Catch The Jew! by Tenenbom Tuvia

Author:Tenenbom, Tuvia
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Gefen Publishing House
Published: 2014-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

Gate Twenty-Eight

How do you become an international human rights rabbi? What does a Christian Zionist girl love more, man or grapes?

A RABBI IS A SPIRITUAL LEADER, RIGHT?

Rabbi Arik Ascherman, dressed fashionably and elegantly, with the coolest of sneakers, is the president and senior rabbi of Rabbis for Human Rights, and the man I’m going to see.

Have you heard of the Rabbis for Human Rights? They are apolitical, Rabbi Arik tells me, and by their own by-laws cannot take any political side. Rabbi Arik tells me that he is apolitical to a fault, that he’ll never take sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and that he will never ever make any move that could be interpreted as taking sides.

My kind of rabbi, and now all that’s left for me to do is have him tell me what he thinks in his heart and how he turns his thoughts into deeds. He is very glad that I ask him these questions and happily obliges. He believes, he tells me, the following:

Israel is abusing Palestinians inside Israel and out.

Israel practices racism against the Palestinians.

Israel steals Palestinian lands.

Israel imprisons Palestinians illegally.

Israel constantly engages in discriminatory measures and actions against innocent Palestinians.

All settlements are illegal.

Israel regularly breaks international law.

Israel is a brutal occupier.

Israel’s army routinely helps and protects settlers’ criminal activities against Palestinian villagers.

Israel acts and behaves like any other brutal dictatorship in history.

Israeli archeologists routinely destroy any evidence that might support Palestinian claims to the land.

And so on and so on, but I jot down only part of what this apolitical rabbi tells me. What’s amazing about this man, and I can’t explain how he pulls it off, is that he doesn’t himself break into laughter when he tells me he is apolitical.

In an ever serious mode he moves on to tell me about the deeds part, what he and his associates do: (a) they challenge the Israeli government through the court system, filing one lawsuit after another against the state; (b) they travel to Palestinian villages to serve as human shields against murderous Jewish settlers and soldiers.

None of the above, as has already been mentioned, is supposed to have anything to do with politics and nothing of what has been said so far could possibly be misconstrued as taking sides between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

Rabbi Arik, a biblical scholar by profession, confidently assures me that the Bible prohibits wars of any kind. The fact that the Bible is full of wars, even ordered by the Lord, is unknown to him. Page after page of the Bible speaks of wars, but none of these pages is known to Rabbi Arik.

I get a bit pissed off at him. I take the Bible, which is in his room, and tell him: Look, almost every page here is full of wars. Are you denying this? Start reading with me!

He refuses.

This rabbi is so righteous and scholarly, in addition to his being apolitical, that he has even lived with Palestinians for two years. As he shares this with me, his eyes glow.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.