December 11, 2007 | 4:13 pm

‘Your brain on drugs’ meets Jack’s customer with the munchies

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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This is incestuous blogging at its best, but the video below justifies it. See, I posted this commercial for Israeli HDTV. Then, Esther Kustanowitz—yeah, that Esther—posted the video with a hat tip to me. But she also added this video which is like the bastard child of the Partnership For a Drug-Free America and Jack in the Box.

December 11, 2007 | 3:54 pm

Not the typical Christmas dilemma

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

That, would of course be the challenge of what parents should do if they are raising their children Muslim or Jewish or Hindu but don’t want them to be the only giftless kids on the block Dec. 25. But, no, this story deals with a Christmas dilemma for families that actually are Christian.

Come each December, high atop the choir loft of St. Luke Community United Methodist Church in Dallas sit the traditional three purple and one pink Advent candles for several Sundays.

But as the month comes to a close, another candelabra appears when the Kwanzaa kinara — with its seven black, red and green candles representing principles of black heritage — is placed on the altar below.

“We’ll light the Advent candles and we’ll light the Kwanzaa candles,” said the Rev. Tyrone Gordon, pastor of St. Luke, where stained glass windows depict the civil rights movement. “Both have prominent places. The Advent candle, of course, is higher up and that’s symbolic because we’re Christian.”

At some predominantly black churches, celebrating Christmas and Kwanzaa is a matter of both/and instead of either/or. Some congregations, especially those with an Afrocentric emphasis, mark both holidays, singing carols about Jesus and reflecting on Kwanzaa’s principles of unity and collective responsibility throughout December.

But some Christians say Christmas should be the sole holiday at year’s end because Kwanzaa lacks a clear biblical message.

Indeed, Kwanzaa is not a religious holiday but is a pan-African celebration started 41 years ago by Maulana Karenga, a former black studies professor at Cal State Long Beach.

So, who’s right? Should it be both/and or either/or? (I know that sentence is really hard on the eyes.)

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December 11, 2007 | 2:13 pm

Esther on Auslander

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

No, not that Esther. But Esther Kustanowitz does have a Web site called The Book of Esther. She also carries a ridiculous number of titles in Jewish journalism—senior editor for PresenTense, contributor to papers including mine and blogger here, here and here.

She’s a talented, prolific writer, and has a good piece in the current American Jewish Life magazine about Shalom Auslander’s foreskin, er “Foreskin’s Lament.” Here it is:

In the beginning, the name of a child represents not so much the child himself, but the hope of his parents. As the child grows, he might grow into the significance of that name, or spend his life running from it. Shalom Auslander was named for a peace that his parents hoped to find after the death of one child and the deafness of another. But Auslander’s memoir, Foreskin’s Lament, illustrates that, sometimes, peace of mind is just not in the cards.

Auslander’s narrative is both shocking and familiar, especially to those of us who graduated from yeshiva day schools. We, too, struggled to translate tradition’s archaic foibles into contemporary resonance; attempted to integrate individuality into a blindingly black-and-white context of sameness; and looked everywhere for peace of mind and spirit. His description of “Holocaust fatigue” - a condition experienced by yeshiva kids exposed to graphic images perhaps earlier than is emotionally optimal - is particularly spot on, as is how he illustrates the inefficacy of parental invocation of the Holocaust as justification for contemporary observance. Our generation feels the Holocaust keenly as part of our history, but its existence doesn’t necessarily mobilize us for action or infuse tradition with meaning: it creates guilt, and if you’re already prone to God-fearing, anxiety about a horrific repeat.

“It is my job as a man to get to know God,” Auslander proclaims at a book reading in Manhattan the night before his international book tour begins. “This is the book I wrote about Him.” The author shares his yearning for the peace of atheism, which he is unable to attain. “I do believe in God,” he sighs, “but ‘believe’ sounds positive. I’m more ‘terrified’. I would kill for [atheist Richard] Dawkins’ certainty, so I could sleep for just one night.”

