In response to my post on 9 Av, Will S. asked why non-religious Jews choose to remain Jewish by choice:

Is it just shared experience, and/or sense of high degree of persecution by outsiders, that inculcates the sense of “we’re a people” in secularist Jews, making them want to live amongst their own rather than assimilate completely into the cultures into which they may have been born, and circumcize their children even though not actually believing in the divine covenant thus symbolized? Or is it some residual level of religious belief, even though most would likely deny such?

This touches on the core question that has confronted the Jews since the dawn of the modern era and one that continues to matter in general society, over and over again, for no good reason, generation after generation. It’s called the Jewish Question and, though most people may be familiar with one group’s “Final Solution” to it, there actually have been many solutions proposed over the years, some of which have been implemented with certain successes and others of which never could have been.

Like most questions, the way it’s asked informs in some ways its answer (“The formulation of a question is its solution”). Will’s question – why be Jewish if you’re not practicing Judaism? – is a typical phrasing for liberals, because it is a cornerstone of liberalism that Jews and all other minorities are nationals of the state in which they reside, with the main thing differentiating them being “faith,” and all liberals are taught to believe that Judaism is the only thing different about Jews. Further, liberals believe that you can identify a person by his “faith,” but you can’t ever challenge his “faith” or question its legitimacy, because religions are somehow inviolate in ways that other ideologies are not.

So Will’s question reflects a liberal approach to the Jewish Question – I of course mean “liberalism” here, as I always do on this blog, in the traditional and true sense of the word, in the sense that North American conservatism is liberal – but it doesn’t ask the question exactly. The question really is: What is a Jew? And the answer a person gives to this question, phrased correctly, will always reveal what he thinks ought to be done with the Jews or about them, or what they should do with or about themselves.

Before liberalism, Jewishness was understood by everyone to be more than a religion. Jews were a corporate entity in medieval society that had their own religious beliefs and prayed to a different god, in a different manner and on different days; were governed by their own laws; spoke a somewhat distinct language; intramarried and were largely genetically distinct; ate different foods; dressed differently; performed different labor; etc, etc. And in many ways, these differences were a function of how Jews were viewed by outsiders (eg, moneylending became a disproportionately Jewish profession in Europe partly with Christian encouragement). The best comparison to a group in modern times would be to native North American Indian tribes, who are recognized as “nations,” that are distinct linguistically, ethnically, religiously, legally, etc.

Two centuries ago, this started to change, as Jews who had the opportunity to be emancipated essentially made a bargain with Christian society that they would allow themselves to be classified as different in some of the above ways but not in others. This was the dawn of the wide acceptance of the liberal approach to Jewishness. Most Jews and most Christians accepted the bargain, but some on each side didn’t. All three of what westerners consider to be the main branches of Judaism came after this change and are products of it: Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Jews all follow the maxim: “be a man on the street and a Jew in your tent.”

In the above framework, both Christians and Jews are supposed to treat Jewishness as equal to Judaism and to treat Judaism exclusively as a religious confession. It follows that a liberal defines a Jew as “a person who follows Judaism,” with more religious Jews being Orthodox and less religious Jews being Conservative, and the somewhat irreligious Jews being Reform. This has worked for a lot of people because the Jews and Christians both got a lot in exchange for giving up what they did. The Jews got emancipation (in Europe) and also legitimacy (in north America) and Christians got one of their most intractable minority problems solved.

Unfortunately, the breakdown in this arrangement was encoded in it from the beginning, and its demise was that it denied something that everyone knew was true: Jews are different in some other way besides religion. Even after the new phenomenon of “Germans/Frenchmen/Americans of the Jewish faith” became dominant, there were Jews who just didn’t feel like not eating their own foods and speaking their own language and, most importantly, most Jews always professed a preference to marry other Jews and thereby to keep themselves distinct, which flies in the face of the liberal compact (a man should be judged by what kind of person he is, not by his religion, which can never be criticized).

Besides being an understandable, if not legitimate, reaction to Jewish emancipation and the Jewish attempt to eat their cake (emancipation and legitimacy) and have it (separateness and familiarity) anti-semitism also puts forward an answer to the What is a Jew? question that’s the opposite of the liberal answer. Where liberals say that a Jew is like everyone except that his religion is Judaism in the way that someone else’s religion might be Methodism or Catholicism, anti-semites observe that religion is irrelevant and that Jews are essentially (ie, genetically) different. And just like all answers to the Jewish question were both descriptive and proscriptive, so was the anti-semitic answer.

If emancipation led directly to anti-semitism, in a straight line they both led directly to Zionism, which tries to answer that same question in yet a different way: Jews are a nation like any other. In many ways the early Zionists were allies to the anti-semites of their day and learned a lot from them. The Zionist answer had its own program, and so did all of the other answers that I won’t bother discussing; the point is just that Will is asking that question whether he realizes it or not, and that there isn’t anything wrong with the question, but that we should be aware that when we ask it, we’re sometimes asking something way more complex than we know.

Israeli propaganda would have you believe that Israel is a liberal western democracy. Though it’s true that Israel is a democracy – much to our detriment – this society is not western, and there is very little about life here that’s liberal.

