"Maurice Pinay":
You might enjoy reading this Sunday's "New York Times Magazine" piece, "Orthodox Paradox." It initiated many of its readers into forbidden knowledge.
It reveals that, to the Orthodox mind, the sole justification for Judaics to adopt a benevolent posture toward the goyim is that such a stance tilts Judaic-goyim relations in favor of Judaic interests, under certain circumstances.
Perhaps it's a classic modified limited hangout, the piece's narrative authority rests on the insider membership, twice over, of its author, the Orthodox prep-school formed, CFR senior fellow and Harvard Law School professor, Noah Feldman. Our conditioned response will be the misrecognition which holds that the only people who would challenge what Feldman tells us are the hateful and stupid.
Given all that is revealed, what is limited about this?
The piece keeps the Unique Goyim Evil theory alive. Nothing in Feldman's article attacks the "bad goyim made us poor Jews this way" account. Because he does not address this, everything unappealing that he reveals about Orthodox folkways can be blamed on the goyim.
... Since the birth of modern Orthodox Judaism in 19th-century Germany, a central goal of the movement has been to normalize the observance of traditional Jewish law — to make it possible to follow all 613 biblical commandments assiduously while still participating in the reality of the modern world. You must strive to be, as a poet of the time put it, “a Jew in the home and a man in the street.” Even as we students of the Maimonides School spent half of every school day immersed in what was unabashedly a medieval curriculum, our aim was to seem to outsiders — and to ourselves — like reasonable, mainstream people, not fanatics or cult members.
This ambition is best exemplified today by Senator Joe Lieberman. His run for the vice presidency in 2000 put the “modern” in modern Orthodox, demonstrating that an Orthodox Jewish candidate could be accepted by America at large as essentially a regular guy ...
One time at Maimonides a local physician — a well-known figure in the community who later died tragically young — addressed a school assembly on the topic of the challenges that a modern Orthodox professional may face. The doctor addressed the Talmudic dictum that the saving of a life trumps the Sabbath. He explained that in its purest form, this principle applies only to the life of a Jew. The rabbis of the Talmud, however, were unprepared to allow the life of a non-Jew to be extinguished because of the no-work commandment, and so they ruled that the Sabbath could be violated to save the life of a non-Jew out of concern for maintaining peaceful relations between the Jewish and non-Jewish communities.
Depending on how you look at it, this ruling is either an example of outrageously particularist religious thinking, because in principle it values Jewish life more than non-Jewish life, or an instance of laudable universalism, because in practice it treats all lives equally. The physician quite reasonably opted for the latter explanation. And he added that he himself would never distinguish Jewish from non-Jewish patients: a human being was a human being.
This appealing sentiment did not go unchallenged. One of my teachers rose to suggest that the doctor’s attitude was putting him in danger of violating the Torah. The teacher reported that he had himself heard from his own rabbi, a leading modern-Orthodox Talmudist associated with Yeshiva University, that in violating the Sabbath to treat a non-Jew, intention was absolutely crucial. If you intended to save the patient’s life so as to facilitate good relations between Jews and non-Jews, your actions were permissible. But if, to the contrary, you intended to save the patient out of universal morality, then you were in fact guilty of violating the Sabbath, because the motive for acting was not the motive on the basis of which the rabbis allowed the Sabbath violation to occur.
Later, in class, the teacher apologized to us students for what he said to the doctor. His comments, he said, were inappropriate — not because they were wrongheaded, but because non-Jews were present in the audience when he made them. The double standard of Jews and non-Jews, in other words, was for him truly irreducible: it was not just about noting that only Jewish lives merited violation of the Sabbath, but also about keeping the secret of why non-Jewish lives might be saved ... (Noah Feldman, Orthodox Paradox, New York Times, July 22, 2007)
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/magazine/22yeshiva-t.html?ei=5087%0A&em=&en=4f9d372ba8aa7e8a&ex=1185336000&pagewanted=print
My, my. So much for the claims that "elder brother in the faith" Maimonides was being misinterpreted by "antisemitic conspiracy theorists," or even more outrageous, that the quotes are "antisemitic fabrications." Read about it in the New York Times.
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