Day 17 of Nat’l Emergency: Dispelling Wild Musings on Cuomo, de Blasio, Mt. Sinai, China

The coronavirus is not only spreading fear, illness and death throughout the land but it also is fostering some wild musings. 

Take, for example, the idea that with his daily press briefings New York governor Andrew Cuomo has become the darling of Democratic hopes and should supplant Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders as the presumptive party nominee for president. To take the whimsy to an even higher level, it is being suggested that Cuomo try to unite the country through a fusion ticket by selecting Nikki Haley, Trump’s former United Nations ambassador and former Republican governor of South Carolina, as his running mate.

There is no denying Cuomo has become a media star for those seeking straightforward talk about the pandemic. He can be funny, empathetic, angry, resolved, informed, attuned to science ... all that and more compared to science-denier-Trump. Cuomo reminds us of New York mayor Rudy Giuliani after 9/11. 

Trouble is, Cuomo also has lots of negatives too numerous to list here. Foremost is his belief that only he knows best and, like Trump, he is willing to pick fights with those he disagrees with. All politicians fight, but Cuomo, like Trump, is another in-your-face type of guy and we already have seen enough of that type of leadership. Plus, we’ve also seen how Giuliani worked out. 

As for Haley being part of a fusion ticket, this is not Israel or any other parliamentary government where a no confidence vote can force an election. Haley might be liked for standing up to foreign governments and the Palestinians but she is as right wing as they come when considering domestic issues. She would not be a logical choice for any Democrat as a vice president fusion nominee. 

John McCain might have won the presidency had he chosen Joe Lieberman instead of Sarah Palin as his running mate. The former Democratic senator from Connecticut was less liberal than most Democrats. As much as Republicans and Conservatives would have been angry at his selection they would still have voted for McCain over Obama while independents put off by Palin’s lack of experience and intellect would have been okay with Joe.

Right now there is no Republican who is pro choice that the Democratic Party would accept.

So dream away those seeking a national unity ticket. We will wake you up after November so you can see the carnage Trump will inflict on the country whether he wins or especially if he loses.

First Amendment Cries: Social distancing vs. religious rights. New York City mayor Bill de Blasio ran afoul of the religious police by suggesting that churches and synagogues that don’t adhere to the coronavirus lockdown guidelines could face “permanent” closure of their buildings (https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-n-y-c-mayor-synagogues-that-don-t-comply-with-coronavirus-rules-may-be-shut-down-1.8717453).

Temporary, I can understand and agree with. Permanent? Not so fast. Let’s give Mayor Bill the benefit of the doubt, that in the passion of the moment he exaggerated a trifle. He’s not being anti-religion, nor is he giving Islam a pass, as some of his detractors have suggested by his referring only to churches and synagogues and not including mosques. 

All that said, there have been repeated violations of the social distancing rules by too many faith leaders and their adherents. For God’s sake, don’t these people know plagues have no religious affiliation? In that sense plagues, along with other natural disasters, are truly the most ecumenical misfortune.

Where Are They?: Two top officers of Mount Sinai hospital system in New York City are sequestered in Florida while their staff of thousands battle the pandemic in the Big Apple (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8164043/Mount-Sinai-execs-safely-tucked-away-FLORIDA-vacation-homes.html). Does it matter?

For sure it is bad optics, but shelter-in-place does not preclude staying in luxury quarters. Unless they are directly involved in treating patients there is absolutely no need for them to be on site. Anyone who is not directly involved in patient care or in facilities management to keep the hospital clean and open should not be required to be on site. 

I wonder, before the article on their whereabouts appeared, how many Sinai employees had any idea where their “leaders” were riding out the pandemic storm. Let’s hold them accountable for how the hospital is supplied and functions during the crisis, not from where they are issuing their executive orders. 

For perspective on how other company CEOs are working from home, link to https://nyti.ms/3bmVQeS

The Blame Game: When the pandemic is over, and it will end, sometime, we no doubt will collectively turn to placing blame on those responsible for its spread. Many already are agreeing with Trump that COVID-19 should be called the China Virus. You decide what you will call it. 

On a more serious note, there seems little disagreement that the virus began its devastating journey in China and that the Chinese authorities mishandled its spread and the flow of information that would have aided other countries. 

Some voices are calling for some form of censure of China, perhaps from the United Nations or other world bodies, even as China denies its guilt and is embarked on a campaign to help other populations, particularly in Third World nations, combat the epidemic while continuing to finance infrastructure projects in those countries. 

It appears we have learned nothing from history, past and present, that liars who repeatedly and loudly proclaim their lies as truth are able to convince a large segment of the populace that their lies are truth and that truth is fake news. 