Israeli citizens are required to carry identification and explain who they are and what they’re doing to police officers whenever asked. They can be summoned for questioning by police without reasonable suspicion of having committed a crime, and they can be arrested for refusing to be questioned. They are not allowed to have a lawyer present during questioning. Israelis can also be arrested and imprisoned without even knowing the charges against them, and without having any opportunity to face their accusers. When in trial, the accused in Israel do not have any right to a trial by a jury of their peers.

Did you know that Israel has a secret police apparatus? It’s called the Shabak (also known as Shin Bet, שירות הביטחון הכללי‎, General Security Service, GSS, Israel Security Agency, ISA, etc). I won’t pretend that the Shabak is anything like the secret police in Soviet Russia or the Mullahs’ Iran – they’re not habitually disappearing opponents of the regime – but they do use many tactics learned from studying totalitarian regimes and I don’t doubt that they’d rise to the occasion if opposition to our regime ever grew substantial.

The Shabak’s Jewish Department is its arm that is dedicated to preventing nationalist (ie, right wing) violence. The problem it faces is that there’s essentially no nationalist violence to prevent. You could say that this situation is a result of the Shabak’s ruthless effectiveness or that the Israeli right simply prefers to love Jews rather than hate Arabs. If it’s the former, the Shabak is a victim of its own success. If it’s the latter, one must wonder what kind of paranoia is fueling the elites’ hatred so much that they created the Jewish Department to sic on their benign enemies.

Though it’s highly potent, the Shabak is a bureaucracy like any other. It styles itself as a solution and needs to keep locating problems in order to keep the funding tap open. Consequently, the Shabak is involved in virtually all of the cases that it eventually brings to prosecution. The best known example is the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin nearly 15 years ago. Yigal Amir, the murderer, was incited to commit the act by Shabak agent Avishai Raviv, whose code name was Champagne. That of course doesn’t absolve Amir of the murder – he committed it alone, pled guilty and went to prison for the rest of his life – but it also doesn’t mean that Raviv wasn’t somehow involved. Note: there are conspiracy theories about the murder and I don’t believe them; what I’ve just said is backed up by evidence and courtroom testimony given under oath and published in major newspapers.

The Shabak in the mid 1990s was totally out of control if one of its agents was egging on Yigal Amir to assassinate the Prime Minister instead of simply figuring out if anyone was going to commit a crime, then collecting evidence and making an arrest. But instead of reigning in the Shabak and the Jewish Department, someone decided to create many more potential assassins by locating people with nationalist views, trying to convince them to commit acts of violence, and then conjuring up Jewish Undergrounds if any plan was ever hatched.

Though I am not religiously observant, and I live in Tel Aviv and work in the internet industry, and I’m not involved in any politics, I have many friends who are religious, who live in Jerusalem or settlements in Samaria or Judea and who are active and even prominent in nationalist circles. Every single one of them has been approached by the Shabak in an effort to turn them into an agent or an informer. The Shabak is not the Stasi, but it’s hard to believe they don’t admire some of the Stasi’s successes.

When being approached by the Shabak, every target hears a unique story that’s crafted to his own situation and identity. An academic might receive an invitation to help struggling officers in their studies; someone whose pistol has been extra-judicially confiscated by the police might be offered another one (who knows how many crimes it’s been used to commit?); someone else who’s unemployed with a wife and children might be offered cash.

Any smart person who’s approached says nothing about anything and does it as publicly as possible, making sure that all his friends and family know that the Shabak has spoken to him. This neutralizes the Shabak’s ability to function in secret, playing games with its victims, promising them things and threatening them. It also restores that person’s credibility. In the open, there are some rules that the Shabak has to follow, but behind closed doors, they can do essentially anything they want. The prime reason for the Jewish Department’s success is that Jews love to talk.

One guy who couldn’t resist the urge to talk was Chaim Pearlman, who recorded 20 hours of conversations with the Shabak even though he almost certainly knew better than to say anything. In the conversations, he allegedly insisted over and over and over again that he was emphatically not interested in any acts of violence and that he preferred to do things like distribute flyers and organize demonstrations. Even assuming that these aren’t his true beliefs, it was completely foolish for him to have gotten involved with the Shabak in this way. If for no other reason, they’ll now wage a vendetta against him in the courts just because he wasted all their time.

And that’s not to say that he’s innocent of the crimes (stabbing a bunch of Arabs in 1998). But could any court ever convict him now, since the prosecution will never be able to show motive? Not to mention the long amount of time that’s passed? I doubt it. Moreover, J is not the only one of us who’s seen Pearlman. He’s a little guy – he looks rather timid and even weak. Could he really have walked up to an Arab in the middle of the street 12 years ago, when he was 17 or 18, and stabbed him? I very sincerely doubt it. He would have to have been so wildly crazy that he definitely would have gotten caught on the scene, running around while covered in blood.

