{"id":14612,"date":"2013-08-05T16:05:59","date_gmt":"2013-08-05T20:05:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2013\/08\/05\/14612.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T19:06:21","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T00:06:21","slug":"yhb-threat-or-menace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2013\/08\/05\/yhb-threat-or-menace\/","title":{"rendered":"YHB: Threat or menace?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Well, and seriously, Your Humble Blogger is not interested in the Something foolish someone wrote in a column in the Jewish Daily Forward<\/i> beat. That would have to be a team effort, anyway, a team of particularly patient, strong-stomached men and women, with a sense of the long arc of history. Restricting itself to its own issues, the Interfaith Family Blog<\/a> can’t quite keep up. Even the Is this \u05e4\u05d0\u05e8\u05d5\u05d5\u05e2\u05e8\u05d8\u05e1 article serious or satire?<\/i> beat would be pretty grueling.\n

I, however, find myself wanting to point out to Gentle Readers all the column by Yoel Finkelman called Why Intermarriage Poses Threat to Jewish Life—But Gay Marriage Doesn’t<\/a>. The headline is more Ferverts than Finkelman, I’m guessing, as when the writer says A Jewish same-sex family can provide a boon for the Jewish community, while an interfaith couple presents a threat, or at least a challenge.<\/i> he… sorta… tempers? Yeah, he tempers the language of threat. He leaves open the possibility, let me say, that an intermarried couple might<\/i> not pose a threat, which is different than explaining the threat that the intermarried couple poses. Which, of course, he doesn’t do, because we aren’t letting him in on the secret plan, ha ha.\n

Most of the so-called argument is just the same business of saying that synagogues should exclude interfaith couples until they start bringing their kids up in synagogues—until the people we lock out start doing some work around here, why should we let them in? And there’s also a lovely blithe assumption that the LGBT community would not require much outreach or other serious application to include; they have at least some middle-class suburban domestic values<\/i>, after all. It’s not like we’d have to include working-class or urban riff-raff in our nice clean shul. No, it’s just those nice gay couples, we don’t have to make any accommodations for them. Jewish same-sex couples with children are low-hanging fruit<\/i> whilst interfaith couples are just so much work.\n

Digression<\/i>: I can’t help it. Hehehehehe he said fruit<\/strong>. End Digression.\n

But the great part of the article, I have to say, the reason I can’t just let it go the way I ought, is that Mr. Finkelman completely gives up on the moral claim against either interfaith or same-sex marriage. He writes that At one level, same-sex marriage and intermarriage present the same problem.<\/i> What problem is that? The problem that it’s impossible to justify moral outrage against them; that the only possible justification for excluding them is blind traditionalism. How dare these happy couples present the problem of making it difficult to justify their exclusion on moral grounds! All is not lost, however, as Mr. Finkelman seems to feel that while morally, there is no basis for excluding either kind of couple, we should continue to discriminate against interfaith couples because inclusion in their case while morally correct would just be too damn much work.\n

Was it not Rabbi Tarfon who said<\/a> The day is short and the work is great, and the labourers are sluggish, and frankly it’s a bit of a challenge so let’s not bother.<\/i>\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger views himself more as a challenge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[196],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hatchet-job"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14612"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14612\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16560,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14612\/revisions\/16560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}