You Suck and I'm Awesome

There are many honest ways to craft a convincing argument and still obscure the truth. For example, I might frame an issue in a way that supports my point of view. Shouldn’t everyone have the freedom to decide for themselves?  I might trot out some statistics that work to my advantage - after all, statistics don’t lie, even if statisticians do. I could highlight some convenient facts that place me at the right hand of the Almighty.  After all, as the late Daniel Moynihan put it, everyone’s entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts.

Except, that last bit hasn’t held up so well. A few years ago, in the all-critical discussion of crowd sizes, Kelly Ann Conway introduced the concept of alternative facts.  And those fact-checkers I rely on for so much – just a bunch of fake news.

It surprises me how infrequently I can win someone over to my point of view – and I don’t just mean my wife.  Friends, colleagues, shul mates – if we start a conversation in disagreement, it more than likely ends that way.  Although, that’s understandable – where we stand depends on where we sit. Suppose you’re about to be born and you don’t know if you’ll be a have or a have-not – what type of government would you prefer?  If you’re a have, or better yet, a have-a-whole-lot, you might prefer something a little more on the laissez-faire side.  Estate tax? Fuhgeddaboudit! Go with affirmative action for generational wealth. Legacy admissions will keep you clear of the riffraff. And don’t strangle profits with pesky regulations or carbon offsets.

But if you’re a have-not, you might prefer a little more progressiveness.  Medicare might seem like a good idea, even though Ronald Reagan claimed that it would mean the end of freedom in America.  The Affordable Care Act – aka Obamacare – yes, some opponents said it would be the first step towards concentration camps, but the elimination of lifetime caps could be comforting.  And although wokeness is destroying American Exceptionalism, a government that works against disenfranchisement might prevent polluters and elevated highways from being clustered in minority neighborhoods.

So, what’s a Jew to do?

Any decent library will be littered with polemics, which are essays explaining why the other guy’s beliefs are just plain wrong – in other words, you suck. A related genre – apologetics – is frequently written in response to polemics and defends a point of view. Or to be brief – I’m awesome. Those sentiments are the crux of the dialectical process. Fortunately, I can keep my opinions out of my dispassionate analysis. Now, I’d like to focus on a type of argument that is particularly pernicious.  Propagandists go into the other guy’s liturgy or position papers, pull something out word for word, and present it entirely out of context.  This type of half-truth can be more dangerous than any lie.

What disingenuous things can be said about Jews?  Let’s take the Talmud. It runs into thousands of pages, including both majority and minority views. That’s certainly fertile ground for any dissembler.  If you can’t find something to misconstrue in all that, you’re just not trying.  It’s kind of like shooting gefilte fish in a barrel. There were many disputations and mandatory sermons in the Middle Ages in which apostates would do just that, using their rabbinic knowledge to undermine Jewish faith. They were probably more successful than we’d like to think.

But is it necessary to delve into obscure points of theology and law to cast shade onto Jews?  Hardly! With the High Holidays coming up, let’s take a quick peek at the most sacred service we have:  Kol Nidre, in which we beseech the Almighty to release us from any vows we have taken during the previous year.

Really? So if a Jew takes an oath to tell the truth, or just signs an IOU, he can get out of it with a  quickie prayer. Kind of like keeping your fingers crossed when you make a promise, except the last bit is not part of our tradition. No wonder the gentiles are so obsessed about Shylock.  It reminds me of a Christian friend in grade school who assured me I could eat bacon if only I could get my rabbi to bless it.  I wish.

But in the late 1800’s, antisemitic newspapers in Germany were routinely singling out the Kol Nidre prayer to slander Jews, opposing their full integration into society. This was just one lie among many that led to disaster.

What’s behind Kol Nidre?  We are instructed not to take G-d’s name in vain, and that’s that.  No matter how sure I am that I had pancakes for breakfast, maybe I’m a little fuzzy and it might have been waffles. I shouldn’t presume to ask the Almighty to cosign for me. This is why courts these days typically ask you to “solemnly swear or affirm” that what you’re about to testify is the truth. It is indeed a distinction with a difference. And Kol Nidre is twisted by our enemies into something entirely unrecognizable.

Another friend from grade school told me that Israelis kicked his father off the family farm in 1948.  That was the first time I had met anyone who was so anti-Israel. He showed me a pamphlet his father had written, and not surprisingly, I disagreed with most of it. There was one thing I remember.  His father had gone into the Torah itself and ferreted out the truth that even according to our own law, Jews had no right to Palestine. You see, the land had been promised to Abraham, whose oldest son, the fruit of his youthful vigor, was Ishmael, not Isaac. Can’t you see how desperate the Jewish lies are? Land always passed to the first-born son.

Of course, any rabbinical student or bar mitzvah boy should be able to swat that one away.  The patriarchal stories are full of twists and turns which belie the primacy of birth order. But this is a precious example of hoisting Jews on their own petard.

