Friday, December 31, 2010

It's Over When This Cantor Sings

The invested cantor at Lakeside Congregation, a Reform synagogue in Chicago's northern suburbs, Rabbi Michael Davis, wrote this:

...As an American-Israeli, I find it curious that America's cities erupted simultaneously with the birth of West Bank settlements. Martin Luther King's assassination at the beginning of April 1968 triggered these riots. At the same time, Rabbi Moshe Levinger, student of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, spiritual father of West Bank settlements (whom I wrote about here) moved into the West Bank Palestinian city of Hebron to celebrate Passover. For the past 42 years, Hebron has been one of the focal points of state-sponsored settler violence against Palestinians and emblematic of Israel's program for the West Bank including constant violence, intimidation, vastly unequal control of resources, curfews, occasional extra-judicial killings and impunity for Jewish thugs. Rabbi and Mrs. Levinger set the tone for Hebron and for the entire movement.

It's baffling to me how liberal American including the Jews who supported desegregation and equal rights for all American continue to support these policies against Israel's non-Jews...

Weird.

As Levinger only arrived in Hebron for the Seder which fell on April 13th, and MLK was assassinated on April 6, his chronology is wrong and his "coincidence" falls. But why should a reform Jew need to know the Hebrew calendar?

But actually, the enterprise to reestablish a Jewish presence in its national homeland began in late August 1967 with a grouip of socialist Zionists from Kibbutz Me'uchad who settled down in Merom HaGolan. The religious Jews the Rabbi/Cantor doesn't like arrived in Kfar Eztion in mid-September 1967, but since Kfar Etzion was established in the 1920s - and had been destroyed and its Jewish population expelled, those that survived the slaughter of the residents by Arabs - does that count?

Now, as for liberal Jews, they that do support are doing so because they know its correct and right and has nothing to do with American politics. Besides, that all his fomenting lacks perspective and proportion and a bit of the turth.

^

1 comment:

Juniper in the Desert said...

And this is a rabbi?? ;(((