In an effort to overcome the continuing criticism that he is unsupportive and, in fact, dismissive of Israel, today President Obama announced that he is converting to Judaism in the hope that this will demonstrate his affinity to and empathy with the Israeli people.
Authorities have been unable to handle the millions of applicants who have volunteered to perform the circumcision.
Europe isn't the only place where circumcision is under attack
Europe isn't the only place where circumcision (Brith Mila) is under attack. The headline above comes from Israel's uber-Leftist daily Haaretz. The description below comes from Jewish Home party leader Naftali Bennett's Facebook page.
Campaign against circumcision and the Jewishness of Israel by Haaretz and friends *** A consistent, organized and planned campaign is being conducted to erase the Jewish identity of Israel. ** Various organizations and Haaretz newspaper are leading the campaign.
Sometimes it is articles on how there is actually no historical basis
or archaeological connection between the Jewish people and its land. Sometimes it is an attack on students who visit Jewish heritage sites in Israel. ** Now it is an organized attack on circumcision. **
"It is primitive", "It is dangerous and inhumane", "You can connect to
Judaism spiritually and not through pagan rituals" and more. **
Friends, since the covenant of Abraham this has been the strongest bond
that connects the people of Israel to his Creator and to himself. ** It has been this way for 3,800 years. **
In Israel, in Egypt, during the First and Second temple periods
(sometimes in enormous danger of decrees against it), in the exiles of
North Africa and in Europe, the Inquisition, pogroms, and even during
the horrific Holocaust. Yes, even during the Holocaust itself we continued to follow circumcision, under impossible conditions. ** Our fathers and mothers upheld the fulfillment of the covenant and the covenant maintained our Jewishness. ** Do not be confused. No compassion or enlightenment is motivating this campaign. People will do at home what he or she wants to do anyway. What stands behind this is a desire to see our state neutered from Judaism.
To turn the one Jewish state of Israel into a state like any other
nation, no different from Sweden, the Netherlands or Belgium. ** Haaretz – Have you no limit??
Naftali
The catalyst for this post (and for the article in Haaretz) might have been the Supreme Court's agreeing last week to hear an appeal from a Rabbinical court decision imposing a daily fine on a woman who - as part of her ongoing divorce battle with her husband - has been refusing for more than a year to have her son circumcised. The Supreme Court also suspended the fine.
I wonder whether Bennett has looked into his bosom buddy Yair Lapid's position on this issue.....
Israel blasts European Council's 'moral stain' on circumcision
Israel's foreign ministry has blasted a resolution against circumcision that was passed on Thursday by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe as a moral stain.
"Circumcision of male children is an ancient religious tradition of two
important religions, Judaism and Islam, and it is also common among some
Christian circles," the Foreign Ministry staid in a statement. "Any
comparison of this tradition to the reprehensible and barbaric practice
of female genital mutilation is either appalling ignorance, at best, or
defamation and anti-religious hatred, at worst."
The Council's resolution called male ritual circumcision "a violation
of the physical integrity of children" and called on states to
"initiate a public debate, including intercultural and inter-religious
dialogue, aimed at reaching a large consensus on the rights of children
to protection against violations of their physical integrity according
to human rights standards
The Foreign Ministry statement said
that claims circumcision harms the health of young boys are false and
run contrary to scientific evidence.
The resolution, the statement
continued, is "an intolerable attack both on the respectable and
ancient religious tradition that lies at the base of European culture,
and on modern medical science and its findings. This resolution casts a
moral stain on the Council of Europe, and fosters hate and racist trends
in Europe. We call on the Council of Europe to act without delay in
order to annul it."
The Council is a pan-European
intergovernmental organization of 47 member states that is not
affiliated with the European Union, and which cannot make binding laws.
Whenever the gentiles want to attack us, the first things they attack are circumcision, Torah study and ritual slaughter. Not necessarily in that order.
