We are encouraged that President Bush, best known for waging war in Iraq, has finally accepted the challenge of peacemaker. –NY Times editorial

A line like that makes your heart stop. The NY Times has not a kind word for the man in seven years, and suddenly they respect him, they are “encouraged,” he is a “peacemaker”? G-d forbid he should actually turn out to be what they wish and hope. If George Bush gets a favorable editorial in the NY Times, can the Nobel Peace Prize be far behind? G-d forbid. Pray for Israel.

Meanwhile the same issue of the NY Times features a dyspeptic word from the comfortably predictable Maureen Dowd, Bush Hater. She still hates him. Baruch Hashem. Sigh of relief.

He wants to look like he’s taking the problem of an Israeli-Palestinian treaty seriously when his true motivation is more cynical: pacifying the Arab coalition and holding it together so that he can blunt Iran’s sway. –Maureen Dowd, NY Times

I hope to G-d she’s right, and that’s all it is.

What a pity that Orthodox Jews have not been active in the Right to Life movement, and have left Christians to speak for us. Yes, we sympathize with them and vote for conservative candidates, and once in a while the Agudah may file an amicus brief. But we have been mainly silent, and as a result, very few people—very few Jews, even—know what the Jewish position actually IS.

In today’s NY Times we have been lumped together with Christians for the umpteenth time, as if there really were one monolithic “Judeo-Christian” view of when life begins. The NY Times thinks that Orthodox Jews share the Catholic view—that life begins at the moment an egg is fertilized by a sperm. The Times says, “In the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is wrong to destroy embryos in the course of research.” And how should they know that there is any difference between the Christian and Jewish views, if we are silent?

If we had been more active and more vocal, we might have had more influence within the pro-life movement, and our actual views might have been better known to the media. In Torah tradition, the soul enters the body forty days after conception. Almost all poskim permit IVF for the sake of treating infertility (not with donor sperm, though)—and when too many embryos are created to have a reasonable chance of safe birth, almost all permit destroying the “extras” in the Petri dish. By “embryos” we mean tiny eight-celled balls in a laboratory dish, aka blastocysts, smaller than the dot at the end of this sentence.

If an IVF cycle produced five or six such balls, the Catholic Church would require that ALL of them be implanted in the woman’s uterus, even though the chance of six babies surviving would be almost nil (and the mother’s health would also be severely compromised). The Catholics (and some Protestants) would say that if some of those minute balls were discarded in the lab, then the doctor was guilty of murder, just the same as if he had killed a 20-year-old man. Halacha, in contrast, permits the doctor to choose the two or three best embryos and discard the rest. Remember, “embryo” means a ball the size of this dot.

Any attempt at candor about problems within the charedi community seems to open a can of worms. Few indeed — even among Orthodox Jews — are the people who can see how overwhelmingly the good outweighs the bad within the charedi community. The comments to my post about “Charedi hooligans” have been very disheartening and depressing to me, running ten to one against charedim.

I cannot imagine any other group within the Jewish world — not Mizrachi, or MO, or Reform or Conservative or secular Jews or Federation or any other group you can think of — who would be vilified on any website the way charedim are, with no one coming to their defense — and if one person does try to say something nice about charedim, a lot of others turn on him and attack him for daring to defend the indefensible.

If one person attacked and criticized Reform or Modern Orthodoxy on a website, a bunch of other people would quickly pile on to counter-attack and accuse that person of intolerance, bigotry and so on, or at least to say that it’s counterproductive to say mean things about Reform, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, yada yada. But here one person attacks charedim and a bunch of other people pile on to agree with him and say charedim are even worse than he said, and hardly anyone weighs in with a mild protest against the bigotry. In American politics, the one group you can safely attack without being accused of bigotry are white Christians. Here in our Jewish world, the people it’s OK to hate are charedim.

I’d like to see a Modern Orthodox blog on which some MO writer would admit there are problems in the MO community(or a Reform site on which a writer admitted there are some things wrong with the Reform movement), and dozens of people would pile on to criticize him for not condemning his own community even more strongly, and to point out that his community is much worse than he admits, and in fact, has hardly any redeeming features.

