Religious Fanatics

A few days ago I ran into the spouse of a lawyer I knew who started giving me drek (shit in Yiddish) for my opinions, mostly published in the St. Louis Jewish Light newspaper, about Orthodox Jews.  Of course, she did not want to hear my response.

I don’t have any problem with Orthodox Jews, evangelical Christians, Roman Catholics, or Moslems, to name just a few, if they keep their beliefs out of my face and don’t try to impose them on me.

I’m especially outspoken about the Orthodox, and more specifically the ultra-orthodox, because they falsely portray themselves as the only true way to be Jewish.  That’s wrong, of course.  My ancestors from both Poland/Ukraine and Germany were proud Jews who identified themselves as such, but they rarely participated in rituals except for things like Passover Seder and did not wear yarmulkes all day.  I am not aware of any of the Jewish Nobel Prize winners who were orthodox.  None of the members of my tribe that I know swing live chickens around their head on Yom Kippur to transfer their sins to the chickens, like some orthodox do.  (When I do try to transfer my sins on Yom Kippur, I use a rubber chicken.)  And I have never been to a Bris (ritual circumcision) where the mohel (circumciser) sucks the blood off the baby’s penis (called Metizah b’peh).

The orthodox, in trying to portray their version of Judaism, attempt to force their ways on the rest of us.  At the Jewish Community Center, they successfully got management to ban the sale of Gatorade because it was not kosher in their view. That des[pite the fact that few if any one them attended the center!  Can you imagine Moses and his herd crossing the Sinai and refusing to drink a case of Gatorade because it wasn’t kosher?

 They also treat women as second-class citizens in varying degrees.  In some of their groups the women are sent out to work and raise families, while the men spend their time studying Torah.  Some men refuse to sit next to women on airplanes, causing flights to be delayed and even canceled while people are asked to change seats.  In Israel they demand sex-segregated buses.

 There are those Jews who believe the Torah (the first five books of Moses) are the literal word of God.  There are others, like me, who don’t believe that we are all descended from Adam and Eve through incestuous relations between their children.  Some of the orthodox believe that God, a notorious mass murderer, flooded the earth leaving only Noah and his family to repopulate the earth through incestuous relationships.  Most of us believe these are foundation myths. 

In sum, “Go ahead and believe in whatever crazy shit you want, just leave me out of it!”