Why Jews Should Not Be Liberals Read online

  Judaism stresses the development of the individual to be the best he can be with whatever talents the Good Lord has bestowed upon him. The act of becoming consists of the act of overcoming. When Jews came to this country, penniless, not knowing the language, but imbued with a fierce desire to better themselves and to prepare a better life for their children, there was no affirmative action. If anything, there was the opposite. Many occupations and professions were closed to Jews at the beginning, so Jews gravitated to those occupations and professions that were not closed.

  One wonders that if our ancestors could have availed themselves of some type of government action to smooth their way, would we all be better off today? I doubt it. All we Jews have wanted throughout our history is to be able to play in the game of life on an even footing with everyone else. No special favors, but no big handicaps are what we wanted. For Jews to now support race preference, which is what today's affirmative action really is, represents a departure from our core beliefs and our traditions. It is time for American Jews, and especially their leaders, to revert back to our ancient Jewish traditions, and oppose all forms of quotas and preferences given to groups consisting of a particular gender, race, religion, color, nationality, or sexual orientation.

  I do have one brief comment on this last category of sexual orientation. Personally, I have known and worked with homosexuals at various times in my career. They were, for the most part, excellent workers who kept their sexual preference to themselves without flaunting it. In today's America, I believe it is this "flaunting" aspect, with the wild parades and public displays of same-sex affection, that turn most people off. The insistence of many gay and lesbian leaders to obtain special preferences in employment and industry for their "class" is also negative.The drive to educate our children that homosexuality is simply an alternative lifestyle is opposed by most parents. And the notion that certain of our clergy now sanction same sex marriage is to my mind completely contrary to Jewish law and tradition. This is another example of members of a particular group wanting to be treated not as individuals, but as a special class.

  In early 2004, the subject of same-sex marriage thrust itself onto the front pages of our newspapers and onto our television sets, as same-sex wedding ceremonies were performed at locales ranging from Massachusetts to California. Some observers believe that this drive was really about forcing the public to accept the homosexual life style as simply a reasonable alternative to the traditional family. Whether Americans will eventually accept this drastic change in the definition of the age-old traditional meaning of marriage remains to be seen. As to how Jews should react, if they hearken to Leviticus 18, there would be no doubt. The Soncino's notes to this chapter emphasize the seriousness of marriage "as a Divine institution, under whose shadow alone there can be true reverence for the mystery, dignity, and sacredness of life." They continue, "Marriage is a primary religious duty. He who has no wifesay the Rabbis-lives without comfort, help, joy, blessing, atonement (true religious communication with God)." It will be interesting to chronicle how the various shades of Judaism respond to this latest challenge to our traditions.

  When God chose the Jewish people to be His own treasure, out of all the peoples of the earth, He did not choose them because they were more or fewer in number, but because the Lord loved them, and wanted to keep the oath He had sworn to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. (Deuteronomy 7:68) The relevant point here is there was no affirmative action then, and there is thus no precedent in our traditions for Jews to now be such avid supporters of this pernicious policy.

  LIBERALS, GUNS, AND JEWS

  The latest cause celebre of the liberals is the gun control issue. Suddenly after two hundred years of Americans having the right to own guns, as authorized by the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights, and brought on by a rash of shootings in various public schools, liberals have fingered guns as the basic problem. Eliminate the guns, and by definition, we will eliminate this cause of so much misery and sadness in this country. No matter that it takes some human being to get the gun, load the gun, take the gun to whatever location the gun holder wishes, and then actually aim and fire the gun with the intent to maim or kill, liberals still reason that it is the gun that is the problem. All we have to do is construct some new rules to make it more difficult for the average citizen to buy a gun, to own it, and then to use it, and somehow this cause of killings will vanish.

  The fact that the number of fatal gun accidents is at its lowest level since statistics were first kept in 1903 is incidental. A fact given by Dave Kopel in National Review, that people with adult criminal records or who had criminal convictions as juveniles commit most murders is also incidental. Liberals seldom let the facts get in their way of proclaiming some holy virtue. Government must take drastic action to bring about their desired results regardless of the means to be used.

  Conservatives and libertarians, not just the National Rifle Association, argue that there are already sufficient laws on the hooks that, if properly enforced, would cure the more outrageous uses of guns. Criminals will always manage to obtain guns. Even though there are an estimated 250 million weapons that are stashed away somewhere in the closets and garages of Americans today, the number of actual crimes, killings, and accidents involving those weapons is a statistically insignificant number. One article estimated that one half of all the families in America now possess some type of gun.

  To purchase a gun in today's America, one must go through a process of delay, depending on the individual state's laws, that can take a week or more to complete the transaction. Some states require the buyer to take an instruction course; some states require a waiting period of several days; gun shows have the same requirements as gun stores. All states prohibit the purchase of guns by felons, children, or mentally handicapped people. Thus, there are plenty of state laws that already make it somewhat difficult to simply walk in and purchase a gun over the counter.