I would venture to say that the vast majority of people in downtown Nairobi or Khartoum or Munich or Rio de Janeiro do not pay much attention to the rhetoric of the UN Security Council but do start believing messages that are bombarded to them by media influenced or controlled by despots and would-be despots. 

The U.S. might claim it has one of the most educated populations but the fealty almost half of our people display toward an incessant, unrepentant liar proves my point that Goebbals, the Nazi propaganda chieftain, knew of which he was talking and acting. 

Perhaps our only hope for the future is to mandate the departure of any American company deemed strategic from China. Yes, it goes against laissez-faire capitalism but our national security is at stake if China is our major supplier of technical, electronic and healthcare equipment and supplies. 

Concurrent with that action must be a concerted effort to educate Americans that their strategic safety is more important than saving a few pennies, even dollars, by buying from the Chinese and instead they should pay more for made-in-America goods. Growing American manufacturing capacity will grow the middle class and, guess what, we will return to the America of the 1950s that Trump trumpets his love for. 

Impeachment, Even Acquittal Are Good Outcomes

I have a confession. Political junkie though I may be, I stopped watching the impeachment inquiry marathon after the initial testimonies during the hearings conducted by the House Intelligence Committee. No need to listen further to each side drone on. They were not deliberating. They were not changing any minds. They were posing for sound bites to flash back home and, in the case of Republicans, to beam into the White House where the TV-fanatic-in-chief monitored each presentation and tweeted accordingly.

Passage of impeachment charges by the House Judiciary Committee, and next week by the full House, along straight party lines was a foregone conclusion. As is, barring revelations from Mount Sinai, acquittal by the Republican controlled Senate.

No one should expect anything different. It is, as God found at the time of creation, “good.”

I reach that conclusion for the good of the country. House Democrats had to expose Trump’s violation of his oath of office and the Constitution. They needed to reassert the equality of the legislative branch in our tricameral system of government, even knowing that it would be a pyrrhic, incomplete victory given the outcome in the Senate.

Exposure of another kind is the “good” legacy awaiting Republicans.

Trump has challenged the limits of presidential power and propriety. His behavior and policies, while often repulsive and abhorrent, are not in themselves impeachable offenses. But soliciting foreign government involvement in our elections is. As is thwarting constitutionally empowered congressional oversight of the executive branch by refusing to respond to subpoenas and by ordering his aides not to appear before Congress or to provide requested documents.

I have heard Trump defenders say he has done nothing his predecessors did not do. Putting the veracity of that claim aside, it matters not that Congress previously gave a pass to impeachable behavior. Two, or more, wrongs do not make a right.

By condoning Trump’s actions Republicans have chosen power over principle, partisanship over patriotism. They are repudiating 230 years of constitutional government in favor of opening up our nation to abuses never before tolerated and, once Trump is found not guilty by the Senate, potentially more egregious and damaging to the republic.

It is a shame that courage and putting country over self have virtually no quarter among our political class. If there is any silver lining in this exercise of impeachment it will come from an invigorated electorate that chooses to reward honesty and bravery in government and in so doing will flush the offenders down the drain, thereby cleaning the swamp of its greatest miscreant.

From Israel It's Getting Harder To Be Called a Jew

First and foremost I am a Jew. Not an America-Jew or a Jewish-American. Just a Jew.  

History, centuries and decades old, even into current times, has shown bigots and anti-Semites make no hyphenated distinction. So neither do I. I am just a Jew.

Not a particularly observant Jew, as regards devotional prayer, though I attend synagogue services most Saturdays and on most holidays. I fast on Yom Kippur and conduct family seders for Passover. 

It might appear I am observant, but I am not. Rather, I am a religious Jew based on values honed by my ancestors over 3,600 years, from the example of Abraham to be welcoming to strangers, to the promulgation of 10 basic commandments by which to live one’s life, to the precept of Hillel that the centrality of Judaism is, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.”

Judaism, of course, did not stop evolving from the time of Hillel (roughly the beginning of the Common Era, some 2,000 years ago). As with other religions, evolution meant division, whether it was the Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes of Second Temple latter days, or the Reform, Conservative, Hasidic, Reconstruction and Haredi movements of the last hundreds of years that broke away from traditional Orthodoxy. 

Living as minorities in lands not their own, traditional Orthodox Jews could rail against what they considered unacceptable, even blasphemous, heretical alterations to their religion. But their anger and disapproval could not and did not result in physical persecutions, though spiritual punishments were meted out (google Baruch Spinoza to see how free thinkers could be treated by the Jewish establishment).  

No one, however, was burned at the stake. Unlike what transpired in Europe and the Middle East, no armies assembled and marched on heretics or infidels, no blood was shed among different sects in their ideological dispute about the ideal way to serve God, though, for the record, when Jews lived in what we now call Israel in the first century CE, fratricide did occur before the Second Temple fell. Indeed, some rabbis have taught that religious differences were the cause of the Temple’s destruction and Jerusalem’s defeat by the Romans.

