This week we tip our hats to Soccer for his/her insightful analysis of the Israeli YES HDTV ad that I wrote about on Monday.

Is the Bottle Dance: not something we can mock?
Soccer wrote:

I think it is brilliant: The commercial is saying that if we do what the Chareidim dont allow, we will have fun, (as we watch chareidim having fun being against it)!

And then later wrote:

Tamar, crazy but I was also in BJ this shabbos! Dont forget what I thought was another terrific point that Rabbi Feldman made: which was the fact that the chareidim, arguably passionate, committed and religiously devoted people, have somehow become seen as a caricature of themselves. There was no concern that YES would be seen as insensitive, irreverant, politically incorrect, andti-traditional, or anything else other than creative, humurous, and original. The chareidim have lost such credibility that those who would never parody blacks, Ethiopians, homosexuals, housewives, or environmentalists can parody chareidim with impunity. Doing so will sell more televisions.

This is a really nice look at the levels that this commercial is using to parody the Charedi community.

I think it’s a shame that Charedim have lost such credibility, but I think it happened as a result of their overboard reactions to anything that they find problematic. It’s simply not an effective way of running a community, and it of course affects whether or not the rest of the world is able to take the Charedi community seriously.

Anyway, it’s interesting to think about how it’s somehow acceptable for an Israeli company to mock Haredi rabbis, but if this commercial was running in Germany or in the States, I doubt we’d find it amusing. More likely, we’d be offended.

Constitution: Not written in invisible ink This week we salute Cavanaugh, who responded to Helen Jupiter’s Words or Turds post about how weird and scary Mike Huckabee can be. In regards to abortion and gay marriage, Huckabee said:

"I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And that's what we need to do, is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards, rather than try to change God's standards."

Here's Cavanaugh's take:

Mike Huckabee has already changed the words of the Living G-d for political advancement—although he's certainly not the first to have done so—but he has not yet changed the Constitution—and not for want of desire to. So changing the words of the Living G-d must be easier than changing the Constitution. For the first, you just sit around and listen to your own arrogance and hatred drown out the voice of G-d; for the second, you've got to convince an awful lot of people to buy the same delusional bullshit your arrogance and hatred has dreamed up.

 

Sad but true. It’s definitely a credit to the Constitution that one person’s arrogance and hatred can’t make much impact on it. On the other hand, see current President…

On Monday I wrote about how single people are sick of being told to shack up, and tarfon responded:

Yes to everything you say, except the last point. Asking whether X is dating anyone is not at all the same as asking how much sex X is having. It's OK to ask X whether he/she's dating someone, but it's not OK to ask what they do after the dates.

So!: Are you seeing anyone?

But you're absolutely right that married folks need to invite singles over (and to accept return invitations) more than they do. Single folks are part of the community and should be treated as such.

Specifically, tarfon is referring to the final paragraph of my post:

So today’s practical spiritual advice is to first invite the singles that you know over more, and second to stop bugging them about their love life. Do they ask about how much sex you’re having with your partner? If not, then you don’t get to ask if they’re dating someone, and if not, why not.

Initially I tried to clarify my point with tarfon, and considered that I hadn’t thought out my position particularly carefully, but the more thought I gave it the more I agreed with myself.

Relationship information is just not something that can or should be asked about in a public setting. Whether or not I’m dating someone is just none of the business of anyone at shul. I can ask about someone’s wife because it’s public knowledge that he’s married, but I wouldn’t dream of asking anyone but the closest friend about how the relationship is going in any specific way, and that’s because putting someone on the spot can be humiliating or just plain unpleasant. For everything that Jewish law says about modesty there is a pretty shocking lack of privacy for most people who are dating or thinking about dating, and I find that really offensive and sad.

The issue is mostly the people who want to know if you’re dating because they have an opinion on the matter—your hair is the problem, this is the wrong city for single Jewish girls, you’re not mature enough, have you met my nephew Max?—but the people who think that it’s just pleasant conversation over kichel at Kiddush are equally frustrating. Does a person who’s single want to have to reiterate their status ten times every Shabbat? Probably not. And even if he has started dating someone, is it something he necessarily wants to chat about with the gabbai? Unlikely.

Please people, watch what you say to us single people. At the very least you should expect that we’re writing about you on our blogs, criticizing your nosy ways and your bad manners.

