Translation from PR-speak to English of the Anti-Defamation League’s “Statement On Islamic Community Center Near Ground Zero”
We regard freedom of religion as a cornerstone of the American democracy, and that freedom must include the right of all Americans – Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and other faiths – to build community centers and houses of worship.
If we tried to use any legal maneuver to prevent this community center from being built, we would be laughed out of court.
We categorically reject appeals to bigotry on the basis of religion, and condemn those whose opposition to this proposed Islamic Center is a manifestation of such bigotry.
Bigotry is bad, mmkay?
However, there are understandably strong passions and keen sensitivities surrounding the World Trade Center site. We are ever mindful of the tragedy which befell our nation there, the pain we all still feel – and especially the anguish of the families and friends of those who were killed on September 11, 2001.
If the events of 9/11 have made someone feel squicked by Islam, that feeling should not be classified as bigotry.
The controversy which has emerged regarding the building of an Islamic Center at this location is counterproductive to the healing process.
We are as high as a kite.
Therefore, under these unique circumstances,
Our opinion regarding 9/11, like the Supreme Court’s opinion regarding the 2000 Presidential election, should never be used as a precedent for anything else.
we believe the City of New York would be better served if an alternative location could be found.
Not that we’re offering to draw you a map or anything.
In recommending that a different location be found for the Islamic Center, we are mindful that some legitimate questions have been raised about who is providing the funding to build it, and what connections, if any, its leaders might have with groups whose ideologies stand in contradiction to our shared values. These questions deserve a response, and we hope those backing the project will be transparent and forthcoming.
We have no evidence that the Islamic Center is run by terrorists, but we’re not above insinuating that such evidence might exist. We call ourselves the “Anti-Defamation League” but we’re not above defaming the Islamic Center’s leaders and donors.
But regardless of how they respond, the issue at stake is a broader one.
We actually don’t care whether or not the Islamic Center is run by terrorists. We just wanted to blow some smoke about that.
Proponents of the Islamic Center may have every right to build at this site,
Then again, they may not.
and may even have chosen the site to send a positive message about Islam.
If so, we will strive to prevent anyone from receiving that message.
The bigotry some have expressed in attacking them is unfair, and wrong.
Did we mention that bigotry is bad?
But ultimately this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right. In our judgment, building an Islamic Center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain – unnecessarily – and that is not right.
We must perform a delicate balancing act between the feelings of people who, since 9/11, have become squicked by Islam (in a totally non-bigoted way), and the feelings of those “Islamic moderates” whom we used to call upon to denounce Muslim extremists. For an Islamic Center three blocks away from Ground Zero, that balance favors the non-bigots. Maybe this Center could be built four blocks away. Or maybe fourteen blocks away. Or maybe in Brooklyn. Then again, maybe not in Brooklyn.
The Anti-Defamation League, founded in 1913, is the world’s leading organization fighting anti-Semitism through programs and services that counteract hatred, prejudice and bigotry.
God help us.
Brooklyn link via agrumer
“Translation” genre canonized by John Gruber
I am not hip enough to come up with a proper headline to this post
Shaul Magid,1 reviewing a sociological study of ArtScroll, remarks:
Indeed, the new Conservative Etz Hayyim is arguably a response to the Stone Chumash the way the Beach Boys “Pet Sounds”(1966) was a response to the Beatles’ “Rubber Soul” (1965).
1 I recall meeting Rabbi Magid at Michael Carasik’s Shabbat table, and now that I know he writes all this stuff on the intarwebs, I will have to look for more of it. Hey, look: “Shaul Magid’s controversial thesis that American Judaism is dominated by three dogmas: pro-Israelism, the uniqueness of the Holocaust, and the war against intermarriage.” That’s controversial?
Sorry, Bibi
The Nine Days are an appropriate time for Jews to repent, and it is appropriate for me to repent for being too cynical about the Israeli political process. I had assumed that the Israeli government is so independent of the Diaspora1 that complaints from liberal American Jews could not possibly block MK Rotem’s proposed conversion bill. I was wrong. חטאתי.
1 Note that for all the fulminations over the “Jewish lobby”, the Israeli government probably gets more political benefit in the US from evangelical Christians than it does from the Jews who live here.