A doctor from Hesse filed a criminal complaint against Rabbi David Goldberg, who serves in the community of Hof, in Upper Franconia (northern Bavaria), according to the Juedische Allgemeine weekly newspaper. The chief prosecutor of Hof confirmed that charges had been filed against the rabbi. The charges are based on the controversial decision of a Cologne district court, which ruled in June that circumcisions for religious reasons constitute illegal bodily harm to newborn babies.
“I am shocked,” said Cologne Rabbi Yaron Engelmayer, co-chairman of the national umbrella group of Orthodox rabbis in Germany, in a first reaction to the report. This marks the first time that a court in the Federal Republic of Germany is investigating a rabbi for performing a religious ritual, Engelmayer told the paper.
Goldberg, a qualified mohel (ritual circumciser) who says he has performed more than 3,000 circumcisions, was informed about the criminal charges against him by journalists, the paper said.
Born in Jerusalem, the 64-year-old has been the rabbi of Hof since 1997. Before World War II, about 3,000 Jews lived in Hof. Today, the community counts about 400 members.
I should probably explain the 1938 quip in the title. The Nazis - may their name be obliterated - started out by banning ritual slaughter, circumcision and other Jewish rites as being 'cruel' to someone or something. It looks like modern Germany hasn't changed a whole lot since then, has it?
I also see that Germany allows people with no standing (like a 'doctor from Hesse') to file a criminal complaint against a private party. Yet another argument for the American legal system (Israel allows people without standing to file high court appeals - search 'standing' or 'justiciability' in the archives).
And it looks like another European Jewish community ought to be making aliya....
Gerhard Nerlich, a spokesman for the hospital, announced that “we are suspending circumcisions until the legal situation is clarified”.
The hospital performs approximately 100 religious circumcisions a year. Two surgeries scheduled to take place were cancelled by the hospital, with calls placed to the families explaining the reason.
In its ruling, the court found that performing the religious circumcisions impinged on a child’s “fundamental right to bodily integrity” and was “against the interests of a child to decide for himself later on to what religion he wishes to belong”. “Even when done properly by a doctor with the permission of the parents, [circumcision] should be considered as bodily harm if it is carried out on a boy unable to give his own consent”, the court said. It noted that once a boy reaches the age of consent, he will be permitted to have a religious circumcision performed on himself.
The president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany condemned the ruling as “an unprecedented and dramatic intrusion on the self-determination of religious communities”, calling it “outrageous and insensitive”.
Rabbi Shimshon Nadel of Har Nof, Jerusalem, said the ruling was indicative of Germany’s sentiments toward Jews. “Throughout Jewish history, there have been many attempts to ban circumcision – this is nothing new, and unfortunately, anti-Semitism is once again rearing its ugly head in Germany,” he said. “The circumcision procedure is something that is safe when performed by a trained mohel [performer of ritual circumcisions], we’ve been doing it for thousands of years, so it really comes down to the training of the mohel.”
I'm not a great believer in the effectiveness of online petitions, but there's one available for signing here.
Following the judgment by the District Court of Cologne, neither the rights of parents nor the constitutional freedom of religion can justify interventions such as circumcision, according to Financial Times Deutschland, which first reported the story.
“As opposed to many politicians, the court was not deterred by fears of being criticized for anti-Semitism or hostility toward religion,” University of Passau jurist Holm Putzke told the paper. “This decision could not only influence future jurisdiction, it could also lead the relevant religions to change their attitude with respect to the fundamental nature of children’s rights.”
The case that prompted the ruling took place in Cologne, when a 4-year-old boy, circumcised by a Muslim doctor, began bleeding two days after the surgery and needed to be brought into the emergency room.
The state prosecutor’s office learned of the case and sued, leading the district court to rule that the circumcision was a “severe and irreversible interference into physical integrity.”
Today, there are about 200,000 Jews in Germany, about 5,000 of them in the western city of Cologne.
Watch for them to find a way to ban it only for Jews and not for Muslims. What could go wrong?
This is a bit off the normal fare for this blog, but I think a lot of you will find it interesting.
