Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Annabelle Gurwitch, Why I Won’t Be Invited to Mitt Romney’s White House, TheNation.com, December 13, 2007

1. Shellfish. My God would never make mussels, clams and oysters taste so good and then prohibit me, a Jewish gal, from eating them.

2. The meek shall inherit the earth. In my family, like much of America’s workforce, not only have the meek inherited nothing, they are barely holding on to their standard of living. So on this point alone, I reject the Bible.

3. American Gladiators. If there were a God, American Gladiators would not be returning to TV this winter.

4. Iran. If there were a God one part of our government wouldn’t be opening doors to negotiate with Ahmadinejad, while another fans the flames for military action.

5. There’s not enough good Szechwan in Los Angeles. If there were a God, he would make better Chinese food more readily available in Los Angeles. LA is mostly made up of transplanted New Yorkers, so why can’t we get good old chicken and broccoli in garlic source out West?

6. Britney Spears. If there were a God, Britney Spears wouldn’t be one of the most Googled topics on the Internet. Although perhaps there is a God and this is one of the signs of the apocalypse. Example: Spears gave us views of her vajayjay: 3,450,000 Google hits. Jonas Salk gave us the polio vaccine: 212,000 Google hits.

8. God doesn’t give you anything you can’t handle. My God wouldn’t allow people to make up inane aphorisms about him. I’m disorganized, easily distracted, have a fear of anything medical and have a kid with health issues. My God would know that I was a poor choice for this assignment, that this saying is just moronic and only serves to make people like me feel worse when we inevitably fail.

AlterNet: Rights and Liberties: Thou Shalt Find It Impossible to Live Like the Bible Tells You to, November 16, 2007

He didn’t want to stone adulterers. But that was part of the deal. That’s what A.J. Jacobs was being paid for.

“The Hebrew scriptures prescribe a tremendous amount of capital punishment,” Jacobs writes in The Year of Living Biblically (Simon & Schuster, 2007), his account of an experiment in which the lifelong agnostic spent 12 months obeying the Old Testament as literally as possible — while living in an Upper West Side apartment and working for Esquire.

“Think Saudi Arabia, multiply by Texas, then triple that. It wasn’t just for murder. You could also be executed for adultery, blasphemy, breaking the Sabbath, perjury, incest, bestiality, and witchcraft, among others. A rebellious son could be sentenced to death. As could a son who is a persistent drunkard and glutton.

“The most commonly mentioned punishment method in the Hebrew Bible is stoning. So I figure, at the very least, I should try to stone. But how?”

At the time, Jacobs was in month two of his venture, still throbbing with a neophyte’s enthusiasm: “I want to smash idols,” he surprised himself by musing. Gathering a pocketful of tiny white pebbles in Central Park, he strolled until he met an irascible old man who mocked Jacobs’ walking stick. When this man — having been asked — declared himself an adulterer, Jacobs lobbed a pebble at his chest. It bounced off.

He had grown up in a resolutely secular Jewish home — sans bar mitzvah, sans Sabbath candles; he was even named after his still-living father, such an Ashkenazic rarity that an El Al security officer, eyeing the “Jr.” on his passport six months into the experiment, doubted that Jacobs was even Jewish at all. “I’m Jewish,” he writes, “in the same way that Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant.”

‘Foreskin’s Lament: A Memoir’ by Shalom Auslander - BOOK REVIEW - Los Angeles Times - calendarlive.com, october 14, 2007

Auslander…can be a moving writer; many passages describe with great skill the airless, oppressive climate of Monsey. Perhaps the finest chapter recounts the time his father — a carpenter who wanted for respect in the scholarly community — was commissioned by the local rabbi to build a new ark for the congregation’s Torah scrolls, only to be humiliated and ignored upon its unveiling.

And he can be funny: A reminiscence of his first dalliance with non-kosher food ranks with sections of “Portnoy’s Complaint.” Auslander watches a Gentile order ahead of him at a poolside hot-dog stand. “Vinnie stood beside me, piling his pig dog high with sauerkraut and thin-cut pickles. I stared, open-mouthed, as he flipped his hair back, cleared a path to his mouth, and took a bite. It was as if he’d never heard of Leviticus 11:7.”