Don’t Rob a Bank When the Police are Watching

Don’t Rob a Bank When the Police are Watching
By
Robert E. Reis

An article by a Harvard Law School professor has upset the worldwide Jewish community.

Noah Feldman revealed that Judaism does not value non-Jewish life for its own sake.

(Noah Feldman, Orthodox Paradox, ttp://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/magazine/22yeshiva-t.html)

Feldman describes his experiences at a private Jewish school and what Orthodox Jewish young people were taught and how they were expected to behave.

He remembers a school assembly where a Jewish medical doctor addressed an audience that contained non-Jews.

The doctor talked about the Talmudic dictum that it is moral to save the life of a Jew on the Sabbath, but that it is immoral to save the life of a non-Jew on the Sabbath. The Sabbath can be violated to save the life of a non-Jew only “out of concern for maintaining peaceful relations between the Jewish and non-Jewish communities.”

When the doctor added that “he himself would never distinguish Jewish from non-Jewish patients: a human being was a human being”, a teacher at the Jewish private school publicly rebuked the doctor.

The teacher cited a leading Orthodox Jewish Talmudic scholar at Yeshiva University who taught the only motive that justified saving a non-Jewish life on the Sabbath was to “facilitate good relations between Jews and non-Jews.”

The teacher later apologized to his students for revealing the secret of why a non-Jewish might be saved on the Sabbath in front of an audience that contained some non-Jews.

Shmuely Boteach has responded to Noah Feldman in the

.

(Can a Jew rescue a non-Jew on Shabbat?, Aug. 19, 2007)

How does Shmuely Boteach refute Noah Feldman and defend Judaism from the implication that it is a racist cult faking universal moral validity?

Boteach appeals to the authority of the chancellor of Yeshiva University, Norman Lamm.

Lamm suggested the Talmudic dictum should be discussed like “a precedent that was once valid”, but has become “effectively inoperative through legal analysis and moral argument.”

Lamm does not asserts the Talmudic dictum in question is “inoperative”, nor does he mention when the dictum became “inoperative” only that it should be discussed like a precedent that has become inoperative.

Lamm’s suggestion may simply mean that Feldman had failed to honor his duty to keep the secret of why a non-Jewish life occasionally can be saved on the Sabbath from non-Jewish eyes and ears.

Boteach asks if the Jewish religion is so heartless as to give a Jew pause before rescuing a non-Jewish life on the Sabbath or to declare a non-Jewish life “scarcely worth saving.”

Boteach tells us:

1.The Talmud was written during “the vicious Roman occupation of the Holy Land.”
2.Roman cruelty provoked two Jewish rebellions during which the Roman slaughtered millions of Jews “in cold blood.”
3.“Indeed, the utter ruthlessness of the Romans is something clearly evident to any non-Jew through the horrible and gruesome death by crucifixion they inflicted upon an innocent Jesus and approximately 250,000 other Jews.”
4.“The Talmud’s discussion, therefore, centered on whether brutal, gentile oppressors like Roman centurions, who were the principal non-Jews with whom the Jews had contact at the time, ought to be saved on the Sabbath.”
Point one is untrue. The Jerusalem Talmud was completed in 350 AD, The Babylonian Talmud in 499 AD, hundreds of years after the suppression of the last Jewish Revolt.
Point two ignores the atrocities perpetrated by the Jewish rebels on the non-Jews within their reach which provoked Roman reprisals.
Point three ignores the fact that the Talmud records that Jesus was executed by a proper rabbinical court for idolatry, inciting other Jews to idolatry, and contempt of rabbinical authority. The Romans are not even mentioned.

The Talmud, however, does not say it is wrong to save the lives of deadly, sworn enemies of the Jewish people on the Sabbath. The Talmud says it is wrong to save the lives of all non-Jews on the Sabbath. The Talmudic position is that non-Jewish lives can be saved on the Sabbath only if letting the non-Jew die might cause problems for Jews. It is simply a “don’t rob a banks when the police are watching exception.”

Let us pause and examine what the Talmud says about the non-humanity of non-Jews.

Kerithoth 6b: Cattle and non-Jews are not human.

Yebamoth 61a: Non-Jewish graves do not impart ritual impurity because non-Jews are not human.

Baba Mezia 114b: ‘The graves of gentiles [goyim] do not defile. For it is written, ‘And ye my flock, the flock of my pastures, are men (Adam)’ (Ezekiel 34:31); only ye are designated men (Adam).”

In Berakoth 58a: Gentiles are not human.

The most famous Jewish commentator on the Talmud is Moses Maimonides. The private Jewish school that Noah Feldman attended was name after Maimonides. What did Maimonides say the Talmud teaches about the value of non-Jewish lives?

“Accordingly, if we see an idolater [non-Jew] being swept away or drowning in the river, we should not help him. If we see that his life is in danger, we should not save him.”

