WWJA? – WHOM WOULD JESUS ASSASSINATE (8/29/05)

Considering that Pat Robertson’s apology for his malevolent words was significantly less enthusiastic than his call for Hugo Chavez’s assassination, I wonder if I might still find an aftermarket that would attract his hardest-core devotees.

Well-intentioned Christians wear the WWJD (“What Would Jesus Do?”) insignia almost everywhere. Pastor Robertson, with mass media at his disposal, now raises an even more vexing question for his adherents’ wrists and keychains: WWJA? “Whom Would Jesus Assassinate?”

The question at its essence is not comic relief. Does everyone who speaks in the name of God really speak in the name of God? Or, is the name of God a benign rubber stamp to validate maniacal agendas already plotted and set in motion by men bereft of God-consciousness?

Islamists randomly murder innocents without batting an eyelash, because Allah told them to. Hitler announced “Gott bei uns!” (“God is with us!”) as though he and the Almighty had chatted about it over a stein of lager. Rabbi Kahane was certain that God wanted him to cart the Palestinians off to the desert. Without imputing the same motives to them, President Bush and his inner circle have nonetheless been just a tad too loose at framing the mess in Iraq in the rhetoric of a Holy War.

I plead ignorance to the finer points of the Christian Testament. But, this I do know: The answer to “Whom Would Jesus Assassinate?” is “absolutely no one.”
Jesus preached peaceful resolution of conflicts. He abhorred anger, murder and political intrigue. He was forgiving to a fault. Hypocrisy took Jesus to the outer limits of tolerance, but after a few strident words or a parable spoken in love, chastisement could never be confused with vengeance. The Pharisees and Priests – whoever, in fact or fiction, they might have been – used every cruelty to anger him, but he would never capitulate. The only time that he really lost it was with the moneychangers in the Temple courts . . . hmmm . . . Jewish merchants trying to gouge Jewish customers.

Whatever one can say about Christianity, no one in his wildest imagination can conceive of Jesus as a hit-man or shadowy operative. Remember that it took three centuries for Constantine to figure out that if you hold a cross horizontally, it looks a lot like a sword.

Whom Would Jesus Assassinate? Not a soul. That would be an issue between the sinner and God the Father, not Pat, God’s snotty kid. What Would Jesus Do? He probably would be enraged. That business in the Temple courts was a tea party compared to intimating that political assassination comes with his and God’s blessings.

Men who have set themselves up as God’s camera-hungry spokespeople not only raise abstract theological problems. They play with the minds of the most credulous among us, the ones who blindly accept dogma and imprecations, and retain allegiance to preacher and preachments despite their obvious ill-will. Hence, a Robertson or Falwell who speaks with God’s authority is well more to be feared than the mule train of “Christian conservative” talk show hosts.

Did you actually hear, as I did, Pat sentence Chavez to death by an assassin’s bullet? He sat there preening in the intimation of Divine authority that intoxicates media-ordained men of God, but did not once mention God’s name. It reminded me of a sermon about Israel that I delivered early in my career. At the end, a congregant chastised me: “If I wanted a current events update, I would go read the Jerusalem Post. When I come to synagogue, I want to hear what God has to say.”

Did the question “WWJA?” ever cross his conscience before Pat invoked assassination in the name of his Christian ministry? Rabbis and imams may substitute the names of their own saints in the equation. You kind of wonder where it will all end, but I sure hope it isn’t before I dump off 10,000 bracelets in my basement. Hmmm . . . perhaps an ad campaign for Walla Walla Juicy Apples?

WEARING TEFILLIN: "YOU MUST BE CRAZY!"

I spend most of my time in the secular world. I’ve read the classics, my columns are internationally syndicated, and I consult with Fortune 500 corporations.

Hoo-hah.

I consider my greatest distinction that every day upon arising I wrap a pair of leather boxes containing sacred texts – one upon my upper arm, one at my hairline – and offer a half-hour or so of prayers.

Praying in its own may seem irrational for one whose day is absorbed in the mundane. But the boxes, known as Tefillin, seem beyond absurdity, the stuff of which Hollywood faux-Kabbalah is made. In a word, to the cynic or even hyper-intellectual secularist, Tefillin appear to be just so much hocus-pocus.

Many Jews, even the worldliest ones, see the distinction between human and beast in the human capacity to understand wisdom as an amalgam of the intellect, spirit, and motivation to action. Donning Tefillin is not simply a “prayer aid” or symbol of times gone by. To the contrary, it is a first-thing-in-the-morning underpinning of the rest of my day, one that will make it purposeful and directed toward creativity, not to aiding and abetting the world’s destructive forces.

DONNING TEFILLIN STIMULATES THE INTELLECT: The Biblical passages they contain are in themselves rich textual source material. But, the entire act poses an inescapable confrontation with the world’s most intellectually vexing questions: How does finite man grasp infinity? How did the world come into being? Is Creation random or purposeful? Will the world end? If so, how?