As the struggle continues between the Jewish department and the Jews, I was totally shocked to see Haaretz reporting on some of the Shabak’s psychological warfare. Five years ago, at the time of the expulsion of the Jews from northern Samaria and the Gaza region, Moshe Feiglin wrote that no one – not a soldier, not a policeman, and not a protestor – should be allowed to bring any weapons into the zone of conflict, and that anyone who did so could be considered a provocateur and should be detained and turned out immediately. At the time, this reflected a very high degree of sophistication, as it canceled the Shabak’s opportunity to arm its agents, or to incite its targets to arm themselves: Feiglin can probably be credited with saving some lives. He also wrote that the protestors would not throw around “Nazi” epithets at the police or soldiers, and that anyone who did so was almost certainly a provocateur. When I was arrested in a large group as part of the struggle, one person started screaming that the soldiers were the Gestapo and that we needed to resist them like in the Warsaw Ghetto. I immediately pointed at him and yelled “Shabaknik!” Everyone else looked at him. He shut his mouth immediately and five minutes later he was transferred to a different holding cell.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t my final contact with the Shabak. As I wrote above, if you’re approached by the Shabak for any reason, you should decline to participate in what they’re doing, but let everyone know that you were approached. I understand that I am a novice at being accused, but that they are professionals at accusing, so I’m going to follow my advice right now.

I was recently contacted on the telephone by a man who identified himself as a police officer. He knew some things about me, but he didn’t know some other things (presumably the things he’d need a warrant to find out…); at first he indicated that I’d been the victim of a crime and then he insinuated that I had somehow participated in the crime. He demanded that I present myself at a police station within five hours to be interrogated. I’m a 100% law-abiding citizen, with the exception of my occasional ingestion of hashish via brownies that I cook in my own kitchen. I got off the telephone with that “police officer” and contacted an attorney, who called around to the police stations and learned that there is no police officer by that name and that I am not known to the police in Israel at all. Does this mean that I was contacted by a Shabak agent? It seems like it, though it’s hard to be sure. Certainly the real police have not phoned me or come knocking on my door since then… I hope I never find out the answer.

As I wrote once about older girls, I basically like fucking them. I’m talking about girls between, let’s say, 30 and 35. I can’t really imagine fucking a girl in her late 30s, and the late 20s is still a no man’s land for me.

Older girls are great for what they’ve attained, not for what they’ve maintained (the maintenance is still highly necessary, but a good-looking 31 year old is still just a formerly stunning 21 year old). One thing I’d never say about a 30+ year old girl is that she “still has youthful beauty.” She doesn’t. Youth for humans ends in the mid 20s; maybe a girl can pull off looking youthful a bit into her late 20s, but I’ve never seen a 30 year old girl who looked youthful even if she still looked hot and sophisticated. I know the Lemondrop people don’t care, but they are so, so delusional that it makes me shudder to think about 31 year old girls strutting about as if they still have youthful beauty.

Moreover, I love that QVC conducted a poll about what makes women beautiful – and made sure to ask “over 2,000 men and women.” Since QVC is watched almost entirely by women, along with some homosexual men, they’re asking people who are attracted to men what’s attractive about women. This feedback loop has produced the insane conclusion that seven out of ten people think that confidence matters most for women, and only two thirds of people think that a woman’s good looks are what make her beautiful! Are we really to believe that a third of people think that a woman’s looks – basically synonymous with beauty – are not the most relevant factor to her beauty?

Picture: I tried using Google Image search to locate the hottest 31 year old girl I could find. This one really doesn’t look bad at all, but she’s wearing a shitload of makeup, is very fashioned out, and still needs to pose in a girlish position to make herself seem younger.

I’m sure he’d appreciate that title, though it would make him a homosexual. Right?

Anyway, I understand that Gene Weingarten is supposed to be funny, but is it even right to laugh when a guy tells a joke about his own industry’s obsolescence and what they’re trying to do to save their own asses?

I wouldn’t actually call him a “grumpy old codger” for preferring the mid 20th century style of newspapers better, but I would call him an idiot for thinking that such a format can succeed in the 21st century when every shred of evidence points in the opposite direction.

People of my generation don’t want to read day-old news printed on dead trees. I regularly turn down offers of free newspaper delivery from Haaretz because I have no use for yesterday’s stories at my door when I’m already reading today’s online for free, and I don’t want the hassle of throwing it in the trash all the time.

Weingarten may think that search engine optimization is goofy and dumb, but the reality is that everyone uses the world wide web to find information, primarily via search engines like Google, and some light on-page optimization to make a news article more search engine friendly only helps more people find it. In the old days, editors could make up wild and goofy headlines because their purpose was to be witty and catch the eye of someone at a news stand. That day is over – there’s such a title wave of information now that you have to give people what they’re looking for, or they won’t look at you for half a second.

Today is a calamitous day in Jewish history, when we observe the destruction of both Temples, by the Babylonians and Romans respectively.

It’s not a holiday the observance of which is mandated in the Torah, so I consider it entirely optional to participate in the public mourning. Nevertheless, I am always surprised and disappointed how very, very few secular types find enough meaning in this day to listen to Eicha (Lamentations), to fast or to visit the Temple Mount (this is reflected in a total ignorance and lack of interest in the Three Weeks preceding 9 Av).

In part, this is a direct result of the explicit and implicit message of 9 Av: we sinned collectively, and we will repent collectively; we were exiled, and we will be redeemed; the Temples were destroyed, and will be rebuilt.

