Rabbi Pruzansky's Blog

Even diehard, enthralled supporters of President Obama (i.e., liberal Jews and others) must be squirming at the recent turn of events. Thos who saw through the rapturous receptions, the fawning accolades, the teleprompter-driven clichés and the hero worship are not in the least surprised by the staggering incompetence and the massive policy failures that are now on public display. And the worst thing about it is that its leading proponent is blissfully unaware that there is a problem, and it can be visible to him only when he looks in the mirror.

The sad irony is that the government shutdown that (among other things) sought to delay the implementation of Obamacare for one year might have been averted if the President had only agreed to the delay that will soon be imposed on him by legislation or by reality. The second irony is that many of the Democrats who stood behind him like wooden soldiers and opposed any delay are now seeking a delay as well. Crass politics as usual, but especially unctuous since the retreat follows the brave stand by days, if not hours.

Certain realities have seeped to the surface that are painful to behold, which is not to say they are not also somewhat amusing. The president’s insistence that basically “all is well,” plan is great, glitches will be perfected soon, people (like the human props he stands behind him) love it now and will soon be loving it more, and that he is the “maddest” of anyone reflects a disconnect from anything that is occurring in the real world. Naturally, it is tantamount to a disclaimer of responsibility, as if things he set in motion do not really originate from him – as if execution of policy is not at all within the purview of the articulator of the policy. “It’s not my fault! I’m just like you! Even madder than you!” But he is not, at least he is not supposed to be. Apparently, the buck stops with him just momentarily before it is passed on, like a hot potato, to someone, anyone, else.

Listening to the early but ambiguous boasts about participants in the system aroused the old litigator in me. Within days, the administration suddenly did not have exact figures as to new insurance sign-ups, but knew it was in the “thousands.” Q. Who told you it was in the thousands? How could they know it was in the “thousands” if they did not have the numbers? If they had the numbers, what is the specific number? Every business knows how to monitor daily sales and signups – even hourly – that is to say, every successful  business. The most recent allegation – and the most plausible one – is that the enrollees are mostly people taking advantage of the expanded Medicaid. Anyone who has the slightest insight into human nature could have predicted that.

The sheer incompetence is breathtaking. That the system has failed technologically is just the tip of the iceberg. The dawning recognition that the cost of health coverage is skyrocketing for all people except for the growing number who are receiving it from the government for “free” (i.e., their fellow citizens pay for it) is being met with obfuscations, denials, and outright falsehoods. In the real world, insurance companies are canceling policies, doctors are starting to drop patients, and health care (not just coverage) is beginning to suffer. The real problem with health care –the market distortion in pricing brought about by a third-party payer system – has been exacerbated, not relieved. Health care remains the only part of the economy in which neither consumer nor provider has a clue what they are buying or providing actually costs. Imagine a restaurant in which you could eat without ever seeing a menu, or receiving a bill, in which different patrons were charged different amounts for the same item, in which the owner did not know at the time of service what he would receive from the mammoth entity that decides pricing and reimbursement, and in which payments could be arbitrarily denied. That business could not survive.

In critical condition is the liberal mantra that government knows best and has the solution to all problems – medical, social, personal, etc. The simplest part of the health coverage overhaul – the registration –  has been bungled despite the cost of $600,000,000 (!), and for the worst reasons: liberal government has little accountability because motivations matter more than results, and the unconscionable hubris of the Chief Executive who did not ensure that the policy that he designed, trumpeted and was named for him actually worked before it was marketed – and then compounded the problem by refusing – because of hubris –to delay it, tweak it or test it. Still to come, once the plan is online, is the shock that will reverberate through the country when the bills come due.

Those who think that the failures herein and the outrageous overreach into our lives are all part of a sinister plot to socialize medicine throughout the country when the system collapses are really giving government too much credit. The idea of present failure as a prelude to some future success is politican-speak, inconceivable to the normal mind. Indeed, one might just as easily conclude that the whole venture is a backhanded attempt to illustrate the virtues of small, limited government. Aha!

And this debacle is linked to the sheer unwillingness, if not incapability, of government to rein in its spending. To one way of thinking that now predominates in Washington, there is no problem that cannot be solved by throwing more of the people’s money at it; and if the problem still lingers, it is only because not enough money was thrown. In that regard, the Republicans, clumsy and awkward as they can sound sometimes, stand in the way of massive revenue enhancements and Obama’s stubborn insistence that more money is needed to satisfy his redistributionist ambitions. That spending has decreased due to the sequester reflected a rare moment of sane statecraft that sticks in the craw of both parties, but especially the left that touts the virtues of big government. An external restraint was probably the only restraint possible, as heavy-handed as it was.

