December 23, 2009 | 9:27 pm

Braun is MLB’s Jewish MVP

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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Just in time for Christmas, baseball card company Jewish Major Leaguers announced today its MOT MVPs for 2009. Any guesses?

No real surprise with the everyday player topping that list: the Hebrew Hammer, Ryan Braun:

the slugging left-fielder for the Milwaukee Brewers. Braun’s .319 Batting Average and 32 homers were tops among Jewish players, and his 203 hits led the National League in that category- a “first” in Jewish baseball history.

Braun’s father is an Israeli-born Jew.

JML’s choice as pitcher of the year is Texas Rangers right-hander Scott Feldman. In his fifth season, and second as a starter, Feldman went 17-8, with a 4.08 ERA. His 17 wins were the most for a Jewish starter since Steve Stone of Baltimore in 1980.

The JML awards tradition began last season, when the winners were Red Sox infielder Kevin Youkilis and Pirates reliever John Grabow.

Braun and Youkilis have both gotten some good play on The God Blog. However, the only Feldman I’m familiar with is Corey. For more on Jewish Major Leaguers, visit their site.

December 23, 2009 | 8:14 pm

Priest OKs shoplifting from big box retailers

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Remember that episode of “The Simpsons” where Bart, Fat Tony’s young apprentice, learns his master’s business?

Bart: Uh, say, are you guys crooks?
Fat Tony: Bart, is it wrong to steal a loaf of bread to feed your starving family?

Bart: No.
Fat Tony: Well, suppose you got a large starving family. Is it wrong to steal a truckload of bread to feed them?

Bart: Uh uh.
Fat Tony: And, what if your family don’t like bread? They like… cigarettes?

Bart: I guess that’s okay.
Fat Tony: Now, what if instead of giving them away, you sold them at a price that was practically giving them away. Would that be a crime, Bart?

Bart: Hell, no.

Well, what if instead of cigarettes it was a new pair of pants from Wal-Mart? And what instead of it not being a crime it wasn’t a sin? Well, I wonder then what the Rev. Time Jones might think. Here’s how the priest in the Church of England made international news:

For a priest in northern England, the commandment that dictates “thou shalt not steal” isn’t exactly written in stone.

The Rev. Tim Jones caused an uproar by telling his congregation that it is sometimes acceptable for desperate people to shoplift - as long as they do it at large national chain stores rather than small, family businesses.

Jones’ Robin Hood-like sermon drew rebukes Tuesday from fellow clergy, shop owners and police.

From his pulpit at the Church of St. Lawrence in York, about 220 miles north of London, Jones said in his sermon Sunday that shoplifting can be justified if a person in real need is not greedy and does not take more than he or she really needs to get by.

One of Jones’ colleagues responded with displeasure here.

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December 22, 2009 | 6:21 pm

Christmas for Jews

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The above “SNL” clip aside, there is a reason for Jews to love Christmas. So argues David Klinghoffer on his Beliefnet blog:

In general, the classic Jewish ways of dealing with this most beloved of Christian holidays have included eating Chinese food, going to the movies, or if you’re a real mensch, working at the office as a way of saying thank you to Christian colleagues who fill in for you when you take off for Jewish holidays or leave early for Shabbat. For myself, when I lived in New York, my wife and I used to mark the occasion by going out for drinks at Aquavit, a fancy and festive Scandinavian restaurant.

Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus, without whom there would be no Christian religion. So for Jews the day also poses the question of how we’re to regard the rival and younger faith. I wrote a whole a book about the reasons faithful Jews have given for rejecting Jesus, but this doesn’t tell us whether, from a Jewish traditional and authentic perspective, we should feel that his birth was on the whole a good thing or bad thing.

Christianity poses a theological challenge to us. Both the Hebrew Bible and our own oral and rabbinic tradition going back millennia have seen the Jewish people as called upon by God to transform the world spiritually. Yet spiritually, in any practical day-to-day sense, our impact on others has been and remains minimal. This has become especially painful in recent generations when Jews achieved in America all the freedom, acceptance and influence that we could ever hope for in a gentile country. In the spiritual realm, we’ve done very little with our privileged position.

Read the rest here. On a less serious note, I recall a Jewish comedian writing a cover story for The Jewish Journal in the past few years about how he loved Christmas but can’t find it online.

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December 21, 2009 | 8:14 pm

An unusual Virgin Birth scandal

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

A few people sent this one to me. Pretty funny, though understandably upsetting for a good many people:

A billboard sponsored by a local Anglican church that shows Joseph and Mary in bed has set tongues wagging in New Zealand, with the Catholic Church condemning it as others found it funny.

The controversial billboard, erected by St Matthew-in-the-City Church in Auckland, shows a dejected-looking Joseph under bedcovers beside a sad Mary. Underneath the image, a caption reads: “Poor Joseph. God is a hard act to follow.”