  There is also a substantial body of evidence as accumulated by Dr. John Lott in his book, More Guns, Less Crime, that the use of guns by citizens in their defense has saved far more lives than guns have taken when used by the attackers. Just the presence of guns in a household, and the showing of them by people in their homes, have prevented many robberies, assaults, rapes, and other crimes. Those states that have concealed weapons laws, permitting gun holders to carry guns on their persons or in their cars, have experienced noticeable drops in reported crimes. When a potential mugger or rapist or robber is unsure if his potential victim may be armed, it is natural for him to think again about following through with his attempted predatory action.

  Thus on balance, it is questionable whether the widespread distribution of guns of various sorts really is the problem that the liberals are championing. The height of absurdity is the move by states to hold gun manufacturers liable for damages and injuries caused by the users of those guns as if the gun manufacturers had any control over their use once in the hands of the buyers. The threat of legal action by states has already caused one of the old-line companies, Colt Manufacturing Company, maker of the original American handgun, to discontinue the production of civilian handguns in America. Colt, seller of more than thirty million firearms since 1836, announced in October 1999, that it would quit making almost all of its civilian handguns. Colt had become a casualty of threatened anti-gun lawsuits. The liberals rejoiced over this action. It was another step in their crusade to relieve the individual of responsibility for any of his actions. Somehow, liberals believe if we can remove all temptation and means for doing evil acts, we will achieve the ideal society.

  We ignore, at our peril, what our founders thought and wrote on this subject. Thomas Jefferson wrote, "The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." It may be difficult for today's Americans to understand that when Jefferson wrote these words, there was a real fear that a strong centrally controlled government could someday come into pe
oples' homes and deny them their liberties. In those days, citizens did not have to worry that much about burglars and other civilian predators as we do today. It was the unrestrained force of government that most concerned them, as is true today in many parts of the world.

  Does any of this relate to Judaism, Jewish law, and tradition? Are the liberals in sync with our tradition in their advocacy of eliminating guns and weapons from our society? And let no one be confused about their ultimate aims. As early as 1976, the leader of the group Handgun Control, Pete Shields, explained their long-term strategy. First, they want to slow down the number of handguns being produced and sold. They then wanted handguns to be registered. And finally, they wanted to make the possession of all handguns and ammunition, except for the military, police, and certain groups, totally illegal, and thus subject to confiscation. Although unstated in such clear terms by today's liberals, it is undoubtedly what they are striving to accomplish.

  Although the Torah was written well before the era of guns, one can get a general impression from what God instructed our Jewish ancestors on the use of weapons of the day. In Deuteronomy 7:2, when God was bringing his chosen people into the Promised Land. He said, "Thou shalt smite them; then thou shalt utterly destroy them, nor show mercy unto them." He did not specify the weapons to be used, so one must assume that Jews were to use whatever weapons were at their disposal. In Deuteronomy 20:13, when the Jews were going forth to battle against their enemies, if they made no peace with the Jews, "thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword." So we were authorized by the Lord to use the weapons of the day to achieve the victory. These would be considered to be rather harsh commands for our society today, but they were God's commandments to the "civilian" Jewish armies of that time.

  All of this may seem far afield from the question of eliminating guns from our possession, but the point is that to the Jews in particular, considering our sad history of persecution and exile, one wonders if history would read differently if the Jews had possessed and used the weapons of their day to defend themselves from their attackers. If they had, perhaps they would not have been forced to continue to wander around the globe for all of those centuries.

  In the twentieth century, imagine if the Jews of Germany, Poland, Austria, and all those countries where they were evacuated to the death camps, had possessed guns that could have been used in their defense. Those innocent people, believing themselves to be secure in their homes and an integral part of society, had willingly given up their weapons when instructed to do so by their governments. By 1937, German Jews had surrendered their weapons by order of the Hitler-dominated government. If they had disobeyed that order, perhaps they would not have been such helpless victims when the swaggering Nazi storm troopers burst through the front doors of their homes and shops to carry them away to concentration camps, torture, and death. They did not have our Second Amendment to guarantee their lawful possession of guns to defend themselves.

  As a persecuted and frequently hated minority, Jews should always be wary of the forces of government that may suddenly be used against them, for whatever reason. Rather than worrying about whether the Religious Right is somehow going to woo away our young people from Judaism, we should be more concerned about whether an all-powerful government is going to some day storm into our homes and offices on some pretense and really convert us, not to another religion, but into another world.

  In April 2000, Americans and the world witnessed the naked use of force by the American federal government. The case of the Cuban child, Elian Gonzales, found floating in an inner tube in the waters between Cuba and Florida, rescued and brought to Miami, Florida, held the attention of this country for several months. Elian's mother drowned in her effort to bring six-year-old Elian to America to live in freedom, and escape from Cuban dictator, Fidel Castro. Elian was then placed in the custody of his father's relatives in Miami to await the decision as to his future. His father, a worker for Fidel Castro's dictatorship in Cuba, took almost five months to make his way to the United States. Finally he arrived and, backed by the Clinton administration, asked to be reunited with his son, whom he had not seen for some time having been divorced from Elian's mother for three years, and then return to Cuba with Elian.

