Rabbi Meir Soloveichik and Amy Coney Barrett: Radical Catholic Love with More Trumpworld Lies and Corruption
David Shasha
Rabbi Meir Soloveichik and Amy Coney Barrett: Radical Catholic Love with More Trumpworld Lies and Corruption
Rabbi Meir Soloveichik and the Catholics (1): Stephen Dubner and Schadenfreude
The end of the Sukkot holiday was a boon time for our dear friend.
Even though Bari Weiss is currently AWOL, her Zalman Bernstein buddy is doing very well at her former haunts.
Here is a convenient review courtesy of The Tikvah Fund:
His WSJ article on Stephen Dubner, whose Jewish parents converted to Catholicism, but who eventually returned to Judaism, is replete with a very complex schadenfreude and sense of Jewish Supremacy:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-former-catholic-dances-with-the-torah-11602198181
The complete article follows this note.
Here is the background:
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/stephen-j-dubner
He manages to talk about the COVID lockdowns for the holiday, with echoes of the Jewish Election theme that was the subject of his Princeton dissertation on Michael Wyschogrod.
Here is how he describes the differences between Christians and Jews when it comes to the Bible:
What Jews celebrate on this day is not only that the Torah is completed, but that we can begin it again. While Christians often call their reading of scripture “Bible study,” Jewish parlance refers to “learning Torah.” It’s not a review, but a constant search for new insights. “One cannot compare,” the Talmudic rabbis reflected, “one who has learned one-hundred times to one who has done so for the one-hundred and first.” The biblical books contain everything we could ever know.
I am intrigued that he uses the term “new insights” when all we are now hearing from the Religious Right is “Originalism.” It is unclear what “new insights” Soloveichik is talking about, as his support for the atavistic Jewish Primitivism of Wyschogrod is deeply tied to the barbaric jurisprudence of Antonin Scalia:
https://blogs.yu.edu/news/straus-center-welcomes-christopher-scalia/
It is clear that the Neo-Con Soloveichik rejects the classical Sephardic tradition and its Jewish Humanism, preferring instead to promote an Ashkenazi Jewish “Originalism,” as we have seen in his theocratic Religious Liberty crusade:
https://tikvahfund.org/advanced-institutes/religious-freedom-in-america/
Indeed, he has published a book of readings that fit very comfortably into the Federalist Society mode:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/SvAkVwHpJUU/m/y50PJbkPBAAJ
And then we get to the COVID:
Given the social distancing mandated by the current pandemic, this will be a Simchat Torah unlike any other. In Israel, currently mired in an intense lockdown, many synagogues will be closed. Around this side of the world, whatever dancing takes place will be muted. Nevertheless, the fragility of life we’ve experienced in the past months allows us to appreciate better what the Torah means to us. The pandemic has made us understand what we often took for granted: how the ability to gather weekly in synagogue and study the Torah together is one of our greatest gifts. And we better appreciate how, in the face of life’s trials, it is the Book of Books that sustains us.
I am not sure if he is anxiously referring to Heshy Tischler and the Mask-Burners here!
The night of Simchat Torah is usually one of the most raucous of the Jewish year. Jubilant songs are sung, and dancing suffuses the sanctuary as the Torah scroll is passed from Jew to Jew.
Indeed, in the degenerate Age of Trump, of which Soloveichik is a proud partner, being Jewish has very much changed, as we have seen in Borough Park:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QE_02l1NvM
We can thank Soloveichik for his support of Trump and his wanton destruction of our Religious Freedom:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/W2F21yO7Plg
We have seen how his pal Senator Mike Lee has flouted mask-wearing after being diagnosed with COVID:
In the enchanted world of Mike Lee and Meir Soloveichik we are free to die under the sign of Lysol!
I am just wondering: What does Stephen Dubner think of all this?
Rabbi Meir Soloveichik and the Catholics (2): Charles Chaput
We then move from Dubner to the Archbishop of Philadelphia going to YU:
Strikingly, this point about Jewish learning was made by one of America’s most insightful Catholic thinkers, who experienced a moment that mirrors Mr. Dubner’s revelation in a synagogue. A decade ago, Charles Chaput, then archbishop of Philadelphia, visited the study hall of New York’s Yeshiva University, where hundreds of students spend much of their day learning Torah. Archbishop Chaput returned to church to deliver a homily about what he saw. He said he realized how “the Jewish people continue to exist because their covenant . . . is the foundation and glue of their relationship with one another, with their past, and with their future. And the more faithful they are to God’s Word, the more certain they can be of their survival.”
