Jeremy Rosen Online

The Jewish Week recently published a review, written by Steven Bayme, of a book by Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the UK. The review said that Rabbi Sacks disagrees with the late and great Rav Soloveitchik’s belief that it is a shared fate that unites Jews. Rabbi Sacks insists it is a shared faith. Rav Soloveitchik Z”L doesn’t need me to support him, of course, and I haven’t read the book, so I don’t know if the reviewer is right or if Rabbi Sacks said such a thing. So let this piece not be read as a critique of him but simply of the idea that Steven Bayme mentioned.

Only someone whose ideas have been shaped more by Christianity than Judaism could possibly come up with such an idea. The Jewish people, bless them, ever stiff-necked, divided, have never truly been shaped by "faith". By obedience perhaps, by national identity at certain times, by anti-Semitism at others--but faith? The very word is a late invention and borrowed from Anglicanism. The Torah itself does not use the word "emunah" (belief, faith) to mean anything more than "trust".

I always found the term "faith communities" a peculiarly Christian term, because it is "faith in Jesus" that determines Christian grace and salvation. Judaism is rather a "way of life". Torah means "teaching". "Halacha" means more than "law"; it is "the way we live". In its structure and nature, if not in its historical development, Judaism is closer to Islam than Christianity. The fact that now politically we are about as far from each other as is possible should not disguise the fact that we are both systems based more on behavior than theology. And you know I really don’t even like the term "Judaism". I prefer "Am Yisrael", the People of Israel.

I do not say, as some do, that there is no theology in our tradition, or that belief has no fundamental importance; but faith is a matter of personal, intangible mental processes and can never truly be tested or verified. Action, behavior, can. Halacha, like Sharia, expects behavior. That is why actions are punished, not thoughts.

So what is it that links and connects Jews in terms of ideas? Is there a common denominator? I think not. Jews are best described as a "Gestalt". That is, a collection of elements, each distinct, that makes up a whole that is more than the sum of its parts.

Pray tell me what faith unites a Charedi and a Reform Jew? They do not both believe in Torah from Heaven or Sinai. They do not both believe their lives should be circumscribed by Jewish law. They usually do not share political or theological loyalties, neither do they agree on the idea of nationalism or Zionism. It is true they will both probably agree they believe in God, but then so too will Christians. Where is their common faith? What do both share with a significant body of Israelis who fight to the death to defend their homeland, belong to a "Jewish state", but are atheists?

You may stand on 5th Avenue and see a man with a black or grey Biblical beard, long black or grey earlocks ("payos" or "peyote", but not to be confused with the drug), an eighteenth century Polish hat, a nineteenth century long black frockcoat, twentieth century white socks, and twenty-first century black sneakers. You will look in the other direction and see a bare headed, cleanly shaven, sweet smelling, Zegna-dressed, Prada-shod, Dunhill-briefcase-carrying executive, both even hurrying to afternoon prayers. They have certain important practices in common, but one views God, the world, history, and text with a literality the other does not. Can they possibly share the same faith?

Many Jews around the world have little interest in or affiliation with religious institutions. The rate at which they marry out of the "faith" (there you are, funny word again) is 50%, on average. What do those who marry out share with those other Jews who consider doing so a betrayal? The most trumpeted vehicle for retaining the loyalty of non-affiliated American Jews is the Birthright program which ships large numbers of Jewish youth to Israel each year on free junkets. Religion is virtually taboo. When in the past some of its programs had a religious dimension, it provoked an outcry. Let us assume it succeeds. Does it succeed in creating faith communities? As they say, "I don’t think so." Any more than Israel itself does.

But I suspect they do share more common values than one might think. They will be prepared to admit to being part of a people descended from some ancient tribes. They will be proud of the survival of Jews and their remarkable contribution to civilization. They will support the right of Jews to have some sort of homeland, as well as their right to settle elsewhere. They will defend Jews against anti-Semitism and expect civilized societies to resist the attempt to write the Holocaust out of the dark history of human inhumanity. Even if they no longer adhere to more than occasional rituals, many will still contribute to those who live and devote themselves to Torah. Even the most Marxist, anti-Zionist, anti-religious of them will still claim at some moment in his life, even when he is trying his best to undermine Jewish identity, that he or she is a Jew. Faith? Bah. Jew? Still!

Last week I wrote an op-ed piece for Ha'aretz on the mosque, or center, or both (depends who you ask) near Ground Zero in Manhattan. The theme of the article was that in free and open societies where all weird and strange religions are allowed to flourish and compete on the market, one cannot and indeed should not try to prevent anyone expressing himself or herself through law-abiding and nonviolent places of worship and gathering. But by the same token religious organizations need to be sensitive to some of the anxieties, even insecurities, of others. The trouble is that there is a tendency to try too hard to push one's point of view into other people's faces under the pretext of freedom of expression, and I called for sensitivity on both sides.

Judaism, thank (my) God, is not a proselytizing religion, so our pushy, in-your-face evangelicals tend to confine themselves to asking passersby if they are Jewish first. Even so I must say I am not comfortable with some Chasidim insisting on overt displays. But throughout history all the major religions have built huge show-off monuments of worship, converted each other's to theirs, and battled away, literally, for the hearts and minds of their own constituencies and any others they thought they could conquer or win over. But it does not have to be this way.

I happen to be an apostle of good contacts and relations between religions wherever possible, and there is more good stuff going on than most people give credit for. If I resent evangelical Christian ideology that suggests that I cannot get to Heaven (wherever that is) unless I do it their way, I react with amusement rather than anger when, say, Jews for Jesus tries to convert me. My brother David is as good an example you can find of someone who is an excellent diplomat and model of Orthodox sensitivity. He is on very good terms with almost everyone and admired the world over for his work, and that includes many of the notoriously difficult to please ultra-Orthodox community too.

I said in my piece that I knew some of the people involved in the Cordoba Initiative to be good and tolerant human beings, the sort who give Islam a good name and try their best to show that it is not composed entirely of throat-slitting suicide bombers. I supported their idea of establishing a Muslim center rather like the Jewish 92nd Street Y or the JCCs which are open to everyone and, although funded and run as Jewish, are not ultra-Orthodox and not necessarily 'halacha compliant'! But then, of course, I have said Judaism is not evangelical.

I also pointed out that all new immigrant populations face resistance to their religious projects, and indeed to this day in many parts of the country Orthodox Jews face resistance and objection to their building plans. Most of the opposition I have read about recently has come from other Jews. We Jews had asked the previous pope to pressurize the Carmelite nuns at Auschwitz to remove a very public cross because of our sensitivities, and I suggested that the Cordoba Institute might consider amicably finding a location just a little further away from Ground Zero. My piece also brought up, as a side note, the insensitivities in Jerusalem on both sides--but then anything in Jerusalem is fraught with political confrontation and agendas.

It is now obvious to me that the Ground Zero whatever-it-is has become a political football, as everything in the USA has a tendency to become, with both sides exaggerating and looking for votes. I regret this.

But since my article I have had conversations with people, insiders and others, who have been at various public and private meetings, and I can tell you it is not exactly at it seems. There are two conflicting interests involved in this project and that, as much as any other factor, is why the project is sometimes called a mosque and sometimes a center. The Cordoba Initiative is headed Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, whom I believe to be absolutely sincere and transparent about what he wants to build and achieve. He has my support. But here's the interesting information I have: He regrets the ruckus and wants to do what he can to defuse the situation. If the current location is a problem, whether rational or not, he is prepared to consider another one. The same cannot be said for others who are now using this as a political football, kicking from both ends of the playing field.

But, ladies and gentlemen, isn't it strange that there is another website? I am reliably informed the developer has another agenda. He is, after all, a real estate man as well as a born-again Muslim. His view is that this is a going to be a Muslim statement. Now if that is the case, by all means make a Muslim statement as loud as you like, but do not make it where you know a lot of people would not welcome it. The 9/11 jihadists were also making a statement. And I get worried by statements, because then it is all about posturing. Freedom of religion and making statements are two very different things.

I have sneaking suspicion this is also about real estate, a great opportunity landing on someone's desk. But I wonder if Cordoba has not got into bed with the wrong guy. My solution is to buy the fellow out or offer him a swap, and then I really do believe everyone will be a winner. We and he will have a Muslim mosque and center which will be what it will be. The incongruity of the present location will no longer be an issue. Imam Feisal will be seen as the figure of understanding and moderation that he really is. And I suspect he will garner much more support from many more people, business and ecclesiastical, to build the vision he really has and we need.

So you have fallen in love. You are in a relationship. You think you are happy. And then the other betrays you.

There are lots of different ways of betraying. It does not just have to be the ultimate, the sexual, though that is the one the Bible focuses on. Modern society, with its greater emphasis on psychology and analyzing human actions, has perhaps gone too far in seeing anything as a betrayal, and at the same time is too cavalier in expecting everyone to forgive and forget everything. Bill Clinton thought he had not committed adultery because he did not go "all the way", and on the other hand an article I read recently tells me I can commit adultery on the internet.