But I suppose turnabout is fair play, because Jews have not been above poking a little fun at Moslem scriptures.  Admittedly, my knowledge of Islam is quite limited, but when I first read the Koran, I was hard pressed to find anything that Jews didn’t already believe. Some of it is even the same.  For example, there’s a story about the redemption from slavery in Egypt that is not all that different than that found in the Book of Exodus. You can read about the righteous Moses, the shortsighted Pharoah, and the real villain of the Passover story, the evil magician Haman.

Peace be upon him, but when the Prophet’s Jewish contemporaries heard about this, they laughed. I suppose that’s understandable, but we also need to take a step back. Yes, Haman seems to be retrofitted into the wrong holiday, and what’s more, Pharoah’s wizards are all nameless in the Tanach. But Jews in glass sukkahs shouldn’t throw stones.  For starters, biblical characters frequently have multiple names and improbable lifespans. How often do we read some story in which some tzaddik appears who clearly should have died centuries earlier? We have so many traditions, who can keep track? For what it’s worth, Christian scriptures also name two of Pharoah’ wizards, Jannes and Jambres, who are not mentioned in our writings. This swipe at Islam just isn’t worth dwelling on.

There is another distortion that is far more dangerous. In Surah Al-Baqarah, the second and longest chapter in the Koran, it is written “Kill them wherever you find them,” referring to infidels. As tolerant as we might like to be, that still sounds bad.  And in the history of all religions, a sentiment like that has been carried out in the name of all confessions, including our own.

Of course, this is not the point being made at all.  At the time of this revelation, Muhammad and his followers were involved in a war. Even so, there were sacred places in which bloodshed was forbidden. For example, the shrine in Mecca, which by Muslim tradition was established by Abraham and Ishmael, was considered too holy for warfare.  Some of their enemies took advantage of this and set up ambushes there, slaughtering those who would not fight back. The Prophet was consulted, who then proclaimed that the faithful could indeed defend themselves whenever they were attacked.  This seems like a Second Temple era innovation allowing Jews to defend themselves on Shabbat.

So, there is a very reasonable explanation for what at first seems quite horrible.  But when you’re explaining, you’re losing. Score one for the Islamophobes.

But what about the Christians? And I’m not just talking about what they’ve said about Jews. If I weren’t already retired, I could make a long career just focusing on slanders originating in the Gospels. Still, it would take far longer to enumerate what they say about each other. Compared to them, we Jews are a model of comity and decorum.

It seems like the history of Christianity is one long food fight. And yes, they do have something analogous to our “Who is a Jew” nonsense. To become a Christian, you need to get baptized. However, suppose you want to switch teams and go from one denomination to another. Do you need another baptism?  If you’re moving from the Lutherans to the Episcopalians, probably not.  But if you’re a Mormon and want to become Catholic, well, the Roman church doesn’t recognize Mormon baptisms, and you’ll need another splash. And don’t get the Born-Again Christians started on Catholic baptisms. Those monsters baptize babies, and they don’t even do full body immersion.  To which a Catholic will likely respond, that’s why there’s a godparent who speaks for the baby and a confirmation later in life, something of a Catholic Bar Mitzvah. And a baby will scream if you dunk it under water.

Of all the mud that Christians fling at one another, I’d like to dig a little more deeply into a canard aimed at the Mormons, also known as the Latter-Day Saints. I have no doubt that there are all sorts of doctrinal differences, but I suspect that a large part of the issue is simple jealousy.  After all, the Mormons, like so many newer denominations, are growing swiftly.  That makes them a juicy target.

So, here it is.  Did you know that Mormons say that Jesus and Satan are brothers?

Great googlie-mooglie! The horror! The horror! What are they thinking? Well, I suppose I could break bread with a Mormon, but I wouldn’t want my daughter to marry one!

To understand what’s behind this controversy, it’s necessary to dig into Christianity writ large.  Like Jews, Christians expend a lot of ink and sweat contemplating the nature of the Almighty. About 1600 years ago, the Roman emperor Marcion convoked the Council of Chalcedon. At this council, most Christians, but certainly not all, adopted the notion of the Trinity.  You may have heard of it:  the three men I admired most, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Still, even the Christians who accept the Trinity don’t actually see eye to eye.  For example, both the Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox include the Nicene Creed as part of their liturgies, but they differ on something called the Filioque. It’s one word in Latin, five words in Greek, and has something to do with whether the Holy Ghost emanates from the Father and Son, or just from the Father.  I don’t really follow the logic, but it’s evidently something well worth arguing about.  If you have any questions, I refer you to the bishop.

It doesn’t stop there.  The Nazarene, being both Son of G-d and Son of Man, is a little bit of both. So what does this mean?  Is it a smooth mixture in which there’s no telling where the divine stops, and the mortal starts?  For example, did the Nazarene suffer on the Cross? Just ask my Catholic wife: of course he did! How else could he redeem us from our sins?  The Docetians didn’t think so: the guy was holy, divine!  He only pretended to suffer.