We have had some seriously insane commenting going on this week. All kinds of haters came out of the woodwork in response to Peter Bebergal’s post on how Christmas became meaningful to him as a Jew. There’s some interesting discussion going on in the comments section on my post about how to enjoy a day off without celebrating Jesus, and all hell has officially broken loose in the comments to my post about 55 black Jews-by-choice. People are calling each other racists, and as usual arguing about who knows more about what the URJ really stands for and I’ve pretty much given up trying to follow the discussion, but this Anonymous comment rocked my socks off, and since we have kind of a British theme going on this week, I think it’s appropriate anyway:
Avraham: Jew by Choice

I usually don’t write on bloggs, but after reading this entry, I could not resist to add to this debate.

The people from Cairo are brave. I pray that they enrich the children of Israel [as many converts have].

First, no journey to become Jewish is meaningless. Your statement is very disappointing. Second, Reform Judaism, Masorti [as we call Conservative Judaism here in the UK], or any other movement within Judaism needs not look like Orthodox Judaism. Neither is Orthodox Judaism the sole representation of world Jewry. At the same time, Orthodox Judaism is not Rabbinic Judaism direct inheritor, nor can it claim a direct phone like to God [on behalf of the children of Israel]. Judaism is not like Christianity with a pope. There is no Jewish pope, or any one stream that represents all Judaism.

On the guys in Cairo. I say, welcome my brothers. I converted to Judaism via Progressive Judaism [mix of Reform and Liberal Judaism], here in the UK. I am a member of a Reform congregation in Newcastle upon Tyne. We have about 3000 mitnadigm, 800 Orthodox and 160 Reform Jews in Newcastle. I am black, born here in England to African parents. I wear a rasta hat as head covering [as against a traditional kippa]. I am also the only black person who is Jewish in Newcastle. I don’t feel any different than any other Jews. Being part of the Jewish people does not incorporate my so called gentile characteristics, because once one becomes Jewish, he/she is Jewish. You would probably know that Judaism forbids one reminding a convert that they were once converts. Especially someone/people who have converted lishma[ for the sole sake of God].

Avraham Avinu was a convert to Judaism. The concept of homogeneity is also a myth. Why, look around you…why do Iranian Jews look like….other Iranians, why do Yemenite Jews look like other Yemenite and why do Polish Jews look…Polish.

Am I against assimilation, yes…but intermarriage is something we need to try and address. No-one seems to have the answer. But note the following…Moses married a Kushite [Ethiopian], and a lady from Median [present day Saudi Arabia], Solomon and David married loads of non-Jewish wives, so did Joseph…should I go on…the question is how does the Jewish world incorporate these people into our communities [within certain boundaries]. That is the challenge. It’s not about excluding them.

I already responded to this in my own comment, but just wanted to add another whole-hearted ‘rock on’!

In response to my post about picking olives with Palestinians, Ismail wrote: Can't We All Just Get Along?: Not really, no.

Judging from the context of her remark, Tamar was proactively insulating herself from the imagined ire of partisans of Israeli policy who may have thought she was going too easy on the Palestinians. Nothing ironic at all in pointing out the political myopia behind such a fear.

And please, don't confuse principled objection to a political delusion with hostility, and lay off the namby-pamby "everyone's a little right, everyone's a little wrong" banalities, would you? Please advise if there is any other significant political disagreement in which this spineless trope occurs with such frequency.

It may be true that all perspectives have some particle of reason supporting them, but so what? Should that require that we put the brakes on our deeply held beliefs? I'm sure there are lovely Israelis who desire peace, just as I'm sure there are reprehensible Palestinians. So what? Taken as a whole, the historical evidence suggests to me that Israel has, since its inception and under many different regimes, made the dispossession of the Palestinians a conscious element of its statecraft. You may disagree (or, like Benny Morris, you may agree but cheer these disgusting actions anyway), but please come up with (what you imagine are) substantive reasons for your misapprehensions, rather than this silly incantation about there being enough blame to go around.

Ismail

Ismail’s right that “particles of reason” shouldn’t put the brakes on deeply held beliefs, but that doesn’t mean someone else’s deeply held beliefs are wrong, babe. I haven't found the historical evidence quite as convincing as you have, apparently.

Also, yes, you should register.

Oy vey: Try as some might, ya can't please everyone.What was up with all the "0 comments" this week? I'll not kvetch too much, because I'll take a slow week for comments over a shitstorm freakout in the comments sections any day, truth be told. Oy. Don't get me wrong, though, the comments we did have were all appreciated, most were wonderful, and a few were even quite funny.