The Reform approach to Judaism that dominates outside Israel, and that increasingly informs the Israeli elites’ view of Judaism when they choose to take one, stands against attaching any relevance to 9 Av at every level. Reform is uninterested in the causes leading to the destruction of the Temples because they rather unlike the notion of the Temples and prefer for them to have been destroyed. They don’t see what they call “diaspora” as any sort of exile at all, since they believe a Jew’s place is in Berlin, Hollywood and Boca Raton every bit as much as it is in Jerusalem, Petach Tikva and Afula. And they most certainly detest the whole idea of having a single and singular Temple standing in a certain geographical location around which the entire world revolves, which is why they call their houses of worship “temples” – though I must say that I’ve been to Reform “temples” and an awfully small amount of “worship” actually transpires in one. Fundamentally, Jews who think in the Reform manner hate 9 Av and everything it represents.

The other reason 9 Av is so little observed in Israel is that the men and women who crafted Israel’s civil religion, wary of coming across as too religious or of promoting secular observance of holidays whose messages they didn’t endorse and couldn’t transform, plucked a new set of holidays entirely out of thin air. Thus, we’re given to listen to a memorial siren and stand in silence on Yom HaShoah and again on Yom HaZikaron, holidays with no historical justification on which we’re supposed to mourn Holocaust victims and then soldiers and terrorism victims, respectively. Most religious Jews feel very uncomfortable with the arbitrariness of these holidays and only observe them out of respect for their secular neighbors and coworkers, and actually many Haredim ignore them entirely. If some rabbis and nationalist-religious thinkers had had their way, the above two observances could have been grafted onto the Jewish calendar of mourning in a more organic way. As it is, we’ve got secular mourning days in the spring that the religious don’t like, and religious mourning days in the summer that the secular barely know about, and wouldn’t like if they did.

But I think it’s important to fast on 9 Av, and I do it every year.

We did sin, and in fasting we do start the process to the correct behavior that will make us worthy to rebuild the Temple. That means, in the plainest language I can conjure, that we must look for what unites us rather than what divides us. For example: my ancestors lived in the Rhine River area 1000 years ago, and yours might have lived in the Iberian peninsula at that time, or in southern Arabia, or in northern Africa, or the Indian subcontinent – but there is no reason to be fixated on that historical moment. Instead, we can think back to 2000 or 3000 years ago and to a vast expanse of time when we were united and sovereign in this country.

We were exiled, though Jewish historians are now relearning that our Exile was not so cut and dried as we recently thought. In fact, the Babylonian exile never really ended (until the second half of the 20th century), and already in the Mediterranean world in 70 CE there were large, vibrant Jewish communities in many places, such as Alexandria and Rome. But undoubtedly exile was then a long process, lasting several hundred years, that led to a slow and almost total removal of Jews from Israel. There is no reason whatsoever to think that redemption – exile in reverse – will be any different or will somehow take a much shorter time. Already the Zionist movement has been bringing Jews to live in the land of Israel for nearly 130 years, since even before the term “Zionism” existed, and the vast majority of Jews already live here in Israel (this is arguable and it depends on how you count Jews).

The destruction of the Temple 1,940 years ago was the culmination of Jewish history up to that point and the defining moment of Jewish history until now. Modern Jews like me – even if they were raised to be religious – have no concept of how important the Temple was. It was at the center of the national and religious life of every Jew and of the whole Jewish nation. The Temple concept is actually of exceptional importance for secular Jews, and there’s a vast amount of meaning to be found in 9 Av for any Jew who cares to look for it.

For what it’s worth, I observe the Three Weeks, the Nine Days and 9 Av in my personal life, though I don’t follow all the rabbinic pronouncements – I keep those that resonate in my life and add some that are unique to me but meaningful. For example, I don’t shave or cut my hair during the Three Weeks (except before shabbat), but I do shower and wash my clothes during the Nine days. I also celebrate a feast – usually a steak and a glass of red wine – in the mid to late afternoon of 9 Av, to prepare for the future, when 9 Av will be a celebratory day. For many years on the evening of 9 Av, I’ve been going to the wall adjacent to the Temple Mount and listening to the assorted readings of Eicha, which is read with a specific and unique tune to sound more like a dirge. Every group there has its own style. I try to sit with a variety of yeshivot, making sure to find the Yemenite reading, since their pronunciation is so different from mine. For those who can’t make it this year, you may listen to Eicha in mp3 format here. And I hope it won’t be necessary next year.

Like Sam, I was a latecomer to the contact lenses club. I thought about this a lot recently after I saw a girl in glasses after I’d been dating her for a while. Of all people, I should not look at someone differently for wearing glasses. But she did seem different.

I wore glasses every day for most of my life. I even slept with them sometimes. Also for most of my life, I didn’t care about my appearance one way or another except to make sure I was decent to go outside the house (inside the house was a different story). But the glasses always bothered me. I could never find a pair that fit right. Even the better-fitting pairs kept slipping down the bridge of my nose. I think I just have an oddly shaped face and glasses aren’t designed to fit it.

That being said, I initially got contact lenses not because I thought they’d make me look better or even fit better – on the contrary, I was so used to my appearance with glasses that I couldn’t imagine my face without them – but because the optometrist asked me if I’d be interested in trying them and assured me (several times, actually) that they’re just as good at vision correction as glasses.

