When our kids were turning from teenagers to young adults, we discovered a painful truth about Pesach: none of us really like it. The cleaning, the banishing of all the foods we normally enjoy the rest of the year, the matza-fueled constipation, and most of all, the long and at times seemingly irrelevant Haggadah that extends the Seder into the wee hours of the night when all you want is a soft matzo ball and softer bed.

We haven’t given up on Pesach, but we’ve tried over recent years to inject some humor into the proceedings.

That’s why I was delighted to discover the parody Haggadah, For This We Left Egypt? by humorists Dave Barry, Alan Zweibel and Adam Mansbach.

Published in 2017, For This We Left Egypt? is both loving and irreverent. It covers the entire narrative, not just a portion, and as such can be used as a “straight” Haggadah, although it’s entirely in English as the authors admit they can’t read the Hebrew themselves. 

“For all we know, it’s a Hebrew repair manual for a 1972 Westinghouse dishwasher,” they quip.

As an affectionate parody, For This We Left Egypt? is full of jokes. Not every attempt at Haggadah humor works, but there are a few zingers worth repeating in this belated book review.

For example, For This We Left Egypt? concurs with our family’s distancing from Pesach. “Many young Jewish people today would rather undergo amateur eyeball surgery than sit through a lengthy and boring Seder.”

As someone who has had actual eyeball surgery, I can attest that the Seder is not that bad. 

As an Israeli reader of For This We Left Egypt? some of the quips were a tad too American for me. When the Israelites made camp in the foothills of Mount Sinai, this new Haggadah relates that it was “hard because Jews are not into camping. Our idea of roughing it is a hotel where the breakfast buffet does not have an omelet station.” 

But we Jews of Israel love sleeping under the stars (although we wouldn’t say not to a lavish breakfast buffet).

Guilt plays well no matter which Jewish community you’re in. So, when Moses learns he won’t be allowed into the Promised Land, he takes it stoically. “I’ll just go up on Mt. Nebo and die. Alone. After all I’ve done for you. It’s fine. Really.”

Barry and his co-writers clearly are not fans of cleaning for Pesach, at least not by their definition of chametz as “bread, pizza, crackers, fortune cookies, soft drinks, vodka, tooth whiteners, certain tropical fish, and all IKEA furniture.” Fortunately, “not all breakfast cereals are chametz. Froot Loops, for example, are made of compressed medical waste, so they’re fine.”

Good thing I don’t like Froot Loops.

For This We Left Egypt? has some other food recommendations. Make sure your gefilte fish is “wild and sustainably caught. Avoid farmed gefilte fish if possible.” Also make sure to have on hand “a carafe of Long Island Iced Tea for Elijah.” We all know that Elijah is going to need a shot of vodka if he’s going to make it through the long night. 

Ever wondered why we wash our hands symbolically at the Seder table before eating the carpas? The Haggadah has an answer. 

“After forty years under the scorching desert sun, the Israelites were totally disoriented. Whenever they asked Moses, ‘Have we washed our hands?’ he invariably replied, ‘I don’t remember. Let’s wash them again, just to be on the safe side.’”

Millenia-old debate resolved.

In the “discussion” prompts on the Four Questions, Barry, Zweibel and Mansbach ask, “Have you ever met a child who cannot ask a question? Wouldn’t it be great if such a child existed, especially on long car trips?”

Moses listened to God at the Burning Bush because “when a divine all-powerful flaming shrubbery tells you to do something, you do it,” which was clearly the influence for Monty Python and the Holy Grail’s “Knights Who Say Ni,” who demand from King Arthur a shrubbery in order to pass.

Pharaoh is described as a “schmuck with the IQ of a glazed doughnut.” Or as we’d say in Israel, “a maniac with the smarts of a sufganiah.”

This Haggadah wonders if Manischewitz wine could be considered an 11th plague. Manna is dubbed “divine dandruff.” Matzah is the perfect food to take to the desert, as it was “not only very lightweight but could also be used as both a weapon and a building material.”

As we near the end of the Haggadah, Barry and his co-conspirators address the question of who should hide the afikomen – the parents or the kids? 

If the kids hide it, they can hold the Seder ransom until they get a new Nintendo Switch. If the adults are in charge, they will hide it either in “someplace too obvious, resulting in a super lame afikomen hunt, or they will hide it someplace too clever, resulting in the total meltdown of every child under six. To avoid all of these scenarios, you may wish to follow one simple rule: Do not have children.”