“And this applies not to corpse uncleanness only but to any other kind of uncleanness: neither gentiles nor cattle are susceptible to any uncleanness.”

“‘If a man schemes against his fellow man and kills the man deliberately, take him away from the altar and put him to death. But a gentile is not considered a man, and even more so, a Jew is not executed for killing an unrighteous gentile.” -  Maimonides,

,  Brooklyn, New York, 1990.

Professor Ehud Sprinzak of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, reports that an examination of the relevant Jewish religious literature by Rabbi David Ben-Heim proves that most of the authorities hold that non-Jews are not human beings. - Sprinzak, Ehud.

, Oxford, 1991

Boteach raises the moral stakes – or sinks to a lower low – by arguing the extermination of civilian non-combatants by aerial bombardment with conventional or nuclear weapons is morally justified when they enemy is dedicated to the destruction of democracy.

“Now,” Boteach continues, “few would construe these actions as proof that these great Western leaders believed that a German or a Japanese life was inferior to an American or British life. Rather, these decisions were made in the context of Germany and Japan being the sworn enemies of the West, who were dedicated to democracy’s destruction. The same is true of why the Talmud questioned whether the Romans, who were similarly committed to the enslavement of the earth, were worth saving.”

Since the attacks on Professor Noah Feldman’s article in the New York Time resort to deceit and obfuscation, it is worthwhile to find out what else he has revealed that might clarity our understanding of the modern Jewish community.

Mainstream, non-Hasidic Orthodox Jewish law does not recognized a marriage by a Jew to a non-Jew.

Before the “Emancipation” the Western Jews by the Emperor of Austria and by the French revolutionaries the Jewish “ghettos” were privileged communities that had the right to enforce their own rules of membership by coercive force.

Jews believe that their Bible contains 613 commandments, not ten.

The aim of modern orthodox Jewish students is “to seem to outsiders – and to ourselves – like reasonable, mainstream people, not fanatics or cult member.”

Modern orthodox Jewish politicians like Senator Joe Lieberman always wear a prayer shawl under their shirts and neckties like the sacred underwear worn by Mormon politicians. They also don a leather phylactery each morning for their prayers.

Senator Lieberman would find it difficult to find anything he was allowed to eat in a non-kosher restaurant other than a plain salad without dressing “assuming of course, that the salad was prepared with a kosher knife.”

The purpose of the Jewish laws about food is to cut Jews off from non-Jews

What is it like to study the Talmud? “A problem in Talmud study is never answered, it is only deepened. The Bible prohibits work on the Sabbath. But what is work? The rabbis began with 39 categories, each of which called for its own classification into as many as 39 further subcategories. Then came the problem of intention: What state of mind is required for “work” to have occurred? You might perform an act of work absent-mindedly, having forgotten that it was the Sabbath, or ignorantly, not knowing that action constituted work. You might perform an action with the goal of achieving some permissible outcome — but that result might inevitably entail some prohibited work’s taking place. Learning this sort of reasoning as a child prepared me well, as it has countless others, for the ways of American law.”

Feldman recalls the sex education day held when he was in seventh grade. After the scientific bits of the lesson were over, a rabbi explained the Jewish-law perspective on these questions. “It amounted to a blanket prohibition on the activities to which we had just been introduced. After marriage, some rather limited subset of them might become permissible — but only in the two weeks of the month that followed the two weeks of ritual abstinence occasioned by menstruation.”

Like the Moslems in Saudi Arabia, modern Orthodox Jewish boys and girls are forbidden to touch each other.

Feldman’s Talmud teacher shared a ruling by Rabbi Moshe Feinstein that forbade romantic attachments between people too young to marry “in part on the ground that it would inevitably lead to nonprocreative seminal emissions, whether intentional or unintentional.”

The Talmud has categories of people who may freely be killed.

“Yigal Amir, the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin, was a modern Orthodox Jew who believed that Rabin’s peace efforts put him into the Talmudic category of one who may be freely executed because he is in the act of killing Jews.”

“In 1994, Dr. Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 worshipers in the mosque atop the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron. An American-born physician, Goldstein attended a prominent modern Orthodox Jewish day school in Brooklyn.”

Every year every Orthodox synagogue reminds believers of God’s command to exterminate the Amalekites. God ordered Saul to kill every living Amalekite — man, woman and child, and even the sheep and cattle.

“To Goldstein, the Palestinians were Amalekites. Like a Puritan seeking the contemporary type of the biblical archetype, he applied Deuteronomy and Samuel to the world before him. Commanded to settle the land, he settled it. Commanded to slaughter the Amalekites without mercy or compassion, he slew them. …. According to one newspaper account, when he was serving in the Israeli military, he refused to treat non-Jewish patients. And his actions were not met by universal condemnation: his gravestone describes him as a saint and a martyr of the Jewish people, “Clean of hands and pure of heart.”

Posted by Robert Reis on Saturday, September 15, 2007 at 06:25 AM in Jewish Diaspora
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