What Leon Wiesletier says in his new Diarist is brilliant. It carries messages that every Likudnik, every Haredi, every Cross Current contributor, and every GOP Jews needs to hear and understand.
Please help me share it with them.
Money quote:
Wow. And there is much more like this
Money quote:
And the political and religious variety of the Jews of America is the most obvious fact about them—but it pains the nostalgists and the dogmatists, who see no glory in a plenitude of Jewish dispensations and regard diversity as a historical and ideological disappointment.They prefer to delude themselves with legends of a lost uniformity of opinion that never existed. Quarrel has always been a Jewish norm, and controversy a primary instrument for the development of Jewish culture and Jewish religion. But there are those, the heresy hunters and the truancy hunters, the real Jews, the true Jews, the last Jews, who refuse to accept the community as it empirically is, to engage with the cacophony and its causes, and instead they haughtily promulgate definitions of inclusion and exclusion, certifications of authenticity and inauthenticity. Most of their fellow Jews are, for them, for one reason or another, traif. What sort of expression of peoplehood is that? We are a people, not a sect. Like the pseudo-Sanhedrin in Jerusalem that calls itself the Chief Rabbinate, they know nothing about the wisdom of flexibility in an era of change. They seem to believe that certitude makes fairness superfluous. It was not surprising that J Street’s most energetic opponents at the President’s Conference came from the Orthodox, many (but not all) of whom are so busy congratulating themselves on their righteousness and their fertility rate that they are blind to their irrelevance to the fate of Jews who are not like themselves, which is to say, to the fate of the overwhelming majority of American Jewry.
Wow. And there is much more like this
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