My personal feeling, well one of them anyway, about humor is that it is a bit of an information lubricant, if you will, making oft complex issues digestible, or at the very least, as was the case here, illustrating an alternative point-of-view, especially in the middle of a potentially frustrating discussion, respectfully and in a non-threatening manner. Bonus if the chuckle isn't had at anyone's expense, either. When things aren't threatening, people tend to listen and hear opposing viewpoints better, and so on and so forth. Not to say that it's wrong to be pissed off and chew someone's as, if that's your bag, but I tend to appreciate the lost art of discussion quite a bit. I also tend to enjoy a nice dose of sarcasm or snark here and there, too.

That said, without further ado, fresh from a discussion this week about Agunot, getting a get, nasty divorces and separation of religion and civil matters, I bring you the comment of the week, a line from a longer comment by David Strauss, that used his simple-yet-impossible-goal imagery to make this point about a man denying his wife a get and thus preventing her from remarrying:

"What he did is cruel, but it's the civil equivalent of me removing all the black tiles from a hallway and someone complaining that they couldn't get to the restroom because they can only walk on black tiles."

But, what really sealed it all up for me this week, in terms of what I'd possibly pick to write about tonight (let me pause here and assure you I got permission to reference this email by its sender), came right after, when a former coworker I'd lost touch with years ago emailed me privately and quite out-of-the-blue to ask quite earnestly if I had "any blessed clout" here at Jewcy to remove the comment out of respect for people with color-preferential obsessive-compulsive disorder.

 

I’ve kind of abandoned our regularly scheduled posts this week in favor of Hanukkah coverage, but Ariela M left such a good comment that we have to honor it with comment of the week:

Tamar,

I usually love what you write, but here I feel like your response to Hitchens's piece was a bit wimpy.  Let's be up-front here:  the Hitchens essay attacking Hanukah is a load of crap.  He introduces his point by glorifying epicurean culture, which is a bizarre move coming from someone who is quick to see the worst in any contemporary religious culture.  But the Maccabean critique of epicurean Hellenism was totally legitimate.  The epicureans glorified pleasure and physical beauty.  It was about eating whatever you wanted to the point where you got sick.  It was about worshipping perfect naked bodies, and considering physically flawed people to be worthless.  It was about maximizing the pleasure of powerful male heads of household at the expense of just about everyone else -- women, male slaves, etc.  They weren't exactly concerned about the widow and the orphan.

Hebrew culture, by contrast, offered some different values.  Instead of stuffing any old thing that looked good into your mouth, the Hebrew or Jew was supposed to think about each bite that went in and where it came from -- was it killed in a proper manner (kashrut), was it tithed to support the important institutions of society (truma and ma'aser), were corners of the field left for the poor (leket, shichecha, etc.)?  Instead of treating slaves and the poor as though they were sub-human, the Hebrew or Jew had serious constraints on the ownership of slaves and had important responsibilities to the less fortunate in society.  Instead of worshiping physical beauty, the Hebrew or Jew was taught the value of "Physical grace is deceptive and beauty is empty" (from the Woman of Valor verses).

 Besides ignoring the valid reasons that the Maccabees had for resisting being coerced to become Greeks, Hitchens also dismisses Greek imperialism by jumping to the fact that the Hasmonean regime that emerged was corrupt and brutal.  But how does this excuse Greek imperialism or establish that the Jews should have succumbed to it?  As my preschooler would say, two wrongs don't make a right.  As someone older than a preschooler might note, the eventual excesses of the French Revolution are no reason to stop celebrating the Revolution and its motivating ideals.  Similarly, we don't stop celebrating July 4th just because the American revolutionaries tarred and feathered their enemies (but maybe Hitchens thinks we should?).

Hitchens next parts ways with sanity altogether when he blames the Maccabees for creating Christianity in a bizarre twist on the old saw of blaming the Jews for killing Jesus.  For good measure, he pins the rise of Islam on the Jews as well.  So according to Hitchens, the Jews DID "cause" September 11th.

On a more serious note, Hitchens completely ignores what Hanukah has been for the past two thousand years of rabbinic Judaism.  The appeal of a story in which a small band of Jews stood up to a large, powerful empire that wanted to destroy them is not hard to understand for a people who spent much of the last 2000 years living as a small band of Jews dominated, oppressed, and terrorized by large powerful empires of Christians throughout Europe.