Once Judaism evolved into a religion of rabbinic tradition, bloodletting was not part of its template.

Which brings us to contemporary times and a schism that threatens to do more harm to Jewish unity than any despot could have imagined. Israel’s multi-party political system has invested an ultra-Orthodox segment of the society (the Haredi) with power and influence that may well transform the country away from its pluralistic, multi-cultural, egalitarian roots into a repressive, religious regime that restricts freedoms and norms common to Western civilization. 

In addition, the schism has global ramifications as non Haredi Jews in the diaspora, despite their financial and political backing of Israel, feel marginalized by the Netanyahu government’s support for the Haredi chief rabbinate’s exclusionary dictums.  

The current fight is over two issues. The first is appropriate access to the Western Wall (the kotel), Judaism’s holiest site. The second is over recognition of religious conversions by non Haredi rabbis.

Assessing the merits or details of each dispute is not my intention here (you can research the issues on your own). Rather, my concern is the presumption of one sect to have the right to determine the religious validity of the remaining people who classify themselves as Jews along with their respective religious practices. (There’s no doubt they have the power to do so because of their leverage in keeping Bibi Netanyahu’s coalition government in office. But that power does not imbue moral authority.)

“The reason why Judaism is the only religion that survived throughout thousands of years and all the massacres and all the attempts to destroy it is that ours is the only religion that has always been the same, the way it was given to us on Mount Sinai,” Nachum Eisenstein, chief rabbi of eastern Jerusalem’s Haredi Maalot Dafna neighborhood, said in an interview with The Jewish Week. “Who gave you, the Conservative and the Reform, the authority to make up a new religion?” (http://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/controversial-cabinet-moves-through-charedi-eyes/#.WWfrkaYWvOk.email)

On the other hand, as Morris Allen, rabbi of Beth Jacob Congregation, Mendota Heights, MN, wrote in the Forward newspaper, “The secret of our longevity during the generations of our statelessness was the vibrancy of open and competing views for Jewish meaning. It is evident in our exegesis, in our rabbinic texts and in our philosophical works. The imposition of an official doctrine is now sowing the seeds of our own destruction.”

Let’s put some of Rabbi Eisenstein’s claims in context: Jews do not practice their religion as given to us on Mount Sinai. We don’t indulge in ritual sacrifices. Prayer was not authorized on Mount Sinai. It is an invention of rabbis, a substitute for ritual sacrifices. Indeed, the position of rabbi was not part of the revelation. It is a construct centuries in the making. After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, Judaism evolved into a set of rules promulgated by rabbis in diverse regions, generally agreed to by a majority but not the totality of Jews. To this day there are rabbis who issue guidelines on what is acceptable Jewish practice given changes in society and technology. But they are not universally accepted as gospel by all denominations. 

So who’s to say Judaic law has to be rigidly set in stone, so to speak? 

Apparently, the Haredi, under the auspices of the chief rabbinate of Israel, do. Their followers have even gone so far as to assert Reform, Reconstruction and Conservative Jews are not really Jewish. Sounds like the Sunni-Shia battle without the bombings.

It is ironic to note that even as Israel is fighting a political battle around the world against forces that want to delegitimize its existence, its Haredi rabbinate, with a complicit Netanyahu government, is engaged in a process to delegitimize the authenticity and practices of a majority of Jews the world over. 

Regrettably, in Israel too many Jews, the vast majority of whom are secular, do not really care about egalitarian access to the Western Wall or control over conversion policies unless they are personally affected when a marriage inside Israel is proposed. But diaspora Jews do care and claim skin in the game because of their previously unflinching support for the state of Israel. 

I agree with Rabbi Allen: “The unhealthy and unwise intertwined relationship between a state and a particular stream of Judaism is destroying the contours of the Jewish people. There can be no possibility of restoring the glitter and joy of being Jewish when an official state religion dices and slices our people apart.” (http://forward.com/opinion/israel/376654/i-was-blacklisted-by-israels-chief-rabbinate/)

Here’s an example of that slicing and dicing. According to the Associated Press, “Israel’s Chief Rabbinate has compiled a blacklist of overseas rabbis whose authority they refuse to recognize when it comes to certifying the Jewishness of someone who wants to get married in Israel.” The list includes 160 rabbis from 24 countries.

Israel’s Jewish future, of course, involves more than just prayer at the kotel and conversion laws. How Israel deals with the Palestinians within the land captured in the Six Day War 50 years ago is a stress point separate and apart from the religious issues. 

I don’t have a solution for any of these trouble spots. But as a Jew I am conflicted by any attempt to minimize my Jewishness, regardless of its originator. 

