Israel Matzav

Obama can't even make up a good lie to save face with Jews

Rafael Medoff publishes this astounding account by Rabbi Haskel Lookstein (if I recall correctly, the rabbi who taught Bill Clinton to say "Shalom, Chaver" after the Rabin assassination) of President Obama's meeting with Orthodox Jewish leaders last week.

A few days before the poll came out, a delegation of Orthodox Jewish leaders met with the president at the White House. In a memo to his congregants this week, Rabbi Dr. Haskel Lookstein of Manhattan’s Kehilath Jeshurun synagogue described the meeting.

“When asked about the perception that Israel is being pressed on the peace process more than are the Palestinians,” Rabbi Lookstein wrote, “the President indicated his belief that both sides need to compromise and that he has pressured both sides. However, in truth, he only cited pressure on the Israelis with respect to stopping settlement activity. He indicated that all of the United States assistance to Israel on security issues is problematic for the Palestinians, but, of course, that doesn’t constitute pressure on them to do anything. The one thing the Palestinians have to be pressured to do is to sit down at the table and negotiate without preconditions. The President has not done this and he avoided giving a clear response to the question of how he is specifically pressuring the Palestinians.”

Although the president and his advisers had plenty of time to prepare for the meeting, and even though the meeting was, as Rabbi Lookstein put it, “carefully scripted,” President Obama “avoided giving a clear response” regarding pressuring the Palestinians. One would think he would have come up with at least one example, even if it was more rhetorical than substantive, to soothe the concerns of the Jewish delegation. No such luck.

Rabbi Lookstein, the author of Were We Our Brothers’ Keepers?, an important book on American Jewry’s response to the Holocaust, has a keen sense of history. He recalled, in his memo, how some prominent Jews with access to President Franklin Roosevelt hesitated “to ask the hard questions or raise the tough issues.”

In December 1942, after the US had verified that mass murder of Europe’s Jews was underway, Jewish leaders were granted half an hour with the president. He spent the first 23 minutes telling jokes and commenting on other subjects. Then FDR spoke in generalities about the Nazi genocide for a few moments. And then – one participant later wrote – he “pushed some secret button, and his adjutant appeared in the room” to usher the Jewish leaders out.

In his diary, Roosevelt’s vice president, Henry Wallace, wrote about an incident in March 1944, in which FDR met with Jewish leaders and “caused [them] to believe that he was in complete accord with them...” The very next day, Roosevelt boasted to his cabinet that he had told the Jewish leaders “where to get off” and had warned them that their agitation for Zionism was “going to be responsible for the killing of a hundred thousand people.” “Enraged Arabs” would retaliate by attacking Americans in the Middle East, FDR claimed.

“The President certainly is a waterman,” Wallace wrote. “He looks one direction and rows the other with the utmost skill.”

American Jews in the 1940s had no way to know President Roosevelt’s true feelings on these issues, and Jewish leaders were reluctant to speak up. “Thank God, we live in a very different world today,” Rabbi Lookstein wrote this week. Today’s Jewish leaders are much more willing than their predecessors to ask the president the difficult questions that need to be asked.

I disagree with Rabbi Lookstein's conclusions, although I find his account compelling and believable.

Most Jewish leaders - and certainly most non-Orthodox Jewish leaders - are not willing to ask President Obama the hard questions. Many Jewish leaders who are willing to ask hard questions are not willing to draw the proper conclusions from the lack of a reasonable answer to them. If the rabbis and lay leaders were asking the hard questions and drawing the proper conclusions, there would be an advertisement in every major American newspaper signed by hundreds of rabbis urging their congregants to vote for Mitt Romney. But there is no such advertisement. There is not even such an advertisement signed by Orthodox rabbis alone, and so many of their congregants will go to the polls and blindly vote for Obama again.

There is no Rabbi Moshe Feinstein to go to the White House and protest, and even if Rav Moshe were alive today, there would be even fewer rabbis that would accompany him than did in 1943.

Obama has read the American Jewish community correctly. It is weak and sycophantic. It lacks the backbone to stand up for itself or for its brethren elsewhere. Instead, it is trying to convince itself that four more years of Obama would not be such a bad thing, because after all 'we can't vote for a Mormon.' 'A Muslim, okay, but a Mormon?'

Our rabbis tell us in the tractates of Sotah and Sanhedrin that each generation gets the leadership it deserves, and the leadership of the generation just preceding the Messiah is the weakest of all.

The Talmud in both Sotah and Sanhedrin says that in the times leading up to the Messiah's arrival, the generation's face will be like that of a dog. The (real) rabbis explain that when one walks a dog, the dog seems to run ahead, but constantly turns around to make sure that the 'master' is following. So is the dog leading the 'master' or is the 'master' leading the dog? In reality, the 'master' is leading the dog, even though the dog gives the illusion that the opposite is the case. The dog symbolizes the Jewish communal leadership; the 'master' symbolizes the Jewish public at large.

God save us all.

UPDATE TUESDAY 6:17 PM

Welcome Power Line readers.

Labels: American Jewish leadership, Barack Hussein Obama, Campaign 2012, Holocaust, rabbis

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:18 PM