R’ Rosenblum made a passing reference in his post, “The Choice is Ours,” to the juvenile delinquents who plague some of our beautiful charedi communities. Although I admire his soul-searching candor, I take issue with one sentence of his:”But one thing is not emphasized: the interrelationship of all Jews, and the responsibility of Jews for one another”

Even in the most insular chassidishe communities, little boys didn’t used to throw stones at cars for entertainment. I don’t know when we started having this plague of young hooligans somehow sprouting up from our most charedi communities.

The division between those who emphasize the “hen am levadad yishkon” aspect and those who emphasize the “ohr lagoyim” aspect of Yiddishkeit is a division of long-standing. But the production of young hooligans has never been a goal or byproduct of EITHER emphasis.

I don’t know where we’ve gone wrong, but could it be that maybe something of the Modern Spirit has somehow crept into even the most insular of our charedi ghettoes? I refer to the Modern Spirit of totally spoiling and indulging young children, so that they become uncontrollable brats.

Jerry Falwell died yesterday, and today is Yom Yerushalayim — the day that Jerusalem was reunified in 1967. We Jews live in a dangerous world, beset by enemies, and it behooves us to be grateful to our friends. I have a fascinating and moving book in my library, Jerry Falwell and the Jews – in which a Jew interviews Jerry Falwell. It was published in 1984. Falwell does not hide the fact that he does actually consider his own religion to be true. (Liberals consider all truth-claims to be ipso-facto signs of bigotry and hatred, but that is obviously not a prejudice shared by Orthodox Jews!) At the same time, he speaks very warmly of Jews and of G-d’s special relationship with the Jews. R’ Emanuel Rackman, in a forward to the book, writes, “It is in the interest of the Jews to know precisely where we stand with our friends as with our enemies…..I find his views far from disturbing; indeed, I find them reassuring.” Now, here are some questions of relevance to today’s date, Yom Yerushalayim:

Q. Are the Jews still the chosen people? Jerry Falwell: Yes, very definitely. Israel is yet to play a vital role among the nations. Israel is moving to the front and center of God’s prophetic stage. I believe the times of the Gentiles either ended with the taking of old Jerusalem in 1967, or will end in the not too distant future. Q. What duty does the Christian have? JF: Christians need to show genuine love and concern for Jewish people just as God bids. God says He will bless those who bless the Jew, and He will curse those who curse the Jew.

The proper response to such a person is a combination of wariness and friendliness. Sincere friendship is to be welcomed, proselytizing to be resisted. And remember, we Orthodox Jews who have decent relations with religious Christians — it is not our children who are converting to Christianity. Rather, those liberal Jews who hate and fear devout Christians — but who go to the wedding when their children marry out — they are the ones whose grandchildren end up in church. And why not? They grew up seeing Xmas trees and crosses in the homes of the mechutanim.

I honor Jerry Falwell for forthrightly repudiating anti-Semitism, for teaching his legions of followers to love and respect the Jews and Israel, and for trying to make a more moral America. Tzadikei umos ha-olam yesh lahem chelek be’olam haba. May G-d rest his soul. Here are a few more passages from the amazing book:

Below, two articles juxtaposed. The connection needs no comment.

Jonathan Schorsch in the Jerusalem Post (the writer teaches Jewish studies at Columbia University): “Shafran may think that the Orthodox merely reject ‘a thing, a philosophy, an approach,’ but these philosophies are held by real, living Jews and many non-Orthodox Jews sense all too accurately that they are being rejected…. If Orthodoxy is going strong, “making” so many new Jews, why the constant need to delegitimize other streams of Judaism? ….THE IMPLICATION is clear: non-Orthodox Jews cannot be accepted as they are. This is at best partial love and care, perhaps even the opposite.”

Marie Coyle in a letter to the editor of a student newspaper at the University of New Hampshire (the writer is the feminist outreach coordinator of Women United Against Eating Disorders): “I am, and will continue to be, aggressively and unapologetically anti-eating disorders. I am definitely trying to attack this problem. I want to be supportive of those who are suffering, but I refuse to say that I am anything but opposed to their sickness. I am not in any way blaming people who have eating disorders; this is absurd. When I say I am furious about eating disorders, I mean that I am furious at their existence, not at the people whose lives are being ruined by them. I have nothing but sympathy and compassion for the hundreds of people on this campus that are suffering. I want to do everything I can to improve their lives. I really cannot stress enough the distinction between being against eating disorders and being against people who have eating disorders. . . .”