Not a very Pesachdik suggestion.

And then who would be present to query if Elijah were in fact to drink from the cup of wine set aside for him, “Would the wine pass through him, ghost-style, and end up on the rug?”

Good old Elijah, the incontinent prophet.

Finally, For This We Left Egypt? asks: Why just four cups of wine? Why not a fifth, a sixth, a seventh? After all, “There’s no point in letting good wine go to waste.”

Unless all you’ve got left on the table is more Manischewitz.

I first wrote about this new Haggadah for The Jerusalem Post.

Pesach photo by Alex Shute on Unsplash

From Loops photo by Jessica Neves on Unsplash

I’m circumcised. So are all the men in my family. We’re Jews. That’s what we do.

But have we made a terrible mistake?

There is a growing movement around the world for “foreskin regeneration.” An online survey conducted by foreskin “intactavist” Brendon Marotta asked 10,000 circumcised men if they’d be willing to have their circumcision reversed and how much they’d be ready to pay.

Some 40% of circumcised respondents said they wanted their foreskins back. Of these, 22.6% said they would be willing to pay over $20,000 for the procedure. 

Why would men be clamoring for a procedure in such a sensitive area? 

In a word: pleasure. 

The foreskin comprises a third of the skin of the penis – that’s an awful lot of satisfaction being lopped off.

But how would we know? Since most men are circumcised as infants, we don’t have any way to compare before and after. 

Unless you’re a Russian immigrant to Israel.

Circumcision was not as de rigueur in the Former Soviet Union as it is in Israel, where brit milah is a clear Torah commandment. But Russian immigrants who want to convert to Judaism will sometimes get circumcised later in life. 

An article in Haaretz quoted an immigrant named Yuri who was already sexually active before deciding to get circumcised.

“The feeling in the sexual contact was affected, it was wrecked,” Yuri laments. “There was a great deal less sensitivity and I needed a higher level of stimulation. I was 16 and I was an idiot.”

Haaretz’s Hilo Glazer interviewed 50 immigrants who were circumcised only as adults. 

“Seventy percent of them reported that their enjoyment of sexual relations had been adversely affected,” Glazer writes. “Twenty-two percent said there had been a significant decline, 10% said it was medium, and 38% characterized it as a minor drop.”

A survey published in Israel Hayom and conducted by Rosh Yehudi, the NGO that was at the center of controversy on Yom Kippur when it tried to hold gender-segregated prayer in Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Square, found that, while 47.8% of respondents said it was “imperative” to them that their children be circumcised, and an additional 25% said they considered it “important,” 8.4% said it was only “somewhat important” for their children to be circumcised, 11.5% said it “wasn’t important” to them, and 7.3% said they were “opposed” to circumcision.

For Jews considering non-circumcision, an organization called Bruchim promotes an alternative – the brit shalom – which focuses on the ceremony but without the cut. There’s also the website, Beyond the Bris; the 2005 book A Surgical Temptation: The Demonization of the Foreskin and the Rise of Circumcision by Richard Darby; Brendon Marotta’s documentary, American Circumcision; and Rabbi Haviva Ner-David’s novel, To Die in Secret, which highlights as a pivotal plot point a woman debating whether to circumcise her son.

Brit milah has not remained static over the years.

According to the Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion, the version of brit milah practiced today is quite different than what was originally delineated in the Bible. Rather, it is a response to the Greeks, who loathed circumcision.

To participate in Hellenistic sporting tournaments, one had to compete naked. Jews wanted to be a part of the games, too. Some Jewish athletes would systematically weigh their foreskins down with stones so they would appear still intact.

The rabbis, who were against assimilation of any kind, responded by mandating the removal of much more of the foreskin than the Torah originally intended. 

If brit milah was originally the ultimate impossible-to-fake “signal” of belonging to the Jewish tribe, circumcision later became more of a moral imperative. Maimonides wrote, for example, that the purpose of brit milah was to “reduce the pleasure of the sex act.”

The 19^th century Victorian- and Edwardian-era English-speaking world concurred, believing circumcision would lessen sexual desire and, as Darby points out, lead to a reduction in masturbation. 

John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of Corn Flakes, sadistically claimed that circumcision would make a “good punishment” for boys who play with themselves, and advocated operating without anesthesia.