The Jewish people has survived for thousands of years, including nearly two thousand since the destruction of the Second Temple. How have the Jewish people survived as a people when every other ancient people has disappeared? Good question, no?
So what preserves Israel if not her military and political leaders? God, of course.
You don't have to be religious to draw this conclusion, because no secular explanation makes any sense given the location of this minuscule and dysfunctional state in a hostile Arab sea. In fact, God has given Israel the Best Enemies! After all, Israel secular leaders are tripping over each other trying to make peace with Arabs who can't even make peace with themselves—and this has preserved what is left of Eretz Israel!
Consider Israel's intelligent and mellifluous Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. He has gone so far as to endorse the creation of an Arab state in Judea and Samaria, Israel's heartland. All he wants is the impossible, that Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian authority, recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people. Abbas refuses.
But for this we must thank God, for if you look at what the Torah tells us about Ishmael and his descendants, of course they won't recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people. Netanyahu might as well ask Abbas to renounce the Quran! But do you know that the Quran, with its racist maledictions about infidels, is helping to preserve Israel as a Jewish state?
Of course, the Quran is only a negative reason for Israel's preservation. There are two positive factors working to sustain Israel—and for this we must also credit Israeli governments, notwithstanding their secular intentions.
One factor is the burgeoning number of Israel's yeshivas—unprecedented in Jewish history. These Jewish academies of learning are sanctifying the Name of God, and God is rewarding Israel by making it fruitful. While Muslims exalt death and want to destroy Israel, Israel exalts life and has become the greatest source of life-preserving discoveries in medical science and life-giving water technology.
The second positive factor that preserves Israel is that it is the most charitable nation on earth. Look how Israel has absorbed millions of refugees—and not all are Jewish! Consider its charitable organizations. Do you know that Israel has a group of people that is on call 24/7 to go to any place in the world that has suffered some catastrophe such as an earthquake or a flood? Israel set up clinics in earthquake shattered Haiti and even sent help even to unfriendly Turkey when that Islamist regime was recently struck by an earthquake.
So, what preserves Israel is its charity and sanctifying God's Name. This is why countless righteous Gentiles love Israel and rally to her support. They love Israel because Israel loves God and helps God's children, be they Jew or Gentile.
And by the way: the only way to bring peace to the Middle East is for Israel to become a light unto the nations.
Okay, I agree with all that. But how did we survive in the diaspora for all those years when most of us were there? And by what merit does God continue to Preserve us? We don't really know for sure why God does what He does, but this seems like a good guess even if it comes from (would you believe) academia.
Anthropologist Melvin Konner of Emory University, Atlanta, attributes the Jewish people's survival to their devotion to some of the mitzvot of the Torah, which he says were specifically suited to guarantee the continued existence of the children of Abraham.
According to Prof. Konner, circumcision and practicing family purity (Niddah) are mitzvot which allowed and encouraged the birth of a greater number of offspring, contributing to the people's continued existence.
He adds that the model of prolific mothers matches Darwin's Natural Selection theory, according to which many offspring improve the chances of survival. In other words, "be fruitful and multiply" is a winning formula.
Konner presented his theory last week at the conference on "Judaism in Evolutionary Perspective" at the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem.
"The existence of the Jewish people throughout history, in light of the exiles and persecution, is a real challenge," says Konner. "Religious people see this as divine intervention.
"There is no doubt that their commitment to religious texts helped, but if we look at certain Jewish traditions, we can definitely examine their influence on the reproductive system."
...
Konner was born into an Orthodox family, but according to Israeli terms he is a former religious today. And yet, he view Torah and mitzvot as an essential asset for Jewish existence.
"I don't think we would have survived as a people without the Torah," he says. "Even though every generation has people like me, who draw away from observing the Torah's mitzvot, it remains the core of the Jewish people.
"Like most Israelis, I don't approve of religious extremism either and view it as a potential threat, but like Ben-Gurion realized – the Jewish people need religious people.
