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Warning against 'hypocrisy of piety'

The latest incident in New Jersey involving the arrest of many Orthodox rabbis from the Sephardic communities in Deal and Brooklyn should serve as a warning to everyone about what I call the hypocrisy of piety among all religious groups. It was always safe to point fingers at the transgressions of leaders from other mainstream religions.

We sadly read, all too often, about the child abuse cases by Catholic priests and are amused by the many cases of marital infidelity by the pompous, self-righteous Christian right-wing preachers and politicians who are intent on telling the rest of us how to live our lives. We are living under the constant threat of Koran thumping fundamentalist Islamic leaders who call for a jihad against the "infidels" of the world who don't accept their extreme culture.

Maybe the Jewish clergy doesn't have the numbers of miscreants that the other groups seem to have, but the fact remains, whether it's the clergy or not, we have to begin looking into our own mirrors. What we lack in numbers, we have in "effect." Just the name Bernard Madoff is enough to raise latent anti-Semitism all over the world. The bearded Orthodox rabbis, "esteemed leaders of their communities" that we saw doing the perp walk, were set up by Solomon Dwek, the disgraced real estate mogul, also from Deal, whose family name is on many of the buildings in that very affluent community, in an apparent plea bargain to protect his father, an "important" rabbi in that community. What was he protecting him from?

The article quotes Dr. Mark Silk, "New Jersey's a place where ethno-religious communities are more noticeable in terms of political involvement of those communities than other places I know." Let's not forget what the Rubashkin family and their Agriprocessor company did to Postville, Iowa. They took over a traditional midwestern town with long established values of community and trust and basically ruined it with their illegal importation of undocumented workers for their kosher meat processing plant, forged documents, bribed FDA inspectors, and caused utter mayhem in their wake. Read Stephen Bloom's excellent book called "Postville: A Clash of Cultures".

I recently heard one of the best sermons by a religious leader that I've ever heard, a Christian minister in a small town in central Pennsylvania. He basically said that life has taught him many things as he got older. One of them is to question the value of prayer. Everyone seems to pray for various things in our lives, yet how many, if any, are truly answered. When a child or loved one is sick or dying, people fervently pray to God for that person's recovery. Most times those prayers are unanswered. We pray for peace but we never get it. Forget the silly prayers asking for your team to win a ball game or to win the lottery.

How many people were miraculously healed after being prayed for? Truth be told, hardly anyone. His point was that the value of prayer should be altered from people asking God for "things" to turning prayer into oneself and teaching oneself to be more open minded, more questioning, more introspective about life and listening to other people. I would love to hear a rabbi once express ideas like this.

The point of all this is to reflect on who religious leaders are and what values they project and how they live their own lives. We have to remember that they are human beings with human frailties and we have to be very careful about injecting them with an aura of piety and expectations that just isn't humanly possible.

Leon Sirulnick
Manalapan

Who met with President Obama?

Much has been written about President Obama's meeting to "woo Jewish bigs" to accept the administration's policies toward Israel. It appears that the "leaders" who attended assured the president that "the bulk of the organized Jewish community is in full support of his peace efforts, including his demand for a complete freeze of Jewish settlements." That conclusion is highly questionable.

The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations represents 52 organizations. However, only 13 members of the conference were invited to meet with the president. Yet, severally politically oriented groups, non-members of the conference, including J Street and the National Jewish Democratic Council, were asked to attend. In addition, Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, and two major fundraisers in Obama's campaigns -- Lee Rosenberg, president-elect of AIPAC and Alan Solow, chairman of the Conference of Presidents -- were also present.

Since leaders of organizations that represent the largest numbers of Jews whose policy differences with the president were not invited, it is misleading to draw sweeping conclusions based on the opinions of a few, unelected leaders of only 13 members of the conference, plus attendees invited to further administration policies. Rather, the meeting was a friendly get together of Jewish "bigs," who are (for the most part) staunch Democratic Party supporters.

It is true that 78 percent of Jewish voters cast their ballots for Obama, perhaps enthralled with the president's "I am a true friend of Israel" speech delivered at the AIPAC convention. However, the "Jewish leadership" was not invited to the meeting to recast their votes on a policy they had never voted for; nor were they there to voice their personal opinions. Rather, their responsibility was to represent the entire Jewish community, and the tens of millions of Christians, who view the Jewish state as America's most committed ally in the Middle East -- not the cause of all its problems. If the "Jewish leadership" does not represent those folks (who may or may not have voted Democratic) whom do they represent?

Perhaps the president's men had a different purpose in mind altogether. Perhaps the meeting was scheduled, not learn what the leaders had to say, but rather to determine what they would say. Surely, by restricting attendance to those who (if they were not already on-board) would be enticed by meeting with the president, the outcome of the meeting was assured. The administration could, at its conclusion, announce that it had the full support of American Jewry for its policy demands on Israel.

I doubt whether all those present really agreed to dividing Jerusalem. In fact, in his AIPAC speech even President Obama didn't agree. Rather, he assured the convention delegates saying, "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided." But that was then, before he was elected.

There is only one nation in all of history that has been threatened with annihilation, and that is the state of Israel. That fact places special responsibility on those who accept the mantle of leadership.

"Bigs" may go along to get along, but "Jewish leaders" must commit to a higher purpose: to do everything in their power to save this generation's 6 million.

Hadassah Linfield
The writer was deputy director, Mid-Atlantic Region of the American Jewish Committee