It is definitely a First Things New Convivencia moment:
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2012/08/yeshiva-lessons
We will recall Soloveichik’s close ties to Father Richard Neuhaus and the radical Catholic extremists:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_fs8wonYLfhONdKPKTgFt_aoi6GPoJ2uhDFcWOfKuTk/edit
It is indeed highly ironic that the central figure of Modern Orthodox YU Judaism wrote a diatribe against having any theological exchanges with Christians:
https://www.jewishideas.org/article/modern-orthodox-approach-interfaith-dialogue
Times have indeed changed in Washington Heights!
The Archbishop is all in with the Wyschogrod Body of Faith Incarnation:
I saw in the lives of those Jewish students the incredible durability of God’s promises and God’s Word. Despite centuries of persecution, exile, dispersion, and even apostasy, the Jewish people continue to exist because their covenant with God is alive and permanent. God’s Word is the organizing principle of their identity. It’s the foundation and glue of their relationship with one another, with their past, and with their future. And the more faithful they are to God’s Word, the more certain they can be of their survival.
My point is this: What I saw at Yeshiva should also apply to every Christian believer, but especially to those of us who are priests and bishops. The source of our brotherhood, the seal of our friendship, is the person of Jesus Christ, alive in God’s Word and alive in the Eucharist we celebrate and share throughout the year.
In the Gospel of Matthew, even as Jesus contests with the Jewish teachers of his day for authority to speak God’s Word, he affirms their rabbinic role. The rabbis, he tells the crowds, “have taken their seat on the chair of Moses. Therefore, do and observe all things whatsoever they tell you.” In the Catholic tradition, we see that same rabbinic role as the duty and responsibility of priests. In our communities, God has charged his priests with taking their seat on the chair of Moses.
Those of us who are priests need to do everything we can to purify ourselves of vanity, fear, fatigue, and resentment, and to make ourselves worthy of that responsibility. Our own souls, and the souls of our people, will depend on the fire that should burn in our hearts”a fire of love for Jesus Christ, for the Word of God in Scripture, for the Church as our mother, and for the people God places in our care.
Indeed, it sounds a lot like Daniel Boyarin and Paula Fredriksen:
Or perhaps it sounds more like Dennis Prager and John Hagee:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/tcPSzq85XRI/m/1F8E5KhICgAJ
In any case, it is rich to hear how Catholics are now marveling at the Jewish ability to withstand the very persecution that their Church has doled out to us:
I saw in the lives of those Jewish students the incredible durability of God’s promises and God’s Word. Despite centuries of persecution, exile, dispersion, and even apostasy, the Jewish people continue to exist because their covenant with God is alive and permanent.
On the one hand, we see how the Neo-Con Jews stand against Christianity, but on the other, there is a burning desire to become one in the battle against American Liberal values.
It is this tension that animates the thinking of Soloveichik and his Tikvah allies.
It is thus critical to note just how the New Convivencia works in Trumpworld, and how White Jewish Supremacists like Soloveichik are cheering on the New Fascism.
Rabbi Meir Soloveichik and the Catholics (3): Amy Coney Barrett, the Whore of Trump
And then, of course, we have Soloveichik’s vigorous defense of Amy Coney Barrett in the name of Religious Liberty:
The complete article also follows this note.
Indeed, it has been a very rough week watching the Whore of Trump cheat and lie, as she does her “Apprentice” audition for the Orange Pig:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/rot8QAXSvMo
Her illegitimate confirmation hearings were a new low for prevarication and PILPUL:
Her pawn-like allegiance to Trump was so absolute that she would not even confirm basic points of Constitutional Law that are obvious to an elementary school child:
Issues like voter intimidation and the peaceful transition of power are uppermost in the Lysol mind, and Barrett’s non-responses were aimed at her Audience of One, reminding us of the Banana Republic AG and Rapist Kavanaugh confirmation hearings:
https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-54274115\
Perhaps even more concerning in a tachles sense is the fact that Barrett, along with the current Chief Justice and Kavanaugh, was a loyal Republican foot soldier in the Bush v. Gore mess:
We already know that the Murderer-in-Chief, who has largely conceded that he will lose the election if it is conducted legitimately, is preparing litigation to battle it out in the Supreme Court:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/24/politics/supreme-court-bush-gore-trump-lawsuits/index.html
Indeed, he has said it out loud that he wants to have “his” SCOTUS there for him:
Barrett pretended as if she had no idea about any of it:
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a34374103/amy-coney-barrett-bush-v-gore/
Perhaps Whore is too kind a word for her!
