In general when the Hoover Institute’s Shelby Steele writes something about race in America it’s worth reading and his Wall Street Journal piece on the verdict exonerating George Zimmerman of Trayvon Martin’s murder is no exception. He writes:

The verdict … was a traumatic event forAmerica’s civil-rights establishment … But they weren’t so much outraged at a horrible injustice as they were affronted by the disregard of their own authority. The jury effectively said to them “You won’t call the tune here. We will work within the law.”

Today’s black leadership pretty much lives off the fumes of moral authority that linger from its glory days in the 1950s and 60s. The Zimmerman verdict lets us see this and feel a little embarrassed for them.

Consider the pathos of a leadership that once transformed the nation now lusting for the conviction of the contrite and mortified George Zimmerman … despite the fact that nearly one black teenager a day is shot dead on the South Side of Chicago — to name only one city — by another black teenager. This would not be the first time that a movement begun in profound moral clarity and that achieved greatness waned away into a parody of itself — not because it was wrong but because it was successful …

Steele’s incisive take on the civil rights establishment’s irrelevance and desperate attempt to reclaim its faded glory is so striking in its parallels to the American Jewish establishment’s own inability to come to grips with its irrelevance. Both had magnificent runs of success in the 50s and 60s when integration of blacks into American society was the era’s defining moral issue and Jews’ climb to prominence and move from the cities to the suburbs gave the secular Jewish and heterodox establishment its time in the sun.

Slowly both became largely passé but with one huge difference between them: the civil rights groups no longer matter because they won having transformed America’s laws and societal attitudes regarding race; the secular and heterodox Jewish groups however no longer matter because sadly they lost as entire generations were lost to Judaism through assimilation illiteracy apathy even conversion to other religions or the faith of “none.”

Both establishments have desperately striven to revive their heydays to prove their continuing relevance by ginning up conflict where none exists and distracting their constituencies from the homegrown miseries in which they are entrapped — and which these groups themselves enabled to develop. They tell their communities effectively “quick look over there ” while all the while right over here black neighborhoods and families disintegrate and Jewish ones disappear.

So black “leaders” have their Trayvon Martin case and similar contrived controversies to change the subject from the grim reality of places like Detroit of which Mark Steyn wrote this week: “Were [someone time-transported from the 1950s] to compare photographs of today’s Hiroshima with today’s Detroit he would assume Japan won the Second World War after nuking Michigan.” Just last week I was walking in the part of Far Rockaway that resembles Detroit when I noticed a lamppost sign with the famous Trayvon Martin photo staring forth from it announcing a “community discussion” for youth about the Trayvon Martin case sponsored by local politicians and youth groups. Looking from that poster to the vagrants loitering nearby and the long lines of people waiting outside a church for food handouts all I could do was to shake my head.

And Jewish “leaders” too have their own little diversions from the silent spiritual obliteration of their flocks. The one currently working best for them is the WOW repertory theater battling valiantly come each new month for the right to turn the Kosel into an open-air bazaar for any and every social cause or cult while every month too another few thousand American Jews cut their last ties to the faith of their fathers forever.

Dr. Steele continues:     

One wants to scream at all those outraged at the Zimmerman verdict: Where is your outrage over the collapse of the black family? Today’s civil-rights leaders swat at mosquitoes like Zimmerman when they have gorillas on their back. 73 percent of all black children are born without fathers married to their mothers. And you want to bring the nation to a standstill over George Zimmerman?

He captures so well what any Jew who loves Hashem and His children ought to want to plead with Jewish “leaders”: Where is your outrage over the collapse — by your own standards — of the Jewish community? Far more than 73 percent of all non-Orthodox children are born without a fighting chance to become educated Jews who can make an informed choice about their Jewish future. And you want to bring the nation to a standstill over Anat Hoffman mugging for the cameras in a rainbow-colored prayer shawl? And now having made an appalling mess of American Jewry you want to import your smashing success toIsrael?

DOG DAYS AGAIN As I read the news report of what took place in the Knesset last week during the all-night session and vote regarding the draft of bnei Torah the enormity of what took place there on both sides overwhelmed me. There was the unprecedented act of a Jewish country making talmidei chachamim into criminals and outlawing full-time Torah study on one hand followed by the unified response of those representing the Torah world in rising one by one to perform kriyah. 

Most affecting of all was reading that the Knesset employees who escorted these representatives out in their rent garments did do with tears in their eyes expressing their sorrow at what they had just witnessed. I’m not in the least privy to Hashem’s accountings but I can’t help but think that the pained reactions of those employees and even the words of the many members of Knesset who said publicly they’d personally wanted to vote against the law but felt forced by public opinion to support it were transcribed that night in Heaven for posterity.

It all seemed so familiar to me yet at first I couldn’t place these scenes: the government bringing the brute force of its will to bear upon a beleaguered minority; the latter reacting not with violence but with quiet dignity and symbolic resistance imploring those in power to turn back at the last moment; and some of those charged with carrying out the diktat themselves in visible pain.

Where had I seen all this before? Then it all came flooding back: the deep anguish now was so very much like that in another August eight years earlier when Israeli soldiers often with tears in their own eyes wrenched thousands of Jews men women and children from the beautiful homes shuls and communities they had created over so many years with so much sacrifice. For several days that Av I — along with Jews around the world — was traumatized. I sat on the couch crying transfixed by the scenes on my computer of Jews dragging other pleading Jews from their homes; I was virtually immobilized having lost all interest in anything else. And ever since I’ve kept newspaper clippings with those scenes in my office to look at regularly and remember and feel the pain all over again.

This is not to revisit that terrible chapter nor to discuss what gedolei Torah held about it and it is certainly not to compare in any way the current crisis with what happened then. It is simply to say that it was clear to me then that whatever gedolei Torah held they felt those Jews’ pain acutely. That after all is how the Chazon Ish explained what it means to be a “gadol”: to have such a big heart and mind that they encompass many other Jews within them and the bigger the gadol the more room in that heart and mind.

So to those who come whether in anger or anguish to ask why many of their brethren don’t say the prayer composed in 1956 for Israeli soldiers (by a man who was much later declared by Rav Shach as unfit to serve as a rav b’Yisrael) I ask gently: please stop. Please don’t prejudge or generalize about me or many many like me. Jews who care will care regardless of politics but they may do so in many different ways even if it’s not your chosen way. And Jews who don’t care all that much not for political reasons but because they never learned to do so will not much care even if they do happen to recite that prayer. There’s more to say but this is a start.