Category: Judaism

The anti-Semites strike on Passover

April 10, 2020 • 1:15 pm

I occasionally hear from reader Stephen Listfield, a part-time rabbi. Today he sent me a note along with thirteen pictures, of which I show six below. His words are indented.

I’m a retired rabbi living in Atlanta.  I officiate part-time at a small congregation in Huntsville, AL; I am there for the  High Holidays and one weekend a month.  Mostly older people. They have zero full-time staff.  They do everything themselves, including all the prayers (except when I am there), all the food, all the maintenance, all the janitorial stuff.

Wednesday evening I conducted a Zoom Seder for the congregation.  On Thursday morning, a husband-and-wife minister couple drove by the synagogue and saw the array of “artwork” shown below.   Police are investigating.  No conclusions as yet.

Sending it along for whatever you might wish to make of it.

Happy Passover, for whatever you make or don’t make of the holiday.  (Quite irrelevant to the point of this message, but I say parenthetically that the supernatural part of the holiday — which, frankly, IS the essence of the holiday — is not my cup of tea.  But the message that Passover has come to universally represent, namely, the human right to freedom not only from slavery but (ideally) from every unhelpful constriction, fear, irrationality and neurosis. . . well, Passover can serve as a very powerful liberating message indeed.)

When I asked Stephen if I could reproduce his name, the name of his synagogue, and also show the pictures, he said “certainly” and added the following:

Some say don’t give publicity to the bastards.  Interestingly, and I know you’ll be interested in this, the entire disgusting mess was thoroughly cleaned within a couple of hours. . . largely via the volunteer help of several ministers and church laypeople who couldn’t come fast enough to express their solidarity and their tangible support.

That’s all great.

And yet I lean toward the opposite view: Let the oozing pus be exposed to some sunlight.  It might help disinfect some of humanity’s intractable and hateful germs.

Happy Passover, indeed!

Correction on story of Haredi Jews forcing an El Al flight to land so they wouldn’t be flying on the Sabbath

November 22, 2018 • 10:00 am

Three days ago I put up a post reporting on (and showing videos of) the distress of Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews whose El Al flights from New York to Tel Aviv was delayed by weather. The sources quoted, and the tapes I presented, appeared to show that the Haredi passengers, extremely worried about flying on the Sabbath (that’s not allowed), verbally and perhaps physically abused the airline staff, forcing one of the two flights to be diverted so the passengers could be on the ground during Sabbath (the other flight couldn’t divert because of a passenger’s medical problem).

Reader Orli, however, called my attention to an article in Tablet noting that the scenario above was misleading on four counts. I’ll excerpt the Tablet report:

So what really happened en route from New York to Tel Aviv? As we now know, three noteworthy things: First, the delay was caused because the crew arrived at the airport three hours late. Sure, it was snowing, and the roads were a slushy hellscape, but virtually all of the flight’s 400 passengers realized that and had the good sense to allow plenty of time for travel. The professionals of El Al weren’t quite as attentive or wise.

Even more maddening, once the passengers, still on the ground and growing irate, learned that the flight would not land in Israel in time for Shabbat, many asked to return to the gate so that they could leave the plane and spend the weekend stateside before making other travel arrangements. The flight’s captain asked everyone to sit down and buckle up, promising his passengers that he was merely taxiing back to the gate. Instead, without providing any further updates, without adhering to the requisite safety protocols, and in blatant violation of his promise, he simply took off for Israel.

Under the circumstances, you’d understand why the passengers, having been disrespected and lied to, might be upset. But the best was yet to come: When Yehuda Schlesinger, a passenger aboard Flight 002 and a reporter for Yisrael Hayom, returned home from Athens, he saw the viral video that allegedly documented those rascally Haredi men flexing their muscles and threatening violence. He recognized the clip, because he had shot it with his smartphone on Thursday night and shared it on social media. There was only one small problem: The video Schlesinger took was of Haredi men singing and dancing to cheer each other up under difficult circumstances; the video shown on Israeli TV was edited and given a radically different soundtrack, one featuring men shouting in a menacing fashion. When Schlesinger, incensed, pointed this out to Israel’s Channel 10, they apologized and claimed that the soundtrack was swapped due to technical trouble. The term for that in Yiddish is fake news.

And the objectors weren’t all Haredim:

Far from being uniformly Haredi, as early press reports insisted, the passengers who rushed against the clock in Greece were a wildly diverse bunch: black hatters and wearers of knitted kippot, Ashkenazim and Sephardim, men and women from all across Israel with nothing much in common save for the tradition that has bound us all for millennia.

While I’m not trying to make light of the excesses of Judaism, which is as ridden with superstition as other faiths, I feel I have to correct my earlier report (I’m assuming here the Tablet story is correct). I’ve made a note on the earlier report that it is likely to be erroneous.