Posted on 09/25/2020 4:18:24 AM PDT by gattaca
The obituary in Britain’s Guardian newspaper of the iconic liberal US Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died last weekend, provoked outrage among a number of Jews.
In the piece, Godfrey Hodgson wrote: “Ruth was brought up in a Conservative Jewish tradition and learned Hebrew as a child, but abandoned her religion because she was not allowed to join a minyan (a group of men) to mourn her mother’s death when she was 17.”
He also wrote: [In 1993, President Bill] Clinton was anxious to make the supreme court more diverse, so Ginsburg’s Jewish religion, which she had given up 46 years earlier, may have counted for more than a lifetime of commitment.”
This produced astonishment among people who knew that Ginsburg’s Jewish identity was threaded through her life and work.
After complaints, the Guardian changed the text to say that Ginsburg “ … moved away from strict religious observance after she was not allowed to join a minyan (a group of men) to mourn her mother’s death when she was 17. Indignant at that exclusion, she nevertheless remained deeply committed to her Jewish identity.”
And the Clinton passage was also changed to say “… so Ginsburg’s Jewish identity may have counted for more than a lifetime of commitment to women’s equality before the law.”
The episode tells us some important things about attitudes towards Jews in the non-Jewish world, as well as towards religion on the left.
Ginsburg embodied a particular ambivalence in Jewish life that is found in no other faith community.
In acknowledgment of her stellar status as a jurist, she became this week the first woman to lie in state in the US Supreme Court and the first Jewish woman to lie in state at the US Capitol building before being buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
The fact that she was not buried immediately in accordance with Jewish tradition and will not lie with her people in a Jewish cemetery may grate upon religiously observant Jews.
But many American Jews, in particular, will recognise in Ginsburg’s life a reflection of their own sense of Jewish identity: distance from religious ritual, but an intense identification with Jewish culture and heritage.
Ginsburg’s husband, Martin, described the family as “not wildly observant,” although he said they went to a traditional Passover seder with relatives. Five years ago, Ginsburg co-authored a feminist reinterpretation of the Passover story with Rabbi Lauren Holtzblatt.
She and Martin sent their children to Hebrew school when they lived in the New York area, but Martin said they didn’t join a synagogue when they moved to Washington because the children had grown up.
Despite this lack of observance, there’s no doubt that, as Ginsburg herself has said, she drew upon Jewish values for her inspiration.
She had a mezuzah fixed to her office door. A poster on the wall read “Tzedek, tzedek tirdof”—the Torah injunction meaning “Justice, justice shall you pursue.”
In 2004, in a speech at a Holocaust Remembrance Day event held in the Capitol, she declared that “my heritage as a Jew and my occupation as a judge fit together symmetrically. The demand for justice runs through the entirety of Jewish history and Jewish tradition. I take pride in and draw strength from my heritage.”
Hodgson’s error was due to more than careless use of language or ignorance of Ginsburg’s life. As is made particularly clear in the original Clinton passage, he assumed that Jewish identity was synonymous with the Jewish religion.
So Ginsburg’s “Jewish religion” had apparently made her “diverse” to Clinton, even though she’d “given it up.” But, of course, it wasn’t her religious observance that made her diverse in Clinton’s eyes, but the fact that she was a Jew (and a woman). And being a Jew was something she certainly did not give up; nor could she have done so even had she wanted to.
Hodgson is hardly alone in this confused thinking about Judaism. Many if not most in the west, including secular folk, think about religion through the prism of Christianity. That’s a confessional faith shaped by a theological creed. If you abandon that creed, you abandon the religion. You are no longer a member of the church; you have become an ex-Christian.
Many think Judaism works in the same way, and so if you abandon Jewish religious practice, then you abandon Judaism. They don’t understand that, unlike Christianity, Judaism is a unique combination of religious laws, ethnic identity and a culture of historic peoplehood.
A Jew can pay no or scant attention to Jewish religious laws or observances, and yet still identify passionately with Jewish culture and peoplehood.
So to suggest that Ginsburg had “abandoned” or “given up” her Judaism was totally wrong.
This failure to understand the complexities of Judaism and Jewish identity also fuels hostility to Israel. Many non-Jews, assuming that Judaism is merely a religion, cannot understand why a faith group should be entitled to a state.
That’s partly why they think it’s outrageous that the Jews have “colonised” land that they assume belongs to Arabs, who they think do have a genuine national claim. They think it’s a category error.
They have absolutely no awareness that the Jews are, in fact, a historic nation, bound by their own system of law and a common language, history, institutions and culture, and that they are the only people for whom the land of Israel was ever their national kingdom.
These westerners may be aware that in the Bible the land was promised to the Jews alone. But in godless Britain, at least, that only deepens their hostility because they believe the Bible is a fairy tale. They have no idea that it operates on different levels, one of which is a historical record of the creation of the Jewish people.
