Last week, archaeologists excavating 2,500-year-old ruins at the City of David unearthed another great find from the early Second Temple era: a coin with the family name “Temekh” on it. This family is described, in the seventh chapter of Nehemiah (Nechemya), as one of the the families that went into Babylonian exile with the Judeans, returning under the auspices of the Cyrus Proclamation.
What's particularly interesting is that this coin portrays lunar worship, certainly not the most Jewish of themes. However, when we take into account that Scriptures identifies Temekh as a family of Netinim, a group whose origins lie in Canaanites who converted under false pretenses (Yehoshua 9), it begins to make sense. The allure of idolatry was strong when the Israelites where the only nation serving an unseen God. However, it takes a certain amount of gall to argue that religious Jews are still worshiping idols today.
Nevertheless, that's exactly what archaeologist Stephen Gabriel Rosenberg writes in the Jerusalem Post (January 23rd), under the headline: “The persistence of idol worship.” His indictment of Orthodoxy for idolatry is attention-grabbing, but his research is a bit wanting. He criticizes "the personality cult" of certain medieval rabbis, ignoring the fact that Rashi is studied alongside the Tosafists, who challenge their grandfather's interpretations regularly; the Rambam is studied alongside the Ra'avad, who often has harsh words for his younger colleague's rulings; and the halakhic masterwork Shulchan Arukh, written by the Sephardic Rav Yosef Karo, contains the critical glosses of the Ashkenazic Rav Moshe Isserles.
Furthermore, he targets the supposedly fetishistic kissing of the Torah scroll and the resistance to touching it, but the latter springs from the scroll's ability to ritually defile one's hands (Mishna, Yadayim 3:5), while the former is the Biblical form of greeting a loved one (see Shemot 4:27, 18:7; et al.). There is no deification here, but an expression of emotion and intimacy.
Jews are a nation of laws, and the Torah is our founding document. Considering the reverence that Americans show for the text and body of their Constitution, which is barely two centuries old, is it wrong for Jews to demonstrate their respect and love for the Torah?
Did the Jewish elite draw a bull's-eye on the wrong Man in Black? Last week, the Jewish Defense League (now with Menorah Man!), pilloried Will Smith for a point he made to the Scottish Daily Record:
"Even Hitler didn't wake up going, 'let me do the most evil thing I can do today.' I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was 'good.' "
On "Rabbi Joe in Jerusalem," I posited an alternative view to the JDL's, that Mr. Smith "may be the foremost political philosopher of our day." Still, all is not peaches and tehina in Hollywood; just consider the following words by Smith's Men in Black co-star, Tommy Lee Jones, as he describes the setting for the battle of David and Goliath:
"There were two armies assembled, the Israelites and the Philistines; they were both on hills, with the Valley of Elah between them. That's a place in Palestine. You know where that is? It doesn't matter."
Actually, it does matter. Granted, it's not really Mr. Jones speaking, but his character, Hank Deerfield, and the words are by Hollywood's First Lord of Subtelty, Paul Haggis. The setting is so important that Haggis named the movie "In the Valley of Elah." It's awards season, and it might be Haggis's year. Again.
It might very well be that no one noticed one throwaway line in this overwrought Iraq War epic, but I think that it shows where the PC police are headed. It used to be that the debate was limited to whether films from the West Bank and Gaza would be labeled "Palestinian Authority" or "Palestine" (the latter, much like Narnia or Middle-Earth, does not, technically, exist). However, the Valley of Elah is not in the West Bank; it's over the Green Line, in Israel "proper." Except that it's not proper for Israelites to be in Israel anymore, apparently, whatever its borders; it's all "Palestine," and any Jew is an interloper.
So let's review: if you report that Hitler believed, in his "twisted" mind, that he was doing the right thing, you're a Nazi; if you rename pre-1967 Israel "Palestine," you're progressive and deserve an Academy Award. Sounds like a dystopia that only Will Smith can save us from! If only the writers weren't still on strike...
RSS Feed