Nonetheless, the ineptitude on domestic issues pales before the dismay, even contempt, with which the international community views America management of its foreign relations today. In 2008, Obama made much of the fact that America’s standing in the world had declined because of “Bush’s wars.” Of course, the standing to which he referred was the United States’ standing in the Arab world, where, sadly but unsurprisingly, it is even lower – far lower – today. But whereas Bush’s America had allies in the world – Israel, Britain, Germany, and others – Obama seems recklessly determined to offend every American ally, and in at least several ways. He projects weakness and indecision such that even France – France! – has decried America’s lack of leadership in world affairs. Even worse, the US has been caught spying on allies (France, Germany, Brazil, and in today’s news, Israel) and again in such a heavy-handed, amateurish way. Whatever the rhetoric emanating from world leaders, this is a new experience for Americans: an American president who is hated by some, dismissed by others, not liked by anyone, disrespected by all and feared by none. Rebuked by Angela Merkel for eavesdropping on her conversations, Obama could do no more than whimper: “We are no longer spying and will not do so in the future.”

Incompetence does produce some bitter fruit.

In truth, the President’s current low approval ratings are tedious and irrelevant; the people, in their wisdom, elected him. But Obama’s attempt to put a happy face on troubling events comes at a price to the media tripe known as “credibility.” For sure, that still matters despite the fact that the election campaign is a distant and distressing memory.  Americans need to know that their leaders are not clueless and hapless. The world is still a dangerous place, filled with rogues and brutes who sense American weakness and exploit it by victimizing the innocent. And an economy is also a fragile mechanism that can be grossly impaired through imposed government distortions and thus impeded for years.

The saving grace for Obama – besides the toadying media – is that the abundance of scandals and failures  in his administration has engendered a fatigue that prevents the focus on any one of them for a decent interval. Something else will happen in the next few weeks and distract the American people from the present debacles, domestic and foreign.

But that also can’t be good.

There is something that we can learn from Muslims.

The recent Pew research study – A Portrait of Jewish Americans – created quite a stir across our world for its findings and implications. Whenever such reports are published, it unleashes paroxysms of panic over its iterations of the obvious.

Intermarriage is now up to 58%. One-third of Jews profess no religion, and for most of those who do, their Jewishness is largely ethnic. Those brief highlights shouldn’t obscure other findings buried in the weeds of the report. Some conclusions produced widespread chuckles, to wit: the survey showed that 1% of ultra-Orthodox Jews have holiday trees every December 25, along with 4% of the Modern Orthodox. Really? How exactly are these Jews of Lakewood, Boro Park and Teaneck disposing of their trees without the neighbors noticing? Or, 76% of the ultra-Orthodox “avoid handling money on Shabbos,” while 81% of the Modern Orthodox don’t handle money. Is this a problem in the Haredi world? Are the Haredim more inclined to carry their wallets with them on Shabbos? Are there shteiblach where, if you get an aliya, you have to pay for it on the spot, in cash?

Some of the questions asked were vague to the point of meaninglessness: “do you keep kosher in the home?” According to the survey, a full 17% of the Modern Orthodox do not, and 2% of Haredim do not, both incredible – but what was the question? A meaningful question would have been “do you keep kosher all the time or only in the home?” Another weird finding: 15% of Orthodox Jews attend non-Jewish religious services a few times a year. Really? Are so many religious Jews hedging their bets and chapping a mass every now and then? Obviously there were people pretending to be Orthodox who weren’t; conversely, many say they are “Reform” but just mean they are not observant.

Some numbers don’t add up at all. Orthodox Jews are literally stuck at the figure of 10% of the population. Yet, everyone concedes that our numbers have grown significantly in the last 30-40 years – and we still can’t break the 10% barrier. Why not? Certainly, we are always under-counted, people are not completely honest in these surveys, and something else: there are many non-Jews who are counted in the study. The dark secret of these surveys is that the real number of Jews is sharply inflated by counting anyone who claims any Jewish blood, even if they are not considered Jewish according to Jewish law. The chickens of intermarriage have come home to roost.

The real crisis as documented by the survey, a surprise only to those who haven’t paid attention for the last fifty years, is that overwhelmingly Jews define themselves ethnically rather than religiously. Jewishness is an ethnicity, so it makes no difference whether one’s father is Jewish, one’s mother is Jewish, one had a Jewish grandfather, or he/she just feels Jewish. To most Jews, and to the world at large, halacha doesn’t matter at all. You get to choose your own identity or identities.

Intermarriage has been devastating to the Jewish people. It has attempted to re-shape Jewish identity even as it has ravaged the Jewish home. Of the more than six million people identified as Jews in the survey, it would not shock if close to two million of them were not Jews according to Jewish law but retain – if they do – some ethnic attachment to the Jewish people. Many of them even celebrate their Jewish connection, and their existence has engendered the Jewish parlor game of: “Is he/she a Jew, a member of the tribe?” There is even a website that scores putative Jews on their Jewishness, played mostly for laughs, but still taken seriously by the professional Jewish scorekeepers. Some embrace the successful (Ryan Braun, the Hebrew hammer, past baseball MVP, son of an Israeli Jew!) and distance themselves from the scandalous (Ryan Braun, substance abuser, suspended from baseball, son of a Catholic mother and raised a Catholic!) He was in, but now is officially out of the tribe.