But in his New York Times Op-Ed Soloveichik made it all about Religious Liberty rather than the imposition of a Trumpist Theocracy which would force Christianity on all of us:
Traditional Jews in America who read these broadsides against Judge Barrett can easily imagine similar ones about themselves. We might wonder what the reaction would now be were a member of our own religious community appointed to a position of prominence. After all, the Jewish liturgy’s expressed aspiration, in an existence filled with injustice, is “to fix the world through the kingship of God.” We believe ourselves bound by a covenant to other Jews, and many of our observances mark us as different, just as they did in Seixas’ day. Like Muslims, Sikhs, and other minority faith communities, we dream of our daughters and sons experiencing American equality without suffering for their beliefs.
In the course of the superbly-timed advocacy for the Lysol nominee, Soloveichik manages to rope in Moses Seixas and Elena Kagan in ways that would likely have dismayed them.
Reinforcing his deep love and abiding concern for Catholics and Catholicism, the article is ultimately a paean to Barrett and her First Things radicalism:
Much attention has been paid to Judge Barrett’s faith, and to “People of Praise,” a religious community of both Catholics and Protestants to which she belongs. Articles have described the oath, or “covenant,” taken by its members to act in loving service to one another. Another topic raised was a speech delivered by Barrett, describing her ultimate aspiration as serving “the kingdom of God.” These stories insinuate that her religion marks her as out of the mainstream, or unable to serve fairly as a Supreme Court justice.
It is an excellent PILPUL performance. Very Ashkenazi, very Mike Lee, very misleading, very New Convivencia.
That is indeed the way of Zalman Bernstein.
And I was struck by the craven attempt to mischaracterize the slimy judge as “mainstream,” a tactic that was also used by The Federalist Society’s Keith Wittington in his NYT Op-Ed:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/12/opinion/amy-coney-barrett-supreme-court-roe.html
As we have seen, the idea is to pretend that Barrett is not what she says she is:
If Judge Barrett is confirmed, she will join a small group of Supreme Court justices who are avowed originalists; they think that the meaning of the Constitution was fixed at the time of its adoption. As a former clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia, long the court’s most prominent originalist, Judge Barrett has often explored and refined the jurisprudential principles laid down by her former boss. When she has weighed in on points of disagreement among originalists, she has tended to push originalists toward the judicial mainstream. When evaluating the constitutionality of laws, where some originalists would argue that the courts should aggressively scrutinize every action that legislatures take, she has urged that judges adopt a more deferential posture. On stare decisis, she has urged giving precedents more weight than some originalists would prefer.
The canard was exploded in an argument made against The Federalist Society and its apparatchik Leonard Leo by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse at the hearing:
Whitehouse made clear the connection between the Barrett nomination and the years-long project of the Conservative radicals to stack the courts with their hand-picked judges who will do as they are told:
In all cases, there is big anonymous money behind various lanes of activity. One is through the conduit of the Federalist Society. It is managed by a guy named Leonard Leo and it has taken over the selection of judicial nominees. How do we know? Because Trump has said so, over and over again. His White House counsel said so. We have an anonymously funded group run by this guy named Leonard Leo. We have anonymous funders running through something called the Judicial Crisis Network, which is run by Severino, and it is doing PR and campaign ads for Republican judicial nominees.
It got a $70 million donation in the Garland-Gorsuch contest. They got another donation to support Kavanaugh. Perhaps the same person spent $35 million to influence the makeup of the United States Supreme Court. Tell me that is good. Over here, you have an array of groups funded by dark money that have a different role. They bring cases to the Court. They do not wind their way to the Court, they get shoved to the court by legal groups, many of which get quickly to the Court to get their business done there. And then they turn up in an orchestrated chorus.
Strangely, it seems that all of them do not want Americans to know what they are really up to:
It is unclear why these wingnuts are so concerned about concealing their true views.
Why should they not be proud to present their true views in clear view of the public?
And we have long seen how Soloveichik stands resolutely with them, as he has long advocated restrictive views on issues like Birth Control:
https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article24724369.html
As in the case of the picture with Trump, we see Soloveichik allied there to the Christian radicals in a very warm embrace.
How touching!
In the end the confirmation hearings are a Gaslight sham, and should not be taking place as the election is going on.
If he had any ethical sense, Soloveichik would take a page from Barrett’s Notre Dame colleagues – some from the Theology Department – and ask that she hold off the hearings until after the election:
Not either Soloveichik or Barrett has any honesty or decency:
Documents are not what they used to be:
Amy Coney Barrett has failed to disclose an awful lot of documents to the Senate in her nomination to the Supreme Court. This is probably one of them: a letter from 88 of her Notre Dame colleagues, dated October 10, asking her to withdraw at least temporarily from consideration for the position.