Finally, I can't help but point out Hitchens's fundamental misunderstanding of the First Amendment.  The First Amendment does not privilege "enlightenment" over "faith," as he fantasizes.  On the contrary, the First Amendment, had it existed in ancient Greek Palestine, would have protected the right of the Jews to continue to practice their religion freely, eating their kosher food and worshiping in their temple, free from any coercion by the Greek majority.  Granted, it would also have protected the right of the Hellenizing Jews to assimilate to Greek culture, but it most certainly NOT have protected the Greeks' right to defile the temple and ban Jewish practices.

Finding things to criticize about the texts and actions of people from more than 2000 years ago does not take a genius.  It's easy.  It's cheap shots.  What's challenging is finding continued worth and value in ancient texts and rituals, which is one of the reasons I usually enjoy reading your column.

I have to run to get ready for Shabbat now, so I can’t give the lengthy response that I want to except to say that I dropped the ball here.  My post was written in response to Steve Almond’s piece on Jewcy, and I just added in the line about Slate right before publication, without spending the appropriate time analyzing Hitchens’s writing.  Ariela is right about everything she says here, though I still hesitate to side with the Maccabees with such zeal.  I think Jews should be held to a higher standard, and that should mean an absence of brutality which is just not evident in the Maccabees’s behavior.

At any rate, more on this on Monday.  Shabbat Shalom and Happy Chanukkah to all!

Gay, Pro-Choice Squirrel Reacts: to Huckabee's words Welcome to the first installment of Words or Turds, where each week, we'll bring you a money quote on God, faith, religion, or any number of other shadowy concepts. It's up to you to decide and explain whether they're words or turds. This week, because he's just got so much to say, here are two gems from from Republican wannabe-president Mike Huckabee:

Huckabee on the problems of the Constitution, as it relates to and deals with issues of abortion and gay marriage:

"I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And that's what we need to do, is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards, rather than try to change God's standards."

Huckabee on why he feels so at home in South Carolina:

“South Carolina’s a great place for me. I know how to eat grits. I speak the language. We even know how to talk about eating fried squirrel. We’re on the same wavelength. I bet you never did this: When I was in college, we used to take a popcorn popper, because that was the only thing they’d let us use in the dorms, and we would fry squirrel in a popcorn popper in our dorm rooms.”

Possible Tuesday Taste Test recipe? Perhaps! But for now, we're more interested to know whether you think Huckabee is a man of words or turds. This one's a real head-scratcher, right?

In response to Amy’s post about donating to a Jewish infertility organization an Anonymous comment suggested: Cindy Margolis: Playboy philanthropist

An easy way to support the cause is to purchase Playboy's recent issue that features Cindy Margolis (described as of Jewish heritage). She has pledged to donate her earnings from posing to infertility charities.

So let me first say that while I certainly support infertility research, I really don’t think the best way to do that is by buying porn. That said, I did some research on Margolis (who’s definitely a Jewess, and is married to a guy named Guy Starkman, who I bet is also a Jew), and she actually sounds like a pretty cool chick. Fertility Today has a nice profile of Margolis (it describes her as “a host, spokesperson, actress, model, author and mother who happens to be America's #1 rated celebrity Web site” which is confusing because I assume she herself is not a website, but I’m being picky). Or you could go straight to Margolis’s personal website, where you can find about a hundred pictures of her cleavage, and a section called Girl Talk where she writes pretty candidly about her struggle with infertility. I kind of expected to think she was an idiot (we all know how I feel about porn) but she comes across as sympathetic and bright.

If you’re interested in Jewish infertility I suggest Project Genesis blog (subtitle: the act of creation requires me, my husband, G-d, and a whole lotta technology), What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting, and Bikkurim. I’m also a big fan of the infertility posts at This Woman’s Work (not heavily Jewish, but completely great).

But thanks, Anonymous, for reminding us that even “America's #1 rated celebrity Web site” can have fertility problems.

In response to my excited post about Rabbi Eric Joffie’s interfaith dialogue initiative, and my apology for ever thinking poorly of the Reform movement, Dan Garwood wrote:
Yoffie Speaks to ISNA: so awesome

Tamar, I'm glad to see you reevaluating your position on the Reform Movement. I don't recall everything you've ever said about Reform Judaism, so if I implicitly or explicitly accuse you of something you never actually said, forgive me.

