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• Friday, January 6, 2006 01:23 PM

  The Orthodox Community "Enables" People like Jack Abramoff

  Dear Salon:

  I am afraid that Mr. Hirsch ignores one aspect of his return to observance, and that is the orthodox community's implicit and indirectly implied opposition to Liberalism and its parallel embrace of Republican politics in the name of "family values." Mr. Hirsch may claim to to be nonpolitical but the default politics in the Orthodox community today, especially the community of the newly observant, is Republican and right-wing.

  In such a contact Jack Abramoff could occassionally engage in some sort of Jewish religious ritural, such as putting on Tefilin or lighting a Hannuka menorah, and then be embraced as "one-of-them" or at least a sympathizer and an important one in a high place at that. Other Jews, who would oppose this sort of corruption and by extension, the Republican party, would be called "self-hating" or "off the path." One of the implict but never explicitly stated roles of becoming orthodox is a rejection of the Jewish liberal tradition, which is supposingly unrealistically utopian and therefore anti-G-d.

  In other words, the notion of "The Truth" is left only to

  G-d and the performance of his commandements but ignored completely and everywhere else in the political and public policy sphere because since everything else is up to G-dit really doesn't matter what man does.

  Sincerely yours,

  Arthur C. Hurwitz

  —Arthur C. Hurwitz Read Arthur C. Hurwitz's other letters
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