Jews who are against Donald Trump, after all he has done for Israel and the Jewish people, and identify and side with Linda Sarsour and Keith Ellison, and Jews like Sarah Silverman, may identify at some point as Jewish, but it is far down the list in their identity politics. Progressive is their fall-back position.

Reuters

These are the Jews who have taken on a new battle cry: Tikkun Olam! Save the World: before saving our own people.

Rabbi Telushkin explains the meaning of love your neighbour. He starts with “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in a strange land.” This does not include loving your enemies. The Torah, he says, commands us to love peaceful non-Israelis living among them no less than they love themselves. An extraordinary commandment at an extraordinary time-just after being liberated from 400 years of enslavement.

And this, according to philosopher Herman Cohen, is the beginning of ethical monotheism; needed for a world in which pluralism can exist.

Sadly Progressives/Jews have embraced this one value to the point that they are just as fundamentalist as the Jews on the right, Neturei Karta, the extreme right wing Haredi who stand with Iran against Israel.

Both groups are enemies of the State of Israel.

There are a paltry 14 million Jews in the world; seven million live in Eretz Yisrael, surrounded by 230 million Muslims who are raised bathed and swaddled in Jew hatred. We know this from their calls to kill the Jews. We read about this in PMW and MEMRI and from ethical journalists around the world.

In the words of Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz from his book The Strife of the Spirit

“The Torah itself expresses a constant unequivocal call to reconsider, to reflect, before it is too late.” And “It is disaster that motivates self-scrutiny and self-examination.”

I suggest we are experiencing a disaster. That this is 1939 all over again! We are watching a revival of Jew hatred that is more serious than 80 years ago-partly because of social media and the many attempts to silence the voices warning of the new Jew hatred coming from Islam. We need look no further than Germany. GERMANY! Where Angela Merkel welcomed millions of Muslims who bring with them their hatred for the Jews. The idea that they would leave those emotions behind is ridiculous. It is philosopher Will Durant’s “wishful” at play.

“The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than their minds.”

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government is proposing legislation that might even include deporting migrants who are anti-Semites. I suggest it is too late. The remnant of Nazis still living in Germany have joined with these Muslims- Nazis 2.0. A study conducted by German government revealed that 33 million Germans, around 40% of country’s population, appear to share a modern form of anti-Semitism. There are new forms of antisemitism and 20 percent latent anti-Semitism still exists within the populace. On closer examination the report actually reveals that much has yet to be determined about modern-day forms of anti-Semitism in Germany – most prominently anti-Semitism among Muslims.

Despite these facts, we hear this from Batya Ungar-Sargon the opinion editor of the Forward. I emphasize opinion-because the facts are few and far between

“Like Israel’s delicate balance of democracy and Jewishness, being a liberal or secular Jew is a delicate one, too. On the one hand, we like our Jewish identity and wish to see it existing 100 years from now. On the other hand, without the anti-Semitism that kept us identified as Jews by those who hated us, it may now require an internal kind of coercion to maintain that Jewish identity in the numbers that the Orthodox do.”

She lives in LaLa land where antisemitism is disappearing. She represents members of our nation who are blind to the wisdom Rabbi Steinsaltz taught “within every nation there is a particular class or group that determines and decides, that sets the pace direction and tone.” These people who call themselves Reform must not be allowed to determine, nor decide, nor set the pace or tone, or all will be lost.

Two generations after the Holocaust we have raised entitled people-who happen to be Jewish. They stand with the Arabs who call for the death to Jews and death to Israel. Who refuse to believe the call from Muslims that “From the river to the sea Palestine will be free” That means no Israel. Yet they stand with them and sit with them.

“Comedian” Sarah Silverman shared her support for  17-year-old Palestinian Ahed Tamimi  currently detained by Israel security forces for slapping and kicking an IDF soldier near her Judea/Samaria (West Bank) home with little retaliation. And this Liberal feminist tweeted “Jews have to stand up EVEN when — ESPECIALLY when — the wrongdoing is BY Jews/the Israeli government.”

Ahed Tamimi reportedly “also emphasized the importance of the boycott,” and declared: “The world must recognize the Palestinian cause. The occupation is not only the theft of land. We oppose racism, Zionism, the entire system of occupation and not only the settlements.” She is from a family of terrorists.

Silverman is just the latest Jew who identifies as American/Progressive first, and Jewish last. They are the new generation of assimilated Jews; a throwback to the assimilated German Jews who knew they would be treated differently from the Shtetl Jews. Except they weren’t. They ended up in the incinerators, too.

These Reform Jews have removed Torah from their teachings. The concept of Tikkun Olam is turn the other cheek and love thy neighbour. That is not Tikkun Olam and we don’t turn our cheek anymore. We have years of ducking and hiding from fear behind us. Now we have Israel and the IDF. 

 

And we have Donald Trump. A man that sends Reform “Jews” into hissy fits.

The Union of Reform Judaism (Reform Jews are America’s largest denomination)  agrees with the President that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel but, “President Trump’s [statement was] ill-timed,” Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the Union’s president, said so (they)  “cannot support his decision to begin preparing [the embassy] move now, absent a comprehensive plan for a peace process. …the White House should not undermine these efforts by making unilateral decisions that are all but certain to exacerbate the conflict.”

And along with this group are the professors of Jewish Studies with their petition:

We write as Jewish Studies scholars to express our dismay at the Trump administration’s decision to reverse decades of bipartisan U.S. policy by declaring Jerusalem the capital of Israel, and authorizing the relocation of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv, outside of a negotiated political framework that ends the legal state of occupation and ensures respect for the rights of all Israelis and Palestinians to Jerusalem.

How dare the President of the USA defend Israel? Move the embassy to Jerusalem, the eternal capital? Consider dismantling the #Obamalek Iran deal? Stand with the Jews when the UN stands against her?

While the religion of Progressivism is more important and more influential in your life than the teachings of Torah and the gratitude for our return to Jerusalem, you may be Progressive, you may be Reform, but you are not a Jew.

 

 

 

From the Ethics of the Fathers: “Rabbi Tarfon used to say, it is not incumbent upon you to complete the task, but you are not exempt from undertaking it.”