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December 11, 2007 | 2:11 pm

Safe (for now) in Sderot

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Marcell Bar-On, whose family has lived near the Gaza border under the constant shelling of Kassam rockets since the attacks began almost seven years ago, sent me this e-mail in response to my post yesterday about the rocket that almost hit their house while her children were still sleeping:

We are fine but have been experiencing daily Kassam attacks (morning, noon and night) for the privilege of being on Hanukka school vacation this week. Also, I saw on the news that the IDF made an incursion into Southern Gaza today, which automatically means that we will soon experience an increase in the frequency and amount of Kassam bombs.

No sign yet of any funding from the government for safe rooms. Unbelievable! What can you do. We live in hope that one day we will be able to live a normal life again.

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December 11, 2007 | 8:41 am

Hooters in hot water in Israel

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Ha’aretz reports that Israel’s first Hooters restaurant—you know, the place with the wings—is causing a big stir with religious Jews. In the United States, you’d like people have better things to worry about than the lascivious leanings of a lame bar, but in Israel I’m sure they do. Maccabees, sharpen your swords.

Hooters is just the sort of establishment that many of Netanya’s religious expatriate Americans were happy to leave behind. But the giant restaurant chain followed them home last week when it opened its first Israeli branch in Ramat Poleg.

Although they say they’d never even seen the new restaurant, prominent members of Netanya’s large contingent of religious Anglos were outraged to learn of the opening. But other native English-speakers seem eager to enjoy this piece of Americana, together with dozens of Israeli youngsters who filled the restaurant to capacity.

“Of all the beautiful things in the States, this is what they bring,” Rachel Morrowitz, who grew up in New York, complained. “This restaurant comes from the bottom of the American cultural barrel, and it should stay there.”

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Deputy Mayor Mendi Weiss (National Religious Party) referred to Hooters as a “cheap and crude establishment” and “a foreign element that should never have been imported from the U.S.” Weiss added that “this connects to what Hanukkah is about: a culture war in which the Jews had to struggle to retain their own identity.”

Hooters also is planning on opening a shop in the pious Muslim emirate of Dubai.

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December 10, 2007 | 10:52 pm

‘Welcome to Hell’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Speaking of commercials, it’s been a long time since McDonald’s had any ads worth making. Their late-night-partying-followed-by-sweet-McGriddle-cakes bit was a trite attempt at hip youthfulness. But this Israeli Micky D’s ad is pretty good.

To be honest, I’d know I was in Hell if all I got to eat were Big Macs.

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December 10, 2007 | 11:39 am

A modern-day Chanukah miracle along the Gaza border

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

When I traveled to Israel last August, I spent two days appreciating the precariousness of life along the Gaza border. Three times Kassam rockets were shot in my direction, including five minutes after I arrived at Kibbutz Nir-Am to share Shabbat dinner with the Bar-On family.

The Bar-Ons became the focus on my story for The Jewish Journal when I returned, and this past weekend, Marcell Bar-On sent me a long letter detailing how life hasn’t become any safer.

The attacks are unprovoked, unpredictable, and continuous, and their effect has been close to catastrophical for us, both economically and psychologically. Our every action, our every waking moment, is geared toward minimizing the impact of living under enemy fire. Our first concern is always for our elderly and our children. My son Gabi, who turns ten in December, was three years old when the bombings started, and doesn’t remember life without Kassam bombs. There are no reinforced rooms in our homes, and the old communal shelters cannot be reached in the 5-10 seconds it takes a Kassam bomb to travel between Beit Hanoun and Nir-Am. So our family does what all the other families do: when we hear the “Tzeva Adom ” (Red Light) alert, we huddle in a small windowless area (in our case, a small passage between bedrooms), our bodies and the tiled roof the only barriers between our children and the incoming bomb. We silently count the seconds to impact; I often need to remind the children to breathe – they are frozen in total terror. And we pray that this time, too, we will be spared.

The effect has been most obvious on our children. At home: bedwetting, aggressive behaviour, extreme moodswings, insomnia, loss of appetite . . . .  and at school: lack of concentration, absenteeism, hyperactivity, outbursts of anger and physical and verbal aggression. But no-one is spared the psychological warfare we are all victims of: almost as many adults are in councelling as are children in an attempt to cope with the harsh reality of our daily lives. In fact, as parents we carry the additional burden of guilt for not being able to protect our children; we feel responsible for what is happening to them.

