Monkey Idols Made of Gold: definitely not jewishConsidering that religion and ethnicity are such sensitive issues in this election year, it might not help Obama to have the vocal support of an Indian politician named Brij Mohan Bhama, who will hold an eleven-day prayer for Obama’s victory in New Delhi. Not that there is anything wrong with the Hindu faith—aside from the lack of protein and scrumptious Chipotle barbacoa beef, *droooooooooool*—but (O?)-Bhama made headlines around the world, including the right-winger-frequented Drudge Report.

As if this weren’t enough, Bhama sent a giant golden monkey idol to Obama’s office, and explained to the media, “Obama has deep faith in Lord Hanuman and that is why we are presenting an idol of Hanuman to him.” (Jesus fucking Christ.)

An Indian-American (not American Indian) representative for Obama accepted the golden monkey love idol on the senator’s behalf, saying, “Obama has extended his thanks for the support.” This was gracious, and rejecting the gift might have caused offense to Indian-American voters, as well as the fine people at Dell tech support.

A significant chunk of the U.S. population believes that Sen. Barack Obama is an anti-Christian foreign weirdo with heretical religious beliefs and a mystical power to brainwash the masses. USA Today reported that a tenth of Americans believe Obama is a Muslim, including 14 percent of Republicans and a fifth of rural Americans. For God’s (and/or Allah’s) sake, 10 percent of Democrats believe that he’s a Mecca-kneeler-towarder-fives-times-per-dayer.

Republicans are counting on this perception in November. You won’t hear Sen. John McCain say it—and to McCain’s credit, he has chastised right-wingers who pathologically utter the name “Barack Hussein Obama” as a scare tactic—but the whisper campaigns have gone on for months.

Apparently Obama carries a miniature Lord Hanuman lucky charm with him, which is why Bhama gave him the golden idol in the first place. (Don’t tell Focus on the Family leader James Dobson, who criticized Obama earlier this week for “deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview, his own confused theology.”) But when it came to generating publicity for his candidate of choice, Bhama should have kept the monkey in his pants.

Presidential Matzo: dry, bland, empty caloriesRemember last winter's Huckabee Christmas message with the "hidden" cross? Now that it’s Passover, it's time for the remaining presidential candidates to release statements about what the holiday means to them.

• Hillary explains that she's moved by the spirit of social justice.
• Barack is inspired by the educational sensibilities of the seder.
• Meanwhile, John McCain flexes his Zionist muscles, reminding us that three Israeli soliders, Gilad Shalit, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev cannot effectively celebrate the holiday of redemption when they remain in captivity.

The New York Times decodes each candidate’s statement, labeling Clinton’s message “liberal,” Obama’s “multicultural,” and McCain’s as “Zionist.”

But the statements themselves have little-to-no-substance. The candidates are just trying to cover their bases, to demonstrate that they care about their Jewish constituency, and though it’s commonly accepted as empty rhetoric, (the Times reminds us that the statements are released mainly “because there’s a risk of giving offense to some group or other if they don’t.”) we still go through the motions of deconstructing each statement and trying to deduce some substance from within the fluff.

Does anyone really think that a 200 word statement is a good indication of how invested any candidate is in the Jewish community? Does it really make any sense to try to glean something from these press releases when they were certainly written by staffers, and are accompanied by a flurry of other statements on everything from Earth Day to Equal Pay Day? If we really want to know how these candidates feel about Jews and the issues that are important to most Jews today, we should be examining voting records, and exploring each candidate's connection to the Jewish community. Detailed analyses of Passover statements is like the second seder: It might be fun, but it’s not covering any new ground.

The Passover/Exodus Narrative: a universal tale of freedomPassover is a time of asking questions, and I have a few. This year, though, the furor that surrounded Barack Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and his sermons that dared to suggest that this Christian nation may actually be earning God’s wrath and damnation for some of its behavior, reminded me of an issue I’d first encountered in South Africa: The idea that the Passover/Exodus narrative of the Hebrews’ flight from Pharaoh and slavery doesn’t belong exclusively to any tribe, but is a universal tale of freedom into which suffering people everywhere are able to insert themselves. And also that even if your forebears were victims of injustice, you’re quite capable of being a perpetrator of injustice.

I think the Rev. Wright furor offered many white Americans an introduction they found shocking to the reality that the black Church in America has always connected viscerally to the liberation narrative of the Biblical people of Israel, making that narrative their own as a source of succor for their own struggles and trials. Martin Luther King, remember, spoke of going to the top of the mountain and seeing the promised land, knowing that he might not make it there. In other words, casting himself as Moses. And it’s an ongoing, vibrant tradition that gives the African American church its special vitality.

The ability of oppressed people to find themselves in the Exodus narrative of liberation is, of course, precisely the point of that narrative. The problem in Egypt wasn’t simply that it was the Jews who lived in slavery; the problem was was slavery itself. And the antidote to slavery advocated in the Torah (the five Books of Moses) — human community constituted on the basis of law and justice rather than political authority claimed on divine grounds — is a universal one; it applies, absolutely equally, to everyone, and everyone is invited, as Moses did, to challenge authorities that offer anything less.