It seems that I was terrified to be thought of as someone who takes a proactive step to modify his appearance in some positive way. That kind of behavior is effeminate – it’s bad enough that I’m not good at sports; what I really don’t need, besides a hole in the head, is to be something like a “metrosexual.” I guess I didn’t realize that contact lenses are so widely used that nobody thinks any differently about people who use them. I’m sure the optometrist just figured that every other patient in my age range asks about contacts, so there’d be a good chance that I would be interested in them too (and that he’d be able to sell them to me).

The contacts are a pain in the ass to clean and not to lose, but I have learned something important from having them. Glasses probably do make my face look better. But they also sit between my face and whatever person who’s talking to me. If my connection with that person is not already strong, I do notice that it’s less easy to form one with glasses between us than when I’m wearing contacts instead. I don’t think it has anything at all to do with glasses themselves – it applies even when the other person is wearing glasses – it has to do with there being a barrier of any kind between our two faces when we’re facing each other. Looking at someone directly, looking to his or her eyes, is supposed to establish honesty and trust. But when there’s something else there, I believe the human brain sends up a red flag, and I don’t feel that trust can be established smoothly.

It’s the same observation I make about facial hair: I love being bearded, but I’ve now been mostly smooth-faced for years because people who look at me – even if they profess to like the beard and even if they do like it – can’t see my facial expressions as well when my face is covered in hair. And someone whose facial expressions are hidden is understood subconsciously to be something of an unknown quantity (or perhaps he has something to hide).

With the girl I mentioned above, seeing her in glasses sent little signals to my brain that made me feel distant from her. I happen to think she’s even more hot in the glasses than without them… but I don’t like when she wears them (fortunately she doesn’t have facial hair).

It was a big step for me to realize that it is totally legitimate to remove barriers to human connection by replacing glasses with contact lenses or going cleanshaven for most of the year, and that doing so has nothing to do with vanity. In fact, making it easier for other people to look at me does nothing at all except making it easier for them to look at me… and approach me… and trust me. It doesn’t make them like me better, but it does mean that I can look someone in the eye, smile and make a connection better. For someone like me who doesn’t do these things naturally and needed to learn them, the willingness to make small changes in my appearance makes all the difference in my life.

I’ve lived in Tel Aviv already more than a few years, and I long ago learned to hide what I believe about any issue from the people I meet here. More than half of the girls I’ve dated in Tel Aviv have been draft dodgers, not including the one draft resister I fucked after I had to listen to her interminably long story of how she fought against the military’s draft board for five years before they relented and told her that she wasn’t going to have to put on a uniform. I’ve had coworkers invite me to remembrance ceremonies on Memorial Day to mourn for the enemy, and I’ve sat and listened while people openly called for the prime minister to be murdered (for those who forgot, we actually had a prime minister get himself murdered 15 years ago).

The bigotry and seething, sneering hatred toward Judaism, religiously observant Jews and Zionism-patriotism-nationalism is suffocating and it so saturates the Tel Avivi worldview that it’s better just never to share an opinion on any issue. It’s all in the name of democracy, of course: my lightbulb moment was in realizing that these people are the true democrats and that anyone who opposes them, by fighting for the particularism and uniqueness of Israel or Jews, is standing athwart democracy’s progressive advance.

So I go along, just keeping my head down and hoping that no one will ask me how I voted, so I won’t have to lie again and say I voted for Meretz, and then I see some staggeringly weird news: the rabbis of Tel Aviv have acknowledged that it’s against Jewish law to rent apartments to illegal aliens.

Well, who would have thought that there are even 25 rabbis left in Tel Aviv to sign such a document? And one so inflammatory? And so correct?

If you doubt that Judaism’s true position is reflected in the rabbis’ letter, all you have to do is read to the bottom of the attack in Haaretz: people with no interest, no idea, and no interest in getting an idea about what Judaism actually says foam at the mouth to oppose it, because it’s “racism,” “fear,” “xenophobia” and “incitement” (“incitement” is a crime in Israel, defined as saying anything to convince someone that progressivism is wrong). The proper role of a rabbi now is – what else? – “preaching love of Israel and all of humanity.”

Wrong! Buddhist monks and Quaker pastors are supposed to love all living beings. Rabbis are supposed to study Jewish texts and tell people what Jewish law says – if not for that task, there’d be nothing at all for a rabbi to do. Though admittedly I’m no authority, I’m not familiar with any authentically Jewish text from the time of Abraham to the present day that deviates from the position that these rabbis have taken. Illegal immigrants and other forms of outlaws are not supposed to get our acceptance. Nor are they supposed to get our approval. Nor our support. And very certainly not our endorsement.

I am a bit disappointed that the rabbis didn’t just go all the way and extend their letter to include the enemy population that does have Israeli citizenship. I understand why they didn’t – they understood that writing, “Don’t rent to Muslims,” is to throw away one’s job, to be prosecuted for crimes like incitement and discrimination – risking real prison time – and to put one’s family at risk of physical harm. I imagine they’ll probably be fired for this letter (“The Attorney General must investigate to find out if these rabbis are on the government payroll”) as it is, but at least they’ll live to tell the story.