The Bible has a whole slew of laws about lying, misleading, stealing someone's mind, and taking advantage of someone's ignorance or innocence. All these are forms of betrayal but may fall short of being the coup de grace that ends a marriage. I suggest we all make some such mistakes, even in the best of marriages. We are allowed, in Jewish law, to lie and tell a bride she is beautiful, to encourage her and enhance her self-esteem. We may tell white lies about our partners not being fat or wrinkly or badly dressed to avoid hurting their feelings. This surely is not betrayal, but some people I know take it as that.

There are other ways of betraying a marriage such as being cruel, verbally abusive, or insensitive. Some betrayals do indeed indicate a pattern of deceit and untrustworthiness that would be ignored or forgiven at ones peril. That indeed is why we allow divorce in Judaism, and even encourage it to allow a victim to hope for and aspire to a better life and a more honest relationship. Once this option was rare and forbidding. Now it is a lot more accessible (though I am sad to say that in Orthodox Judaism it too often comes at a price over and above an equitable settlement).

Turning, as I always tend to, to our sources, I can find two conflicting ideas. On the one hand, Jewish law forbids a husband to cohabit with the wife who has betrayed him. A co-respondent in a divorce case may not afterwards marry the divorcee. The former is easier to choose to bypass, because the husband who forgives his wife is under no obligation to tell the religious authorities or demand a divorce. In the second case the name of the co-respondent is known and often identified in the get and divorce proceedings. But these examples are of the unforgiving option. Interestingly, the Torah only talks about a person confessing and atoning. Forgiveness seems to be a Divine quality. I cannot find a source to support forgiving someone who was not sorry or did not repent.

The controversial case of the Sotah, the Fallen Woman in Numbers 5, makes unpleasant reading under the best of conditions. Rabbinic close reading of the text insisted that the woman had actually betrayed her husband on two levels. She had consorted with another man inappropriately, even if we had no direct evidence of adultery. And she has persistently refused to obey her husband's wish that she end the association. She, for her part, insists she is innocent of adultery but not necessarily of betraying her husband's wishes. The humiliating trial by ordeal is designed to get her to confess only if she insisted on her innocence. If then she came out unscathed, the rabbis expected them both to forgive and make up and have a child to seal the deal. I cannot think of a more obvious example of forgiveness of betrayal.

What better symbol can one ask for than the repeated Biblical motif of the Jewish people betraying their God at the worst and crudest of levels, and yet Divine forgiveness, albeit with a dose of pain and exile, would always be assured. This is the underlying theme of Jewish religious life from the betrayal of Tisha B'Av, the abandonment of God and Jewish values, followed by the month of Elul in which we fall in love with God again, and in Tishrei ask for His forgiveness. God may be forgiving of us humans on earth, but even then not in every case and not necessarily in this life!

It is much harder for humans to forgive. Indeed sometimes anger is a necessary catharsis and must be allowed to run its course. Yet the fact is that perpetuating bitterness and anger can be counterproductive and destructive. Sometimes it is pride, sometimes the pain is so great we simply cannot get over it. Each relationship carries its own baggage, rawness and illogicalities. A good relationship is one in which partners recognize the specific anxieties and neuroses of the other and act accordingly. What other people feel and think is no determinant of what you or your partner might feel. As Tolstoy said about families, each happy family resembles each other, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way; so it is with love. And when a relationship is shaky, it is knowing and understanding the specific way in which one's partner is unhappy that enables one to recover.

All this is true not only of love, but of any area in which human beings come together in partnership and one of them does something, willful or accidental, that threatens the whole fabric of the relationship. And that is why all of this is relevant to this time of the year, as we approach Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kipur. Can we ask God for forgiveness for ourselves, if we cannot grant it to others?

Having anything, means that one risks losing it. That is true of possessions, of life, and of course of love. But because one risks losing something, surely that does not mean one should never try to achieve it. As Lord Tennyson said (yes, Lord Tennyson and not Shakespeare), "'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." Indeed, it was Shakespeare who said, "For violent fires soon burn out themselves" (Richard II).

This does not seem to deter us from falling or trying to fall in passionate love. What is remarkable about the loss of love is that it can be particularly debilitating and difficult to overcome. It often remains within one's psyche as a bleeding wound even when a new love has replaced it. Some people never recover.

Losing one's health, death, the collapse or deterioration of material possessions--these are either inevitable or beyond one's control. They are not necessarily personal insults. They are not a statement about how lovable, desirable, or attractive one is or not. And that is why the pain of lost love is so intense. One is negated, rejected, rubbished. And even the old excuse, "It is me not you", does not seem to help.

Yet the fact is that powerful and passionate as love is, it is still an emotion. Very often another part of our brain countermands the emotion and counsels logic, opportunism, or simply concession to other people or other demands. (Not to mention the other parts that press the claims for lust and excitement). Most of our lives are led trying to find a balance between the logical and the emotional--what we want and what is appropriate to the given circumstances. Still, we humans tend to want everything. We either strive for possession or perfection.

Even God started out as an idealist. He wanted unconditional love and obedience. He only gave Adam one command, but that was enough to highlight the fault line. Any statement "you can't" seems to invite betrayal. Love is not control. Control, domination, exploitation is a denial of genuine love. Having created humanity with the capacity for choice, God was in a way forced by the very willfulness of man to set him free from his Garden of Eden. If you love someone you must let him go.

The prophet Hoseah describes the relationship between God and Man. "When the Lord spoke through Hosea, He said to 'Go, take a wife who is a whore and will have children of infidelity, for the people (land) has committed adultery in departing from the Lord'" (Hosea 1:2).

Hoshea asks us to imagine the awful pain that a betrayed lover feels, even when he knew from the start what the outcome would be. In this case it is God. It is the nature of love, spiritual and physical, to yearn for a perfect merging of two souls. The ideal is a marriage based on love, not just contractual obligation. "And it shall be on that day, says the Lord, that you shall call me my "Man" ("Ishi"); and no longer my "Master" ("Baali")" (Hosea 2.18). The relationship of "Ish Ve Isha", a man for a woman and of course vice versa, is a relationship of total commitment. The relationship of a husband as a master "Baal" is just a contract. So if God can aspire to a passionate devoted relationship, of course that must be what He wants for us too!

Yet most of us fail in our relationships to some degree. I was selfish and self-centered as a young man. What I thought was "love" was really "desire." I had an agenda for my life and that was going determine my choice of partner. Later I came to understand that love is a very different, much more profound phenomenon because it is based on "give" rather than "want." It is something very few people are privileged to experience. In most cases, marriage is either the mistaken next step from desire and passion or, on the other hand, an arrangement between families or individuals.

If in either case it succeeds it is because both parties want it to. And wanting it to succeed, requires a degree of agreement, shared values, and aspirations as well as the decision to remain faithful. Not unlike the decision to be religious, interestingly. The amazing thing is that to the Western mind it seems inconceivable that an arrangement can actually lead to as much love and as deep a passion as falling madly in love at first sight.

I have met people who have been scared of love simply for the fear of losing it and being hurt. Just as some fear being completely honest about themselves for it leads to vulnerability. And just as some shy away from marriage because they think a successful marriage must be founded on 'love at first sight.'

The fact is that love and marriage do not always "go together like a horse and carriage". If they do, it is a blessing. But they are two very different processes. There is sexual attraction and there is compatibility. That's why a couple having lived and slept together for several years, then get married, may still break up.

And that leads me to the next installment. If marriage is an arrangement, does the pain of infidelity inevitably mean it is all over, forever?

I have so often attacked individuals in the Charedi world for the way they play the system. Now the boot's on the American Reform foot over an attempt to try to resolve the issue of Russian Israelis who are not Jewish, and there are lots of them. A bill before the Knesset would have decentralized conversions in Israel to allow each local rabbinic authority to deal with its specific problems in the ways it sees fit. But as an inevitable quid pro quo, it reasserted the authority of the state rabbinate over such matters.

American Reform lobbies have weighed in. Netanyahu has capitulated. The bill is sabotaged. The Russians are left in the murk. Yet it has done nothing to address the real issue American Reform is worried about. It has simply shown them up to be dogs in the manger.

Their real issue is not conversion. It is that religion and politics have been intertwined since the foundation of the state. Personal religious status is in the hands of the Orthodox (and increasingly intolerant) rabbinate. This affects, primarily, marriage and burial. There is no civil marriage in Israel, for Jew, Christian, or Muslim, though those married civilly abroad are recognized.

I do not like this. I do not subscribe to Reform Judaism and think their decisions have split the Jewish people more than Orthodox revanchism. But I also strongly oppose religious coercion. If Israel would separate "State" from "Religion" there would be no problem at all. As in the Diaspora, Jews would be free to choose whatever brand of religion they want knowing full well that other Jews might not accept their credentials. That’s life. I know if I want Satmar to accept me I’ll have to change the way I dress. I can choose, but in Israel, politics rules. It is a system where you know the Prime minister will give in to Charedi pressure because he wants their votes and to US Reform pressure because he wants their money. I wish secular Israelis had the guts to change their political system and exclude the smaller parties who blackmail in return for votes. But they haven't, they don’t seem to care enough. Don’t only blame the religious. It’s the seculars’ fault too. Israel is a democracy. If that's what they want, there's nothing I can do about that.