Church archdeacon Glynn Cardy said the billboard was intended to lampoon the literal interpretation of the Christmas conception story and highlight the real significance of the festival.

“What we’re trying to do is to get people to think more about what Christmas is all about,” Cardy told local media.

“Is it about a spiritual male God sending down sperm so a child would be born, or is it about the power of love in our midst as seen in Jesus?”

Here’s the site for St. Matthew-in-the-City’s. Let me know what you think.

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December 21, 2009 | 4:21 pm

The sacred identity of ‘mistress’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

A generally love the unorthodox approach Slate takes to many story. And the premise on this article about Tiger Woods’ lady friends is another good angle. But the way it’s written comes off as a defense of the sanctity of being a mistress:

The Tiger Woods “mistress” count is up to 11, the Boston Herald reported on Wednesday. If the golfer wanted to have “mistresses” at every port, he shouldn’t have bothered getting married, a contributor at Examiner.com opined recently. And as “alleged mistresses … come out of the woodwork,” the Seattle Post-Intelligencer noted Tuesday, once-devoted sponsors are growing wary. It’s shocking, really: The more the press covers the Tiger Woods scandal, the more abuse they heap on the word mistress. We don’t know much for certain about Tiger Woods’ extramarital relations. But the term mistress generally connotes a level of commitment to one’s side dish(es) that does not seem to be present here. A woman who has sex with a man once—or even repeatedly— but without any real devotion is not really his mistress.

The word mistress entered English in the 14th century by way of French. Effectively equivalent to master with the ess feminine suffix, it originally meant “a woman having control or authority”—such as a woman who is the head of a household. By the 15th century, the word developed the meaning “a woman who is loved by a man; a female sweetheart,” but the specific sense “a woman other than his wife with whom a man has a long-lasting sexual relationship,” to quote the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition, doesn’t appear until the early 17th century. (John Donne made this meaning particularly clear in a sermon mentioning “women, whom the Kings were to take for their Wives, and not for Mistresses, (which is but a later name for Concubines).”)

This bare dictionary definition, even with the emphasis on “long-lasting,” doesn’t fully capture the nuances of mistress’s use. A mistress is exclusively devoted to one man. Although that man may have other partners, his relationship with his mistress is relatively serious and stable. He may even pay to support her, or at least help cover some of her living expenses.

One of those co-adulterers, the one who started Woods’ downward spiral, was Rachel Uchitel, who, as Danielle Berrin writes, is Jewish.

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December 21, 2009 | 2:11 pm

Twitter, prayers and grief

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I regularly see Twitter updates asking for prayer. And I’ve never thought there was anything weird or inappropriate about that. Further, I think it’s a great use of social media.

So why the hate?

As Shellie Ross waited in a hospital for word on her son, Bryson, she posted this note to the social networking site Twitter.com: “Please pray like never before, my 2 yr old fell in the pool.”

She found out 19 minutes later that Bryson was dead.

Ross’ decision to broadcast that message Monday night to more than 5,300 people who follow her posts on Twitter has unleashed torrents of support and derision. Social networking experts and friends said Ross was right to reach out for help, while critics questioned whether her son would be alive if she spent less time online.

“Could this child’s death have been averted had the mom not been on Twitter all day?” asked Madison McGraw, a personal security guard and writer who blogs at madisonmcgraw.com. “This woman spent all of her time on Twitter. It was unbelievable,” said McGraw, who lives outside of Philadelphia and doesn’t know Ross.

Everybody’s a pundit.

Indeed, children are 100 times more likely to drown in a pool than be killed by a firearm. But it is absurd to suggest that just because someone was blogging or tweeting that they were responsible for their child drowning. Sadly, kids have been drowning in pools since swimming pools became a marker of American suburbia. Despite what the above video from the David Crowder Band says, Twitter doesn’t actually kill you.

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December 20, 2009 | 3:15 pm

Christmas ‘Basterds’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Yesterday, as Chanukah ended, and I swapped my SuperJew t-shirt for some black socks with wreaths and candy canes on them, the Greenbergs sat down to celebrate Christmas.

My mom loves to give, so Christmas comes with more gifts than anyone could open on even eight nights. I used to tell her I didn’t need anything, but that’s a debate I can’t win. Thankfully.

Among my favorite gifts was a DVD of “Inglourious Basterds” from my wife. I know, it seems like more of a Chanukah gift.

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December 19, 2009 | 5:22 pm

Beginning to look a lot like Christmas

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

We get some beautiful Christmas lights in the South Bay, but sadly no one does anything like this.

(P.S. If you feel like you’ve seen this clip before, you’re right. It’s a bit of a God Blog tradition.)