The God of Abraham, proclaimed as the one true god, is obviously everyone’s god; he’s not a tribal fetish; he’s been invoked precisely to challenge the sort of tribal fetish deities that the Egyptians had used to rationalize their system of oppression. So, the Passover/Exodus narrative has powerful resonance to all people of the Abrahamic faiths (and possibly others) who may find themselves confronting oppression.

But those who feel threatened by others' demands for justice -- oppressors who cloak their own abuses of others in pieties of Christian soldierhood or the Star of David as the brand icon of an occupation -- get very uncomfortable when they realize that others see them as inheritors, not of the righteousness of the Biblical Hebrews' flight to freedom, but of Pharaoh's attempts to suppress the Israelites.

But throughout the Old Testament, the Jewish prophets are warning the Israelites to take nothing for granted. The mantle of righteousness cannot be inherited genetically (surely, the God of Abraham is not a racist who judges people by their DNA) or claimed simply through vigorous prayer and observance of ritual; it must be earned in one’s conduct in relation to others. Thus Hillel’s famous definition of Judaism while standing on one foot: “That which is hateful unto yourself, do not do unto others; all the rest is commentary.” In other words, it is only via the decency of your behavior in the world that you can be a good Jew.

Jews who commit injustices against others would be unequivocally condemned by the Jewish prophets, just as those who drop bombs on others or sentence them to death are plainly deluded when they claim to be guided by the inspirational example of Jesus. That, I think, is the essence of what Reverend Wright was saying in those passages that caused so much controversy — that God would damn, not bless, an America that committed injustices. To which I’d add, in line with Rami Khouri’s profound challenge to Israeli journalists at the height of the last Lebanon war, an injustice committed under a flag bearing the Star of David would be fiercely condemned by the Biblical Jewish prophets.

It was easy to see how little our Jewish genetic lineage did to make us really Jewish in the South Africa of my youth, where every Passover, we sat around seder tables singing, in a barely understood Hebrew, of the days when we were slaves, while the black women who lived in our backyards under a domestic labor system not that far removed from slavery, carried in steaming tureens of matzoh ball soup and tzimmes. We may have convinced ourselves that our DNA entitled us to claim this story as our own, but it was abundantly clear that in the South African context, most Jews had thrown in their lot with Pharoah, while the Israelites were working in their kitchens.

The mantle of justice associated with the Torah prophets, it seemed to me later, was nobody’s birthright; it had to be earned.

As a young activist heading out into the townships every weekend to meetings where communities were planning to resist eviction or burying those who had fallen in the fight against the regime, I was intrigued to hear the preachers and ordinary people couch their own struggles firmly in the narratives of the Exodus.

But around my own seder tables, the descendants of Pharoah’s slaves paid scant attention to the plight of those in their kitchens. They were discussing real estate and accounting scams — and, of course, how long it might be before “the schwartzes” (yiddish for “blacks”) would rise up and spoil the party.

If Hillel was right (and I believe he was) that Judaism is less about rituals and the minutiae of halachic law than it is about the ethical treatment of others, I can safely say that I learned very little of Judaism in the more than 200 hours of family Seders I sat through in South Africa. In keeping with thousands of years of tradition, we always kept a chair empty and a glass full in case the Prophet Elijah showed up. Looking back, I shudder to think what he would have made of the spectacle had he actually accepted the invitation.

I suspect he’d have dragged us over the coals in language not unlike that used by Reverend Wright. A friend once told me that his father, an Anglican priest, believed that whereas Christians had to work their way into heaven, Jews were basically on the guest list; our entry to Paradise was assured, by virtue of the fact that we’d been born Jewish. I thought that was a remarkably silly idea. Not only that; it’s remarkably dangerous, too, because it rationalizes moral laziness and injustice and violence committed in the name of a false righteousness. Unfortunately, I suspect, my friend’s father’s belief that as Jews, we are genetic entitlement to God’s favor, is all too widespread. Passover, and the universal tale of oppression and freedom it celebrates, is a good opportunity to burst that bubble.

[Cross-posted from Rootless Cosmopolitan]

There were moments of eloquence in Obama's speech, but I can't decide if solipsism or condescension accounts for his thinking that the very limited scandal surrounding his toxic pastor Jeremiah Wright is related to America's greater and permanent stain of slavery. It is an insult to blacks, not to mention the civil rights movement, to claim that vitriol, hysteria and demagogy are endemic to a community that has, quite without the help of raving religious charlatans, already given us two Secretaries of State and two Supreme Court Justices.

By this reading, we're expected to accept that a little bit of Jeremiah -- who thinks the government invented the AIDS virus, that 9/11 was a homegrown catastrophe -- resides in anyone made to ride in the back of a bus. Is this really the kind of message he wishes to broadcast? Obama also errs in comparing his preacher to members of his own family. He can't have controlled who his grandmother was, but no one forced him to join the Trinity Church twenty years ago, much less to remain a congregant when he discovered the kind of spirituality being hawked from its pulpit. (It was in 1984 that Wright traveled with Louis Farrakhan to meet Muammar Gaddafi, the dictator responsible for bankrolling "Black September," the hostage-takers at the Munich Olympics, and just two years shy of facilitating the bombing of a Berlin discotheque in which many U.S. servicemen were killed.)