Driving with car windows open, even in the heat of summer, so that one can hear the alert and perhaps have a chance to stop the car and get to some kind of shelter . . . children playing outside, always acutely aware of exactly where the nearest house or tree is, so that they can run for their lives and find what inadequate and pitiful protection they can . . . cellphones for every child of schoolgoing age, so that we can stay in contact with them when they are not at home , and so that we can call them to see whether they are safe after every bomb has fallen . . . how can I describe the long moments waiting for my child to answer the phone after a Tseva Adom alert?

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On the first day of Hanukka this year, at 6.30 a.m., a Kassam bomb fell less than five meters from where my son Gabi and daughter Mayan were sleeping. I had been busy in my home office when the Tzeva Adom alarm sounded. I could not hear the children running for our little “safe corner” and I immediately realised that they had not heard the alarm and were still asleep in their beds, even as the bomb was already on its way from Gaza.

I ran in the direction of their bedroom, shouting for them to wake up; as I reached the bedroom door, they jumped from their beds but a second later the bomb struck. It did not explode upon impact, but penetrated deep into the soft earth and later had to be retrieved with the help of a bulldozer.

Our personal Hanukka miracle had just occurred: had the bomb fallen one week earlier, before the first winter rains when the earth had still been hard, it would have exploded on impact and the result could have been catastrophic for our family.

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December 10, 2007 | 11:38 am

Orthodox ‘YMCA’ video

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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December 9, 2007 | 10:43 pm

Scientists and the other f-word

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

A staple in the arsenal of Christian apologetics is that, at the end of the day (not End of Days), even scientists base their beliefs on faith. Recently in the New York Times, a scientist talked about using the f-word in making the leap from

SCIENCE, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term “doubting Thomas” well illustrates the difference. In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue.

The problem with this neat separation into “non-overlapping magisteria,” as Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion, is that science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order. And so far this faith has been justified. ...

Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith — namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too. For that reason, both monotheistic religion and orthodox science fail to provide a complete account of physical existence. ...

Until science comes up with a testable theory of the laws of the universe, its claim to be free of faith is manifestly bogus.

Thoughts?

(Hat tip: The Frontal Cortex)

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December 7, 2007 | 2:59 pm

Hirsi Ali: Where are the Muslim moderates?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

IN the last few weeks, in three widely publicized episodes, we have seen Islamic justice enacted in ways that should make Muslim moderates rise up in horror.

A 20-year-old woman from Qatif, Saudi Arabia, reported that she had been abducted by several men and repeatedly raped. But judges found the victim herself to be guilty. Her crime is called “mingling”: when she was abducted, she was in a car with a man not related to her by blood or marriage, and in Saudi Arabia, that is illegal. Last month, she was sentenced to six months in prison and 200 lashes with a bamboo cane.

Two hundred lashes are enough to kill a strong man. Women usually receive no more than 30 lashes at a time, which means that for seven weeks the “girl from Qatif,” as she’s usually described in news articles, will dread her next session with Islamic justice. When she is released, her life will certainly never return to normal: already there have been reports that her brother has tried to kill her because her “crime” has tarnished her family’s honor.

We also saw Islamic justice in action in Sudan, when a 54-year-old British teacher named Gillian Gibbons was sentenced to 15 days in jail before the government pardoned her this week; she could have faced 40 lashes. When she began a reading project with her class involving a teddy bear, Ms. Gibbons suggested the children choose a name for it. They chose Muhammad; she let them do it. This was deemed to be blasphemy.

Then there’s Taslima Nasreen, the 45-year-old Bangladeshi writer who bravely defends women’s rights in the Muslim world. Forced to flee Bangladesh, she has been living in India. But Muslim groups there want her expelled, and one has offered 500,000 rupees for her head. In August she was assaulted by Muslim militants in Hyderabad, and in recent weeks she has had to leave Calcutta and then Rajasthan. Taslima Nasreen’s visa expires next year, and she fears she will not be allowed to live in India again.