In his post, “The Hijacking of Tikkun Olam,” Yitzchok Adlerstein wrote, “Tradition always understood that any human attempt at effectively remedying the world is doomed to failure.” In response, reader Gershon Josephs asked, “I had not heard of this tradition. Do you have a source for this?”

Because so many people, it seems, have never heard of one of the main foundations of Jewish tradition — namely, the principle that we can accomplish nothing without G-d’s help — I hereby supply three Biblical sources in answer to Gershon Josephs’ request. I hope that these will spread through the ether like a good virus.There are many more, scattered throughout the Torah and Talmud, but these will do for a start.

Tehillim 127:1 “If Hashem will not build the house, in vain do its builders labor on it; if Hashem will not guard the city, in vain is the watchman vigilant.” (Psalms)

Devarim 15:11 “For destitute people will not cease to exist in the land; therefore I command you, you shall surely open your hand to your brother, to your poor, and to your destitute in your land.” (Deuteronomy)

In his post today, Rabbi Menken did not provide the definitive Orthodox statement that Rabbi Ellenson called for, but I will do so. First, here is part of the essay to which Rabbi Menken was responding, an article — written by the head of the Reform HUC — with the inflammatory title “Obscene Orthodox Hatred Demands a Clear Denunciation”:

To be sure, such Orthodox opposition to non-Orthodox rabbis is hardly a novelty in modern Jewish history. Indeed, if one considers an event such as the assassination of Rabbi Abraham Kohn of Lemberg in 1848 by an ultra-Orthodox zealot, the charges of Eliyahu and the protests of the Hod Hasharon Orthodox Sephardic congregation seem mild….These displays of unwarranted contempt and hatred demand a public response of condemnation on the part of my Orthodox colleagues….Citation of another historical precedent helps illustrate why I make this request. In July 1860, a group of zealous Orthodox youth in Amsterdam entered an assembly of the Shochrei Deah, a Reform group, and stoned the liberal rabbi Dr. M. Chronik, almost killing him….Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer — then head of an Orthodox yeshiva in Eisenstadt, Hungary — did not hesitate to condemn these youth for their actions.

Rabbi Ellenson is quite naturally concerned that Orthodox opposition to Reform will lead to violence. Seeing as how a Reform rabbi was murdered in 1848, and another Reform rabbi was stoned as recently as 1860, it’s no wonder Rabbi Ellenson fears for his life. Those Orthodox fanatics, wow, every 150 years they explode like Krakatoa! So here is the definitive Orthodox statement that Rabbi Ellenson requested:

Orthodox Jews stand with Rabbi Hildesheimer, and unequivocally condemn the ad hoc killing or stoning of Reform rabbis. It is totally inappropriate and contrary to halacha to impose the death penalty in the absence of authoritative judicial proceedings, when we are in exile and there is no proper Sanhedrin. We await the coming of Moshiach speedily and in our days.

In the current issue of TIME magazine (May 7) there’s a short piece with the headline, “For Women, Equal Pay? No Way.” The graphic shows a map of the US with each state labeled , “79%” or “75%” or “82%” — the earnings of women as compared with men. The headline is intended to leave the false impression that women still don’t get equal pay for equal work. Like one dot in a pointillist painting, this one tiny item by itself is nothing. The problem is that it’s part of a bigger picture, a propaganda war in which feminists never stop trying to change women into men, to arouse anger and resentment against men, to create a utopia that would be hell on earth for most normal women.

This dot in the pointillist painting is intended to convey the following subliminal messages: Women earn less than men for no good reason. The only possible explanation for the pay gap is discrimination. In a just society, women would earn exactly the same amount as men. A woman seeing this graph should feel resentment and righteous indignation. A man seeing this graph should hang his head in contrition.

In actuality, the TIME piece (if you read it carefully) says nothing about equal pay for equal work — a goal the US achieved thirty years ago. Rather, it says that women in the aggregate earn 80% as much as men in the aggregate. Well, let me tell you something. The gap has been narrowed as much as it possibly can be in a free country. Almost all of the remaining gender pay gap is THE RESULT OF WOMEN’S OWN CHOICES. The only way the pay gap could be narrowed any further would be if a totalitarian government FORBADE women to take a few years off of work to raise children, FORBADE women to work at easier jobs, closer to home, with shorter hours; FORBADE women to rely on their husbands’ incomes. How ironic that the feminists who claim to be “pro-choice” have such contempt for the choices most women actually make.