Maybe he thought it was a commentary on Leviticus
At shul today, I noticed a guy reading Foucault’s History of Sexuality during the Torah reading.
Thinking outside the beis medrash
I’ve seen a lot of angst in the Jewish blogosphere over the ever-rising cost of day school tuition; this article, linked by someone on my LJ-friends list, is the latest example of the genre. The problem has a tragic dimension, because of a little-known wrinkle in economics called the Baumol effect.
James Surowiecki explains:
When Mozart composed his String Quintet in G Minor (K. 516), in 1787, you needed five people to perform it—two violinists, two violists, and a cellist. Today, you still need five people, and, unless they play really fast, they take about as long to perform it as musicians did two centuries ago. So much for progress.
An economist would say that the productivity of classical musicians has not improved over time, and in this regard the musicians aren’t alone. In a number of industries, workers produce about as much per hour as they did a decade or two ago….
The rest of the American economy functions differently. In most businesses, workers are continually getting more productive and can produce a lot more per hour than they could ten or twenty years ago. In 1979, workers at G.M. needed forty-one hours to assemble a car. Today, they need just twenty-four…. Because companies are producing more for less, they can hold down costs, and when times are good they can raise wages without hiking prices. So, in the late nineties, as productivity rose, wages did, too, though inflation lay dormant.
Generally, productivity growth is a boon, but it creates problems for non-productive enterprises like classical music, education, and car repair: to keep luring talent, they have to increase wages, or else people eventually migrate to businesses that pay better. Instead of becoming nurses or mechanics, they become telecom engineers or machinists. That’s why teachers are getting paid a lot more than they were twenty years ago. (The average salary for an associate college professor has risen almost seventy per cent since the early eighties, and that’s if you adjust for inflation.) To pay those wages, schools and hospitals have to raise prices. The result is that in industries where productivity is flat costs and prices keep going up.
So if we want to keep Jewish education accessible, instead of letting it consume an ever-increasing proportion of each family’s income, we have to think about ways to make it more productive. How could our community achieve at least some of the goals of Jewish day school without hiring one full-time teacher for every fifteen to twenty-five children?
I’ll offer one idea: A team that knows something about Judaism and programming could set up a Jewish-themed online role-playing environment, where Jewish kids from all across the country, whether or not in day school, could meet like-minded folks, socialize, and take lessons in Jewish religion and culture in the form of quests for honor and treasure. We could call it “World of Frumkeit”.
Dances With Monotheism
Over the past few weeks, I’ve seen some controversy in political and SF blogs regarding a certain Hollywood movie, in which a white American human takes on the form of a blue-skinned alien. I was reminded of this when I read last week’s parsha (Exodus 1:1–6:1), because one could argue that the young Moses is an Egyptian prince who has the form of an Israelite. Pharoah’s daughter describes him as “from the Hebrew children” in 2:7, and Jethro’s daughters describe him as “an Egyptian man” in 2:19. This dual identity gives us a new way to understand one of the most cryptic passages in the Torah, Exodus 4:24–26, which the new JPS version tentatively renders as follows:
At a night encampment on the way, the LORD encountered him and sought to kill him. So Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin, and touched his legs with it, saying: “You are truly a bridegroom of blood to me!” And when He let him alone, she added, “A bridegroom of blood because of the circumcision.”
Moses is on his way back to Egypt, to deliver his first “let my people go” message to Pharoah. And now God wants to kill him? What’s going on here? Rashi cites a midrash that Moses was condemned for not circumcising his son, but this explanation raises problems of its own. Given that Moses could have argued that circumcising an infant before taking him on an arduous journey is dangerous, and given that failure to circumcise promptly is not a capital offense in halakha, why did God suddenly judge Moses so harshly? Better scholars than myself have put forth a variety of answers to this question, but I’d like to put forward my own.
Let’s back up to 4:18, when Moses tells his father-in-law, “Please let me go and return to my brothers in Egypt, and see if they are still alive.” The phrase “my brothers in Egypt” is ambiguous; maybe even strategically ambiguous. Does he mean his Hebrew blood relatives, who are being worked to death as slaves? Or does he mean his adoptive Egyptian family, which might have suffered a purge when the new pharoah (2:23) took power?
