Updated Again: Job: Jewish Individualist

Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Judaism & Jews, Religion

I got thinking about the Book of Job after I heard La Coulter make fun of Howard Dean for choosing Job as his favorite New Testament reading!

Dean is an unsharpened pencil, but he’s right about Job; it’s unrivaled in Christian Holy Scriptures.

In case you wonder why I’m expounding on a book in the bible, a sidebar is in order: I’ve always thought of myself as a secular person. According to my mother, however, I’m religious. She says a person who is scrupulously just and upright is religious. (She’s biased, of course.)

According to Ann Coulter’s definition, I’m religious too. The definition is on page 266 of her book, Godless, which is the first of her books I’ve read. I bought Treason, because I think the thesis is spot on. The others—liberal this; liberal that —don’t interest me. I don’t regret reading Godless. It’s a lot of fun (the chapter about idiot environmentalists is super. With one exception perhaps (I wonder who?!), I don’t know of anyone who writes this cleverly and amusingly.

In any case, if we apply Coulter’s definition, I’m religious. It is: “Whatever your religious persuasion, if you believe we are distinct from the beasts, you’re with God. (Here are my Animals have no Rights essays, which, nevertheless, and contra Coulter, do not defer to a deity in the process of explaining why animals are without rights.)

In any event, I’m of a generation of secular Jews which knows and loves the Hebrew Bible as a tremendous literary, philosophical, and historical achievement. It’s unique. Those who have studied it (in Hebrew, as I have) know the 39 books for the vital, lively (very Jewish), earthy, pioneering, and fascinating works they are. There is nothing stuffy or pompous about the Hebrew Bible, either. In A History of the Jews, Paul Johnson writes: “The Bible is essentially a historical work from start to finish. The Jews developed the power to write terse and dramatic historical narrative half a millennium before the Greeks…

One glance at the Quran and you appreciate even more the power of the Hebrew biblical narrators. (If I were really religious, I’d believe the first five books were written by God, but that’s not what I was taught in a secular Israeli high school—that’s not where the evidence leads).

Back to the Best Book in the Bible: Is there anything in Christian Holy Scripture to rival the Book of Job? (And if there is, we know whence the inspiration came). Considering the period, it’s radical. Here goes:

A very righteous and prosperous man—in Jewish tradition, wealth acquired righteously is a blessing—is put through a succession of trials by God and victimized horribly. His kids are killed, his wealth taken, and he’s inflicted with a skin condition that makes him writhe in itching agony. Yet no matter what God throws at him, he 1) refuses to denounce God. 2) Insists, based on pure fact—and as the ultimate individualist would—that he, Job, is right and God is wrong. What’s more, in the end, God agrees with Job , confessing he was only trying him to see how deep Job’s faith was and how far he could be pushed.

Again, that’s radical. (Such a chapter in the Quran would have ended with a beheading—Job’s stiff neck would have been smitten.)

It’s hard to beat such an unorthodox concept, considering the times. Jews have a tradition of arguing with their God. Abraham haggled for the sinners of Sodom and Gomorrah and Jacob physically wrestled with the angel of God.

Still, besides libertarians, who today argues with authority? Nobody—unless that authority happens to be promoting libertarianism, Jeffersonian republicanism, or something that goes against the preordained religion of statism.

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Update: A few readers set out to Christianize Job, in other words to reinterpret Hebrew Scriptures in accordance with Christian constructs and beliefs, alien in Judaism. They did so dogmatically too.

Well, well, scrape away the patina of piety and Christians behave like Muslim Replacement robbers; laying claim to a legacy that is first and foremost so utterly Jewish; written by Jews who, viscerally and intellectually, thought more like me than like any Christian.

Just as Christian thinking is foreign to me; Jewish thinking is manifestly foreign to my interlocutors. They evince no understanding of Judaism. When these particular Christians discuss the Hebrew Bible, they denude it of its Jewish essence and superimpose upon it the Christian articles of faith.

