Rabbi Dr. Marvin Hier: #1 Most Influential American RabbiNewsweek came out with its second annual list of Top 50 Influential American rabbis, and this year started a list of the Top 25 Pulpit Rabbis. But alongside the lists, it printed an op-ed by Lisa Miller called "Is Your Rabbi Hot or Not?" that summarizes some of the criticism of the first list, and explains that the list of pulpit rabbis is a way of recognizing not just Madonna’s puppetmaster and the heads of various movements, but also rabbis who are particularly good at inspiring their congregants, nurturing growing communities, and are exceptional leaders.

Miller was right when she speculated that the response to the list would cause storms to rival the ten plagues. Rabbi Jill Jacobs is already on record at Jspot complaining about how few women made it onto the lists (3/50 and 4/25).

Miller and the three guys who put together the list, (Gary Ginsberg, an executive at NewsCorp.; Michael Lynton, chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures, and Jay Sanderson, CEO of JTN Productions) claim their intent is to inspire the public, and help people find rabbis who are doing transformational work. It’s a nice thought, but ranking rabbis is different than ranking local sushi bars. For one thing, it’s telling that there are only 25 Top Pulpit Rabbis, but 50 Influential Rabbis. Pulpit rabbis seem to be inherently less important than rabbis who run major foundations or movements, even though the impact of a pulpit rabbi on your average Jew is much greater than the work of the guy who runs, say, Chabad.

And beyond that, what’s the point, really of ranking them? Maybe listing fifty rabbis with great influence in American society would be interesting, but keeping track of who drops from number 23 to 29 is perhaps not a productive way of dealing with a bunch of high maintenance power brokers. And what we certainly do not need in the American Jewish community is more animosity between movements and machers in the major communities.

Did you know that JDate offers bulk rates to rabbis who want to sign up their entire congregations wholesale? And that some rabbis are paying out of pocket to get their flocks hitched? JDate is seriously the greatest racket in the history of the Internet.

Just because HaShem seems to think you’re wasting your time on Nerve, though, doesn’t mean that JDate isn’t fraught with peril. Look at the Good Samaritan who calls himself Portnoy4U (which, as unappealing literary characters go, is pretty much the male equivalent of a woman calling herself LilLadyMacbeth) and whose “What I’m Looking For” essay contained the following aside:

“IF YOU NEVER SAY ONE WORD TO ME IN YOUR ENTIRE LIFE, STILL HEED THESE NEXT PEARLS OF WISDOM!!!! UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD YOU EVER GO TO THE MATZOH BALL IN BOCA RATON!!!! DON'T DO IT.”

Or the lady whose terse profile said only “looking for someone special to spend my time with, please have hair on ur head.”

My winner this week, though, is the GUY WHO VOLUNTEERED. BullofBudapest, seriously, you’re my hero. Not only did you e-mail me specifically requesting to be featured in this column, which shows megaballs, but your profile is approximately 3000 words long. I’m excerpting my favorite part, but ladies, you kind of have to read the whole thing:

With Holocaust survivor parents I KNOW Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Hence, I love to party, dance (wild/dirty, imagining I'm Black, to slow/soft taking long, tight dips), get into heavy discussions & light flirtations, make passionate love (any other kind?), humble the arrogant, fight the "good fight"(charge windmills), challenge the smug; solitude, silence, spiritiuality, nature, current affairs, NPR, Air Amerika; high-volume stereo singing along with Orbison, CCR, Rait, Motown, James Taylor, The Eagles; and seeking to understand my God.

Previously: Jerry Seinfeld Meets James Bond

Michael Hirsh's only point in this Newsweek editorial on last week's Hamas seizure of Gaza hinges on what has become the conventional wisdom about Palestine: It's not ready for democracy. Isn't the Bush administration to blame for angling for legislative elections when everyone in the know and on the ground  said it would lead to the ascendancy of the Islamists?  Further, how does that stunning catastrophe make relevant again the old question of what to do when the democcratic process yields un-democratic results? Sometimes known as the "bullet or the ballot" dilemma, it came up previously in Algeria in the mid-90's, and one can still keep score of a person's politics by his take on how the Islamic Salvation Front should have been dealt with. 

Anyway, Hirsh sheds no new light on the subject:

Why does the disaster in Gaza matter? In part because the defeat of the secular—and more moderate—Fatah forces could, along with the insurgents' success in Iraq, inspire Islamist radicals in the region and around the world. Hamas is not the Taliban, and it knows that an uptick in rocket attacks against Israel will be met with a harsh response. But, as Bush said in his second Inaugural, the whole point of promoting freedom is to blunt the hopelessness and anger that breed radicalism. Gaza faces 50 percent unemployment in the best of times. Qaeda-like splinter groups that have carried out kidnappings of foreigners have already begun to appear. Further isolating the territory is not likely to fill its residents with faith in the future.

Well, Hamas is already a Qaeda-like splinter group, likewise descendent of the Muslim Brotherhood and with an ideology formulated by middle-class university students, so that nightmare's already real. But now that the group retains total responsibility for the governance of Gaza, it may yet have fashioned a rod for its own back.

One of the longstanding concerns of Hamas's so-called "inner wing" was that it would one day be in charge of the region and have no one else to blame for the problems there. Fatah was an easy foil as an opponent, and it remained so all throughout Hamas's win in 2006  since Arafat's party still controlled security and other key services of state.

All that's changed, however, accountability for the continuing squalor and misery of Gazans shall belong to Haniyah and company and to them alone. Call it the blessings of unilateralism.

Humanitarian aid -- in the form of food, water, electric generators -- should of course be provided to the people of this clerically ruled islet on the Mediterranean, but it should be made clear to them, and to Hamas, that such aid is dependent on the largesse of external actors and NGOs.

Hamas's victory may prove to be Pyrrhic in the short term and, what is more encouraging, a complete failure in the long term.