Western secular progressives dismiss the Bible because they hate religion. They believe that it stands in the way of the liberal causes they hold dear to them. Ginsburg was a secular heroine because of her promotion of those liberal causes. So they can’t process the fact that she drew on that same biblical text for her moral values.
Orthodox Jews, along with those from different religions and none who believe that today’s progressive causes have repudiated the core moral tenets of the Hebrew Bible, may regard Ginsburg instead as the standard-bearer of American Jews who have regrettably made liberalism their religion under the mistaken assumption that it represents authentic Jewish values.
Justice and compassion — the core principles of the Hebrew Bible that are extolled by liberals — are, however, parts of a broader moral and ethical package. When detached from the Bible’s other precepts, such as individual duty, responsibility and accountability for one’s actions, they may be transformed into their diametric opposite and become instead the weapons of liberal “social justice” power politics.
One may be appalled by that and worry about the future of American Jewry as a consequence. One may regret Ginsburg’s rejection of Jewish religious observance, just as one may regret its rejection by the majority of the American Jewish community and the moral confusion that has caused.
But no-one can be in any doubt that this is an argument, however bitter and anguished, among Jews. And Ruth Bader Ginsburg died as she had lived—a rightly garlanded tribune of the incomparably disputatious, morally driven and law-bound Jewish people.
Jewish News Syndicate
I’ll bet she believes in God now.
This “social justice warrior” trope and near-sainthood crap is pure garbage. She was a reliable liberal vote on the SCOTUS and nothing more.
Since when is the Jewish religion in on the extermination of millions of babies?
Even satan believes in God...
“A Jew can pay no or scant attention to Jewish religious laws or observances, and yet still identify passionately with Jewish culture and peoplehood.”
This is vaguely equivalent to saying that an American citizen can reject the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Founders and the founding principles of the country, and loathe most of his fellow citizens, but still love baseball, watch the Oscars, go to pizza and beer parties, really really like certain other Americans, and not want to leave. True, he remains an American citizen, and he still has a right to vote.
Kind words are a tradition when almost anyone dies. But the reality of their lives oft differed. Leaving aside all the verbiage, some Jews abandon most or all faith for secular lives. This doesn’t hurt other people. But some of these non- religious folks then go astray by substituting secular style “causes” for the void in their lives. Some of these “causes” are harmful to others, such as communistic “Ideals.” These may sound good And indeed the individuals likely think they are Doing good deeds or, as the article puts it, “pursuing justice.” Well, pursuing justice is a lofty goal to be sure. Indeed we are Biblically encouraged to pursue justice But genuine justice can not be obtained through force ( such as a dictatorial state, whether the dictatorship of the proletariat or Obama’s vision of a domestic military larger than our entire national defense forces). Justice is a very fragile thing. Judicial power and Diktats from courts are especially capable of abuse, especially when unguided by any genuine understanding of constitutional or moral principles. Ruth Ginsberg’s career tragically illustrates this danger of “pursuing justice” by abrogating it.
“her stellar status as a jurist”
Please, I know this is a mourning time for her but save me the false platitudes.
It my strong opinion that the world is in a better place without Ruth Bader Ginsberg.
She has to face the real court now and it doesn’t matter how many praises the people heap on her. Or the screams of the unborn babies
Since most of them vote for Democrats.
All those millions of babies aborted? Yeah, that’s a real warrior all right. The bitch.
In other words, it’s hypocrisy.
Lots of Jews turned to Baal or Molich in the scriptures. It’s not so progressive really.
Ru-ta-BayGa
Featured in some Frank Zappa song
Somehow related to La-Dee-Ga-Ga
What time of morning? She was a piece of garbage that likely went straight to hell. She killed millions of babies or at least was very complicit in it. She’s trash. I’m sick of these rip statements. I don’t want her to rest in peace.
If somehow she asked forgiveness on her deathbed then she has a shot. But her last words werent that. Her last words were don’t pick a new Justice until after the election.
.....”Halakha is the collective body of Jewish religious laws derived from the written and Oral Torah. Halakha is based on biblical commandments, subsequent Talmudic and rabbinic law, and the customs and traditions compiled in the many books such as the Shulchan Aruch.”
I am not an MoT, but it is my understanding that a Jew should be buried within 24 hours of his/her death....why was RBG lying in state for several days following her death...? or can such Halakhic laws be “bent” or bypassed for political ends...?
A burial can be delayed for a few days, maybe one or two. There are no burials on the sabbath. There might be a delay of a day for a relative to arrive or for a high official. But lying in state for several days would not be considered proper, as I understand it.
Ginsberg was Jewish, but not religious. A “bagels and lox” Jew. Like a Catholic who supports abortion and never goes to confession or mass. she was born into a faith but became faithless because she found a new faith called Progressive-ism, or Socialism.
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