Don’t understand Judaism? Well and good. But just as I don’t lecture you about your scriptures; don’t pontificate about mine or rape them with Christian constructs that are to Judaism as universalism is to Islam.

Furthermore, so long as you can’t read the Hebrew Bible in the Hebrew, but rely on some stuffy King James translation, drop the authoritative tone.

Now, my particular animated take on Job—the one that so infuriated Christian literalists— happens to be an extension of my father’s thinking, an orthodox Rabbi and a brilliant scholar of Judaism. Acknowledged as such.

Job, of course, is a philosophical masterpiece. To the literalists who jumped out of their skins at my suggestion God was wrong and that the book all but implicitly concedes the point, let me say this: G-d doesn’t dispute that Job was right in his insistence he did not sin. By logical extension (deduction is something the great JEWISH sages practiced routinely), this would imply G-d was wrong to punish Job. Again: By restoring Job and admitting Job was innocent of all wrongdoing, by default, G-d (G-d of the Jews, that is) admits He was toying with Job.

Again, Job is a deeply Jewish book. Christians (and Reform rabbis) cannot be expected to have a feel for the Hebrew Bible and for Jewish theological thinking, which is very different from Christian thinking.

So how about it? Let’s see less ignorance and more of that Christian humility in your approach to scriptures not your own, about which you know so little.

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Updated Again:

A valued writer on BAB has written in to say, in a nutshell, that the magnificent Jewish bible—all 39 explosive books is nothing but a prelude, a preparation, for the New Testament and Jesus, which Jews regard as a mere prophet.

Yeah, Christians are as chauvinistic as Muslims about reinterpreting, misinterpreting, appropriating, and diminishing this pioneering, and uniquely Jewish text, to say nothing about centuries of experience. As misguided as they are about Jews and their bible, Christians are peaceful and very dear to this writer, so far.

But don’t push it. Positions such as this one, manifestly wrong and off-putting, will have no place on this Jew’s blog.

Reversing Reality in the Yates Case

Crime, Criminal Injustice, The Courts

In the legal system, a shambles really, truth is often dismissed if petty procedural rules have been violated. If a defense lawyer can prove that an arresting officer skipped a word while mirandazing a murderer, the entire case ‘DNA evidence and all’ may be retried or worse: reality might even be reversed. The murderer, caught mid-act, could be found innocent. The exclusionary rule is another legal trick by which this can be achieved.

The modern day Medea, Andreas Pia Yates, methodically drowned her children aged six months to seven years. I won’t go into the tiresome details, but thanks to a legal technicality, she’s gone from guilty of murder to innocent by reason of insanity.

Even if the stellar jury that first convicted her overlooked her alleged psychosis, as I’ve written, “An individual’s essential nature does not change because he suffers behavioral or mood problems. Most ‘mentally-ill’ people choose never to commit murder. Why? Because mental peculiarities don’t rob people of their moral nature. Texas law concurs by implying that even under extreme mental duress, a person is not bereft of the capacity to reflect on his actions and thoughts and make choices. In every situation, no matter the constraints, one can exercise some free will, even if it’s only to decide how to respond to a hopeless predicament.

The insanity plea is bad enough as it is:

“ It capitulates to the mistaken ‘and corrosive’ notion that, when crimes are too horrible to comprehend, medical concepts must replace moral concepts. The insanity plea further performs a very odd exercise: It says that to find her not guilty by reason of insanity, the jurors would have had to accept that it was not Yates, but her ‘disease’ or some alter ego, that tortured those children to death. According to the new, reality-reversing verdict, Yates is no longer a victimizer, but an innocent victim of her ‘disease.’

This nonsensical bifurcation flouts the Law of Identity: A person can’t have done the deed, yet simultaneously be innocent of it! The great 19th-century American philosopher Lysander Spooner put it this way: ‘Guilt is an intrinsic quality of actions, and can neither be created, destroyed or changed by legislation.’

* In addition to the hyperlinks in the text, you can read more about so-called mental disease in “Broken Brains?”