Of course, the Docetians were more Gnostic in their outlook, and if we drill down into Gnostic thinking, we get into all sorts of strange esoterica. One thread rejects the idea of a virgin birth altogether.  Rather, the Nazarene was simply the product of the ordinary union between Joseph and Mary.  So, how did he get his oomph?  Good question, and it was hinted at last week in a discussion by another one of our brothers. One of the psalms, I forget which one, says that the Almighty knew us in the womb. This has been interpreted to suggest that while we were gestating, the Almighty kept us entertained with knowledge of the entire universe.  Just before we are born, some angel flicks us on the lip, and the memory is wiped out.  Something like fetal amnesia. Except, not in the Nazarene’s case, who retained it all.

For what it’s worth, the Moslems don’t deny the virgin birth.  The Nazarene is their fourth holiest prophet.  They do reject the notion of anything so anthropomorphic as divine insemination.  If the Almighty wanted Mary to be pregnant, it would just be so.  Fact-check: true.  Maimonides would agree.

Before Catholicism dominated Christianity in Europe, there was a sect called the Arians.  Whereas the Catholics, and most other Christians, identify the Nazarene with the Almighty who created heaven and earth, the Arians did not.  Like everything else in the universe, G-d created the Nazarene. 

Which seems to be what the Mormons believe. And since it all comes back to the Almighty, G-d also created Satan. Which makes Jesus and the Devil spiritual brothers. I’m reminded of what another of our brothers discussed a few weeks ago:  Jews believe that the Almighty created both the Yetzer Harah – the evil inclination – and the Yetzer Hatov – the good inclination. And while I’m the topic:  O. J. Simpson, Tucker Carlson, J. D. Vance – all created in the Almighty’s image.

And yes, I find the notion of the Nazarene and the Opponent being spiritual brothers a little weird. But who am I to talk? As a Jew, I wrap myself in leather straps every day. Now that’s weird. If you really want to dunk on the Mormons, this is a good place to start.

Yes, indeed.  You suck and I’m awesome. But these sorts of distortions are not limited to religion.  Let’s shift over to politics and sample some of the red/blue culture wars so prominent today.

Who remembers death panels? That was the Obamacare bugaboo that would let liberal elites decide whom to unplug.  Well, who among us hasn’t fantasized about tossing his mother-in-law off a cliff? Certainly not me. But how did this notion get started?

Until a century or two ago, you lived until your late forties or maybe early fifties, and then you croaked.  Baruch dayan emet. Now, medical knowledge has advanced, and we have a completely different landscape. That’s mostly a good thing.  Still, it can be quite complicated.  Some treatments can be quite painful or only marginally effective. Savings can be depleted, leaving our families bankrupt.  All of this could lead to a quality of life no one would voluntarily endure.

Which is why an early draft of the Affordable Care Act provided for consultations on these fraught end-of-life care decisions.  Which seems reasonable to me, except, death panels!

Moving on to another completely uncontroversial topic – immigration.  What’s this about Haitians eating our cats and dogs? I suppose it’s easy to laugh – last week when I picked up a six pack for our session, I was wearing one of my many goofy cat t-shirts. Another customer teased me about only returning one of his vacationing daughter’s pets.  I didn’t respond, but maybe I should have said something clever about needing Christian children to make a good kreplach. But it is no joke.  This calumny is every bit as bad as the Blood Libel. The Holocaust didn’t really get going until the 1940’s.  The Nazis spent the previous decade printing pictures in Der Sturmer of hook-nosed Jews raping Aryan maidens.

But at least the kitten business has the benefit of being a total lie, and as such is not a subject of my current discussion. There is something else that seems far less harmful but is a good example of a bit of truth twisted into something that is not.

You may have heard about Kamala Harris being Biden’s immigration czar. Nice job, if you can get it. So, she’s the one who oversees the border, makes all the decisions, and is ultimately responsible for our dystopia.

Except, not so much. Besides all the lies about migrant crime and the loss of black jobs, Harris’s role was much more limited.  She is part of a working group to develop policies to keep migrants in their home countries, which certainly must be a part of any solution.  This is a complicated problem, and it will take more than simple minded slogans like ‘build the wall” and “mass deportation now” for any fix to work.

Let me give you a concrete example.  This is a story from the first, and hopefully last, Trump administration.  I only heard it once – I won’t swear to it, and I won’t even solemnly affirm it, but I do believe it’s true.

The government of Venezuela is just plain horrible.  At one point, no doubt with the best of intentions, Trump wanted to lay some new sanctions on them. Some of his staff pointed out that if he followed through, it would surely lead to an increase in the number of migrants to this country. Which he hated more than anything else. But he ignored what he was told.

A pity Kamala wasn’t there to set him straight.

But the door swings both ways. What are some of the honest lies Democrats are saying about Trump?

He’s a convicted felon, a sexual predator, and an insurrectionist.  His own niece calls him a narcistic sociopath. Some suggest he is not burdened with the truth.  He pals around with Holocaust Deniers and neo-Nazis. He uses some of the same rhetoric as Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin.

And how do his acolytes respond?

That’s just Trump being Trump! Witch hunt! Rigged! Take him figuratively, not literally! I know you are, but what am I? Heads I win, tails you cheated!  MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

Now, go and study.