Most Israelis come from Sephardi countries where there is no Reform presence. The vast majority of new immigrants to Israel are Orthodox. Your average Israeli is secular and does not keep anything. Nevertheless the Judaism they refer to is a traditional one, even if they don’t like its rabbis. Israel has never recognized Reform Judaism, its rabbis, or its conversions. But this hasn't stopped Diaspora communities from supporting Israel, any more than many secular Jews support Orthodox mystics or Reform Jews support Lubavitch or, indeed, many Christians support Israel.

I am all in favor of choice. I fully understand anyone not wishing to be associated with fundamentalism or a Judaism nostalgic for the Ghetto. But you can't kick a tradition in its teeth and then expect it to accept you. Yet that is precisely what Reform Jews are asking of the Orthodox rabbinate in Israel when they demand that they accept Reform conversions or Reform rabbis.

Conversion in Israel is subject to politics only because of history. The Knesset decided, not rabbis, to call anyone with a Jewish grandparent Jewish for the purposes of the Law of Return. That was a political decision. Now it is faced with thousands of Russian Israelis (encouraged to come for demographic reasons) who are not Jewish by any religious standard, yet as citizens may fight and die for Israel (as do many Bedouin and Druze who have never claimed they were Jewish). Many Russians, faced with the reality of the situation, want to rectify their Jewish status and convert. But the only option currently available is through a rigid and centralized rabbinate.

But is conversion a genuine religious process or simply a convenient sham? Some rabbis in Israel, as in the USA, Reform and Orthodox, have tried to resolve these issues by making conversion easy. They make up their own standards and I am sorry to say, often take backhanders. They are perfectly entitled to act as they see fit. But the State Rabbinate cannot be expected to recognize these converts. Why the heck should they? Since when can an applicant for US citizenship tell the US how much of a citizen he is prepared to be?

MK Rothem's bill tried to solve the Israeli problem. It was give and take. He got the rabbinate to agree to be flexible about standards, to allow conversion to be open to all state-employed rabbis with their variations, but in return had its status as the arbiter of Jewish identity confirmed. It is not ideal. But it would have helped the Russians and not changed anything as far as American Reform is concerned. But it has been scuppered because of American Reform meddling. So now no one wins. The Israeli Rabbinate still does not recognize Reform converts, and rabbis and Russian Jews won't get an easier path to conversion. Well done, the Yanks.

It is nonsense to claim the bill would have divided Jewry anymore than it already is. We are split between Zionists and non-Zionists, secular and religious, and Reform and Orthodox. Concern for Israel is an important common denominator. But a united Jewry on any issue is as much a myth as a united Christianity or a united Islam. Can you imagine Sunni accepting Shia authority or vice versa? Still they all support the Palestinians.

Of course the answer is to separate state and religion. Until that happens, by all means Reform should fight to strengthen its presence and values, positively. It should stop pretending that this issue is splitting Jewry any more than it has already. It should pressurize to separate State and Religion, not to impose its own religious values, for that is to play the very game it claims to abhor. Meanwhile leave the Israelis to sort their own problems out in the haphazard way they have always done. Eventually they might get right, politically and religiously!

Anthony Julius has a reputation as one of the brightest English lawyers of his generation and has a PhD on T.S. Eliot. Recently he was praised for his role in the defense of Deborah Lipstadt against the revolting David Irving. Julius has spent many years studying anti-Semitism in all its varieties. He concludes it has felt like swimming through a sewer.

His book Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England is magisterial. Some of the critical reviews have been predictably nitpicking and Harold Bloom's positive review in the New York Times brought the secular anti-Zionists out in force so it must be good. No Judaica library should be without it.

The disease has proved uniquely persistent, mutating from religion to religion and from nation to nation. It exists even where no Jews are present. What every outbreak has in common is illogicality mixed with paranoia and politics.

There is nothing new in Julius's chapters on English history. England gave the world the Blood Libel. The Crusaders slaughtered Jews as the easily accessible heretics. Jews were blamed for everything from the Black Death to famine and war, just as later they were blamed for being capitalists and Marxists, internationalists and nationalists, too weak and too strong.

In England Jews were used and abused and then expelled in 1290. Yet hatred of Jews persisted even when there were none around. When, under Cromwell, the question of readmitting Jews was discussed, sections of the Anglican Church raised the specter of Jews destroying churches, killing Christian children, banning pork. Merchants argued that the Jews would simply swindle everyone else and put them out of business. Similar charges were made in 1753 when Parliament passed a Jew Bill and King George actually signed it giving Jews equal rights. The uproar was so great the bill was repealed! In anti-Semitism, every one of the medieval calumnies has a modern equivalent.

Julius's specialized contribution is how anti-Semitism is deeply embedded in English literature. From Chaucer to Marlowe, from Shakespeare to Dickens, and on to Eliot, the Jew is invariably depicted as the dangerous, malicious symbol of evil and everything good Christians oppose. All of this makes the exceptions all the more amazing. There are those in the field who think Julius exaggerates anti-Semitism in English literature right up to modernity. But Julius makes a powerful case.

In the most relevant part of this book, he examines current anti-Semitism in England in general, and specifically in the context of anti-Zionism, which is now commonly used as a surrogate. A major factor is Islam which, like Christianity, always had a problem with Jews precisely because they stubbornly persisted with their "old" ways. Perhaps under parts of Islam Jews suffered less at certain times, but the Jew was always regarded as the outsider, the Dhimmi.

One can, of course, understand the modern political antagonism. When two nations fight over the same home there will be a lot of bitterness and violence on both sides. But it is the completely irrational hatred and demonization of the other, regardless, which betrays the disease. Rwanda illustrates how easily "the other" can be dehumanized. Most disturbing because it is inflammatory and has led to violence against Jews around the world is the medieval anti-Semitism that floods the Muslim world underlines how easily human minds can be distorted by manipulators.

The Church remains problematic. Catholicism has tried to eradicate anti-Semitism. But mainstream Protestantism (as opposed to the Southern Baptists) has adopted an anti-Israel narrative as the biased language of the recent Methodists report illustrates only too well.

To make matters worse, too many acculturated Jews have always cooperated and conspired with prejudice in order to secure their own positions in society. Julius demolishes secular Jewish anti-Zionism. The issue once again is not whether Jews or Israelis deserve criticism or condemnation. It is the assumption that all evil is on one side only and that only Palestinians deserve a homeland, not Jews.

Some ultra-Orthodox Jews have long opposed secular Zionism. Nevertheless, most of them still wish to live in the Holy Land and perpetuate their ancient link with it. But secular and left-wing anti-Zionism goes back to the struggles within Communism. Much of Russian Jewry opposed the very idea of a Jewish State (ironically so too did the majority of Anglo American Jews). They fed the left-wing and labor movements of Russia, America, and Europe, and their grandchildren are the secular Jews who today feel embarrassed by the Jewish religion and Jewish particularism. For a while some could identify with a secular socialist Zionist agenda.

But as Israel proved to be as fallible as any other democracy, abandoned its socialism and allied with the great capitalist USA, many of them turned on Israel to cleanse themselves of their embarrassing Jewish identity, and reject the idea of a specifically Jewish homeland. Now that the Communist "god has failed", all that is left is anti-Americanism and anti-globalization. Israel is an easy target. This also explains the strange alliance between secular left-wing Englishmen (and other left-wingers) and those who despise women, gays, and liberals, and wish to overthrow the Western democratic process.

Julius makes the point that no other country suffers from a campaign of de-legitimization, irrational hatred, and double standards as much as Israel does, and he believes it is precisely because of its Jewish character. It is the loss of objectivity, the language of hate and prejudice that explains the exaggerated odium directed at Jews and Israel, and of course Islam's own internal problems.

It is often said that it is Israel that causes modern anti-Semitism. Julius debunks this theory. The antagonism would still be there, regardless of geopolitical circumstances. Hatred will always find a way of seeping out of the sewer; if it cannot find one channel, it will always look for another.

A few weeks ago an English judge, Bathurst Norman, instructed a jury that a gang of political terrorists who broke into and smashed up the offices of a company that dealt with Israel should be let off. He compared Israel to Nazis and said that the protest was a legitimate democratic expression of sympathy for the plight of the Gazans and against Israeli oppression. Now let us see if he or any English judge exonerates another case of smashing up private property on political grounds or compares any other state to the Nazis. If not, we will know for certain that Anthony Julius is understating the problem of anti-Semitism in Britain today, rather than exaggerating it.

This important but depressing book needs to be read by anyone who cares for the health and sanity of modern society. When violence is directed at Jews it never ends there.

For a genuine yeshivah bochur, nothing compares to the delight of grappling with a complex piece of gemara. This as well as the inspiration of Torah itself, explains why one is not allowed to study during the fast of Tisha B'Av. That would give one pleasure at a time when one should be feeling sad. (For most youngsters nowadays, the highest degree of mourning would be achieved if they were denied Facebook or their iTunes.)