So, the 'Presstitutes' Can Tell Right from Wrong

Just War, Media

Brent Bozell pointed out this week that media coverage of the Israeli-Hezbollah war has been quite fair, with few acknowledged exceptions.

I happen to agree with him this once.

It has become as clear as crystal that those who slept with their sources in the ramp up to war in Iraq actually know quite a bit about unbiased reporting. They understand the need to report both sides but to avoid moral equivalence between them; they get the necessity to warn viewers when they’ve been taken on a guided tour by Hezbollah. And they’re good at showing the misery on both sides, while not ignoring that because the one side is inflicting so much more suffering on innocents, the legitimacy of its cause is at stake.

The same people who hyped the Iraq war, its prosecutors, and their propaganda, and concealed the destruction to that country’s infrastructure, have remained so far relatively detached. They’ve simply stepped aside so the viewer can survey the damage for himself.

And get this: one-time jingoists who suffered Alzheimer’s when it came to Just-War ethics and the international law (the naturally compatible type, not the UN version) vis-Ã -vis Iraq are suddenly debating concepts such as proportionality.

To be fair, a great deal of credit goes to the Israelis. Washington controlled and shaped every snippet of emerging information in the count down to war, and thereafter. It did so through an elaborate set of limits and conditions imposed on reporters in exchange for access via the embed program.

Embeds were supervised by the military in the same way Saddam once assigned minders to accompany Western journalists. Even so, American TV networks went beyond the call of duty in green-lighting the home team.

That journalists are doing an adequate job covering the war in south Lebanon has a lot to do with the fact that they’ve a far freer hand; Israel hasn’t an “In Bed with the Military program. Their soldiers — unlike ours — are not allowed to propagandize. In fact, they can’t even talk to the press about any aspect of the operations, much less pose for staged photo ops.

So much for the “formidable Israeli propaganda machine.” If they had one, they’d have set up an embed filter.

Ultimately, it’s good to see reporters doing their job — it’s good to know that when they try, they are not entirely incapable of telling right from wrong.

So, the ‘Presstitutes’ Can Tell Right from Wrong

Just War, Media

Brent Bozell pointed out this week that media coverage of the Israeli-Hezbollah war has been quite fair, with few acknowledged exceptions.

I happen to agree with him this once.

It has become as clear as crystal that those who slept with their sources in the ramp up to war in Iraq actually know quite a bit about unbiased reporting. They understand the need to report both sides but to avoid moral equivalence between them; they get the necessity to warn viewers when they’ve been taken on a guided tour by Hezbollah. And they’re good at showing the misery on both sides, while not ignoring that because the one side is inflicting so much more suffering on innocents, the legitimacy of its cause is at stake.

The same people who hyped the Iraq war, its prosecutors, and their propaganda, and concealed the destruction to that country’s infrastructure, have remained so far relatively detached. They’ve simply stepped aside so the viewer can survey the damage for himself.

And get this: one-time jingoists who suffered Alzheimer’s when it came to Just-War ethics and the international law (the naturally compatible type, not the UN version) vis-Ã -vis Iraq are suddenly debating concepts such as proportionality.

To be fair, a great deal of credit goes to the Israelis. Washington controlled and shaped every snippet of emerging information in the count down to war, and thereafter. It did so through an elaborate set of limits and conditions imposed on reporters in exchange for access via the embed program.

Embeds were supervised by the military in the same way Saddam once assigned minders to accompany Western journalists. Even so, American TV networks went beyond the call of duty in green-lighting the home team.

That journalists are doing an adequate job covering the war in south Lebanon has a lot to do with the fact that they’ve a far freer hand; Israel hasn’t an “In Bed with the Military program. Their soldiers — unlike ours — are not allowed to propagandize. In fact, they can’t even talk to the press about any aspect of the operations, much less pose for staged photo ops.

So much for the “formidable Israeli propaganda machine.” If they had one, they’d have set up an embed filter.

Ultimately, it’s good to see reporters doing their job — it’s good to know that when they try, they are not entirely incapable of telling right from wrong.