As Orthodox women, we have the special honor and privilege — and pleasure! — of nurturing babies and children, of bringing new Jews into the world and raising them to carry into the future the torch we ourselves were handed from the past. Everyone knows that pregnancy and childbirth can be painful and difficult. Everyone knows that taking care of babies can be exhausting, dirty and thankless work. What young women too often don’t know is that pregnancy can be exciting, that childbirth can be exhilarating, that taking care of a soft and cuddlesome baby can be the most rewarding and delicious thing you ever do in your whole life. Why should a woman want to be a man when our lives are so rich in ways that men can never know?!

In today’s Miami Herald there are four articles, each one an interview with an elderly Florida couple who survived the Holocaust. Their stories are tragic and also inspiring, but here is the fact that caught my eye: each of these couples — all of them now in their eighties — had exactly two children, and today they have between them very few grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

I am not certain whether it is because of the conscious choices that non-Orthodox Jews made, or Divine Providence, but today it is only Orthodox Jews whose numbers are increasing. I don’t remember who made the famous remark about not granting Hitler posthumous victories, but Jews in America are famously reproducing at negative-ZPG rates.

The only non-Orthodox elderly Jews with significant numbers of grandchildren are those fortunate enough to have at least one BT child. It is too late for those elderly survivors, but young Jews today who do not want Jewish numbers to decline any further should 1. marry young and 2. have more than two kids and 3. give their children enough of a Jewish education so that their kids, too, will have more than two kids.

“Marry young” means, for a woman, before age thirty — even if she doesn’t have tenure yet. Some things are more important than a career, or should be. Jewish heroism today means giving birth to more Jews! Have you seen the latest biography of Einstein? The lists of Jewish Nobel laureates? The review in Moment Magazine of a book about the Chofetz Chaim? Jews are a blessing to the whole world. Jews, Jews, we need more Jews!

When I first read about the lady on the #2 bus, I was inclined to cheer her on. From the sound of it, the behavior of the men was appalling, and she got some good licks in. Certainly the idea of separate seating on buses is most unappealing to me, but in her place, I would have meekly moved back anyway. Secretly I’m glad there are other, sterner women who aren’t so meek. Well, to be honest, it’s not the separate seating but the sitting in back that bothers me. If the men sat in back and the ladies up front, I really would not mind. My charedi brother in fact says that if looking at women is the real problem, the men should sit at the rear of the bus–facing backwards! :- )

My charedi relatives mostly are opposed to the whole idea of mehadrin buses, although one female relative tells me that many women prefer the separate seating because they are not crushed by pushy men who elbow their way through crowded buses. And they can nurse their babies discreetly under loose blankets without being noticed. But I still find the idea of segregated buses distasteful.

Having said all that, I really wonder about some of the details in the bus story. There is an email going around the internet, purportedly written by the victim, which has in it one absolutely astounding detail. It claims that there were TWO SECULAR CAMERAMEN ON THE BUS WHO VIDEOTAPED THE INCIDENT. Is this plausible? How often do secular cameramen take the #2 bus to the kosel at 6 AM? What are the odds that they would do so just on the day when this bizarre incident unfolded? Was the confrontation planned? Did someone tip the cameramen off? Were they really on the bus? Where are these two men? Where is the footage they shot? Why hasn’t it been aired?

Below, the email in full (I have put a couple of sentences in bold). I don’t know for sure that this is the form in which she originally wrote the letter; others may have edited or added some elements, or perhaps someone else wrote this letter altogether:

Today, Hoshana Raba — the seventh day of Sukkos — is the anniversary of the day all the sukkos in North Miami Beach blew away, exactly one year ago.

Three days earlier, the weather reports started talking about a tropical depression called “Wilma” — so far down in the alphabet, so rare to have so many hurricanes in one season. Would this become a hurricane?

The next day, the warnings became a bit more serious. The day after that, one day before she hit, the radio and TV went to all-Wilma, all the time.

Having lived through a number of hurricanes in my neck of the woods — in fact, the eye of Katrina had passed directly over my house, a few weeks earlier! — I knew what to expect. Or thought I did. A lot of wind and rain, some branches on the road, a day or two without electricity. Katrina was only a Category One when it hit us, en route to New Orleans: it meant one day with no lights and no air conditioning.