The fast of the Ninth of Av, this coming Monday night and Tuesday, commemorates all the tragedies of the 2,000 years of Diaspora, which for many includes the Holocaust too. So pleasure is out. Studying Torah is out. The only part of the Talmud one may study is that section that deals with the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem. Those ignoramuses who think Herzl was the beginning of Jewish involvement in Jerusalem should ponder that for two thousand years Jews have fasted and mourned the loss of our homeland once a year (three times a year, if you include the other fasts related to the destruction). Actually for 2,500 years if you include the first destruction in 586 BCE.

The text we can study, gives a specific Rabbinic take on the circumstances that led to the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70CE.They have always maintained that we have been our own worst enemies and have brought destruction down on our own heads. Most historians would want to include other internal and external factors in the Roman Empire at the time, as well as Vespasian’s personal agenda (read Martin Goodman). But what matters is the moral message.

Here is the first part:
The destruction of Jerusalem happened because of Kamtza and Bar Kamtza. There was a man who had a friend called Kamtza and an enemy called Bar Kamtza. He once made a banquet and told his servant to go and bring Kamtza. The man went and brought Bar Kamtza. When the host found him sitting there he said, "You are my enemy, what are you doing here? Get out." He replied, ”Since I am here, let me stay, and I will pay you for whatever I eat and drink." He refused. So he said, "Let me give you half the cost of the meal." Again he was refused. "Then let me pay for the whole party," he asked. The host still refused and bodily ejected him. Bar Kamtza said to himself, "Since the Rabbis were sitting there and did not stop him, this shows that they agreed with him. I will go and stir up trouble with the Roman authorities." He went and said to the Procurator, "The Jews are rebelling against you." He said, "How can I tell?" He said to him, "Send them an sacrifice and see whether they will offer it [in the Temple]." So he sent a fine calf with him. On the way he made a blemish on its upper lip, some say on the white of its eye, in a place where we count it a blemish but Romans do not. The Rabbis were inclined to offer it in order not to offend the Government. R. Zechariah ben Avkulas replied to them "People will say that blemished animals are offered on the altar." They then proposed to kill Bar Kamtza so that he should not go and inform against them, but R. Zechariah ben Avkulas said to them, "Is one who makes a blemish on consecrated animals to be put to death?" R. Yochanan thereupon remarked, "Because of the scrupulousness of R. Zechariah ben Abkulas our House has been destroyed, our Temple burnt, and we ourselves exiled from our land." Talmud Gittin 55b & 56a.Bar Kamtza was humiliated both by his enemy and by the rabbis who obviously were in the pocket of the host. Nothing much has changed. Most religious leaders forgive and fawn over wealthy donors much more than they do for the more modest. Money is still the root of most rabbinic evil. But then what about the Bar Kamtza's overreaction? Jewish self-hatred can be so profound that some of us still turn on our own with a vengeance, just as he did.

I have often wondered about the servant. Was he a kind of E.M. Forster maiden aunt, meaning well, using his own initiative to try and force a reconciliation, but in fact making matters worse?

As for Rav Zecharia, why didn't it occur to him to send a delegation back explaining their reasons? The point of course is the moral rather than the facts. Zecharia could well represent rabbinic leadership today, so concerned with the minutiae of legal appearances, with what other people might think, that he fails to see the larger picture. On the other hand you might argue that he was too modest to act when what was needed was guts, decisiveness even a certain arrogance. Rabbis, very good at scholarship or teaching, rarely make the best leaders because they won’t stick their necks out for fear of what others might say. And political rabbis are usually tied to their parties and interests. True leadership requires taking risks and unpopular positions.

No we haven't changed. For two thousand years we have been reading this same story and we still haven't learnt the lessons. Those fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.

I often ask myself why I focus in my blog on the very small Jewish world and its problems (as well as its successes). Perhaps I should turn to the larger world picture.

Too large a canvas can be too vague and impersonal. Besides, Judaism is a microcosm. Everything that goes wrong within our small community is a small version of the larger one. Perhaps a smaller focus is more precise and instructive.

I constantly come back to the way the religion I love is misused, how instead of being a tool for uplifting humans it is too often a vehicle for controlling and limiting them. I stand for the former but this week I find another example of the latter. I had thought that the Young Israel organization was an example of what was good and enlightened in American Orthodoxy. Not so, it seems.

According to The Jewish Week, the National Council of Young Israel, is trying to expel a small affiliated synagogue in Syracuse, New York. You might think it is for ideological reasons, following the current trend to get stricter and stricter (and sadly, Young Israel seems to be going in that direction). But in fact what it really boils down to is (surprise!) cash.

In the UK and Europe Jewish communities, synagogues and burial grounds are usually controlled by a centralized organization, the result of the social and political circumstances that prevailed in the nineteenth century. That is the norm; there are, of course, exceptions. In the USA it is a free-for-all and, in my view, much healthier for it—synagogues are fiscally independent, own their own real estate, and may choose to affiliate with umbrella organizations.

Each synagogue that chooses to affiliate pays an annual fee to benefit from the organization's administrative and educational facilities. The organization can, of course, expel constituents, and by the same token synagogues can resign. It is a free society

In recent years, tension between some constituent synagogues and the head office of Young Israel has arisen over several issues of "Orthodoxy". Rabbi Weiss in Riverdale recently hit the headlines for trying to ordain a female rabbi (a rose by any other name, etc.). A few years ago he established a more open-minded and less rigid rabbinic training college called Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, to counterbalance what he saw as Yeshiva University's drift to the right. Young Israel refuses to accept YCT rabbis. Some member synagogues want to.

And there is the issue of the role of women. No, not whether they should or should not be rabbis, but whether they can run synagogues as lay leaders. They can run countries, corporations, and universities, but not, it seems, synagogue boards (perhaps they are not crazy enough).

Syracuse has had two women presidents in recent years. Young Israel does not approve. It wants to expel the Shaarei Torah Orthodox Congregation of Syracuse, officially over the synagogue's failure to pay $20,000 in back dues. The Syracuse congregation actually resigned from Young Israel two years ago when Young Israel demanded it overturn the election of a woman president. So it can hardly owe dues if it resigned, no?

Dr. Beverly Marmor, its current lay leader of the congregation, said, "We were told that if our [woman president] did not resign immediately, they would sue us for having used their name for years and would also claim our assets." The synagogue owns its building, a parsonage, and at least three Torah scrolls. Now there it is, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. The assets. That's the issue. Religion is the front; money-grabbing is the truth.

The June 10th article in The Jewish Week states:
Although Marmor said her synagogue sent a letter to the National Council informing it of the resignation and a name change from "Young Israel-Shaarei Torah of Syracuse", the National Council hired an attorney who wrote back to say that the organization's constitution bars a member congregation from resigning its membership and affiliation.

The letter also instructed the congregation to confirm its continued membership and "cease and desist from any further effort to operate as an independent Orthodox synagogue..."

Marmor said her synagogue has ignored the letter.

"This is the United States of America," she said. "Whoever heard that you can't resign from a voluntary organization?"

But the National Council does have the authority to expel a member and seize its assets, according to the organization's constitution. I just hope this doesn't get to the civil courts. The case for the defense is that Young Israel is a badly run, incompetent organization whose left had does not know what its right hand is doing. Perhaps. But once again, it's a religious organization creating a PR debacle in which religion is associated with primitive values and money-grabbing. And it seems to happen almost everywhere.

As we approach Tisha B'Av you have to wonder how we Jews ever did get our act together, ever!!!! Sure, the rest of the world is just as crazy and probably more corrupt. But weren't we supposed to set a good example?

Is Israel's mission in this world the same as the role of the Jewish religion? You might think so, given the way Israel is excoriated for failing to live up to Jewish ethical standards.

The Bible asks of Jews to try to be a holy nation. Nowhere does it suggest they are intrinsically better than anybody else. On the contrary, they are constantly described as stiff-necked, backsliding incompetents. The prophets, in particular, like to talk about a special relationship between God and Israel. But this relationship was an obligation most Jews found too demanding. They kept on failing. Yet miraculously Jews survived, with their ethical obligations intact. As they were failing, individuals, prophets, poets, mystics, and scholars were flourishing and laying the foundation for survival, even if the nation state itself was doomed.

There is a difference between the individuals who make up the people and its political systems, which it adopts and uses like a hermit crab crawling into whatever history or the circumstances decree.

If the Jews ran their affairs as a theocracy, then certainly the people and the morality would be inseparable. But it hasn't ever been that way in Judaism since Moses. Jewish polity and religion have almost always been in conflict and as we know rarely successfully.

Lord Palmerston is reputed to have said that Her Majesty's government does not have policies, it only has interests. Power politics is and must be concerned with power, with doing the best possible to achieve it, apply it, and retain it. This almost always involves pragmatism rather than idealism.