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December 19, 2009 | 2:59 pm

Another AAR honor

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

This is the Sabbath. My first semester of law school is over, and I’m sitting on the couch with nothing to do. Amen.

I’ve definitely neglected to mention many things over the past month, but here’s a bit of overdue shameless self-promotion: I placed second in the American Academy of Religion’s contest for reporters at papers under 100,000 circ.

The judges praised Greenberg for his “meticulousness,” adding “the hallmark of this writer was the immense amount of reporting that went into the pieces”

In other words, I had the allowance and the obsessiveness to spend way too long on some of these stories. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I placed third in the same contest in 2008. Unfortunately, there’s not much hope for continuing the upward trend. At least I went out on a good note.

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December 17, 2009 | 11:34 pm

Happy 2009, Ben Bernanke

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

No one was surprised to see Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke recommended for another term by the Senate Banking Committee today. But I imagine some people were surprised to see Time magazine name Bernanke the 2009 Person of the Year:

So here he is inside his marble fortress, a technocrat in an ink-stained shirt and an off-the-rack suit, explaining what he’s done, where we are and what might happen next.

He knows that the economy is awful, that 10% unemployment is much too high, that Wall Street bankers are greedy ingrates, that Main Street still hurts. Banks are handing out sweet bonuses again but still aren’t doing much lending. Technically, the recession is over, but growth has been anemic and heavily reliant on government programs like Cash for Clunkers, not to mention cheap Fed money. “I understand why people are frustrated. I’m frustrated too,” Bernanke says. “I’m not one of those people who look at this as some kind of video game. I come from Main Street, from a small town that’s really depressed. This is all very real to me.”

But Bernanke also knows the economy would be much, much worse if the Fed had not taken such extreme measures to stop the panic. There’s a vast difference between 10% and 25% unemployment, between anemic and negative growth. He wishes Americans understood that he helped save the irresponsible giants of Wall Street only to protect ordinary folks on Main Street. He knows better than anyone how financial crises spiral into global disasters, how the grass gets crushed when elephants fall. “We came very, very close to a depression ... The markets were in anaphylactic shock,” he told TIME during one of three extended interviews. “I’m not happy with where we are, but it’s a lot better than where we could be.”

As I’ve mentioned many times before, Bernanke is Jewish and was a favorite target of anti-Semites certain that the global financial crisis was a Jewish conspiracy.

Though his middle name is Shalom, Bernanke doesn’t broadcast his Jewishness. This 2008 New Yorker profile mentions “Jewish” once. But he is, apparently, proud of the heritage, and has been since growing up among a sea of Christians in South Carolina.

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December 15, 2009 | 6:33 pm

Oral Roberts, legendary evangelist, dies at 91

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Oral Roberts, the legendary evangelist, has died. He was 91.

The AP has this breaking story:

Roberts died of complications from pneumonia in Newport Beach, Calif., according to his spokesman, A. Larry Ross. The evangelist was hospitalized after a fall on Saturday. He had survived two heart attacks in the 1990s and a broken hip in 2006.

Roberts was a pioneer on two fronts—he helped bring spirit-filled charismatic Christianity into the mainstream and took his trademark revivals to television, a new frontier for religion.

Roberts overcame tuberculosis at age 17, and credited that triumph with leading him to become one of the country’s most famous ministers.

He gave up a local pastorate in Enid in 1947 to enter an evangelistic ministry in Tulsa to pray for the healing of the whole person—the body, mind and spirit. The philosophy led many to call him a “faith healer,” a label he rejected with the comment: “God heals—I don’t.”

Read more here.

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December 15, 2009 | 4:22 pm

Why you should read KtB’s Manseau

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Peter Manseau, the gentile with a knack for winning Jewish book awards, is getting a lot of well-deserved attention these days. Here’s some from The New York Times’ book blog, Paper Cuts. What’s he working on?

Writers are often told to pick a genre and stick with it, but I get restless if I don’t have both a fiction and a nonfiction book going at once. The pull to spend time on anything other than the work at hand can sometimes be so strong that I have to find a way to turn procrastination on one project into progress on another.

On the nonfiction front, the book I’ve recently begun (coming in a few years from Little, Brown) is a retelling of American history called “Twenty Gods or None” — a title borrowed from one of Thomas Jefferson’s lesser known defenses of religious liberty: “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” The book will describe the making of the nation from the perspective of marginal religious traditions — basically, it’s a narrative debunking of the stubborn assumption that the United States is essentially a Christian nation. 

My next novel, meanwhile, is stuck more in my head than on the page, but it’s set in China in the 1970s, just after the end of the Cultural Revolution. In all my work, fiction and non-, I’m interested in the moments at which old gods die and new gods are born; I’m particularly curious lately to see how that story might play out in a place where — officially, at least — there were no gods at all.

Read the rest here.

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