It seems to me that you never really gave Reform Judaism a fair chance. By writing off Reform Judaism, you've disenfranchised an entire group of their right to express and practice Judaism in a way that is meaningful for them.

Granted, there are Reform Jews who don't really practice Judaism. There are Reform Jews who ignore Kashrut simply because it's inconvenient. There are Reform Jews who have never studied a passage of Torah, let alone a page of Talmud. The problems within the Reform Movement are myriad, but it is precisely the committed Jews within the movement who are the first to speak up and say, "This is a problem." The outside world doesn't get to see those people fighting from within for a Reform Judaism that is meaningful.

I found it interesting that it was the URJ-ISNA alliance that made you change your tune. Of all the things Rabbi Yoffie spoke about on Saturday morning, that was the least surprising for me. The initiative that shocked me (in quite a good way) was that which Rabbi Yoffie presented about Shabbat. As he said, Shabbat Shacharit has become more about worship of the Bar/Bat Mitzvah child than of God. His proposal is to find ways of returning the true meaning to Shabbat worship. The Reform Movement has long been known for its political and social activism, but not always its commitment to religious principles. Why then, does the initiative which really stays on course get highlighted, as opposed to the one(s) which indicate a new, positive direction?

Perhaps I'm imposing my own religious priorities on to you, but it seems superficial to repeal all your negative sentiments about Reform Judaism because of one political action initiative. If I, practically a poster child of the Reform Movement, have issues with the Movement and the way its members practice Judaism, then how can you, who seems to be somewhat more traditional in her observance than I, suddenly profess to completely vindicate the Reform Movement?

I suppose it sounds kind of weird that I'm telling you to continue being critical of Reform Judaism. The point I'm trying to make is that Reform Judaism is much broader than each of its initiatives. So, just because the ISNA initiative is great, that doesn't mean that everything else is awesome too. But, by the same measure, when Reform Jews or the Movement do something you don't like, please avoid totally writing them off, as there are still valuable aspects to Reform Judaism. But please, continue to criticize Reform Judaism, and uphold those criticisms that you have held before, because the Reform Movement is definitely not perfect. Do take the time, though, when you have criticism, to take some time to look into the reasoning behind that which you're criticizing, and maybe you'll understand, if not necessarily agree with, why the Reform Movement does things the way that it does.

I certainly don’t think all of my problems with the Reform movement have been solved or made irrelevant by Yoffie’s initiative, but it made me confident that this is a group with a lot of drive and guts, which are pretty important to me. But it’s a great and thought provoking comment. Rock on, Dan!

Inferno: where Suharto should end up This week we salute a few particularly witty and wise comments. First up, Mateo’s response to Helen’s post on the death of former Indonesian dictator Suharto:

 

Suharto joins Pol Pot and others in the ranks of genocidal dictators never brought to justice in life. It eases the conscience, just a bit, to believe in a retributive afterlife where Suharto now serves penance in some painful, eternal Inferno.

So maybe we don’t have hell, but we sure hope Suharto is going to get bitch-slapped on the Other Side.

We also liked Ehud Ada’s response to my suggestion that everyone get a big Jewcy tattoo on their left butt cheek:

Er, ok. But if I get it on the right cheek, will folks assume I'm a gay Yeshiva U. alum?

Yes, but only if you moon us at shul.

Then we had two particularly awesome comments in response to the post on the policy of no gay partners at Yeshiva of Flatbush high school reunions. First, Baltimom gets a little snippy about frum people who want acceptance of their homosexuality:

 

Continue reading...

This week’s comment of the week goes to Zbird’s response to my post about Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and his new anti-multiculturalism book.

My second paragraph was saying that you have no evidence to support your statement that the problems Sacks attributes to multiculturalism are actually the fault of a bureaucracy that somehow mistreats immigrants.

Bureaucracy: so helpful

I'm not saying that anyone should be mistreated, but I question your knee-jerk liberal belief that what immigrants need is more/better bureaucratic (I assume you mean "taxpayer-funded") support to make them feel at home--as if they were children in their first year at sleep-away camp who need extra attention from the counselor lest they feel homesick. The U.S. coddles immigrants and non-immigrants alike a lot less than in Europe, where government supported housing, healthcare, jobs, etc. is the norm. Yet somehow the US' immigrants, exposed to the vicissitudes of the market and forced to fend for themselves, are better assimilated and more at peace with the larger society than in Europe (i.e.: see the Paris riots from last year, or the fact that nearly all the 9/11 hijackers, the 3/11 Madrid and the London bombers, were radicalized in Europe).

btw--I'm not trying to make a statement about the degree to which a government should help its citizens and immigrants in general. Frankly, I think the US should "coddle" its residents a lot more when it comes to healthcare. My point is that you shouldn't assume government is the answer to the segregation Rabbi Sacks describes.