This does not mean that one cannot be ethical in politics. But it does mean that if you are, you will probably not succeed for very long. The primary role of a state is to do the best it can for its citizens, only secondarily to take care of the rest of the world. If the two coincide, then of course, so much the better but as we know it is impossible to get universal agreement on either ethics or policy.

Zionism made two ideological mistakes. Firstly in thinking it could replace Judaism as an ideology, and secondly that it had some kind of world mission, a light to the nations and stuff. But arrogating mystical concepts to politics is always dangerous, as Islam proves.

In the 1950's Ben-Gurion did actually believe Israel could be an ethical state. That was why Israel always voted against Apartheid. It wanted to be counted amongst the ethical states. But then came rejection. One country after another simply turned its back on Israel; John Foster Dulles, de Gaulle, Stalin, the so-called "non-aligned states", and of course the Muslim states. Israel had no option but to look for friends wherever it could find them. This meant teaming up with South Africa despite Israel's consistent pattern of voting against Apartheid at the UN and despite the Nazi past of many of its Afrikaans leaders. Israel justified links with South Africa on purely pragmatic grounds. After all, Israel had accepted German reparations despite Begin's moral stand against them. Now it actually invited Nazi-sympathizer Vorster to Israel.

In 1986 the Chief Rabbi of South Africa, Bernard Casper, and the head of the United Synagogue of Johannesburg, Hans Saenger, invited me to Johannesburg to discuss the possibility of my succeeding Rabbi Casper, and I spent August with them. I had been a supporter of the Anti-Apartheid Movement since my student days, and its vice president since my first rabbinic position in 1968. I wanted to get a feel of the political situation on the ground.

Through an old left-wing academic and media friend, Allan Segal, I was put in touch with Benjamin Pogrund, who facilitated my meeting many of the most significant black and Indian opposition leaders of the time. They all advised me against coming if I intended to speak my mind and said that they only saw violence ahead. Interesting how differently things turned out, thanks to Mandela. In the end, the negotiations got nowhere. But one repeated message I got from the opposition was that feeling ran high against Israel for its support of the South African racist regime. How far its support went is the subject of a debate you can read here.

Israel is accused of giving nuclear information to South Africa in The Unspoken Alliance: Israel's Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa. Interestingly, others say it was the other way round! Several people in the know have rebutted his claims. Indeed some claim it was South Africa who helped Israel. But either way, the fact remains that at that stage Israel needed allies, and does even today. China, the up-and-coming power, has an appalling record of oppressing its own minorities. But I hear no one saying Israel should not court China. Everyone else is.

Israel exists in an imperfect world. If it has lost its idealism, it is because it has no alternative other then self-immolation. I regret its loss of innocence, but I don't know any state that is innocent. Morality and idealism are the realms of spirit, not of politics. It is fine for states that are not existentially threatened to pretend to be idealistic, especially if idealism comes with benefits like oil and money. Britain only stopped arming South Africa only when it no longer needed to economically.

We all know that Israel is an imperfect state, along with every other state under the sun. It is a democracy, which anyway is a ridiculous system, only marginally better than most others. Actually, I’d always go for a benevolent dictatorship, if only one could guarantee the dictator would be both benevolent and see things my way. In a democracy one can no more stop extremists simply because one dislikes their values than they can stop me expressing mine. One has to persuade as many voters as possible of one's position. My role as an individual is to be ethical and to try to propagate ethical values. But I look to my state to protect me.

If genuine peace were a serious option in the Middle East, Israel would be both morally and politically bankrupt to reject it. But until we reach a settlement, with enemies openly and brazenly seeking Israel's destruction, survival must be the priority. In Jewish religious law if a person wants to destroy you, even if he threatens to, you must get there first! That is Jewish ethical law, and it is usually good politics. But it does not mean that taking risks for peace might not be an even better form of defence!

An ethical state can only survive in an ethical world. An ethical people survives despite the world.

If the recent ultra-Orthodox Charedi spat in Israel was simply about racism, I would not feel as furious as I do. Last week one hundred thousand black- and fur-hatted faithful gathered in Jerusalem to protest the Israeli High Court decision to send to jail parents of a strictly Orthodox school in the religious town of Emmanuel.

The school was founded by the Slonim Hassidim who wanted state funding but needed sixty pupils to qualify. It only had forty girls, whose parents insisted on a very strict regime. To get the rest they had to lower their standards to allow other girls, not so religious, to join. But these girls were kept segregated behind a wall in the school, for fear that their corrosive values--like sleeves only down to the elbows and pop socks in summer instead of full tights--might ruin the best!

But it was claimed that the wall was to keep Ashkenazi and Sephardi girls apart, and the High Court ordered the responsible parents to remove the offending wall. The Rebbe of Slonim, however, told them to defy the High Court and listen instead to God (his version, naturally), so the parents have repeatedly defied the High Court decision.

I hate racism with a passion. The fact is that Jewish law is and has always been so absolutely against any form of racism. No one who is a racist can possibly claim to be genuinely Orthodox. (And please do not confuse ideological exclusivity with racism, because anyone can adopt a different ideology if he wants to, but can’t change race.) There are, to my shame, Jews who are racist. It is just like any country that has laws against racial discrimination--you still have the mentally challenged who have just not yet evolved.

Go into almost any Charedi community or yeshiva nowadays and you will find a racial mix--blacks, browns, Ethiopians, or Sephardi Jews (mainly from Islamic societies), amongst the faithful. Indeed, in this particular school there were Sephardi girls, and several of the parents amongst those who defied the court and went to jail were Sephardi. So the issue cannot simply be about racism.

It is true that the Sephardic community in Israel has long complained of discrimination. Poor immigrants from the Maghreb and Yemen were treated very shabbily by the Ashkenazi elite when they arrived. It was largely Menachem Begin who first helped turn the tide. Then the creation of the Sephardi religious party "Shas" gave Sephardim real political power and clout. Things have been changing. Some of my own nieces and nephews have happily intermarried into Sephardi communities.

But if this really was a Sephardi issue why did the Sephardi "Shas" party stay shtum? It did not organize one counterdemonstration. One might argue that most Sephardi rabbis don't want to be seen challenging religious authority because they use it just as much, themselves, as a tool of control. And if they do anything to undermine ecclesiastical omnipotence, they will lose too.

So was this just about religion? Did the High Court get it wrong? Was it just trying to find an excuse to beat up on the religious because they don't join the army and rely on secular taxes for handouts? Wasn't this just about some parents wanting a stricter form of Judaism than others and not wanting to be diluted? Cannot religious groups vie with each other over who is stricter if that is what they fancy, so long it doesn't make demands on the less religious?

Most civilized societies allow religious groups to do as they please so long as they don't harm others or break the law. Plenty of Orthodox schools around the world have their own entrance requirements. If you have a television you can't get in, a tattoo you are out. If you belong to another Chasidic sect and you might not worship the same rebbe, don't even try to apply.

One might even legitimately argue that a thorough Talmudic education is far more intellectually rigorous and demanding than Western school standards, but that is another issue. If Orthodox schools want to allow kids to grow double pipicks or wear tents, it is their right to choose--as it is to wear fur hats in the middle of summer and not use deodorant. They believe that God, as mediated by the Great Rabbis of the Generation, know what is right and best. They prefer to follow them rather than the mainly secular civil judges who have entirely different values.

That is their right, so long as they do not expect the state to underwrite their values. Let them simply run their own affairs and not expect the state to subsidize them. If they ask the state to support them, then they surely have to abide by the rules of the state or get out.

But in Israel political haggling allows a situation where Orthodox schools get state funding and can tell the state to mind its own business altogether. No standards, no curriculum, no inspection. Nothing. So they have got used to ignoring the outside world. And this is really all about state cash.

It is called entitlement, a kind of addiction to handouts, usually a result of overindulgent welfare. Some people believe they can ignore the law because what they do is for God or Allah or whatever. They put up schools illegally, fiddle social services, apply for fraudulent subsidies, and indulge in illegal business activities. In Israel they refuse to serve in the army. They rely on the secular and nationalist Orthodox to defend them, then have the gall to expect subsidy. And I blame Ben Gurion, and indeed Begin. They both could have changed the electoral system to stop this blackmail, but did not. Those who sow the wind, etc.

Netanyahu needs the religious to stay in power, so he will make sure they get what they ask for and too bad for the Supreme Court. Whenever there's a cause that is trumpeted as a holy one, you can bet your bottom dollar it is really all about the cash.

I have been dealing too much with politics of late. So to redress the balance I am going to deal with love. Of course it’s a massive subject and far too complex to deal in one brief session. So be patient, please. More will follow. So here's the first step, focusing mainly on the origins of love in Judaism.

I cannot think of a more misused word than "love". The same word, Ahavah, is used in Biblical language to talk about loving one's neighbor, one's father and mother, one's children, one's master, one's friend, one's God, and of course one's spouse (in the case of King Solomon, hundreds of women). The Greeks distinguished between mental love, Platonic, and physical. Biblical Judaism did not. "Ahavah" derives from the root "Hav" which means "to bring" or "to give". Judaism simply spoke about a relationship in which one gives, brings something; one has obligations, rather than the modern idea of "what can I get out of it?"