  The United States Justice Department then engaged in negotiations with Elian's family in Florida to relinquish their custody so that the father and child could be reunited. The family believed that it would be in the best interests of the child for the family and the father to meet and jointly arrange for the custody transfer. They believed that after five months of nurturing the child and providing a surrogate mother for him, that some healing period was necessary.

  Just as negotiations between the family in Florida and the United States Justice Department led by Attorney General Janet Reno in Washington, DC, were nearing an agreement on a meeting place to effect the custody transfer, all hell broke loose. On early Saturday morning, the day before Easter Sunday, the Justice Department and the United States Immigration Service, sent in armed swat teams to literally snatch Elian from the arms of the fisherman who had saved him and hustle Elian to Washington, DC, into the waiting arms of his father.

  Using overwhelming force, in just under three minutes, the front door of the family's house was knocked down and amidst shouts of warning to stay still or be shot, the "rescue" was completed. The American public would have had only the report of their government to go by except for one intrepid Associated Press photographer. He managed to get into the house during the raid and produced an unforgettable picture of an armed agent pointing his machine gun at the fisherman and Elian before grabbing the child to remove him from the house. That one picture, truly an historic one, should have sent chills up and down the spine of all Americans, and particularly, American Jews.

  Aside from the custody question, aside from whether the government's action was legal, and aside from the political fallout of this action, this one picture showed the true nature of the naked force that can be used by government against its citizens. Of course, Attorney General Janet Reno pointed out that the machine gun in the picture had its safety switch on and that the gun was not really pointed at the child, but was only pointed in his general direction. And of course, she said she had no other alternative to ordering this action, because negotiations had broken down, which was contradicted by her appointed negotiators who were on the scene in Miami. Regardless of what the final legal outcome of this episode turns out to be, the picture for Jews should be clear.

  This is what can happen even in this God-blessed nation of America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, if the people running this government take it upon themselves to read the law in a particular way, or in this case perhaps to even break the law. Individual rights vanish, and we are left only with a faint hope of defending ourselves, or having our supporters help to defend us. Oh yes, the Justice Department used the excuse for using such overwhelming force that there were rumors there were weapons in the house. So even if there were guns, and there were none, an attempt was made by the government in this case to associate the violence used by them with the possibility that legal guns owned by American citizens were at the core of the problem.

  The entire history of the Jews is filled with similar incidents. Most of them were perpetrated against us simply because we were the outcasts, the Jews of that society, and as such we did not possess the rights of other citizens of those countries. Most of us living all of our lives here in America have never experienced such humiliations. One has only to read the history of anti-Semitism however, to understand what our ancestors have experienced. We Jews should be the foremost champions of the right to bear arms and to defend ourselves in our homes against intruders, both civilian and government. In the Gonzales case, even the distinguished Alan Dershowitz (the same who commented that the Religious Right is our enemy), wrote that the government had no right to do what they did and that the naked use of force was a sad day for this nation. Although he di
d not publicly relate his comments to his Jewish heritage, one can sense that this connection must have been uppermost in his mind.

  Once again, it would appear that liberals are on the side of an issue that is not in harmony with Jewish law, tradition, and experience. President Clinton continued to play on the emotions of Americans that guns are the problem, without paying much attention to the fact that we are not enforcing our current laws as stringently as they should be enforced. Our legal system which takes decades to punish murderers and which allows interminable appeals to those criminals, must bear some responsibility for the outbreak of major crime in recent years. My and my wife's personal chiropractors, Dr. and Mrs. Douglas Ryan, were murdered in their home in Chino, California, over seventeen years ago. Their convicted killer is still alive in prison, continuing to wage more appeals. Justice delayed is justice denied.

  To blame guns for recent tragic shootings of children is similar to blaming automobiles for the 50,000 highway deaths that occur annually. Autos and trucks do not drive themselves. It is people, their values, their habits, and their actions that are the root cause of deaths, either by gun or via autos. Judaism tries to set people on the right paths in life and gives them the proper guidelines to live those lives. What happens from then on is up to us, both individually and as a nation.

  THE POLITICS OF

  CLASS WARFARE

  Liberals love to quote statistics on the great differences in income of the different classes. The disparity between those Americans who are "making it" in our society and those who are struggling seems to be growing. The number of workers who remain below the poverty level does not seem to shrink much, in spite of the enormous public funds spent to relieve that situation. The fact that over a period of sixteen years, from 1975 to 1991, only 5.1% of those who were formerly in the bottom 20% of the income table, remained at the bottom, and that almost one third of the poor families in 1975 had moved to the top brackets in 1991 (Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas report), does not seem to dent the liberals' constant complaint that our system does not seem to work for too many people. Therefore, we must continue to shovel out massive sums of money and other benefits to assist those unfortunates in getting off that bottom rung of the income ladder.