Tonight — Shabbos, the 26th of Tammuz — is the fourth yahrzeit of my father, R’ Nachman Bulman zt’l.

I spoke to my mother today shortly before Shabbos (her time) and she told me that she had gone to my father’s kever earlier in the day, together with my brothers, my sister, and many other relatives and friends who live in Israel.

“The taxi driver cried all the way to the cemetery,” she told me. Why? “He was listening to the news. They were talking about the funerals of three Jewish soldiers. He kept wiping his eyes with a tissue, the whole time.”

When my father was alive, I used to ask him his opinion about everything. If it was a Torah subject then, as far as I was concerned, his opinion was da’as Torah — he saw the world through the eyes of Torah.

There is more than one story in the Valis case, and I would like to add my own comments to what R’ Yakov Menken wrote.

Story One, the death of an infant:
The first story is the tragic story of a baby’s death. The young father is accused of having killed his baby in a fit of rage over the baby’s crying, while others say the father was playing with his baby, threw the baby up in the air playfully as fathers do, and then tragically lost his grip, with the baby landing hard on the floor, emergency called, baby rushed to the hospital and dying in the emergency room.

Either this case was one of horrible abuse and murder, or it was a tragic, heartbreaking accident. The case is not clear, not yet proven one way or another. Demonstrations demanding the accused’s release were therefore at best premature.

I consider it unlikely that the young father is guilty, but it is certainly possible. I believe that abuse is extremely uncommon in charedi circles, but it does happen. Statistically, babies are FAR more likely to be killed by unrelated males (with Mommy’s boyfriend being by far the most common culprit) but it is not unknown or impossible for a father to kill his own baby, even a father with long payos.

In the Spring 2006 issue of Reform Judaism Magazine, there is an article of particular interest to me because it is about my own father, Rabbi Nachman Bulman, of blessed memory.

The article is by David Ellenson, the president of Hebrew Union College–the Reform rabbinical seminary. He is from Newport News, VA — a city I remember with great affection from my own childhood. My father was the rabbi of the Orthodox shul there when I was a little girl.

I am particularly indebted to Menachem Butler and his American Jewish History blog, without which I never would have known about this amazing article. It was featured in his March 28 blog entry, entitled “Growing Up in Newport News,” which was sent to me by several friends.

R’ Bulman was one of the founders of NCSY and won the hearts and minds of many young Jews back to the Torah of their grandparents. But David Ellenson was not one of his success stories. Indeed, my father might well have been distressed by what became of that young boy he once taught. A Reform rabbi? The head of all the Reform rabbis?! No, that was not my father’s dream for his pupil.

As a follow-up to Shira Schmidt’s post about religious girls, weight, and self-esteem:

In one area I think we do a lot better than the non-Jewish world, and that has to do with social expectations in high school. Stephanie Wellen Levine, a non-Orthodox journalist, spent a year studying high school girls in Crown Heights (Lubavitch-town) and found that they had nothing like the cattiness and cliquishness of high school girls she knew in the non-Orthodox or non-Jewish schools. She reported that most of the girls did care about clothes but to a much lesser extent than in the public school she herself had attended. She also found that the heavy girls were just as socially popular and accepted as the thin girls—again, unlike the situation in non-Jewish schools.

What she found in Crown Heights squares with my own experiences teaching in a girls’ high school in Miami—not Lubavitch but of course Orthodox. The girls’ popularity and happiness and confidence do not seem related to how thin or heavy they are. On the other hand, everyone would rather be thin, that’s a fact.

Among girls and women, in my community at least, thinness is not much of a social issue, and Baruch Hashem for that. Most girls do try to look nice and are fashion-conscious, but I’m proud that these external factors count for relatively little socially, and that most of the girls care more about character and higher values.

The body lies on a stainless steel table, draped with a sheet. Together with three other women, I cut away the body bag and hospital clothes, remove bandages, pull out IV lines. We wash the body, the water flowing down the table and out of a hole at the foot of the table, into a steel sink. The room is tiled white, brightly lit, antiseptic. We look like doctors, gowned and gloved, and the room looks like an operating room — except that in one corner there is a mikva.

We work quickly and quietly. Conversation is improper, disrespectful, except for the task at hand. If there is a flow of blood anywhere, we stanch the flow and save the bloody cloths, to be buried with the body. Sometimes the work is tedious and dull. Sometimes there are complications that make things more interesting from a medical point of view — I have a medical curiosity about the cause of death — but complications delay us getting out of there, home to our families.

