Ask the Rabbi: “Blurred lines and reality”
Ask the Rabbi, with rabbi Yitzchak Schochet
Sorry, orli, i Am spoken for
Dear Rabbi,
It took me time to muster the courage, but I am going to ask you if you can suggest how I can find my ideal Jewish mate. I have been on the dating scene for a while and I feel that men are very superficial. They profess their love, but don’t mean it and they will run a mile when that love means commitment.
I don’t have low self-esteem, but being told once in a while that I look nice wouldn’t hurt. So many of them are tightwads and won’t spend much on you – usually insisting we share the costs. In one instance, a guy who was paying had the nerve to actually tell me that I had enough to eat!
Will I ever find my Prince Charming?
Orli
Dear Orli,
So you want to date someone who loves you, who spoils you, who always says how beautiful you are and never thinks you’ve had enough to eat.
Basically, you want to date your grandma.
Maybe it’s time you start looking in a different direction.
Sounds like you’re siphoning from the wrong barrel. Or maybe the last of the good guys went 27 years ago, when my wife married me.
Real question post-paris
Dear Rabbi,
In the wake of the Paris attacks, I find that people tend to become much more Islamophobic. Surely it is wrong to condemn all Muslims on account of a select few radicals – and we as Jews know that better than most. Shouldn’t we be putting that message out there?
Jerome
Dear Jerome,
There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world. Of course they are not all radicals. The overwhelming majority are peaceful people.
According to intelligence sources, only 15 to 20 percent are radicals. That means that 80 percent are peace-loving individuals. But it also means that anywhere between 180 million to 240 million of them are radicals dedicated to the destruction of Western civilisation.
That’s three to four times the entire UK population.
Most Germans were peaceful, but the Nazis drove the agenda killing 16 million people in the process, of whom six million were Jews.
The peaceful majority were irrelevant. The Russians killed 20 million. The peaceful majority were irrelevant; and the same happened throughout history.
There were approximately two million Muslims living in the UK on 7/7 2005, but it took only a handful of them to bring the country to its knees.
The question isn’t shouldn’t we be putting the message out there.
The bigger question is: why is that peaceful majority silent?
Why aren’t they out there denouncing the atrocities on the streets, in their mosques? I’d rather you answered that question.
Blurred lines and reality
Dear Rabbi,
Don’t you think if Israel stopped its occupation then Jews everywhere would stop being attacked? Shouldn’t Israel rethink the way it is impacting Jews throughout the world?
Aaban
Dear Aaban,
For many (and apparently yourself included) the battle cry has been one of anti-Zionism which, they insist, has nothing to do with anti-Semitism.
Yet, the lines have become fundamentally blurred and the reality speaks for itself.
When a rabbi in Italy is stabbed because of what’s going on in Israel; when a Jewish businessman in France is beaten because of what’s going on in Israel; when a Jewish professor is boycotted in the US because of what’s going on in Israel; when a Jewish student is cursed on the streets of London because of what’s going on in Israel – then it is no longer to do with Israel or with Zionism or with the so-called occupation, but everything to do with the Jew and Judaism and anti-Semitism.
As one Canadian journalist wrote: “Jews are the canary in the coalmine of human life.” In other words, what starts with Israel doesn’t end with Israel, as events all over the Middle East now prove. And what starts with Jews doesn’t end with Jews, as the tragic events of last weekend in Paris has demonstrated.
Renowned American journalist Marie Brenner wrote an article in Vanity Fair about the riot in Paris on Saturday, 26 July 2014, when a pro-Palestinian demonstration ended with thousands of protesters chanting “mort aux Juifs”(death to the Jews). She asked: “How can anyone be allowed to paint a swastika on the statue of Marianne, the goddess of French liberty, in the very centre of the Place de la Republique?”
One year later and, alas, here we are.
Anti-Semitism begins with Jews, but it never ends with them.
As former Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks wrote: “Anti-Semitism is not a belief but a virus. Viruses mutate. Anti-Semitism mutates.”
Make no mistake about it. It is our problem – but it is not just our problem. It evolves into a global problem.
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