More proof that soccer is not only the lamest sport in history, but that it’s also evil: according to Haaretz, nine out of ten Islamists and mujahidin prefer soccer to more civilized sports like football (the real kind) or tennis.

Consequently, if you watch soccer on television, in the best case scenario you’re inadvertently endorsing the world’s slow Islamization. Worst case: if you actually play soccer, you are a terrorist.

Note: more than 20 years ago, I played soccer in an organized league. In the entire season, my team did not score a single goal, and our greatest accomplishment was holding our arch-rivals to a mere 7-0 lead. We still got trophies at the end of the year. Can you think of a crappier sport than that?

Muslim terrorists love soccer and want you to care about it. Resist their attempts to destroy your way of life. Football season starts in less than two months. You can hold out for that long!

Will S. asked these questions:

I’m Canadian, and an ardent monarchist myself; to me, it ties in with my patriotism, and my faith as a Christian (of the Protestant variety), and my disposition as a Canadian.

Monarchy, though, is always at least outwardly religious; whether the Christian monarchs of Europe, or the Islamic kingdoms like Morocco, or Japan, almost all monarchies, if not all, either credit their authority to govern to God, and are seen to at least outwardly conform to a particular faith. And most of the most ardent monarchists one encounters online tend to be religious, and particularly, Roman Catholic.

As a Jew, but not a religious one, would you welcome a religious monarchy for Israel, a return to (what I call) the Old Testament monarchies? How comfortable could you, as a modern, non-observant type, fit into such a society?

Just curious.

To clarify, could you envision an Israeli monarchy without theocracy?

Also, IHTG asked in my Open Thread:

You’ve expressed sympathies for monarchism in the past.

Looking at Jewish history, we have two examples of monarchic rule – the revered biblical Davidic kingdom of Judah, and the oft-overlooked* Hasmonean Judea.

So, what sort of monarchism did you have in mind, and how would it compare to those two examples?

*I’m of the opinion that the annals of the Maccabim are ignored to our detriment. For example, their policy of conversion of non-Jews, which would seem bizarre to modern Jews, but could conceivably have been a useful tool for the reborn Israel.

I thought this merited a full treatment rather than just specific response only to the questions raised. So I’ll try to do that here.

Monarchy

When I speak and think about monarchy, I’m referring to a system of government in which one man owns the government in the name of his family. He inherited the government from his father and grandfather and he will pass it to his son and grandson. There is no “politics” in the sense that it exists now, because the opinions of the general public are irrelevant to, and not solicited by, the few who rule, and because the barriers to entry into the government are so high as to be nearly insurmountable. But there is “politics” in the sense of politics as a branch of philosophy, which will always be consulted by people with power.

A dictatorship is not a monarchy, whether it’s a single guy who seized power, or a party, or the military or a faction in the military, no matter in whose name the dictatorship rules. Dictatorships have rather low barriers to entry – any schmuck can grow up one day to be a dictator – and in a dictatorship it’s never clear who the next dictator will be, with huge internal power struggles that are just more violent and byzantine versions of the democratic politics we know. I’m leaving aside constitutional monarchies as not relevant since, as we can see when we look around the world at them, a constitutional monarchy is just a premature republic.

I agree that monarchies are religious by nature. It’s not an accident that so many different religious traditions like to compare their gods to kings, and their kings to gods. A god implies order. We’re taught to love and fear a god, to request humbly from a god and to give thanks to a god. A king’s power can seem godlike and, for a religious tradition like Judaism that makes it so hard to conceive of God because God isn’t supposed to have human attributes, we can think that God is kinglike and at least have some sense of godliness. A king must concern himself with his domain’s religion.

Jewish Monarchy

The United Monarchy lasted for about a century and it’s the basis for what a Jewish monarchy should be, especially the second and third monarchs, David and his son Solomon. Hundreds of years later, the Hashmonaim also claimed the title “king,” but this is generally considered to have been illegitimate because they were also high priests, and as cohanim they were from the tribe of Levi and not from the house of David. Moreover, Israel was not really independent at that time, so it would be a stretch to consider them fully kings. It’s hard to say whether the Jews had more sovereignty then (under mainly the Romans) than we have now (under the Americans), but in any case the “kings” were something like vassals. An earlier title that the Hashmonaim used before king, ethnarch, describes their position well.

Jewish Messianism

The Jewish messiah is a living human male Jew in the future who will be anointed (משיח) king. That’s all. You don’t have to believe in anything supernatural to believe in the Jewish messiah. You can even believe in the Jewish messiah without believing in God. In order to be an anointed Jewish king, he’ll have to be a true descendant of David. The Rambam helpfully gave us some handy tools for figuring out if a certain person is or is not the messiah.

How we can be pretty sure someone is the messiah:

• He’s a king.
• He’s from the House of David.
• He studies the Torah intensely and observes the mitzvot (written and oral) in David’s style.
• He compels some sort of Torah lifestyle for the whole nation.
• He corrects or clarifies the issues that are unclear about the law.
• He fights what is basically the Jewish notion of holy war, a war of conquest over the land of Israel and to defend Jews.

