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WHO GOES FOR US?
I recently read an article written by a Jewish blogger who strongly defended Israel and was very critical of the growing blatant bent of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel writings of the progressive Left and some sections of world academia. He received a sharply worded letter from a fellow Jew who demanded to know why this blogger had not written such a blog about discrimination against Afro-Americans and Moslems and other minorities in American society.
In other words a Jew is not allowed to defend fellow Jews and the Jewish state unless he has first earned his true credentials of liberalism by defending others who are not Jewish. Being loyal to one’s own tribe is no longer acceptable in liberal society. It is viewed as a petty, outdated form of chauvinism. The true liberal must be universal, even-handed, without national or religious loyalties.
Jews on behalf of other Jews is unacceptable in this skewed vision of universal tolerance. There are no good guys or bad guys - just other guys who must be defended before my own. So there are no more terrorists in the world – just militants; no aggressors – just people with justified grievances; and there are no concepts of defensible borders – merely “occupied territories.”
Jews are prohibited by this new liberal set of strictures from defending fellow Jews and the State of Israel since doing so will violate the universalist even-handed, pie in the sky, utopianism beliefs and policies of the deluded Left. There are even Jewish groups that have altered the traditional prayer book of Judaism in order to make it less Jewish.
In the 1930’s there were Reform temples that added prayers on behalf of the coal miners in West Virginia. Today there are those that pray on behalf of the California redwood trees and the diminishing sperm whale population. But who prays on behalf of the Jewish people and the Jewish state and for its rights to exist? Really, who?!
We read in the haftorah of this week that the prophet Yeshayahu finds himself in the midst of a vision of the Heavenly court, so to speak. And there he hears a Divine voice asking: “Whom shall I send and who will go for us?” That question reverberates through Jewish history and certainly sounds loud and insistent in our current time.
Who goes for us? Who places the survival and welfare of the Jewish people over and above all other priorities in our sick world? Who feels the pain and suffering of Ofakim and Sderot and does not first demand equal time for the problems of Morsi and Assad and the other victims of the ill-fated and bankrupt Arab Spring?
The great Jewish balladeer of the last century, Shlomo Carlebach would relate: “When I would visit college campuses and ask a student who he was, the Catholic would answer I am Catholic. The Protestant would answer I am Lutheran, Baptist, etc. The Mormon would answer that he was Mormon and the Moslem would say that he was a Moslem. But if someone would respond that he was simply a human being, then I knew that he was a Jew!” In today’s milieu one is simply not allowed to be a Jew first. And therefore there is intermarriage, alienation and a dwindling American Jewish population, both in numbers and in being spiritually unattached to Judaism, Torah and the traditional Jewish value system. Many Jews sadly just do not hear the voice of Heaven calling out: “Who goes for us?!”
Much of this is simply attributable to the abysmal ignorance of many Jews regarding their own faith and its values and practices. In a book written by Walter Lippman, a famous and influential Jewish political columnist and political pundit of the last century, his dedicatory verse was “The stone that the builders have rejected has become the cornerstone of the structure.” He attributed this verse to the New Testament where it does appear, apparently completely unaware that the verse appears many centuries earlier in Psalms as written by King David.
During the Second World War, Lippman like many other American Jews of influence and ability made scant mention of the purposeful destruction of European Jewry by the German enemy. Emphasizing this aspect of the war would have made the war too Jewish and therefore one had to portray the struggle in purely universalistic terms.
Such Jews then, like many Jews now as well, could not afford to appear too biased for Jews and Jewish causes since that would compromise their universalistic credentials. But nevertheless the Heavenly question still echoes in our world awaiting our answer: “Who goes for us?!”
Shabat shalom
Berel Wein