The first human relationship in the Bible, of course, was that of Adam and Eve. They knew how to reproduce. Eve could not have been too worried about her husband straying. Adam was delighted to have found a companion, someone closer to him than the animals. In saying, "And that is why a man leaves his parents and stays closer to his wife", the Torah suggested a very intimate kind of relationship that would transcend (without necessarily replacing) that which one had with one's parents. The ribcage protects the heart, which symbolized love, as it still does today. Creating Eve out of the rib was another way of asserting the emotional link between the two, to supplement the physical. The word "love" is not used, but the symbolism is clear.

Abraham and Sarah appeared to have had an incredibly close relationship in which both of them tried to understand, if not anticipate, the needs of the other. The word "love" is not mentioned there. But according to the Midrash it was with Hagar, under the name of Keturah, that there was passion. It suggests she was so deeply in love with Avraham that she kept herself exclusively for him and waited until Sarah died in order to marry him. For the rabbis to have even thought of such a possibility means they were not only aware of romantic love, but actually admired it.

Throughout the Bible the actual word for marriage is not at all romantic. It is the transactional--"to take", to take as or for a wife. And the arrangement involved such issues as dowry and financial inducements. The idea of getting married for the first time without parental involvement would have struck them as inconceivable. Nevertheless, Biblical law insisted on the husband's having obligations to his wife; that was its way of talking about her rights. And yet it would be wrong think of marriage simply as a transaction. Love played a very important part.

There is no explicit reference to love in marriage until Rebecca. But look at the sequence of words. "And Isaac brought her [Rebecca] into the tent of Sarah, his mother, and he took her to be his wife and he loved her." It seems pretty clear that marriage as an arrangement came first and love came later. Contrast that, though, with Jacob. He fell in love with Rachel after just seeing her at the well. So there is a biblical precedent for that beautiful if rare madness of "love at first sight".

A very different example the Bible gives of love is the case of Shechem who first raped Dinah and then fell in love with her. How different that was from the other Biblical example of rape. Hundreds of years later Amnon, the son of King David, seemingly fell in love with his half-sister, Tamar. But he got her alone and raped her, and afterward all he felt was revulsion. Young hot love it seems comes in different forms.

The classical example of love in the Talmud is Rabbi Akivah, the poor and ignorant shepherd who falls in love with the daughter of one of the richest men in Judeah, Kalba Savua. And she indeed falls in love with him. The father is so angry he cuts his daughter off and they live in abject poverty until Akivah, after years of study, proves himself to be one of the greatest minds of those Jewish times.

The word "love" is not actually used in the text that tells the story, but Rabbi Akivah remarkably describes the "Song of Songs" as the holiest book of the Bible because its outward romantic language of passionate love is, he claimed, an analogy for the love humans should aspire to of God. How different to the Greek intellectual predilection for conceptualizing God and turning to proof rather than experience for validation. But doesn't it seem appropriate? That a man so overpowered by love for a woman should seek to transpose that passion onto the relationship with God? What does it say both about his attitude to human love and to the Divine? It worries me because if folie d'amour is used in religion, I fear it leads to abuse.

But do love and marriage necessarily go together? In ancient times and later, getting married involved a process of betrothal. Betrothal was a "right" of a parent that technically required the daughter's agreement at attaining majority--given the historical and social context, refusal must have been as rare as it was in non-Jewish societies. Certainly amongst the aristocracy, noblesse oblige required sons and daughters to marry to further the dynastic social and financial obligations of the family.

The popular Talmudic recommendation is that "one should love one's wife as much as one loves oneself and honor her even more." The combination of these two words, "love" and "honor" are the foundation of Jewish marriage, just as they are of one's relationship with one's parents, where identical words are used. Yet clearly the two are of a different order. After all, one cannot divorce one's parents, whereas halacha allows for divorcing a wife, if only to stop people hating each other.

Still the modern notion of romantic love determining one's marriage partner is clearly one that, although it might have always existed, has only become more the norm in recent times. However, just as a marriage based on love may end up loveless, there is just as much a chance as that a marriage initiated by shared interests and obligations might result in love. And love can hurt ... but that is for another time.

Helen Thomas is an ancient journalist, employed by Hearst Newspapers in the USA. She has been White House correspondent for decades, incidentally, though not surprisingly given her ancestry, an opponent of Israel. She should have been pensioned off years ago, but her survival is due to the fact that she is such a character that she is indulged. Her outburst now on YouTube, that the Jews get the hell out of Palestine and go back to Poland and Germany where they came from, illustrates her ignorance as well as her prejudice. Most Jews in Israel today originated in the Middle East and have never been anywhere else. There is no fool like an old fool and her own words have betrayed her. The ensuing furor has forced her to resign at last.

Normally one would swat the flea and laugh it off. However as Goebbels famously said, big lies when told often enough are believed, and the anti-Semitic anti-Israel websites are abuzz with approval of her comments.

My initial response was to say that it’s a fair point, if she also agrees that all USA citizens return to their countries of origin and leave the continent to its indigenous population. Or that the Normans and their descendants in England go back to France. Let us indeed clear every person out of the Holy Land and then set up a universally recognized independent body (itself an impossibility nowadays) to take genetic, textual, historical, archaeological, and cultural evidence to show who has the longest and best claim going as far back as records of any kind exist. I am all the more confident now that the BBC reports that genetic evidence links most Jews to the Middle East. And since the majority of Israeli citizens came from Muslim lands, and of course anyone asked to move will also be financially compensated with compound interest.

To swing in a different direction, I regret that Geert Wilders has won such a significant number of votes in the Netherlands. But that is precisely because he is prepared to say unpalatable things about fanatical parts of Islam that manifest themselves today all over the place. And it precisely because other politicians are not willing to face reality that they lose credibility and right-wingers like him succeed.

He is wrong to think all Muslims take the text of the Koran literally. We also have texts of the Bible that need to be seen in context and have been reinterpreted subsequently. Every single religion I know of claims to be peaceful and only concerned with bringing God and love to the world. And every religion contains narrow-minded fanatics who believe that only they have the exclusive truth and intend to apply it to everyone else one way or another. And every religion in history that gets power ends up abusing it in horrible ways.

Every religion, when it starts up, has to prove itself against an earlier one and so systematically tries to discredit its predecessors, destroy them either physically or ideologically. That is the strength and the weakness of religion and I am delighted that in the West now we have restricted the role of religion and limited its excesses.

I am also pleased that Britain's Home Secretary has announced she will require foreign spouses of British citizens to learn English before arriving. This will help the process of integration, something no British government has dared to consider hitherto. It won't change things overnight. The USA requires integration, but it has its home-grown fanatics too. The last thing we need now is a Trojan horse of religious fundamentalism. Actually the horse is already inside the gates.

In theory, Islam is as good a religion for the mass market as any other. It is much closer to Judaism than Christianity. I believe in choice. But I also believe in freedom and in honesty. Of course we know not all Muslims are Jihadis. Of course we know all Jews are not settlers or supporters of Kahane. But it is as much a lie to pretend Islam has no problem with increasing Jihadism as it would be to deny that sectors of Judaism have been taken over by extremists of one sort or another. That's the nature of the world we live in. It is the delusions of apologists that worry me. We Jews have to combat our extremists, and Muslims need to combat theirs and not pretend there aren’t any.

In the world of PR, my product is better than yours. Yours stinks; mine works. Religion ought to be above PR lies. But tolerance demands that each religion must accept responsibility for its own problems. Unless all religions can recognize and identify their own lunatics and act to isolate them, unless moderates of all religions work together to stop everyone's fanatics, we will all be consumed.

We should strengthen the hands of those who genuinely want to work for cooperation and understanding. We cannot resolve all political issues. Of course most Muslims support Muslims, and most Jews support Jews, and most Christians support Christians and the vast majority want to live in peace. Just as most Englishmen optimistically will support England in the World Cup (I'm rooting for the USA because I think they have a better chance)! Christians, Muslims, and Jews are each internally divided. We cannot ask for unanimity, but we can expect realism and honesty.

I know I shouldn't tar everyone with the same brush, but I have to say the Israelis seem to shoot themselves in the foot so many times that I'm surprised they still have any feet left. It really worries me. I know there's nothing we Jews can get right but still do we really have to hand it to them?

OK, so I can understand a not very sophisticated or educated ultra-Orthodox minister of the interior, who only got a senior appointment because of haggling and coalition bargaining, puts his foot in it and embarrasses his prime minister by announcing more building on the very day the American special negotiator, Senator George Mitchell, comes to town. After all, he is not just a politician (and we know that almost all politicians are either crooked or stupid), he is a rabbi too. So what do you expect?

OK. I can understand the Israeli police force mishandling the Sheikh Jarrah protestors. Everyone knows the Israeli police are both infiltrated by criminal contacts and dumb. That is why they always go around in twos--one to write and the other to read.