It is often said that Islam has been “hijacked” by a small extremist group of radical fundamentalists. The vast majority of Muslims are said to be moderates.

But where are the moderates? Where are the Muslim voices raised over the terrible injustice of incidents like these? How many Muslims are willing to stand up and say, in the case of the girl from Qatif, that this manner of justice is appalling, brutal and bigoted — and that no matter who said it was the right thing to do, and how long ago it was said, this should no longer be done?

Read the rest of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s column for The New York Times. Ali, herself, would probably qualify as a moderate Muslim, if she still followed Islam. But she has long since been marked for death thanks to her heresy.

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December 7, 2007 | 11:25 am

Jesus’ pick: Huckabee

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

From a talk at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University:

STUDENT: Recent polls show you surging… What do you attribute this surge to?

HUCKABEE: There’s only one explanation for it, and it’s not a human one. It’s the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of five thousand people. (Applause) That’s the only way that our campaign can be doing what it’s doing. And I’m not being facetious nor am I trying to be trite. There literally are thousands of people across this country who are praying that a little will become much, and it has. And it defies all explanation, it has confounded the pundits. And I’m enjoying every minute of them trying to figure it out, and until they look at it, from a, just experience beyond human, they’ll never figure it out. And it’s probably just as well. That’s honestly why it’s happening.

 

The Campaign Spot at NRO found this explanation in want:

Readers can draw their own conclusions on Huckabee’s meaning. As you probably can guess, this rubs me the wrong way. If Huckabee’s rise in the polls is the result of a factor that is not human, how about the declining poll numbers of his rivals?

It reminds me of a comedian’s joke about football players who point to the sky and thank God and/or Jesus when they score a touchdown. Nobody ever hears a defender say, “well, I thought I had him covered pretty well, but then Jesus got in my way.”

You probably expect me to agree with that. But I’m not sure I do. Praying to win in sports is silly. But sometimes the right person rises to be a leader at the right time, and if we begin with belief in an all-knowing God, isn’t it possible that candidate had His endorsement? That being said, there is a difference between the divine rule of kings and the God-ordained democracy of someone whom God has decided to use. And I’m not offering any credence to Huckabee’s claim—though, it may not be a claim and actually be a public praise. It’s difficult to say. As I told a friend last night: I am wary to take at face value a politician’s public expressions of something as naturally personal and private as faith and spirituality.

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December 7, 2007 | 10:47 am

Waiting for Joseph Smith

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Manya Brachear, who was a Gralla Fellows with me, goes a bit deeper than just wondering whether Mitt Romney’s speech yesterday will quell fears about his faith. (For evangelicals, the LA Times reports nothing will.) On her excellent religion blog, The Seeker, Brachear writes about a glaring omission in Romney’s name dropping.

Abraham Lincoln, Brigham Young, John Adams and, of course, John F. Kennedy. But there was one name he did not invoke.

Where was Joseph Smith?

Just as John F. Kennedy was not the first Roman Catholic to run for the White House, Romney is not the first Mormon to do so. Prophet Joseph Smith Jr. announced his candidacy in January 1844. As mayor of the Nauvoo City Council, Smith ran on a platform of the gradual abolition of slavery, a reduction in the size of Congress, a national bank, territorial expansion that included the annexation of Texas and Oregon and radical prison reform that would have converted all prison sentences into community service.

He also championed a “theodemocracy,” a form of government that would guarantee Americans the freedom to attach themselves to whatever moral community they desired. Each community and its religious institutions would work toward developing a public and private morality while government would work to protect their liberties.

That ideal might have inspired a candidate more than 150 years later.

“Religious tolerance would be a shallow principle indeed if it were reserved only for faiths with which we agree,” Romney said Thursday. “There are some who would have a presidential candidates describe and explain his church’s distinctive doctrines. To do so would enable the very religious test the founders prohibited in the Constitution. No candidate should become a spokesman for his faith. For if he becomes president he will need the prayers of people of all faiths.”

But how would we know whether Smith inspired Romney? The Mormon prophet was never mentioned in Romney’s speech. The omission of that legacy is a shame, said Terryl Givens, a professor of literature and religion at the University of Richmond and a Mormon. But it’s also understandable.

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