I am seldom given to responding to individuals who write letters to the editor in local newspapers and am frankly amused by Hal Sobel’s perpetual leftist ideological advocacies in the Great Neck News.
However, this past week, he presented such a great pageantry of leftist Jews and some alleged religious justification for the righteousness of their cause, that I felt it necessary to set the record straight lest the gentiles think all Jews are as misguided as he.
The Jews who came here over a century ago were heavily infused with Bundist, leftist ideology.
As Jews had been so persecuted throughout Europe, many believed that communism would be their savior. They became a root of the modern Democratic Party and the left.
Those Jews who remained in Europe, the few who survived the Holocaust and those who lived under the communists of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and their descendants, who found communism to be little better than Nazism — and who arrived after World War II (especially the Russian Jews) tended to be more Republican.
“Tikkun olam” is a simple injunction in the daily “Aleinu” prayer which proclaims simply that we should “repair the world by proclaiming God’s sovereignty.”
Nothing more, nothing else.
Now here’s where the truth hits Hal, the lefty Jews and the unholy leftist-Islamist alliance — the alliance which includes the Bernie Sanders, the Michael Lerners, the George Soroses, the Sidney Blumenthals, the Rebecca Volkmorresons (I wonder why he left out Jill Stein) and the rest of these self-haters.
Jewish liberalism and leftism may have made sense in the era before union organization and Social Security, but today, it is a backbone of the anti-Semitic BDS movement and of other causes inimicable to Jewish survival.
The truth?
Jews in the reform, conservative and orthodox movements were mostly in sync on core Jewish survival issues until some 50 years ago.
However, as the conservative and reform movement began to see largely empty pews on the sabbath, their leadership concocted out of whole cloth an expanded “tikkun olam.”
Not only did it become expanded, but it did not have the self-respect of insisting on reciprocity.
To the contrary: “Tikkun olam,” contrary to the simple injunction of God’s sovereignty became whale rights, Palestinian rights, Black Lives Matter (who through “intersectional” partnering with BDS Palestinians and other anti-Semites and equate questionable cases with outright attempted murder of police officers and excuses to destroy communities through looting — they are no allies of the Jews), gay rights, abortion rights, et al.
Many of these are legitimate social issues, but have nothing to do with “tikkun olam.”
Not that I am some perfectly practicing Orthodox Jew, but the fact is that those movements are disappearing for their leaders having created an alternative religion through what Professor Stephen Plaut of Haifa University has dubbed the “tikkun olam fetish.”
The conservative and reform movements suffer because of this replacement “theology.”
Worse, we often advocate for our enemies and expect no reciprocity.
Call it, “Tikkun olam for thee, but not for me.”
What other ethnic group would foolishly do for others while receiving only betrayal in return.
For our critical role in Civil Rights movement because it was right — not because of the tikkun olam fetish — we merit Black Lives Matter partnering with our libelous enemies?
Aside from a few wealthier demographic zones such as Great Neck, Roslyn and the like, how many reform or conservative synagogues remain, for example, in the communities in New York City from whence so many of us came?
This is not to denigrate the conservative and reform movements but make clear that some people go to synagogue for authenticity and not for politics.
As Mort Himmelfarb opined, “Jews like to live like Episcopalians, but they vote like Puerto Ricans.”
Or still better, as Norman Podhoretz stated, “The problem with Conservative and Reform Judaism is that it’s just the Democratic Party with a few holidays thrown in.”
Norman is not an Orthodox Jew. He also described them as “the Democratic Party at prayer.”
If Hal Sobel wants to proclaim his leftism and be a liberal Jew, that’s fine — just don’t falsely attribute such self-defeating Jewish behavior to scripture.
I will conclude by reminding readers that our scripture does tell the Jewish people that “Your enemies shall emerge from within you.”
Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld
Great Neck
Readers Write: Don’t confuse Judaism with liberalism