And here’s how we can be certain that someone is the messiah:

• He successfully does all the above things.
• He builds the Temple on the Temple Mount, in the actual spot where it stood before.
• He gathers together the Jewish people (and identifies who is whom vis a vis tribes and lineage).

Note that I don’t exactly hold by the Rambam’s interpretation or his rulings, or necessarily by what any rabbi says. But I find his wisdom very instructive and I like to cite it on this topic. Of course, I don’t believe the “oral law” is binding and I certainly don’t think King David had any idea that, 1000 years after he lived, some people called “rabbis” would develop the concept of an “oral law” that he is supposed to have followed. But that’s beside the point. One of my favorite parts about the Rambam’s brief lists of qualifying traits is that he’s also clear that the messiah must be living. Another thing I like about it is that he basically says that the messiah will not change supernatural into natural. Life will still go on, in all its infinite intricacies. Nothing scientifically incomprehensible will happen. Again, I do not believe that Jews are required to agree with the Rambam’s opinions on this matter, or even that Jews are required to believe in a messiah.

Why do I mention Jewish messianism in this context? Only because that will be the vehicle for restoring Jewish monarchy in Israel. No other type of Jewish king besides a Davidic one will ever have the legitimacy that was lacking when the Hashmonaim tried to usurp it.

How a Jewish monarchy in Israel will happen

Unlike many Haredim, I don’t believe the third Temple is going to fall out of the sky one day onto the Temple Mount, already built. Nor do I believe it’s going to happen in the way that most people think it probably would happen: the situation in Israel gets intolerably bad, then it gets even worse, then we all figure that we may as well just give power to some guy, and that guy solves our problems and we live happily ever after with him wearing a crown.

I actually believe that we’re going to have to be somewhat advanced in solving our own problems before the stage will even be set for a monarch to enter. Some things that will need to happen in preparation:

• The country’s Muslim population will need to be expelled. It doesn’t mean that Muslims can’t be living here, but it does mean that they can’t be living here as a population, a national minority with group rights. As families and as individuals, they’ll have to accept a different status than the one they have now. This can either transpire in war, as the local Muslim population is shown to be openly and actively supporting our external enemies, or it can happen when there’s no war being fought. Israel already has the precise legal mechanism for effecting an expulsion of civilians under non-conflict conditions: it’s the 2005 Evacuation-Compensation Law that was used to expel the Jews from Gaza and northern Samaria. In that case, expulsion was absolute, down to every last man, woman and child, every animal, and they even demolished the synagogues and dug up the corpses from the ground and expelled them to different cemeteries.
• Construction of the Temple will need to begin. Preparation for the construction is already underway and it depends on things like whether they do have, or are getting, a red heifer, and/or whether they’re in fact successfully raising some children of cohanim in isolation so as to keep them ritually pure. Of course the mosques will need to be removed. I consider the Dome of the Rock to be of sublime beauty and I hope it can be taken apart carefully and reconstructed somewhere else in the world. I don’t think the Temple will need to be completed; perhaps that’s something that the messiah will do.
• The Sanhedrin will need to be strengthened. I’m not sure that the nascent Sanhedrin established six years ago will be the actual body that serves in the role, but I have a lot of respect for their initiative. Already they are hearing civil cases and there are people accused of political crimes by the state who have refused to be judged except by the Sanhedrin. In the future, these trends can grow and, if the state’s value system alienates the majority of traditional Jews, they may gradually shift their allegiance to the Sanhedrin if the Sanhedrin makes itself worthy. Of course, the Sanhedrin itself will have to evolve. It will need to make rulings that manage to satisfy groups of people with fundamentally opposed worldviews. I expect the Sanhedrin to do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of ironing out differences in liturgy and interpretation of halacha for the different Jewish communities.
• Some internal divisions will need to be overcome. Some will never be overcome, but I’m optimistic about the most superficial ones. I’d like to see the further growth of a true “Eretz-Yisraeli” Jewish identity that manages to supersede identities based on where our ancestors lived approximately 1000 years ago. When a majority of Jews in Israel can not easily explain whether they are Ashkenazi, Mizrachi or Sfaradi, this will have been achieved.

I don’t doubt that, if these things actually do happen, they will not happen in a vacuum. Instead, they will all be tied in with one another and with other of what I once called historical-redemptive processes (I was trying to bridge a group of religious people and Marxists). Moreover, the progress will not be straightforward, but will take a very long time, and there will be setbacks along the way. But that’s what needs to happen.

Features of a Jewish Monarchy

I expect a Jewish monarchy to be fully monarchical and fully Jewish. There will be no give-and-take between Judaism and monarchy like there is today when Israel calls itself “a Jewish and democratic state” and finds that Judaism is essentially anti-democratic and democracy is essentially anti-Jewish. I do not expect the king to sit around and learn Torah all day long to try to figure out how he should rule. The Torah doesn’t tell a king much about which policies he should pursue. In his personal life, the king is not going to approach life like a “yeshiva bochur” does. He will not spend a moment wondering whether to put his right shoe or his left shoe on first, and once they’re on, he will not spend a moment wondering which to tie first. He will be “religious” in the sense that he observes the mitzvot as he understands them. But the terms “religious” and even “religion” that I know from growing up in America aren’t easily translatable into Judaism. Perhaps his personal observance will be more like what we now call “traditional.”

