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Main St., Suite 150, Milford (corner of Haggerty in the Newberry Square Plaza) (just N. of Commerce in the Valley Plaza) (248) 960-7666 (248) 684-0321 ■ BBC) Grill on the Table ■ Best Sushi Bar in Town ■ Traditional Floor Sitting Rooms Available ■ Free Karaoke 9:00 p.m. with dining or drinking I 10% off I I your TOTAL food bill '4. ANY TIME I Dine in only • Not good with any other offer expires 8131103 I ew Seou 8/ 1 2003 54 740140 .Arden Authentic Korean & Japanese Cuisine Phone (248) 827-1600 www.newseoulgarden.com newseoulehotmail.com Open Daily Catering Available 2 27566 Northwestern Hwy. r; from page 53 idea when it arose in the 1800s in Germany. Judaism was built to be reformed. Problem is, some of the reforms were designed for little pur- pose other than to make Jewish wor- ship look less weird to any Christians who might happen to drop by. So a spirited, participatory free-for- all was turned into Jewish church: Rabbis put on robes, stood on a stage in front of the room and engaged in boring, monotone responsive readings with the congregation. All the atro- phied dullness of Christianity, only without the salvation. Worse, this induced what Freud would call "regression and transference." The audience of spectators regressed to a childlike state and transferred parental authority onto their rabbis, who became more like priests administering the reli- gion to their congregants. No matter. Reform Jews figured someone wearing a black hat, probably somewhere in Israel, was doing the "real thing." And so checkbook Judaism was born, through which Americans could practice their religion by proxy. Little did they know their money was going to some of the most stri- dently Zionist sects around and forc- ing the Israeli government to cow even further to their bizarre demands. Which brings us to the real reason we can't talk about Judaism today: Israel. Note — I'm not suggesting that Israel shouldn't exist, but many readers will already think I've just said that. They cannot even see these words that say otherwise. Our problem is not with the Israelis, but our insistence — as Americans — in justifying a nation's existence with our religion. By forcing the Torah to serve as an accurate historical chroni- cle of the Jewish claim to disputed ter- ritories, Jews turn themselves into fun- damentalists who have no choice but to interpret their texts literally. 'Abraham got this piece from God in Genesis, and Jacob got this piece from the Pharaoh ..." The trans- dimensional nature of Jewish myth — as profound as that of any Eastern reli- gion — is reduced to a real estate deed. This literalism is a problem. Fundamentalists believe that Jews must be in control of the entirety of biblical Israel in order for the messiah to return to Earth. This is why Orthodox extremists from Brooklyn race — guns in hand — to settle the West Bank. It is also why the American Christian funda- mentalists are responsible for funding a majority of Jewish immigration from Russia to Israel. They want to bring on the End of Days and get to Armageddon already. But because many Jews refuse to look a gift horse in the mouth, everyone from Bush to Falwell becomes our allies. Fear, desperation and a history of perse- cution make for strange bedfellows. To free ourselves from this self- defeating conundrum, Jews must understand our unwitting complicity in this pact with, well, the devil. We must entertain the possibility that Israel, the nation, may not be the ulti- mate realization of Jewish ideals as much as a necessary compromise. There are better arguments to be made for a Jewish homeland than the assertion that the "one and true God" gave it to us. (That's not what abstract monothe- ism was invented for, anyway. She's not just our God — she's everyone's.) After centuries of exile or worse by nation states with their own official religions, one Jewish strategy was to create our own nation, with its own official religion. Although long characterized by an independence from territory and local gods, Judaism might not be completely wrecked by the temporary suspension of these values for the greater priority. Israel may indeed be important to the Jewish people and, as a potential laboratory in ethical nation-building, to the whole world, but its current and inappropriate centrality to the Jewish faith makes it a topic that cannot be approached or discussed openly. Like the synagogue and the Jewish bloodline, Israel has become an idol. As a result, many American Jews feel that to question the religious or political authority of Israel — to suggest, as I have, that God might not have invented the nation-state — is akin to blasphem- ing Judaism or forgetting the Holocaust. So, as the Jewish authorities have made abundantly clear to me, we are to remain silent. Life for Jews in the Americas today is as good as it has ever been. Only by reviving the inquiry and activism that are truly central to Judaism can we serve as antagonists rather than passive sup- porters of everything from blind funda- mentalism to the Bush regime's designs on the Middle East and the world. Just because the Jews will inevitably be blamed for provoking these cru- sades doesn't mean we have to make the accusation true. Resistance is our tradition, and it's worth fighting for. At this point, it's more important to me that I do Judaism than that I get to call myself Jewish. — Copyright © 2000-2003 Featurewell. corn; all rights reserved.