Zbird’s got me here. I’ve got no idea how precisely immigrant bureaucracy works in England or elsewhere in Europe. But I just can’t imagine why my assumption is that it doesn’t work well…

Cunning Linguists: That's "cunning Yiddish linguist" to you.This week, some interesting ideas were raised and discussed in the comments section of Matthue Roth's post which gave us a round-up of Limmud UK. In the post, Roth writes, "Former Speaker of the Knesset Avrum Berg's assertion, while reading I.B. Singer's Nobel address, that Yiddish is a language without words for violence. That, he says, should be our model for building a Jewish state and a model for its future -- with all the corollaries that come with that. (After our session, I pointed out to him that one of the first Yiddish phrases I learned was potch in the tuchus. He said it didn't count.)"

Out of the six that were posted in response to Roth as of this late hour I'm writing, the comment that really stuck out to me was Portnoy's original comment, the very first comment, a comment in direct response to this particular item on Roth's bullet-pointed Limmud UK summary list. Portnoy wrote:

"This is a load of crap. Yiddish has numerous words and expressions for violence which range from the ever-mild barnes (noogies) to aroysnemen a mashkante af emetsn (to hold someone down and beat the shit out of them, - literally, to take out a mortgage on someone), not to mention all the variants that deal with nase arbet (murder, or, literally, wet-work). The notion that Yiddish doesn't have words for violence is also illogical, since as the victims of violence Yiddish speakers would, at least, have words for what was done to them. But Yiddish speakers also did unto others as was done unto them and a significant lexicon exists for it. Just because milquetoasty Avrum Burg is a frayer for buying into the fantasy that Yiddish speakers are passive, doesn't mean you have to be. His comment may be a nice platitude, but it's not based in reality. It's Yiddish disinformation."

Yiddish social-lingual structures and dynamics? Yes please. The lingual nerd in me enjoyed this comment immensely, to be sure, as it conjured up all sorts of linguistic essays I've long wanted to delve into writing (or try writing, in any case). But surely such rumors, extracted from either nothing or from tiny threads of misunderstanding, surely they exist around other languages, too? You bet. Like the notion that the Irish have no word for sex (Hat tip to Tamar for uncovering this fabulous article that only gets better and better as it continues.) and the many other fascinating articles (if you geek out on such things, too) on Language Log like John McCain's assertion that Eskimos have no word for robins, or the 46 Somali Words for Camel-- which includes this beautiful line about assumptions, "...hackneyed rhetoric and banality of thought... the unmotivated assumption that cultural interest always translates instantly into multiplication of vocabulary..." Not that that line as anything to do, per se, with the comment of the week, my original jumping off point, but it's a good line in any case. On that same thread, please let the record show that I can't actually decide if I love "Yiddish misinformation" or "milquetoasty Avrum Burg" better.

 

This week we salute Uriah’s comment on the Megachuch and taxes post.

If these megachurches are making money from shopping malls, movie theatres, and sporting events, and not having to pay taxes, then the separation of church and state has gone too far.  How much of that money is actually being used for something other than cushioning the pockets of Elders, Deacons, and Reverends?

Big Butter Jesus: totally treyf

 And, no, I wouldn't shop at a place I knew was owned by a Christian religious organization.  I also wouldn't patronize anyplace I knew had anything along the lines of sweatshops involved in the making of their products.

Big business is big business, not big jesus.  If I'm not running around my restaurant with my Tanakh under my arm proclaiming jesus as a heretic and a fake, they shouldn't be running around the movie theatre shouting about jesus as the true creator.  It's ridiculous.  

But actually, all of the comments made on that post were really interesting and provocative, so I salute everyone who threw in their two cents.  This has the potential to become a really big problem both for the government, and for Jews who are trying to decide where to shop and spend time.  The discussion in the comments is exactly why I love Jewcy—varied and intelligent and didn’t involve anyone making comments about me and my cuntocracy. 

Too many of you readers aren’t commentators.  And I know you’re smart.  Show me some lip, people.   