"In Israel today you can be completely secular without affecting your Jewish identity. In the Diaspora there is no such thing. In recent generations, secular Judaism has been a way out of Judaism. But three things have allowed the existence of the Jewish people in the past, and in the future: The people, Torah and God."
I heard from one of my rabbis that someone asked Ben Gurion why he permitted the Haredim to establish religious schools during the State's founding years. His response was "in another generation, they won't need them anyway, so let them have them for now.
A San Francisco judge has ordered a measure that would place a ban on circumcision within the city limits off November's city ballot in San Francisco (Hat Tip: William Daroff via Twitter).
San Francisco’s circumcision ban is officially off the November ballot, after a judge ruled Thursday that state law expressly preempts local jurisdictions from regulating health care professionals.
A San Francisco Superior Court judge upheld a tentative ruling from Wednesday that sided with the Jewish Community Relations Council and other individuals suing The City and San Francisco resident Lloyd Schofield, who gathered more than 12,000 signatures to get the ban on the ballot.
If passed by voters, circumcision on males under 18 in San Francisco would have been a misdemeanor punishable by a $1,000 fine and up to a year in jail. Schofield calls male circumcision is a brutal practice, just as deplorable as widely condemned female circumcision practices.
As many of you are already aware, San Francisco has an item on the ballot this year that would make performing a bris (circumcision) within the city limits a crime. Dennis Prager says it might be good for the Jews if that initiative passed.
If the most left-wing major city in America starts arresting Jews who have their children circumcised there, some American Jews might awaken to the threat to Jews posed by the Left. Obviously, San Francisco’s already-existing bans — on toys in Happy Meals, on soda in city-owned properties, on plastic bags, and the city’s proposed ban on the sale of pets, including goldfish — have not made many Jews (or non-Jews) wonder whether left-wing governance is dangerous. But perhaps a ban on circumcision will.
Of course, not everyone who is on the left — and certainly not the traditional liberal — is an enemy of the Jews. But, aside from Islamists, virtually all the enemies of the Jews are on the left.
The worldwide campaign to delegitimize Israel (i.e., to pave the way for moral acceptance of Israel’s destruction) is virtually all on the left. Universities in America and elsewhere in the Western world, as well as the mainstream news-media outlets around the globe, are all dominated by the Left. They drum into the minds of their students, readers, listeners, and viewers that Israel is one of the worst societies on earth.
The anti-Israel propaganda on the left is so great and so effective that according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Many of the youths who survived the [Norway] massacre said they thought the killer, dressed as a police officer, was simulating Israeli crimes against Palestinians in the occupied territories.”
Yet, most American Jews still walk around thinking that Christians and conservatives are their enemies when, in fact, they are the best friends Jews have in the world today. From the present conservative Canadian government, which is probably the most vocal pro-Israel country at present, to every major conservative talk-show host in America (including the fiercely pro-Jewish and pro-Israel Glenn Beck, who has been libeled as an anti-Semite), to the leader of Holland’s Party for Freedom and member of the Dutch parliament, Geert Wilders (one of the most eloquent pro-Israel voices in Europe today), to the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page — the Right is where the Jews’ friends are.
According to BoingBoing, the form is meant for those who, while applying for a passport, can’t produce a birth certificate. “But as the FA suggests,” the site notes, “the circumstances in which people unable to provide a birth certificate will be given this form (rather than the traditional bureaucratic investigation) are not spelled out; further, the form itself remains a Kafkaesque impossibility for most people to complete.”
Consumertraveler.com notes the near impossibility of the proposed application, too:
The State Department estimated that the average respondent would be able to compile all this information in just 45 minutes, which is obviously absurd given the amount of research that is likely to be required to even attempt to complete the form.
“It’s not clear from the supporting statement, statement of legal authorities, or regulatory assessment submitted by the State Department to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) why declining to discuss one’s siblings or to provide the phone number of your first supervisor when you were a teenager working at McDonalds would be a legitimate basis for denial of a passport to a U.S. citizen,” that site goes on to say.
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