OK, I can understand that you bring a walking disaster like Avigdor Lieberman into office. He has been your protégée and knows all your dirty secrets. You owe him. But why then put Lieberman, a man with fewer diplomatic skills than Mike Tyson (and not much more attractive), in the most sensitive public relations area, the Foreign Ministry? Even if you do give him by far the best and most articulate spokesman you could wish for, Mark Regev (you then make sure he only gets limited exposure and you let incompetents make matters worse, because you owe other friends other favors).

OK, I can understand you give Barak the Defense Ministry. He is an ex-general, a highly cultured, and by now a very wealthy, politician who nominally stands for the old left-wing aristocracy. He is supposed to be in charge of the army that cannot even dislodge one illegal settlement. He cannot rein in settlers running amok and shooting up villages. He was the one responsible for that stupid botched handling of the flotilla. For goodness sakes you either have lousy intelligence or you deserve to be fired for sending unprepared soldiers abseiling down into a cesspit of 'peaceful' of course, murderous jihadis. It obviously didn’t occur to him to disable the propellers or the engine and let it drift for some other humanitarian boat to come to its rescue.

Yes, we know this was a cleverly planned trap laid by experienced agitators to maximize PR and further isolate Israel. We know legitimate aid gets into Gaza from Israel, and cars and trucks come in via tunnels from Egypt. Gaza gets more aid than most decaying rustbelt towns in the US, and the United Nations has just opened an Olympic-sized swimming pool for them. We know the world won't cry over the 94 Ahmadiyya massacred in Pakistan last week or call for a boycott. And yes, we know Turkey needs to cover up its own massacres of Armenians and Kurds. Anyone notice how many Kurds were killed last week? And Erdogan, himself? Why is everyone saying Israel is losing a friend? He was never a friend. Remember how he insulted Peres at Davos? No, it was the secular generals who got on with Israel, and now Erdogan the Muslim anti-secularist is putting them all in jail.

And is a blockade against Gaza getting you anywhere? What is the point? Look at the US. It has equally stupidly been blockading Cuba for a generation and got nowhere. For goodness sakes, stop it. Shut down the Israel side of the border altogether. After all Hamas wants the end of Israel why help it altogether? Let it direct its hatred south. Yes I know arms will come in the way they are flowing into Lebanon. And they will be fired at Israel and Hamas doesn’t give a damn how many expendable women and children are killed in return. We know if Israel retaliates it will be blamed. But better be blamed and get rid of your enemy than getting blamed and NOT getting rid of them. It is clear that getting rid of Israel is the agenda and of a lot of Jews too of all smells.
OK, so it is Netanyahu's fault for being so desperate for power he preferred to get into bed with the religious, the right-wing, and the Russians instead of a presentable, reasonable, intelligent moderate like Tzipi Livni. So yes, we know Netanyahu flatters to deceive--and if he sounds articulate, the fact is he is not very bright. He was not a success last time and he is not now. If only the silver lining was that he'd really give peace a chance but it is clear that’s beyond him.

Why even Olmert at least had the common sense to allow an earlier dumb flotilla through to Gaza. For goodness sake, let 'rent mobs' have their demonstrations. They know they can't get near China or Russia, who bomb the hell out of their troublesome minorities or Iran who torture them to death. They know if they try going through Egypt they'll end up in jail. Israel is a soft target precisely because it is not as bad as everyone says it is. You never saw any placards amongst the demonstrators saying 'Muslims kill Muslims,' more than anyone else.

OK, I know I am going to be embarrassed week after week by incompetent Israeli politicians. But I had hoped the much vaunted Israeli military top brass were at least up to scratch. So even if Israel continues to bury itself further into the PR pit that its enemies are digging daily for it, at least we could count on them to save ourselves from ourselves.

But they did not cover themselves in glory in Lebanon against the braggadocio Hezbollah guerillas. They did not do a much better job in Gaza. Now they bloody well can't even handle a civilian ferry on the high seas. And these are the people we expect to defend a Jewish state from the hoards of primitive fanatics, an Iranian nuclear bomb, and the political failures.

How on earth anti-Semites can think we control and manipulate the world, when we can't even run one of the smallest states on the planet, Lord only knows. But then hatred knows no logic. And how they can think we control Washington when we can't even take control of a Turkish ferry without a massive cock-up. It just beggars belief. The Great American Government can't even handle a hole in the Gulf of Mexico. I only hope and pray God is still watching.

The New York Review of Books published an article last week by Peter Beinart castigating the American Jewish establishment for not being critical of Israel, and saying that is why they are losing the next generation of Jews. He conceded that this did not apply to Orthodox youth, but he was appalled at that prospect. I guess secular fundamentalism is as bad as the religious kind.

We live at a moment in history when Israel is reviled by the majority of the world. It is painful, but there are very good historical and political reasons for it. We Jews have been here before. We must not give up or let it faze us. There is an increasing divide between Jews over Israel, just as there is a divide between those who live Jewish lives and those who do not. But a lot of current Jewish anti-Israelism reminds me of Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century, when the worst anti-Semites were Jews like Weininger and Schonerer.

Of course I am not saying anyone who criticizes Israel is an anti-Semite. Otherwise I'd be one, myself. But neither am I saying that every Jew who does is not! I believe that we who care owe it to our history and tradition to support the survival of Israel. That does not mean we cannot or should not try to change it or repair its faults.

I do not know of one country that is not corrupt in some way, or that has not made terrible mistakes internally and externally. I recall some Americans being so upset by George Bush that they vowed to leave the country. But not once did they argue that America should cease to exist or that Americans have no right to their state.

I agree with a lot of Israel's critics. I support the Sheikh Jarrah demonstrators. However my criticisms are predicated on an absolute commitment, not necessarily to Israel's ideology, but to its survival. The right of the Jews to have a homeland of their own is challenged often by Israeli and Diaspora nominal, accidental Jews. Too many of them have become moral masturbators. They indulge their own fantasies regardless of how much hatred they spray around or fuel.

Jewish opposition to Zionism is as old as political Zionism itself. It has an ultra-Orthodox pedigree as much as a Marxist one. There have always been internal battles. But if dissent is one thing, giving up our right to return to Zion is another. For as long as nationalism is the universally accepted currency and is deemed legitimate for Serbs, Montenegrins, and Croats, to deny it to Jews is as wrong as denying it to Palestinians or Kurds. And to blame Israel as the primary source of evil is to refuse to see the complete picture.

Beinart castigates the American Jewish establishment for having lost the allegiance of its young because it has been too slavish in its support for Israel. His analysis is probably correct. But his reasons are wrong. If non-religious Jews no longer feel attached, that is because they have not been given a good enough or passionate enough reason to stay engaged. And who is to blame for that?

The vast majority of American Jews of the previous era were descendants of refugees from oppressive and anti-Semitic European regimes. Many of them were active communists, and many others were already on the way to assimilation before they reached America. Jews in London, Paris, and New York were in the vanguard of social secular movements, opposed to clericalism. Many of them had already lost the religious component of their Jewish identity.

When they needed cohesion in the New World, they found it in socialist networks, country clubs, undemanding religious substitutes, secular Zionism, and later, the Holocaust. The whiff of old socialism was perpetuated by voting Democrat or Labour. None of these were really powerful centrifugal passions that guaranteed continuity. It is not surprising their children feel more at home in Hollywood than Jerusalem and have more in common with those of other religions or no religion than with Orthodox Jews.

But you cannot blame leadership for that. I dislike establishments and that is why I have always avoided them. As a student I ran disruptive campaigns against the Jewish Agency and the arrogance and moral bankruptcy of the Israeli nomenclatura. But it did not turn me into an enemy of the Jewish state. The role of communal leadership is to strengthen commitment to peoplehood, not to undermine it. And if it often gets its tactics wrong, the goal is legitimate. Beinart argues that the only way we can keep young Jews involved is by highlighting Israel's failures.

Beinart fears Jewish extremes. I do too. But if peace will work both extremes will learn to modify and adjust. Why just pick on Orthodox Jews? If Palestinian hopes remain alive through increasing religious extremism, why should we be surprised if a new Jewish generation does not learn that very lesson.

What is the lesson? Only those with passion and commitment are prepared to fight for the future of a cause they believe in. If one wants to see a Jewish homeland survive, who would you rather have on your side--Tony Judt, Ilan Pappe, Alexei Sayle, or religiously committed young men prepared to fight in the Israeli army to defend their homeland until such time as peace becomes a realistic option?

Building a safe home requires resolving differences, not pretending they do not exist and that if we give up and walk away peace and happiness will reign forevermore. It also requires that we build an honest fair and moral home. Otherwise it will be destroyed, like others we have built before. But a Jewish future will be shared only if our side has as much passion as the other.

Left-wing, liberal, humanitarian internationalism, good as it may be in certain circumstances, too often leads to anodyne, facile, feelgoodism. Religious passion can lead to fanaticism. Instead of each side denigrating the other, the ideal is for both to work together to exercise balance.

In the meantime, of course, I support my side, warts and all. And I hope community leaders will too. If that is too much for Beinart, then as far as I am concerned we are simply not on the same side.