When the body is clean, we take the woman’s body and we place it in the mikva. We have been careful never to leave her exposed while we were washing and cleaning — always uncovering just a little bit at a time. We take pains to preserve her dignity, because her soul is nearby, watching us, in distress until the burial takes place.

For a moment the body is exposed but it is quickly covered by the purifying waters of the mikva. We four women of the chevra kadisha say, as we put her under the water three times, “Tehora hee, tehora hee, tehora hee” — “She is pure, she is pure, she is pure.” Of course “pure” is not the right word for a religious concept that has nothing to do with cleanliness — she was clean already before we put her in the mikva. Her body is ready now for the Resurrection of the Dead when Moshiach comes.

Responding to Yitzchok Adlerstein’s post about a movie that’s much in the news, Eliezer Barzilai wrote:

“there are movies in which a spouse comes back as a child (Birth), or as a person of the same gender as the surviving spouse (Ghost) in which physical intimacy with the reincarnated spirit is presented as a thing of beauty. The Greeks also liked the idea, as we find Zeus taking the form of a swan or a bull, and having his way with various maidens. These stories, I believe, implant the idea that one loves the essence of the person, and the physical form is irrelevant. But then you step back and realize, with a feeling of nausea, that they are advocating pedophilia and bestiality.”

…and homosexuality

The beloved spouse coming back as a person of the same sex as the bereaved is obviously Hollywood’s way of pushing the idea that it doesn’t matter, or shouldn’t matter, what sex your spouse is. Everyone — not just gays — should choose mates without regard to the sex of the partner. We should all be people, not men or women. That’s part of the feminist agenda, too. Which may go some way to explaining why Hollywood is making so many movies that prima facie would only appeal to the 1% of the population that is gay — not much of a demographic there. But feminists — now you’re talking about a lot of people.

Doing carpool today, taking my kids home from school, we passed by the local public high school. Kids were streaming out of the public school, many of them carrying big heart-shaped helium baloons for Valentine’s Day.

Something struck me then which in fact strikes me every year on Halloween, Santa Claus Day, Kwanzaa, Valentine’s Day and Spring-Color Egg Day, and that is: the public schools DO teach religion, and they DO celebrate religious holidays.

This has been actually infuriating me for years, ever since I first noticed it. The Bible cannot be read in public schools, teachers cannot refer to G-d, the Ten Commandments cannot be posted on the walls, but the teachers openly promote witches and cupids, goblins and Greek gods, pagan rites of spring (the eggs being all that remains of Easter) and orgies of commercialism.

Mind you, I don’t actually want the birth of Chr*st or his supposed resurrection (Easter) to be taught in public schools, but I do think the utter absence of any reference to G-d in even generic terms is a social and moral horror, especially when an alternative religion IS being promoted in public schools.

In a recent post of mine, titled “Disclaimer” I wrote about the violence of Jewish police against peaceful Jewish protesters in Amona. The gravamen of my post was that Israeli police should not treat fellow-Jews as if they were Arabs.

In comment #5 to my post, Joel Rich wrote:

Interesting is how when one’s own group has elements that act inappropriately, they are often minimized as a fringe element not representative of the greater whole, yet when “the other’s” group has elements that act inappropriatley, that entire group is demonized.

I didn’t realize he was talking about different groups of Jews and thought he was saying that there is little difference between Jews and Moslems/Arabs — that Arabs merely have “elements who act inappropriately.” I thought he was saying that there is little difference between peaceful Jewish protestors and jihadi Islamo-fascist Arabs, that is.

Had to put that disclaimer up there to forestall what will otherwise be the inevitable wrong-headed deduction some people will make after they read this post. OK, now that I got that out of the way:

Yaakov Menken wrote:

Why have you not been listening, I ask in my mind, when the charedim were telling you this for decades?

To which Alexander commented:

In the comments to Yakov Menken’s latest JIB post, Micha wrote:

But in what sense is this a religious blog, rather than a political blog run by religious people?

and Shlomo added:

Let me be more specific, what percentage of your postings would require prior recitation of Birkas HaTorah (had I not already done so) or, had they been printed out, require disposal in a respectful fashion?

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

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:

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.