After Moses takes up wife, children, donkey, and staff, God reviews his mission, but adds a detail (4:22–23) that He had not previously mentioned:
Say to Pharoah: “This is what the Eternal says: Israel is My first-born son. I am saying to you, ‘send my son so he can serve Me’, and if you refuse to send him, behold, I will execute your first-born son.”
I submit that this message is a veiled threat against Moses himself. God is asking: do you consider yourself a member of the nation that is My first-born son, or are you the first-born son of Pharoah’s daughter? Whose side are you on?
I would like to register a meta-complaint
Even before the news hit the New York Times, you may have heard about “complaints choirs”, Finland’s incomparable gift to world culture. Here you can see videos of choirs that have gathered all over the world to sing their particular grievances: ninety-one singers in Helsinki, twenty-three in Hamburg, fifty-four in St. Petersburg, eighty in Canada, seventeen in Jerusalem—
Wait a minute. Seventeen?!
Chevra, this is an outrage. I can forgive the Jerusalemites for not out-whining Russians and Finns, but to be bested by Canadians1 (sorry, besamim), chorusing about their cold feet and their ill-dressed Prime Minister, is an affront to the honor of the Jewish nation. This must not stand.
So if anyone is looking to assemble a Boston Jewish Community Complaints Choir, please count me in. Bonus points if you can find a catchy tune for “everyone on my right thinks I’m a heretic and everyone on my left thinks I’m a lunatic”.
1 Among the English-language complaints choirs whose videos actually ran on my browser, I think the only one superior to the CBC’s production is the Chicago choir, which includes the quintessentially Chicagoan complaint “my dead grandma always votes for the wrong candidate”.
The Internet interprets a cherem as damage and routes around it
It’s too bad there aren’t more Orthodox Jews working for Agence France-Presse, because this article, headlined “Ultra-Orthodox rabbis decry Internet’s ‘terrible impurity’”, buries the lede.
The reporter and editor don’t seem to realize that “haredi leaders denounce Internet”, in and of itself, is about as newsworthy as “evangelical Christian leaders denounce premarital sex”. The real news here is that the rabbis are calling out Internet sites run by other haredim that are airing out the community’s dirty laundry or otherwise lack, shall we say, the nihil obstat of the gedolim.
via jwz
Thank God we are free, unlike this poor sod
Twice in my life, I have attended Passover Seders1 in people’s homes in which we, as we celebrated our freedom, were attended by Black servants. Perhaps if I had been raised in a social class where “the help” was a constant presence in my life, I would not have considered this unusual, but I felt like the hosts must have been deaf to irony. What did those women say to their families when they got home from their jobs? I hope that at least they were well paid.
It turns out that Maimonides, who was not raised with even the illusion of living in a classless society, had a different approach to this kind of situation. He wrote, in Hilchot Chametz u-Matzah 8:2:
If [the son at the Seder] is young or of low intelligence, [the father] says to him, “My son, we all used to be slaves—like this maid, or like this slave—in Egypt, and on this night the Blessed Holy One brought us out to freedom.”
Fortunately, in this millenium, other people have come up with better ways to explain slavery to the very young.
1 One of them was not, technically, a Passover Seder, but rather a birthday bash held on the first night of chol ha-mo’ed in which the hosts decided to break out the haggadot. Don’t ask.
Cain’s best friend
The author of the “Everyone Needs Therapy” blog informs us that October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and highlights a program, co-sponsored by the American Humane Association, to help abused women take their pets with them into shelters.
And just a few days ago, in synagogues all over the world, we read Bereshit, which describes the first recorded instance of domestic violence. That story, according to the midrash, also involves a pet. Nachmanides (s.v. Genesis 4:13) cites Bereshit Rabbah 22:27 as explaining that the “sign” that God set for Cain’s protection was actually a dog; Cain would know that wherever the dog went, he could follow safely.
OK, it’s not a perfect parallel: Cain was a perpetrator of violence, not a victim. But unlike many other perpetrators since Genesis, he repented and, as far as we know from the text, didn’t do it again…
