabashedly said this in full view of the Jewish Agency plenary:

There is nothing in all of Jewish history to suggest that a Jewish community anywhere, including in the Land of Israel, can sustain itself without G-d and Torah. Torah-free civilizations have no staying power. . . . There is no reason logically or historically to think that Israel could not find itself fifty years from now populated by Hebrew-speaking, once-Jewish goyim who are perfectly content to separate themselves from the Jewish people around the world.

But one moment, that quote was even more sharply fundamentalist than the first one, so that doesn’t help matters at all.