So I read. Here are a few recent articles worth considering.: 

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/israelis-dont-care-that-youre-insulted-an-open-letter-to-american-jews/

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Is-Jewish-unity-an-Israeli-national-security-issue-499315

https://nyti.ms/2u7Etwl

Remembering a Respected Teacher

If you looked at him during class, every so often you would see him wince. His eyes would squint ever so slightly. A sour crease would envelope his lips. Sometimes he would rub the side of his head with his fingertips. One side of his brow, the right side if I remember correctly, had about a one inch square indentation, as if a chisel had been taken to his skull.

Amnon Haramati was different from all the other Hebrew studies teachers I encountered during my 12 years of parochial school education at Yeshiva Rambam and Yeshivah of Flatbush High School in Brooklyn. Unlike the others, he would not let us address him as Rabbi or Rav Hamarati. It was Mar (mister) Hamarati, though in later years he did acquire the title of rabbi. Unlike the others, his accent was not eastern European. It was Israeli. He was clean shaven. He stood tall. Erect. Defiant in stature and status. He embodied a dignity that commanded respect. No student ever made fun of Amnon Hamarati. You only wanted to secure his recognition for a job well done.

I was pretty good at Judaic studies. But some time during my high school years I began having trouble completing sentences entirely in Hebrew. My mouth could not keep up with my brain. So I would throw in the occasional English word to round out my thoughts. Amnon Haramati was not amused. He would demand I speak slower. In Hebrew. Only in Hebrew.

He was younger in age and temperament than the other Hebrew studies male teachers, just 18 years older than my classmates and me. He had a sense of humor. One of his pet theories was the belief that the Hebrew Bible contained references to everything ever created. We would challenge him to prove it. Show us, we would demand, where the telephone or television were in the Bible. Amused at our simple request, he would cite the revelation at Mount Sinai, God speaking to the people of Israel and appearing before them not in a black and white broadcast but in living color.

His only vulnerability, that occasional wince. There were rumors his skull harbored a metal plate, a souvenir of Israel’s war of independence. I never heard him talk about it not in class at Flatbush nor earlier, during the summers before high school when I saw him at Camp Massad Aleph where he counselored an older age group than mine.

More than 20 years ago, in his short but moving acceptance speech of the 1994 Covenant Award as an outstanding Jewish educator, he related in third person testimony the tale of a soldier so severely wounded in the head during the battle for Jerusalem in 1948 that doctors pronounced him dead, only to be reclassified as barely alive but blind after a nurse heard him moan, only to be told he should not consider pursuing academic studies after another nurse discovered he was not sightless (https://vimeo.com/122476742?ref=em-v-share).

Word came Thursday that Amnon Haramati passed away. He was 86. 

Lift-Off, Deferred

A small story a couple of weeks ago indicated the European Union was considering closing part of its operations in Strasbourg, France.

Not too important a story to most people, but it rang a bell with me. Some 15 years ago Gilda accompanied me to Strasbourg for a speech I delivered to a European sporting goods association. Located in northwest France, Strasbourg is the main city of the Alsace-Lorraine region contested with Germany for decades. Its favorite food is sauerkraut, served with boiled meat. Andre Solter, the famed chef of Lutece, the famous New York French restaurant, hailed from there.

In Strasbourg, waitresses inputted your order and ran your credit card through portable terminals they carried with them to your table. Technology available 15 years ago in France has yet to be adopted in the United States.

But I digress. Today's blog, while inspired by Strasbourg, is another of my self-deprecating stories.

While in Strasbourg, Gilda and I attended Sabbath services at a local synagogue. It was an Orthodox service, so we had to sit apart.

Now, it is customary in most Jewish temples to recognize guests by giving them an honor during the Torah reading portion of the service. The gabbai (head usher, or sextant) came over and apologized, relating that all the honors had been dispensed except that of hagbah, the lifting of the two-poled Torah, a scroll roughly four feet tall and weighing anywhere from 30 to 60 pounds, for about 10 seconds. In some quarters, the spread of the hagbah lift—how many columns of text can be seen by the congregation—is a measure of virility. Anything more than three columns is a good showing.

As a rule, I don't do hagbahs. I don't feel strong enough to sustain even a one column lift. I fear I would drop the Torah, which, for those not familiar with Jewish practice, would demand anyone who witnessed the unfortunate incident fast for 40 days, the length of time it took Moses to receive the Torah from God on Mount Sinai.

No way was I going to subject Strasbourg's Jewish community to the possibility of a foodless 40 days. I respectfully declined the honor of hagbah.

Several minutes later a teenage boy performed the widest hagbah I have ever witnessed—at least 15 columns! The Torah he lifted, the Torah I had deferred an opportunity to lift, was barely 18 inches tall and weighed perhaps 10 pounds.