OPINION

For This We Yearned?
Let's Rethink Jewish Identity

now the

GAMES

wish youth
Detroit?

Over 4,000 paHid p
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The JCC

will take
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661-7722.

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kwith Community Cener
of Mctropalan rktroit

6/5
1998

36

The Jewish Community Center of Metropolitan Detroit
D. Dan & Betty Kahn Building • 6600 West Maple Road ■ West Bloomfield, MI 48322
Jimmy Prentis Morris Building ■ 15110 West Ten Mile Road Oak Park, MI 48237

RABBI JONATHAN ROSENBLUM
Special to The Jewish News

N

o matter how alienated
from his religion, it was a
rare Eastern European Jew
who would ever publicly
repudiate his religion in front of gen-
tiles.
Our history is replete with stories
of those who passed all their lives as
non-Jews and yet, when the Jews of
their town were rounded up for the
slaughter, stepped forward to declare
that they too were Jewish.
Today, we who so
pride ourselves on our
independence abase
ourselves in front of
the rest of the world.
We publicly spit on
the religion of our
fathers and gleefully
declare our contempt.
Homosexual activists
boast on TV, "We are
the generation of the
flood," the generation
that broke all barriers
of perversity.
In our first military
confrontation, shortly
after the exodus from
Egypt, Amalek, the
arch-enemy of the Jewish people, the
supreme denier of God in history, cut
off the sign of the covenant of Abra-
ham from slain Jews and flung it
toward heaven as proof that there is
no covenant and no God.
Today, Amalek is within, and it is
Jews themselves who proclaim to the
world that we have put behind us the
old superstitious religion. They
declare that all barriers to unbridled
freedom have fallen.
The nation has lost its head. Yossi
Sarid and Yitzhak Levy join hands in
celebrating the victory of Dana Inter-
national, a transsexual, and the honor
it has brought to Israel and Israeli
song.
Levy was stung by the suggestion
after the Independence Day Batsheva
Dance Troupe fiasco of scantily clad
dancers that a rabbi can't be with-it
enough, progressive enough, to serve
as minister of education. So he hur-
ries to show how hip he is, how
unfazed by transvestites and transsex-
uals.

Jonathan Rosenblum, an Orthodox
rabbi, writes from Jerusalem. This col-
umn first appeared in the Jerusalem
Post.

He still dreams of currying secular
favor by distancing himself from the
haredim, or ultra-Orthodox, and
imagines that the new paganism is
not as contemptuous of his kind as of
the haredim.
Rather than being buoyed by the
affection of Europe, we should ask
ourselves precisely what honor has
been conferred upon us and why.
Consciously or unconsciously,
Europeans honor us for having refut-
ed Jewish claims of moral superiority
and chosenness.
Christian and pagan anti-Semites
have always hated
the Jew as bearer of
God's moral message
to humanity: Chris-
tians because they
believe themselves to
have supplanted
Jews as God's cho-
sen; pagans because
they despise morali-
ty-
Church-sanc-
tioned pogroms and
the civic degradation<
of Jews throughout
the ages were
designed to demon-
strate to us that we
had lost divine favor.
Our continued existence and obsti-
nate retention of our faith in the face
of such proofs only testified in the
eyes of the gentile world to our
exceptional perverseness.
Nietzsche recognized the Jews as
the source of morality, and con-
demned us for having drained the
pagan world of its Dionysian power.
Hitler, the arch pagan, followed Niet-
zsche. He ranted that the Jews had
inflicted two wounds on the world:
mercy for the downtrodden and cir-
cumcision. Nazi propaganda films
portrayed Jews as a horde of rats
transformed into Chasidim. Hitler's
Jew hatred was synonymous with
hatred of a religion that charged its
adherents to be holy because "I, the
Lord, your God, am holy."
Today, however, neither pagans
nor Christians need trouble them-
selves any longer with the Jews. We
have declared ourselves pagans, cele-
brants of any form of sexual license
and chic androgyny; we have turned
those among us who continue to
believe in God into objects of scorn
and ridicule.
Once anti-Semites portrayed us as
sexual libertines and perverts to
undermine our moral authority.