The idea is to make sure to ram the New Theocracy down our throats and to hell with the truth.
And it is the New Theocracy that so animates Meir Soloveichik, as he continues to tear down the noble legacy of Sephardic Jewish Humanism that was once the hallmark of the oldest Synagogue in America.
If the current illegitimate nominee is confirmed to the Court, we will now have a Pornographer, a Rapist, and a Whore all serving on the most important tribunal of justice in the land.
We do not stand a chance.
David Shasha
A Former Catholic Dances with the Torah
By: Meir Soloveichik
Stephen Dubner, a co-author of “Freakonomics,” is the son of Jewish parents who converted to Catholicism and raised him in their newfound faith. Mr. Dubner’s 1998 memoir, “Turbulent Souls,” recounts his later return to Judaism. His turning point came when his then-girlfriend suggested that he visit a synagogue. Mr. Dubner did so reluctantly, and on arriving instantly regretted the decision, surprised by “how little it felt like Church,” and feeling “like an intruder, perhaps an imposter.”
Then the Torah came out of the ark. Suddenly, Mr. Dubner writes, “The air itself seemed to grow lighter, easier to breathe.” As all in attendance hurried over to kiss the scroll bearing the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, he did likewise. “A resonance, a gratefulness, a relief, blistered its way inside me: It is the book they are venerating here.” Mr. Dubner today has a Jewish family. His son, Solomon, is named for Mr. Dubner’s father, who went by Paul. His rediscovery of his roots began with a synagogue experience: “The way a Jew greeted the Torah, as though it contained everything he would ever need, everything that had ever been known or could ever be known.”
The Torah scroll is the most sacred object of Jewish life and the centerpiece of its Sabbath service. Every week it is escorted from the dark. A portion is read aloud in the synagogue, and the scroll is reverently returned to its place. On the next Sabbath, we pick up the text where we left off; and this weekend, on a holiday known as Simchat Torah, or “The Joy of the Torah,” we achieve the annual completion of the scroll.
What Jews celebrate on this day is not only that the Torah is completed, but that we can begin it again. While Christians often call their reading of scripture “Bible study,” Jewish parlance refers to “learning Torah.” It’s not a review, but a constant search for new insights. “One cannot compare,” the Talmudic rabbis reflected, “one who has learned one-hundred times to one who has done so for the one-hundred and first.” The biblical books contain everything we could ever know.
The night of Simchat Torah is usually one of the most raucous of the Jewish year. Jubilant songs are sung, and dancing suffuses the sanctuary as the Torah scroll is passed from Jew to Jew.
It can surprise outsiders that Jews would dance with their law and that a book of revelation could inspire such seemingly irreverent joy. In the 17th century, the London socialite Samuel Pepys came across a Simchat Torah celebration and wrote: “I never did see so much, or could have imagined there had been any religion in the whole world so absurdly performed as this.” Centuries later Harvard theologian Harvey Cox was more appreciative, describing it as a “gamboling with God.”
That we dance with our scrolls indicates that, for the people of the book, sacred text is more than law; it is our friend. When we finish reading the scroll, we ensconce our beloved Torah in what may seem to be a “last dance”—but then suddenly, unable to tear ourselves away, we begin reading again.
Given the social distancing mandated by the current pandemic, this will be a Simchat Torah unlike any other. In Israel, currently mired in an intense lockdown, many synagogues will be closed. Around this side of the world, whatever dancing takes place will be muted. Nevertheless, the fragility of life we’ve experienced in the past months allows us to appreciate better what the Torah means to us. The pandemic has made us understand what we often took for granted: how the ability to gather weekly in synagogue and study the Torah together is one of our greatest gifts. And we better appreciate how, in the face of life’s trials, it is the Book of Books that sustains us.
Strikingly, this point about Jewish learning was made by one of America’s most insightful Catholic thinkers, who experienced a moment that mirrors Mr. Dubner’s revelation in a synagogue. A decade ago, Charles Chaput, then archbishop of Philadelphia, visited the study hall of New York’s Yeshiva University, where hundreds of students spend much of their day learning Torah. Archbishop Chaput returned to church to deliver a homily about what he saw. He said he realized how “the Jewish people continue to exist because their covenant . . . is the foundation and glue of their relationship with one another, with their past, and with their future. And the more faithful they are to God’s Word, the more certain they can be of their survival.”
Mr. Dubner and Archbishop Chaput, former and current Catholic alike, discovered the heart of our faith. When all else fails, it is the Torah that sustains us. We know that now more than ever. This year, what is usually a jubilant song on our lips will become a clarion call in our hearts.