And the award: goes to....Okay, okay, so a couple of shitstorms this week. We're a discussion-ey people, these things happen. Predictably, I sat down to write a post about Benjamin E coming to Tamar's defense over the Shomer Negiah post and breaking things down into smaller units of discussion to keep the fight clean and productive, and Tamar's subsequent declaration of love to Benjamin E. Comment of the Week Gold, let me assure you.

But, I realized nobody really touched the anonymous comment that not only missed the point of the comment it was in response to, but named Conservadoxy invalid Judaism, and rather boldly marched into the territory of what movement of Judaism one feels they are a part of versus being declared unfit to be in the movement of Judaism one feels they are a part of. While there is a lot to discuss there, well, there is something not-quite-right to me about declaring an anonymous comment the comment of the week (Oh, I'll catch it right in the face for that, I'm sure).

Hang on, hear me out. I don't mean anything mean by it-- anyone has the right to post anonymously if they'd like, but I think there's something to be said for leaving your name. In a way, when I see an anonymous commenter leaving something really ballsy, I feel for them. I can't help but wonder if the commenter is able to be assertive in their real life. Unfortunately, in my experience a lot of us take anonymous comments rather lightly because somewhere, we're thinking, "Forget it. If s/he really meant that, s/he would have claimed it." It's easy to say something potentially volatile if nobody knows who you are, but some part of me questions the motive for posting anonymously. Do you not really believe in what you're saying? Are you afraid someone will be angry with you if you say what you really think? Just things I wonder about, because I can't possibly fathom the motivation for posting both aggressively and anonymously. I'm mean that. What's the worst that could happen if we all just said what we thought, you know, as ourselves? Really, I'm trying to nudge/encourage more than I am out to rag anyone.

But, I'm getting off task here. The real shocker to me, and thus, the Comment of the Week is that it was not until the eleventh comment that someone inquired about the Shomer Negiah panties. Respectful, eyes-averted, modest hat tip to Soccer.

Yesterday in the comments to my post about virginity and the fifteenth of Av someone calling themselves Soccer suggested that I “leave HAdar and go study at a yeshiva with Jewish values!”
When you Google Jewish Values: you get a lot of pictures of people looking triumphant
I don’t know anything about Soccer, and I don’t actually care. I wouldn’t have graced his/her hater comment with a link except that it amused me that Hadar was being called out for Jewish values. One might have a problem with Hadar halachically, but the truth is that Hadar does in fact consider itself obligated by halacha, it simply chooses to interpret halacha in a way somewhat different from how Rav Ovadia Yosef, for instance, might poskin. The core value is the same, though, right?
But Jewish law can’t be the only Jewish value, and I bet there are plenty of people who would argue that Jewish laws are completely irrelevant to Jewish values, so where do we go for more ethical direction?

Is it a Jewish value to be Zionist? What do Jewish values say about abortion? Ecology? Women’s rights? Slavery? War? Genocide?

If you were under the impression that any of those are questions answered simply, I think you’re way off base. As far as I know there are conflicting understandings and opinions regarding all of these issues, with people weighing in from around the world and throughout time. Luckily or unluckily the Torah doesn’t say anything that definitely requires you to recycle, or forbids a man from beating his wife. We take a few comments that may or may not seem relevant and extrapolate from them grand and impressive doctrines on, say, slavery and halacha, and how the Torah views slavery as repugnant and an insult to human dignity. But then we’re stuck with the fact that according to the Torah, it’s perfectly acceptable for a Jewish man to own slaves. Even Jewish slaves are allowed, though not encouraged. But today, if you wanted to go to Thailand and buy some girl to be your housemaid, I doubt your rabbi would be on board with the proposal. He’d likely say something about how it doesn’t jive with Jewish values and then lecture you on the mitzvah to rescue the captives.

Today, morality has been pretty much codified by humanistic terms, and most Jews, even Orthodox Jews, live according to a lot of rules and ethical guidelines that are never or rarely explicit in any Jewish texts. Technically, for instance, halacha allows a person to cheat a non-Jew out of money, but I don’t see many contemporary responsa urging Jews to pad their pockets with money they didn’t get fairly, and I can’t imagine any rabbi I know advising someone in business to go through with a shady deal just to make a mint at the expense of a Baptist coworker.

I guess my point here is the same as it was when I wrote about Jewish delis the other day. I wish people would be more specific when they used the word Jewish. It’s becoming something we just clip to whatever’s convenient, never considering whether it will be a good idea to call something with little or no connection to Judaism ‘Jewish.’