DONNING TEFILLIN STIMULATES SPIRITUALITY: This seems like a no-brainer. But, as my cardiologist used to day, “The case is not so easy.” How does the small and tangible connect us to the infinite and incorporeal? And yet, in some nearly incomprehensible, mystical manner, it’s true. The essence of our faith is the myriad ways that the finite and the Infinite intertwine. Each Divinely-mandated commandment that we perform is, in fact, preceded by the celebratory words, “I am doing this mitzvah for the sake of uniting the infinite Holy One with His finite manifestation on earth.

Spiritually, the Tefillin are a nexus of the Jewish past, present, and future. They are imploded mystically with the Exodus, the revelation at Mount Sinai, and all the pain and glory until the End of Days in which all of the world’s tumult will be reconciled in the coming of Messiah.

DONNING TEFILLIN IS A CALL TO ACTION: In their boxes and winding, it is as though they convey an energy that strengthens the weaker of our arms. They bend our longest finger in servitude of our hands to G-d. They dwell opposite our heart, the seat of our passion. They rest before our brain, the epicenter of our intellect. They knit together the nexus of head and spine, the very spot where thoughts and passions are converted to deed.

Donning Tefillin should not prompt the question, “Are you crazy?” Nor is it a prayer aid like worry beads. It is a Divinely-mandated rehearsal each morning for what the unity of intellect, spirit, and motivation will look like when they are at one with the Divine during the coming day.

I wish I could say that I attain that oneness every day that I wrap my arm and forehead in my Tefillin. Sometimes, I confess, it is more of a mechanical exercise. It’s good to keep in shape, regardless.

This, I do know: On the days that I do don my Tefillin with meaning and thoughtfulness, the time I spend at my work, with my family, with my study of Torah, with my recreation, with my G-d, with my friends, is all the more delicious. G-d is not a landlord who comes around to collect the rent but an intimate friend, and life doesn’t get any better.

A PLEA FOR KASHRUT IN THE HINTERLANDS

In 1990, I moved back to Atlanta to care for my parents. I did my best to eke out a living by writing. Nothing creative, just advertising, technical articles, collection letters.

A successful businessman from rural Toccoa utilized my services. He had the intelligence of a one-eyed donkey. My writing made him look so good that he invited me to work for him.

Toccoa was inhabited by yokels who were largely illiterate and had few aspirations. Their idea of a good time was to get drunk and get into fights. They had never seen a Jewish face in Toccoa until I arrived. My boss was so proud that he told everyone I was a rabbi.

I don’t know what people said behind my back, but they seemed to respect me. I got along quite well with the employees of my own company, because I was the only halfway intelligent, compassionate one to whom they could talk. They were adherents of fundamentalist Christianity, and knew nothing about Judaism. The gap would have been disturbing had it not been so comical:

One day, the girls were having an argument about some point of religion. As I walked in, they were jubilant. “Ask Marc,” one said. “After all, he’s a Jesuit!”

The operations manager, a college graduate, once announced that he had recently had “Marc’s people’s soup.” Ah, it must have been matzo ball, I thought. He continued, “I believe it’s called pasta fazool!”

Then came the party celebrating my engagement to Linda, a covered-dish dinner. I informed the host that we ate no meat, poultry, nor shellfish. We figured that we would unobtrusively eat the side dishes.

The message obviously did not get through. The entrée was pork roast. The salad was topped with bacon. The pasta was mixed with shrimp. The beans were cooked in fatback. The pie was mincemeat.

Linda and I must have seemed terribly rude.

They presented us their gift, a collection of $25. Ashamed, we offered our thanks and left shortly thereafter. As soon as we were out of range, I announced to Linda, “Let’s hold off our hunger just a little while. Now we have just enough money to buy a kosher pizza when we get back to Atlanta.”

SOMETIME SENTIMENT TRUMPS KASHRUT

Ever since I declared myself an amateur chef, I have spent most of my culinary life trying to make forbidden food conform to the rules of kashrut, and I have been relatively successful:

Properly cured duck’s breast is a wonderful substitute for pork prosciutto. A glazed veal roast is a remarkable substitute for ham. Seared ahi tuna loin is indistinguishable from the finest filet. Carefully poached and chilled halibut make a delicious ersatz crabmeat cocktail, when surrounded by a piquant tomato sauce. Kosher Polish sausage is a great replacement for highly seasoned pork andouille in a Cajun gumbo or jambalaya.

But, when all is said and done, the American-Jewish appetite is not about converting the illicit to the permissible. To the contrary, it is about the dubious, but almost universally touted, notion of “kosher-style.” Just what is kosher-style? If I wanted to be cynical, I would say that its practitioners may as well be eating liverwurst and muenster on Christmas stollen.