Rabbi Soloveichik is director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University and rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel in New York.
From The Wall Street Journal, October 8, 2020
Leave Judge Barrett’s Faith Out of This
By: Meir Soloveichik
One of the most enduring descriptions of American pluralism was composed by a religious Jew. In 1790, Moses Seixas led the dwindling Jewish community of the Touro Synagogue in Newport, R.I. He had struggled to sustain the religious observances that endowed Jews with a distinct identity: public readings of the Torah, circumcisions of baby boys, and the keeping of kosher dietary laws. Soon Newport’s remaining Jews would depart for other communities as opportunity there dwindled, and Seixas could have easily been forgotten in the annals of American history.
One letter would ensure his immortality. Newport was visited by George Washington, and Seixas welcomed the president with a paean to the Constitution’s ban on religious tests for public office. Jews, Seixas wrote, beheld in America “a Government, which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance — but generously affording to All liberty of conscience, and immunities of Citizenship.” In his response, Washington echoed Seixas’ words, agreeing that “happily” the government of the United States “gives to bigotry no sanction.” He then added a reflection of his own. “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of,” Washington emphasized; all faiths would be granted equal “immunities of citizenship.”
Speaking centuries later at the same Touro synagogue, today the oldest Jewish house of worship in the country, Justice Elena Kagan of the Supreme Court noted the “astonishing” import of Washington’s words. In embracing a tiny religious minority, Justice Kagan reflected, Washington extended the “promise of opportunity to everyone, regardless of belief,” and was “self-consciously constructing the country by his words and his deeds about what it meant to be an American.” Justice Kagan movingly explained what the president’s letter meant to Jews like her own grandparents, who arrived as immigrants in America. The legacy of his letter, she reflected, was that “their Jewishness, strange as it may seem to some, would prove no barrier to their accomplishments.”
Justice Kagan’s reflections remain relevant now that Judge Amy Coney Barrett has been nominated to serve as her colleague on the court. Much attention has been paid to Judge Barrett’s faith, and to “People of Praise,” a religious community of both Catholics and Protestants to which she belongs. Articles have described the oath, or “covenant,” taken by its members to act in loving service to one another. Another topic raised was a speech delivered by Barrett, describing her ultimate aspiration as serving “the kingdom of God.” These stories insinuate that her religion marks her as out of the mainstream, or unable to serve fairly as a Supreme Court justice.
Traditional Jews in America who read these broadsides against Judge Barrett can easily imagine similar ones about themselves. We might wonder what the reaction would now be were a member of our own religious community appointed to a position of prominence. After all, the Jewish liturgy’s expressed aspiration, in an existence filled with injustice, is “to fix the world through the kingship of God.” We believe ourselves bound by a covenant to other Jews, and many of our observances mark us as different, just as they did in Seixas’ day. Like Muslims, Sikhs, and other minority faith communities, we dream of our daughters and sons experiencing American equality without suffering for their beliefs. We continue to celebrate Seixas’ legacy, and work for an America where what Justice Kagan said about her grandparents will be true about our grandchildren: that their Jewishness, “strange as it may seem to some, would prove no barrier to their accomplishments.”
None of this precludes tough questions about Judge Barrett’s worldview. At times, discussions of her religion seems to serve as a proxy for her views on abortion and other moral questions, and many apparently look to her religious practices as a guide to how she will rule on these matters. Yet as a widely published academic, Barrett has been more open than most nominees about her beliefs, which are those of a traditional Catholic, and has signed an ad supporting “the right to life from fertilization to natural death.” Judge Barrett has also been open about her jurisprudence, which is that of an originalist. She has described Justice Scalia as her mentor, and asserted that her Constitutional interpretation is guided not by her own faith but by the meaning of the document at the time it was written. Senators can, and should, ask her how a self-proclaimed originalist can objectively separate one’s own opinions from an understanding of the text. A judge’s jurisprudence — as well as the propriety of such a nomination so close to an election — are worthy matters of debate, and they are appropriate reasons to oppose or support Judge Barrett’s nomination. But her faith is not.
A century after Moses Seixas, his great-great-niece, Emma Lazarus, would also eloquently describe the American idea in a poem that now appears on the Statue of Liberty. It depicts an America that made room for difference, which, as Kagan perfectly put it, extends the “promise of opportunity to all, regardless of belief.” Supreme Court nominations are often heated, but we cannot forget the lessons of Seixas’ story. The legacy of Washington’s letter, of religious pluralism, is a promise too precious to lose.
Meir Soloveichik, the rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel in New York, is the director of the Zahava and Moshael Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University.
From The New York Times, October 11, 2020