A Time to Hate

A rabbi speaks. From The Spectator:

The waters did not stop rising on Obama’s watch. The Earth was not healed. On his watch, a country that finally had healed itself from the shame and scourge of imposing slavery on human beings more than a century earlier, a country that had atoned and that had created and institutionalized a new social infrastructure by which people no longer were denied because of their skin color or religion — a country that reflected that healing by electing a Black man president despite his manifest lack of personal achievement, close ties with an organized-crime felon, and questionable biography — suddenly erupted into a new era of racial bitterness. Michael Brown and Ferguson aflame amid the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” lie promoted by Obama and by Eric Holder but shot down by a Missouri grand jury. Freddie Gray and Baltimore aflame followed by a series of outright judicial exonerations handed down by a Black judge who saw that every accused cop had acted properly and lawfully. A lowlife killed by George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida, a thug whom Obama told us would have been the likes of his own son if he had had a son. Eight years of racial divide, social division aimed at tearing us up as a color-blind and religion-blind American People, just to promote electoral successes.

And yet I accepted that Obama had won. No derangement syndrome for me. It was what it was. As a New York Mets fan from their founding in 1962, I understood what it was to wait patiently and to endure eight years of unmitigated disaster. As a boy, I waited then, and then came Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman, and Nolan Ryan. As an adult I waited. And then came Donald Trump and Mike Pence.

When the Mets finally took it all in 1969, the other teams accepted the results. They lost gracefully. Now it was the Mets’ turn, and they had won it fair and square. But these past three years have been something different. Trump and Pence won fair and square. But there was no grace. Rather, there was instant character assassination, instant war, instant denial. Advertisements urging electors to violate their Electoral College oaths.

Fabrications of collusion with Putin. Investigations that hamstrung a presidency. Lies and innuendoes leaked and published by the unindicted co-conspirators we call the “mainstream media.” A never-ending hunt to find scandals and Trump accusers: a bimbo who pole-danced at bars, her lawyer who now dances behind bars, another crooked lawyer who tape-recorded his own clients and now is locked up, disbarred from the Bar. One cartoon character after another.

As a rabbi of 40 years and a person who believes that most people have the potential for goodness, and who tries to find the good even in people who disappoint until they absolutely close off the possibility of goodness being discovered within them, I now have learned to hate.

The Bible certainly does not encourage hate. “Do not hate your brother in your heart. [If he does wrong, go ahead and] Rebuke your compatriot, but do not sin because of him” (Leviticus 19:17). “Do not seek revenge, and do not bear a grudge against the children of your people. And you shall love your neighbor as you love yourself” (Leviticus 19:18).

But the Bible acknowledges the existence of viciousness and cruelty, and it demands of decent people that we not sit on the fence in the face of evil: “Those who love G-d hate evil” (Psalm 97:10). King Solomon laid it out best in that magnificently poetic third chapter of Ecclesiastes, which inspired not only The Byrds but even Pete Seeger and Judy Collins.

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. There is a time to hate. (Read more.)

The pandemic road to serfdom. From The American Mind:

Today’s new oligarchs constitute a modern-day equivalent of the Medieval aristocracy. Like the barbarians who seized control of land during the demise of Rome, they seem well-positioned to benefit from the emerging social distance-driven recession. The dislocation caused by the pandemic has greatly expanded the financial assets of the country’s increasingly hegemonic giant banks. But the biggest long-term winners are the big tech firms that dominate digital pathways at a time when the analog world, already failing, now faces inexorable obliteration.

Today’s other ascendant class is what I call the clerisy, who today fulfill the role played by the clergy in the Middle Ages. Known as the First Estate in pre-revolutionary France, the clerisy today is largely secular but consists of the key influencers in the media, academia, the upper bureaucracy and the ever-expanding “non-profit” sector. This new middle class enjoys something of a symbiosis with the oligarchic elites who mainly finance non-governmental organizations and the universities, and tends to a share a similarly progressive world view.

The people losing out most in the pandemic are the remnants of what was once dubbed the Third Estate: the commoners, long the bastion of democracy and liberal ideas. Millions of owners of small businesses have been devastated by the lockdowns, their lifetime investments allowed to turn to dust because the clerisy has declared them “non-essential” and hopes to keep them in lockdown well into the summer.

Worse still, as the promise of becoming business owners and homeowners has faded—particularly for the young—many increasingly fall into the insecure “precariat” of gig and part-time workers. These modern-day serfs are suffering the most from the pandemic. Millions of low-wage workers in hospitality, retail, and restaurants have lost their jobs and possess only meager prospects of getting them back in the near- or even medium-term future. Many others, largely low-wage service workers in “essential” jobs, are still working, but at high risk to themselves, often without adequate health and other protections. (Read more.)

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