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All in a Name

Discussing the controversy over the trampling of religious rights under Obamacare touched upon here last week Conservative clergyman Irving Kula is quoted in the Jewish Week as noting that “Jewish hospitals have gotten over” what Catholic hospitals are now protesting vehemently. “We don’t freak out at compromising in order to get government funds.”

According to the article Kula observed that in “Kiryas Joel … the Satmar leadership long ago agreed that there wouldn’t be any mezuzos in a Kiryas Joel public school for severely disabled children — all of whom are Jewish — in order to maintain the school’s legitimacy as a public school for children with special needs that the village couldn’t afford on its own. ‘Think about that’ says Rabbi Kula. ‘No mezuzos. Satmar leadership doesn’t experience that as an imposition. We’re better at understanding the quid pro quo of taking government money. We’re less worried about that.’ ”

Whether the clergyman has his facts straight about the Kiryas Joel mezuzos or whether even if so there are other reasons for their absence such as perhaps the public school being government-owned property — I simply don’t know. This much however is clear: Agreeing not to affix a mezuzah is not quite analogous to being compelled to facilitate the snuffing out of nascent life. By the clergyman’s lights what Pharaoh of old failed to realize was that all he needed to do to get Shifrah and Puah to do his bidding was offer them some government funding for their birthing clinic. Then again perhaps back then the Jews hadn’t yet “gotten over” the quaint notion that the Divine will principle trumps compromising for monetary gain with which those stubborn Catholics are apparently still struggling.

In any event I’m glad that just as Chodesh Adar makes its appearance I can write about a clergyman named Kula holding forth on how we Jews have “gotten over” the need to compromise for money’s sake. Although the saying goes “You can’t make this stuff up” I could have made this one up in the Purim spirit. But thanks to the Jewish Week I didn’t have to. 

 

A SYLLABUS OF SILLINESS In a Wall Street Journal piece entitled A Syllabus for the ‘Occupy’ Movement conservative law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds serves up a brilliant skewering of the Occupiers who currently are in wintertime hibernation long may it continue:

Schools from New York’s Columbia to Chicago’s Roosevelt University are offering courses on the “Occupy” movement. This has inspired some derision from the right but I think that derision is misplaced. There is much that a course on the Occupy movement might profitably cover. Here are some possible lessons:

The Higher Education Bubble and Debt Slavery Throughout History. Since ancient times debt has been a tool used by rulers to enslave the ruled … One complaint of many Occupy protesters involves their pursuit of expensive degrees that has left them burdened by student loans but unable to find suitable employment. This unit would compare the marketing of higher education and student debt to today’s students with the techniques used to lure sharecroppers and coal miners into irredeemable indebtedness.…

Bourgeois versus Non-Bourgeois Revolutions: A Comparison and Contrast. The Occupy movement left its major sites … filthy and disheveled. By contrast the tea party protests famously left the Washington Mall and other locations cleaner than they found them with members proudly performing cleanup duties.…

Class Differences Within Economic Protest Movements. While the Occupy movement’s proletariat were sleeping under canvas many of its leaders were staying in five-star hotels. Six-figure sums of money were collected but their disbursement was cloudy. Does every movement however egalitarian in doctrine inevitably produce its own overclass? Are “egalitarian” movements more prone to such outcomes? Readings: George Orwell’s Animal Farm Li Zhi-Sui’s The Private Life of Chairman Mao.

And so on. But if I may I‘d like to draw upon my own extensive experience in curriculum development to supplement Professor Reynolds’s offerings with a few more:

First a seminar on Liberalism and the Law of Unintended Consequences. This unit explores what happens when adherents of liberal utopianism focus exclusively on the glorious intended outcomes of their righteous struggles and revolutions while ignoring the morality of the means used to arrive at that blessed future. The answer in the Cliff Notes version? Very bad things to very many people.

Guest lecturers: The owner of the kosher Milk Street Cafe who laid off dozens of employees — all card-carrying members of the “99%” — and then closed his doors entirely due to the Occupation; budget directors of cities across the country who will detail the millions in police and sanitation overtime paid by taxpayers; and West Coast port workers who will describe what Occupy protests did to their livelihood. Readings will include analyses of the effects of welfare and educational policies on the black family of minimum wage laws on black unemployment of environmental policies on American farmers and other workers and of feminism on the family lives of actual women.

Next a course tentatively entitled either “When Guilt by Association Masquerades as Righteous Indignation or Am I My Dysfunctional Cousin’s Keeper?” An exercise in compare-and-contrast between a) the outraged demands for Orthodox Jews to denounce and renounce miscreants with whom they find themselves linked by the media under the catch-all category of “chareidi” and b) the rather more laissez-faire attitude of the Occupiers and the media toward the anti-Semites within that movement.

Particular attention will be paid to liberal denunciations of those pointing out the existence of such anti-Semitism such as the statement by 15 leading liberal Jewish lights “strongly oppos[ing] right-wing attempts to smear [Occupy Wall Street] with false charges of anti-Semitism. It’s an old discredited tactic: Find a couple of unrepresentative people in a large movement and then conflate the oddity with the cause. One black swan means that all swans are black.” To provide a balanced perspective on the Occupy movement we will also assign readings from a compilation of media reports and op-eds in which the Occupiers denounce and disassociate themselves from the anti-Semites. Students concerned about excessive coursework need not worry: It will be a very thin booklet. Field work will include a class trip to an actual open field where students will learn how to circle real wagons.

Last a refresher course entitled “Who Says Human Sacrifice Is Obsolete?” It will cover the numerous attacks on women that occurred at Occupy sites and the disinterest therein of movement organizers feminists all. The course will contextualize the notion of sacrificing the few for the greater good of the Cause as a recurrent phenomenon in the feminist movement which divides humankind in general into two groups the sacrosanct and the dispensable. To wit: Muslim women Orthodox Jewish women conservative women female victims of liberal politicians and UN employees the unborn — dispensable; feminists and the degenerate liberal politicians who enable them — sacrosanct.  

Parallels will be drawn to other instances of “human sacrifice” to liberalism’s gods including an example in last week’s news: Barack Obama’s elimination from his new $3.8 trillion budget of the $20 million in vouchers needed to allow 1600 poor black children to escape the failed District of Columbia school system with its 56 percent graduation rate for a program whose students have a 91 percent graduation rate. Unlike Molech however appeasing the Powers known as teachers unions thankfully does not require sacrificing one’s own kin: Sasha and Malia Obama are safely enrolled in the elite Sidwell Friends School along with Joe Biden’s granddaughters.  

 

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