Potential problems facing a Jewish monarchy before it exists

There’s only one main problem: America doesn’t want it. Israel is in America’s camp, and while we’re free to govern ourselves with much autonomy, no country in America’s camp gets to make its own decisions on every issue. The bottom line is that if America continues as is or gets stronger, it will remain impossibly difficult for countries to become independent, and nearly as difficult for countries to stay independent, as it is now. But if America gets weaker or somehow manages to break apart, many additional countries will experience real independence.

I am a former card-carrying Libertarian and I could certainly justify a more isolated America and/or an America that’s broken up into 50 independent or semi-independent states in pro-American terms, but it would be disingenuous of me now to do that. I don’t give a damn how Americans govern themselves except that everyone else has to fall in line. I favor a return to sovereignty of more than just a handful of countries, with most countries being led by America.

Challenges to Israeli monarchy

Kings are not really well equipped to deal with presidents. Democratic politicians are (self) selected for their cunning and their lack of scruples, while kings are educated to be wise and temperate. So a monarchic Israel, which will obviously face major challenges diplomatically, may find itself at a further setback trying to address them.

Secession is obviously a prime concern. If Israel establishes itself as a sovereign monarchy some day by seceding from the established world order (American hegemony), what’s to stop Tel Aviv from seceding from Israel, Ramat Aviv from then seceding from Tel Aviv, Ramat Aviv Gimel from seceding from Ramat Aviv, and so on, down to the individual who can’t decide whether or not to secede from his own brain? In short: nothing much, and any substantial change to the world order is a recipe for war between the people who don’t like it and the people who like it a little too much. Sometimes things just need to be fought out.

Another worry is that we could get a king in charge who simply doesn’t care about Judaism and Zionism. Maybe he’ll trade Jerusalem in exchange for Beirut; maybe he’ll bring in Chinese administrators to run everything. Maybe he’ll ban Hebrew and circumcision. We have to assume, though, that a king’s family will derive its rule’s legitimacy from Judaism and that the king’s own religious beliefs will prevent him from flushing it all down the toilet. In cases where he tries to do so, the family can always step in to remove him and put his son or brother on the throne.

Other comments

I believe Hillel Weiss has written about this extensively. I haven’t consulted his work because I don’t have the patience to read it all in Hebrew.

Mencius Muldbug’s idea of a modern substitute for absolute monarchy is called neo-cameralism. I’m intrigued by it, but also concerned that it would be plagued by legitimacy problems. Also, it’s a little too high tech science fictiony for my taste.

If you came here looking for instructions on cheating, you won’t find them. I am a reformed cheater and think cheating is despicable, so please don’t do it. In my high school, virtually everybody cheated (I know of two students who didn’t), but in retrospect I would have been much better off if I’d not participated in it, mainly by doing what I perceived as low-level things like allowing my homework to be copied and copying other students’. After I graduated high school, I never once even considered cheating in college or in any work setting, though I’m sure I would have been able to get away with it. That might be changing, as the Times reports that there’s a new arms race between cheaters and colleges trying to catch them.

The article discusses technology that colleges are using to catch cheaters. But I don’t know what good it does to catch somebody in the act of cheating, and it doesn’t at all address ways that cheating can be prevented and, when it’s not prevented, used to convince other people not to cheat in the future and create an atmosphere that holds cheating in contempt.

Before investing in video cameras and before making life that less pleasant for students who like to chew bubble gum during a test, if I were tasked with ending cheating, I’d simply raise the punishment for it to expulsion: no zero on the paper, no F in the class, no probation, no suspension, no black mark on the diploma – just expulsion. Having a single sanction does imply a downside – students are much less likely to be found guilty of cheating if guilt means they’ll be expelled immediately – but I think it’s well worth it.

The next thing I’d do is institute an honor code. But I mean using a real honor code that imbues real honor. A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do, is a real honor code. An honor code does not need a preamble, and an honorable person does not need to have “lying” defined for him, as in this crap honor code. But, since honor doesn’t come entirely from within, a strong honor code needs to reflect that honorable people don’t accept or tolerate dishonorable people in their presence.

Finally, I’d bring back the notion of class rank. I’ve never been a student at an institution that had class rank, so I can’t imagine the sort of additional pressure it would put on me to get good grades, move higher up relative to my peers and, yes, to cheat. But I do know that ranking students would make them care about each other and about each other’s work. I don’t see them realistically being driven to turn each other in or to fabricate false allegations about each other, but I do see them being driven to stay focused and to realize that cheating actually does hurt one’s peers.

When I was in already finishing college, one of my brothers matriculated at a school with a single sanction honor code, and when he told me about it, I knew that it made perfect sense. The students sat on juries that called witnesses and effectively expelled fellow students by finding them guilty of cheating, and in some cases those juries were reluctant to convict because they didn’t necessarily think the crime rose to the level of expulsion. But by associating cheating with expulsion and then sticking to their guns, they both imposed honor and brought honor to themselves and to their school. I couldn’t have been more impressed.