Over Shavuot we have been thinking about how the Torah was given on Sinai. It is one of the fundamentals of our religion that we often take for granted. But what actually happened on Sinai is not at all clear. Even the Torah itself gives different descriptions in Exodus 19 and 24. And the rabbis in the Talmud and Midrash give differing opinions too. Nevertheless, Torah as we have it is the foundation of Judaism.

One of the most significant divides in religious communities is between the literalists and the figurativists--those who feel bound to take holy narratives literally, at face value, as opposed to those who put much greater emphasis on the idea, the significance, and the symbolism beneath the surface. The latter do not necessarily deny the historical background or that miraculous or amazing events took place, but see the text as a spiritual and behavioral guide, rather than a scientific textbook.

The Talmud, the Midrash, disagrees as to exactly what was transmitted on Sinai and when it was written down. But there is now a general assumption noit only that the Torah comes from God but that all the Written and the Oral Law was given at one moment in time. To many Jews, even some Orthodox ones, this seems it seems a trifle fanciful especially if one thinks that God told Moses on Sinai about Purim, Chanuka, two sets of crockery, the eiruv, or indeed how to use a time switch for Shabat.

The question, then, is whether one can remain within tradition and still find room and significance for those ideas that rationally one struggles with? What I have to say will not even be considered by the fundamentalist school of Jewish theology. But I am writing for those who do, indeed, try to reconcile rationalism with faith.

There is a solution in the idea first put forward by a German thinker, Hans Vaihinger (1852–1933). Dealing with "reality" and whether what we see and experience is "true", he argued that human beings cannot really know the reality of the world. For example, the way a table looks to the human eye is very different to the way it looks through a powerful magnifying glass. Which is "real"? We behave "as if" the world matches what we think we see.

George Kelly (1905–1967), an American psychologist, also encouraged people to try different ways of looking at events to see what might happen when they act "as if" these alternative ways might work; in this way they might learn to change their ways of behaving.

So what matters is not if something really IS the way we see it, but how we respond to it and act. A wall may not be "solid" through a microscope, but I do not try walking through it. Would you rather someone who believed in being good but was not, or someone who questioned what it meant to "be good" but behaved completely and consistently according to the highest standards?

I am not convinced we are expected to adopt unquestioningly those ideas we have intellectual doubts about. I believe the rabbis of Talmud accept this when they say that what they cannot accept is the person who denies, rejects, as opposed to those who are still in the process of clarifying how to understand certain ideas. Only a "kofer" (a denier) is excoriated. Not the honest questioner.

As for how the rabbis want us to understand what they mean when they say something, the great medieval commentator Rashi, himself, says that Chazal often use language in an exaggerated way to attract the attention of the simple folk (Shabat 30b Mutav Techabeh). One of the most common hyperbolic forms of language used in Midrashic and Talmudic Judaism is the Hebrew word "keilu" which does actually translate "as if".

We are familiar with the phrase in the Hagadah, "In every generation one is obliged to see oneself as if one has actually come out of Egypt"(Pesachim 116b). Obviously this means "imagine" and is clearly not literal. But here are some other examples from the hundreds to be found in the Talmud:

"He who eats and drinks on Tisha B'Av [a rabbinic fast] it is as if he eats and drinks on [the stricter Biblical] Yom Kipur." (Taanit 30b)

"Whoever tells Lashon Hara [gossip] it is as if he denies the existence God." (Arachin 15b)

"Whoever studies Torah one day in the year it is as if he has studied all year round." (Chagigah 5b)

"Keilu" is important. But it is not a halachic fact. It is an essential idea. What matters is what one does. One can behave in a way that indicates devotion to God and the Torah, or in a way that in practice ignores or denies God and Torah. What the rabbis wanted was for us to treat Jewish law as if we personally have heard it from God. As if God were speaking to us now. That is why we adhere to Jewish traditions.

The theological ideas of our tradition, as opposed to the behavioral ones, are there to help us avoid thinking of the world we inhabit only as material, but try to imagine a spiritual world and spiritual values as well. If one wishes to be part of the mainstream of tradition, one needs to treat all the theological imperatives of Judaism with respect and a serious desire to understand what they mean. But ultimately we must try to hear God speaking to us through them and to understand what the real message is, not just the superficial meaning of the words. Remember they chose a way of speaking that had to allow for the simple man as well as the intellectual giant.

To adapt the idea to current politics, one may disagree with the vast majority of Jews either because one is not as right-wing or as left-wing as one's neighbor. But what matters is how much one is doing to perpetuate the Jewish tradition and keep it alive.

I always voted for the Labour Party in the UK. I admired its idealists, like Aneurin Bevan, Hugh Gaitskell, and Michael Foot. I supported Harold Wilson's desire to turn the UK into a scientific meritocracy. I felt bad for cuddly Michael Foot, propelled into a position unsuited to him, but still better him than angry, bitter Tony Benn. I applauded Tony Blair's strength in standing up to the unions, and his balanced approach socially and economically. Even with their loony left, I identified with Labour more than with the Conservatives, who were snobbish, xenophobic, and elitist.

As for the Liberals, there's no point in voting for a party that can turn up to parliament in a single taxicab, as my father used to say. I thought they were right about many issues, including the electoral system. Still, a vote for them was a wasted vote.

I turned against Labour for various reasons. Like any party that is in power for too long, it lost its edge. It became complacent, and it failed to tackle fundamental social issues and abuses of welfare. It promised to democratize the risible House of Lords, but did not.

From a Jewish perspective, and of course I have one, the leadership was predominantly pro-Israel, but too many of its prominent MP's, like Clare Short, were blinkered in their hostility (criticism is one thing, hostility is another). They refused to change the law so as to stop ugly monkeys trying to haul Tzipi Livni, of all people, before the English courts on criminal charges and they have ignored militant Islam in order to retain the Muslim vote.

As for the Liberal Democrats I'd never dream of voting for a party that puts boycotting Israel on its agenda, still has the unspeakable Baroness Tonge as a member, and goes out of its way to insult the Board of Deputies by sending in its deputy leader, William Wallace, to rebuke Anglo-Jews for supporting Israel.

The sad fact is that no party seriously addressed the issue of cultural conflict, of homegrown antagonism to democratic secular values. But some were worse than others. The Lib Dems were so eager to gain power that many of their candidates allied themselves with rabid fundamentalists who disapprove of every plank of their political and moral agendas except for antagonism towards Israel (and towards Jews, since the Koran, not unlike the New Testament, says some nasty things about them).

So that only left the Conservatives. Britain needed change. I thought they would be the least damaging to the values and interests I hold dear and you never know, despite my scorn for all politicians, they might even do a good job.

From a Jewish perspective again, their leadership is pro Jewish although their Foreign Minister Hague is not. Under him the rabidly Arabist Foreign Office will continue to ensure that the only place the Queen cannot go to in the Middle East, is Israel. Not that I care too much about that.

Anyway the Conservatives won even if they needed the Lib Dems to join their coalition. Thank goodness the Lib Dems have been kept out of the ministries of Home Affairs, which controls immigration, Work and Pensions which controls Welfare.

In Britain there are three main voting blocks. Upper-class, right-wing, big money tend (always exceptions, of course, to any rule) to vote Conservative. Left-wing workers, trade unionists, loonies, vote Labour. Liberal intellectuals vote Lib Dem. The middleclass professionals, businessmen, entertainers, sportsmen, and overnight personalities are the swing voters who switch between the major parties. They brought Thatcher to power, but later switched to Blair. Now they have swung back to Conservative. Why? It is not the economy. Brown did a great job until international factors derailed every major economy in the world, and no one believes the Conservatives are going to change the world.

More people voted Conservative precisely because they were the only ones who did not kowtow to the Muslim extremist vote. Neither were they xenophobic. Most Britons are not. They know working immigration benefits a country and the average Brit by now is used to foreigners and not much bothered (except for rival gangs). That is why the Conservatives destroyed the fascist BNP vote. What the average Brit cannot abide is the appeasement of those who want to undermine or negate British values. Whereas Labour and the Liberals have gone out of their way to indulge, and court and subsidize radical Muslims, the Conservatives alone have not.

There is a reaction to alien fanaticism. One sees it in Belgium, which hitherto had Socialist government that courted the Muslim vote and overindulged it with welfare. Yet now Belgium has preempted France in voting to ban the burka in public. France has no anti-immigrant legislation, but sends Jihadist preachers home. All one needs is a simple message, "We have our values. We are going to keep them, and we are not going to support or encourage anyone who wants to undermine them." But sadly in Britain none of the major parties so far had the guts to say this.

That’s how we Jews integrated. Some of us wanted to keep our funny dress, strange customs, and cultural identity, but we did not try to undermine the values of the society we came to. My parents even advised me, as a teenager, to wear a hat instead of a kipah, so as not to stand out. (As if I didn't anyway.) And if we wanted change we used the democratic channels to fight, not gunpowder.

Change in politics is necessary. And if the Cons actually deal with the crucial social issues instead of ignoring them, next time they will win a proper majority. That is democracy. That is why I love it.