How should we refer to the almost two million people in the United States who claim a Jewish identity but are not Jews? It is here that we can learn from the Muslims.

Muslims are creative, inspired, and are such proficient marketers that they have a good scam going. Whenever they want to distance themselves from Muslims behaving poorly (hijacking, stabbing, rioting, beheading, car bombing, suicide bombing, general terror, etc.) they say the perpetrator is not a Muslim, but an “Islamist.” Islamist. It is a term of very recent vintage, and most convenient. There is no need for hand-wringing, soul-searching, or denunciations of the evildoers by Islamic religious or political figures. They need only say that those terrorists are not Muslims, but Islamists, and have absolutely nothing to do with the true Muslims of the world.

Why can’t Jews do the same? These non-Jews according to halacha are actually “Jewists, ” not Jews. They have some tepid connection to the Jewish people and religion but are not Jews. And we should to our list of Jewists our own share of miscreants, not as violent as the Muslims (sorry, the Islamists), but embarrassing to us nonetheless. So, henceforth, Jews who steal, murder, cheat, lie, molest, double-park or otherwise bring shame upon us are not real Jews. They are Jewists. A real Jew would not behave that way. Any rabbi who does any of those misdeeds – or kidnaps, tortures, defends pedophiles or sermonizes too long – is not a rabbi but a rabbist, a Jewist rabbist. Take all the Jewish politicians who have had “women” problems in the last few years (Weiner, Spitzer, ex-San Diego Mayor Filner): Jewists, all of them! In one fell swoop, Jews can lose our angst, guilt, and shame over Jews behaving badly. They are Jewists, not Jews! We never again have to berate ourselves with such painful questions as: “how can a Jew (or rabbi) behave that way?!” It is because they are not Jews but Jewists acting Jewistically (sometimes with excessive compassion that blinds them to the illegality of their conduct). Problem solved.

If only it were that simple.

Unfortunately, we cannot wish away all the scoundrels and malefactors listed above, nor can we dismiss their Jewist co-religionists. These Jewists – people who are not Jewish usually through no fault of their own – are living, breathing, and walking reminders of the assimilation, intermarriage, and secularization that has devastated the Jewish people (mostly) outside the Torah world, and shows no signs of subsiding.

In fact, the opposite is true. The saddest aspect of the study is that things have to get worse. While professional Jews measure Jewish identity by such indices as support for Israel, political clout, and donations to Jewish organizations, looming over our heads is the reality that these individuals – however fine they might be – are lost to the Jewish people. Most Jewists are lost.

I could tow the party line and tell you that if we did X or Y we would save every soul, but I don’t believe it. There is a snowball effect; intermarriage breeds more intermarriage and assimilation breeds more assimilation. That they left has little to do with us, and if they come back, that too has little to do with us. Not nothing, but little, and what we can do we should do because every soul is precious and a world in itself. But it is America, more than anything else, the land of freedom and opportunity that has swept away the souls of Jews. It is one of the bitter ironies of Jewish history: we have better prevailed in the struggle for Jewish identity in times of persecution than in times of freedom. G-d’s gift to the Jewish people after a millennium of persecution in Europe – the capacity to serve Him faithfully in the freedom and prosperity of the United States – has, for most Jews, been squandered.

The good news is also obvious. The Orthodox world is growing and prospering. Our population is increasing – Orthodox Jews average 4.1 children, non-Orthodox far less than 2 – our levels of observance are increasing, and our retention rate is relatively high. Who could have guessed? The secret to Jewish continuity is Torah and mitzvot. Big shock! Sending children to Yeshiva keeps them Jewish. Who knew?? The Orthodox world is not perfect today, but when was it ever? All people have free choice. But the trends are favorable. In the survey, four times as many Jews thought remembering the Holocaust was more essential to being Jewish than observing Jewish law, and twice as many thought having a good sense of humor was more essential to being Jewish than observing Jewish law. Sure…

Our Sages compared the Torah to water – “water is Torah” (Masechet Bava Kamma 17a) – because water is the vehicle for sustenance as well as the symbol and instrumentality of rebirth. If we drink the living waters of Torah, we live; it is as simple as that. Will this message be heard by our brothers and sisters? I hope so, but it doesn’t appear that they have as yet drawn the same conclusions. They will send kids to Israel for ten days hoping the crash course in Jewish identity endures,  increase their social action and work for more inclusivity, etc. – anything but Torah observance. “Success” is defined as marrying a Jew, which, however viewed, is a very low bar.

But to withstand the deluge of assimilation requires more than even Torah and Mitzvot; it requires the capacity to stand alone against the tide – like a Noach or an Avraham or the other giants of our history. It requires knowing when to join and when to separate, and having the inner strength to serve G-d whose commandments transcend the popularity and morals of any particular generation.

That is the secret to our survival as Jews, and not as Jewists. And those are the ideas and values we impart to our children that will ensure the Jewish future as G-d envisioned it when He formed our nation, gave us the Torah and marched us to the Land of Israel.