Alas, on this topic I am not cynical, for despite its legalistic hypocrisies, kosher-style food touches a warm spot in my heart. For the American Jew of Eastern European descent, kosher-style is equivalent to the food that grandmother prepared in the tenements of immigrant neighborhoods, now minus the strictures of kashrut: brisket, kugel, garlicky pickles, stuffed derma, corned beef, chopped liver, matzo ball soup and so on.

Kosher-style beef and poultry, however, are not slaughtered to kosher standards and are typically purchased from the neighborhood supermarket. The seasonings, though, are straight from grandma’s kitchen. Meat and dairy products may be cooked or served side by side, but the combination will be corned beef and cheese, never ham and cheese. The same for sour-cream napped potato salad and coleslaw accompanying spicy kosher-style hotdogs, but never porky bratwurst. Chicken soup and matzo ball may make a perfect appetizer for lox and cream cheese on a bagel.

The kosher-style delicatessen has become a venerated American phenomenon. It has institutionalized the notion that kosher is first and foremost a matter of Jewish sentiment, not legalism. Ironically, among the most prized item on the kosher-style menu is the Reuben sandwich: layers of corned beef, sauerkraut, Russian dressing on rye bread and topped with melted Swiss cheese, an ultimately non-kosher concoction, yet somehow intertwined with Jewish heartstrings.

Yet, Jewish sentiment seems to have no limits: A friend accompanied his companion to a renowned kosher-style restaurant in Miami Beach during Passover. After a bowl of chicken soup, the companion meticulously ordered a Reuben sandwich . . . on matzo! Before my friend could ask, his companion explained, “I promised my mother on her deathbed that I would eat only matzo on Passover.”

WHY I LIKE MY STEAK THICK AND RARE . . . I THINK

When I was a kid, we of the Jewish underclass spent our summer vacations relegated to tiny bungalows known in Yiddish as “koch alenehs,” literally “cook alones,” because, unlike going to a bona fide resort, you bought your own groceries and prepared your own meals. The sparseness of the Wilson’s koch aleneh was at least counterbalanced by the grandeur of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and Lake Superior.

What was the cuisine is our koch aleneh, you ask? In my childhood, our kashrut standards were at a bare minimum, if at all. We bought our staples, including meat, from the local grocer. Fish, though, was a special treat, freshly caught from Lake Superior and much of it smoked that day right on the rickety dock at Front Street.

Treating the family by occasionally going out to a restaurant was problematic, exacerbated by my crabby grandmother who brought her cloud of disdain to even the most joyous occasions. Ironically, she was not a religious woman. In fact, she purportedly “escaped” to America to liberate herself from her father’s orthodoxy and did not even light Shabbos candles.

Something, though, made her phobic about food served in restaurants. Her universal complaint, asserted with the certainty that the sun rises in the east, was that dining establishments added sage to all their recipes, lending them a noxious taste and aroma . . . despite her having never seen, much less tasted, the herb. Restaurant meat was likewise suspect because, to give it “goyische” flavor, it was wrapped in “chelev,” a term that she herself did not know referred to the Biblically-prohibited suet surrounding the kidneys and other organs.

Aside from her inability to throw a baseball, the fit that she pitched every time someone suggested that we treat ourselves to dinner was so unbearable that my peace-loving parents invariably acquiesced. She had no intention of dining in a restaurant that served sage and chelev, and to spare us the fate, she would sabotage our plans to go, too.

I was a robust, loving kid, so her imprecations meant little to me. I met them with whining and even an occasional tantrum. One year, I apparently caused so much grief that my parents gave in to taking us to Rutherford’s, a memory-filled steakhouse where they dined on their honeymoon.

Upon entering, the air was already redolent with impending disaster. No, my grandmother would not eat the salad, because “it had sage in it.” After much cajoling from my father, she reluctantly ordered a steak “very, very well-done” and completely trimmed of any fat. When the steak arrived, it was deemed “too bloody” and was sent back for a second immolation. This time the steak returned bucked at the edges and charred, but she refused to eat it because it had obviously been “basted in chelev.”

At this, my father rose from the table, meticulously rearranged his silverware and folded his napkin, announcing that we were headed back to the koch aleneh. Imagine the irony as my grandmother unapologetically threw open the refrigerator door, dressed her salad in ketchup and picked flakes of flesh away from a bony whitefish.

All I remember, Dr. Freud, was being yanked away from my first serious encounter with a bloody rare sirloin steak and a baked potato oozing fresh butter. I wonder whether this pre-adolescent trauma lurks deeply my brain as I still quest obsessively after a perfectly rare, thick steak accompanied by baked potato dripping in, OK, pareve margarine. And what of my herb garden overgrown with sage? And what of my schmaltz surrounding my chopped liver?

As for my grandmother, she lived on crankily to the age of 95. Apparently, she would not surrender herself to the Angel of Death until he promised her that in Heaven no one would ever hoodwink her into eating sage or chelev.