Israel Matzav

Target Lieberman continues

Legal Insurrection reports that the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation has decided to retain Hadassah Lieberman, wife of Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, as its spokesperson. But that doesn't mean the battle is over. Far from it. The vicious attacks against both Joe and Hadassah Lieberman over Joe's principled refusal to support Obamacare's 'public option' and 'medicare buy-in' provisions continue.

Big Hollywood reports on one such attack. It asks what's the difference between a Hollywood Leftist and the Mafia? The Mafia doesn't go after your family. Firedoglake does.

And they're not the only ones.

Meanwhile, Joe himself is under attack by the Judaism is Liberalism crowd.

During the past decade or so, there has been a rising panic over the growing influence of fundamentalist Christian precepts on modern American politics, but no one has said very much about Joe Lieberman’s fundamentalist Judaism. Although he prefers to call himself an “observant” rather than an “Orthodox” Jew, he is in fact an Orthodox Jew. His approach to modern life is just as uninflected as that of his Christian counterparts.

Sure, he has proved himself flexible on issues like gun-control, gay rights and abortion—all instances where he has taken a standard liberal position. But these aren’t subjects that arouse Lieberman’s passions. What really sends him soaring are issues—health care, Israel—that are, at the same time, loftily resonant with moral meaning and directly related to his material self-interest. The advantage of a fundamentalist perspective is that you can clothe your basest motives in noble sentiments.

So Lieberman, the Orthodox Jew who ostentatiously walks miles to Capitol Hill on the Sabbath because of the Jewish prohibition against operating machinery on the seventh day, has provided himself with some very pious blinders. An American war in Iraq will be futile, wasteful, and ultimately destabilizing? This rational skepticism cannot hold a candle to the feeling that it would be just. A public health-care option, or a Medicare buy-in will solve the problem of unaffordable health care in this country? The rational proposition sinks under the weight of the feeling that it will increase the deficit, and if it doesn’t add to the deficit, it will set us on the road to single-payer serfdom, and if it doesn’t do that, well, you feel it’s wrong.

You don’t doubt the morality of your feeling, because you have used your strict, self-sacrificing observance of Jewish law to prove to yourself that you are a good man. And you are not a hypocrite, because your observance proves that not only do you profess a belief in God, but you act on your belief. God on one side, your obedience to God on the other—the result is an ironclad conviction that what you do is absolutely right.

...

I grew up surrounded by non-religious Jews who were guided by the principle of rachmones, meaning “compassion.” They were guided by feeling, too, but it was not the absolute certitude of fundamentalist feeling. Rather, it was the feeling that life changes fast, and that people are vulnerable. They were gentle and ironic people. They liked this Yiddish saying: “God loves the poor, but helps the rich.” They probably lost more than they won in life, but they never fooled themselves into thinking that they were doing good when they were merely doing well.

Let the professional Jews quote the Talmud at me, but the way Lieberman has derived his political morality from his religious fundamentalism, and used both as fig leaves to cover his thralldom to money, is ritually unclean. Some people—for example, the sick and the crippled—might say that it is really not Jewish at all.

What's wrong with this, aside from author Lee Siegel dragging Israel into an argument that has nothing to do with it, is his misconception that Jewish faith and observance ought to be congruent with modern notions of political liberalism. They are not and ought not to be. (The comparison between Orthodox Judaism and fundamentalist Christianity is also one that many Orthodox Jews will dispute, but I'm not going to get into that).

As was pointed out by Norman Podhoretz in discussing his new book Why Jews are Liberal (still waiting for a review copy of that one), if Judaism mandated liberalism, Orthodox Jews would be the most liberal of all Jews. But in fact, survey after survey shows that Orthodox Jews have the least identification with liberalism of any of the 'streams' of Judaism.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:58 PM