My own suspicion is that Obama only ever discovered this shambolic God that failed because, as a bright young atheist from Hawaii, he felt that a pew-pounding minority church was a convenient entree into local Chicago politics. The word for this is cynicism, or to put it in the mushy-headed language his supporters prefer, 'You are the idiots I've been waiting for.'

P.S. I had been thinking about the point Zbird makes below before I saw him make it. Consider this an addendum to the above:

It's not news that everyone contains contradictions and multitudes and has base moments.

"I am a racist," wrote Martin Amis once, accounting for the complicated psyche of his favorite poet and family friend Philip Larkin, then under mass literary indictment for what Larkin's biography and collected letters disclosed. "I am less racist than my father was, and my children will be less racist than I am." Good sense, in other words, is historical, rooted to what Peter Singer has called the ever-widening "moral circle" by which we grow more enlightened and humane as the centuries go by. Something like that.

Amis's point was refreshingly free of cant or homiletics, and it encompassed the kind of human frailty many believe Obama artfully addressed today. It also helped that Larkin had confined all of his racist, anti-Semitic filth to the realm of private correspondence -- the poems, the stuff that mattered, were blessedly free of it, which shows that even bigots and reactionaries can exercise good judgment or aspire to be better than they are, or, if you like, than their generation has allowed them to be.

My problem with Obama's speech is that he is lowering the bar to the floor, apologizing not for a celebrated postwar poet of great depth and feeling, but for a vulgar merchant of populist sleaze. Jeremiah Wright was not caught committing his many betises in casual conversation or in the semi-exclusive confines of the neighborhood barbershop, or around the kitchen table. He was preaching them from a pulpit, before a large audience, loudly and repeatedly, for decades. Shall we say this is reflective of the broader black experience in America even at its most uninhibited or flippant? (One thinks here of Chris Rock's stand-up about the friendly-seeming old codger at work who calls his white colleagues "crackers" behind their backs but is the picture of servile minstrelsy to their faces.)

Let me phrase my grievance another way: If a Jewish candidate for high office attempted to convince me that a little bit of Meir Kahane resided in all of us, I'd condemn him roundly. Not in my name, big boy. And how dare you?

The high-minded response to this kind of discourse is to say that one is trafficking in "sweeping generalizations." The liberal-left pundits, all stricken with the vapors today by Obama's long and admittedly brilliant speech, have raced to credit him with loosing a deep, dark secret about some supposed racial collective conscious. Isn't this intrinsically presumptuous and offensive to those who would argue there is no such thing to begin with?

I know I'm expected to say here that I've no right to speak for insulted African-Americans because I'm not one myself. However, I don't think it is naive or callow to say that Obama's success thus far indicates that the country has indeed reached a point where it no longer has to think in such prefab, codified categories. If he becomes president, then he will not answer to a demographic, he will answer to all of us. And by that measure alone, he has failed me.

Everytime it appears that Barack Obama is teetering, he goes up the podium and gives a speech and the critics are silenced. His potency lies in the fact that he acknowledges his critics. His skill rests in being able to demonstrate the similarity between two seemingly contradictory things --- in this case a racist old black man named Wright and a racist old white woman named Ferraro. I found the speech to represent the second half of Martin Luther King Jr.'s project --- the healing part. It is no longer about white versus black, but about white and black suffering from economic disenfranchisement. He is a realist. He believes that the good in humans is always in play, even in the political game. He knows how to exploit that, just as the rest of our politicians know how to exploit the vile.

Michael Chabon: He's trained to interpret communications from Bizarro World As Izzy noted yesterday and Michael followed up on today, Michael Chabon wrote a ringing endorsement of Obama in the Washington Post. Concerned that Commentary might lose its credentials as the most borderline-delusional magazine in the Jewish world today, Jeopardy champion John Podhoretz penned a reply to Chabon in which he referred to The Yiddish Policeman's Union as "a work of anti-Zionism so thoroughgoing that it makes Mearshimer and Walt look like Jabotinsky and Ben-Gurion by contrast." Excellent piece of prose, John! It almost makes daddy's "World War IV" argument sound rational!

But with characteristic class, Chabon came back with a gentleman's knockout:

Dear Mr. Podhoretz,

Criticism from you is, as always, particularly sweet, though I am forever grateful for having been trained, by years of reading Superman comic books, to properly interpret communications from the Bizarro World.

So, thanks for the reassurance and endorsement of my views.

Sometimes I can’t not help not enjoying your writing, either!

Sincerely,

Michael Chabon

(I'm assuming it's the real Chabon who commented there, but obviously it could have been anyone.)

Here's a picture of Barack Obama making a funny face. It's from the lead story at SomethingAwful.com. I am allowed to post things like this because I made a deal with the devil.

This reminds me of the time Bill Cosby drove a bumper car and made
funny faces, all while advocating that we eat Jell-o Brand pudding
snacks.

Continue reading...

Gotta go with the liberal on this one.