Circumcision is far from pain-free, regardless of the recipient’s age or state of stupor.

Dr. Daniel Shinhar runs a clinic in Tel Aviv that performs circumcision on infants under sedation. He notes that “the pain of circumcision is equal to that of having a tooth pulled without an anesthetic.” 

On the plus side, circumcision appears to reduce the risk of urinary tract infections, prostate cancer and sexually-transmitted diseases such as genital herpes, syphilis and HIV.

While the idea of more pleasure is enticing, I’m not considering reversing my own circumcision. Interested men, however, can turn to a startup called Foregen, which is running clinical trials to re-establish a fully-functioning foreskin.

Foregen creates an extra-cellular matrix – a kind of “scaffolding” made of proteins, carbohydrates, collagen, hyaluronic acid and other biological material formed from donated foreskin tissue.

Foregen then applies different growth factors “to get the tissue revascularized,” Ryan Jones, Foregen’s chief operating officer, told me. 

“If the Israel Hayom-reported data is accurate – that more than 18% of secular Israelis feel circumcision isn’t important or are outright opposed – it shows a surprising lack of support for circumcision among secular Israelis,” Rebecca Wald, executive director of Bruchim, told me. “There’s still widespread endorsement of circumcision, but this definitely indicates the tide is turning.”

While I wouldn’t go so far as to call circumcision a “terrible mistake,” perhaps there’s a middle ground for the Jewish baby boys yet to be born.

Could we return to the Biblical, more minimally-invasive method of brit milah that existed before the rabbis and Greeks messed things up? Would that enable greater stimulation without turning non-circumcised males into Israeli locker room oddities? 

Or should we just not touch the whole sensitive topic?

I first wrote about foreskins for The Jerusalem Post.

“Foreskin’s Lament” is the title of a wonderful memoir by Shalom Auslander.

2023 has been a year where atonement seems as unachievable as it is necessary. As Yom Kippur rolls around again, there’s a sense of weariness in the air. 

Will the opposing sides in Israel’s burgeoning civil war ever be able to bridge their gaps? 

How will we know if a proposed compromise is legitimate and not just a trick to buy influence and time?

Is this the end of the state of Israel – and by extension, the Jewish people – as we know it? Can we survive a constitutional crisis?

There are so many sins of the current government (and some for the opposition, too) that it’s hard to know where to start. But here goes. I’ll use the Yom Kippur vidui (confession) liturgy as a jumping off point. 

This is not the complete list but highlights that evoke the most anger and frustration.

1. אָשַֽׁמְנוּ. ah-sham-noo – we have trespassed. This is the starting point for our journey towards atonement. We have not listened to each other; we have not been willing to engage in serious compromise.
2. בָּגַֽדְנוּ. bah-gahd-noo – we have betrayed. For the coalition, acting as if a thin majority gives you carte blanche to turn your back on the anguish permeating the people of this country is not democracy but a tyrannical betrayal of the founding principles and institutions of the state.
3. גָּזַֽלְנוּ. gah-zahl-noo – we have stolen. This government is attempting to steal our children’s dreams – of living in a democratic state, of modeling decent and moral behavior where ministers don’t routinely run red lights or run over security guards. 
4. דִּבַּֽרְנוּ דֹּֽפִי. di-bar-nu dofi – we have slandered. Populist ministers have slandered the IDF, calling concerned soldiers traitors, fascists, leftists and worse. Yair Netanyahu has turned X into his personal insult machine.
5. הֶעֱוִֽינוּ. heh-eh-vee-noo – we have caused others to sin. The fury on the streets is so pronounced that some protesters have had run-ins with the police, who have responded, sometimes brutally. 
6. זַֽדְנוּ. zahd-noo – we have sinned with malicious intent. Yariv Levin and Simcha Rothman, architects of the judicial coup, know full-well what they’re doing. Levin even said as much in April – that his judicial appointments bill, had it had been accepted as originally written, would not be compatible with democracy.
7. חָמַֽסְנוּ. chah-mahss-noo – we have forcibly taken others’ possessions. Here I point my frustrated finger at Israel’s ultra-Orthodox politicians who cynically demand the tax dollars of citizens who work, to pay for those who do not.
8. טָפַֽלְנוּ שֶֽׁקֶר. tah-fahl-noo sheh-kehr – we have added falsehood upon falsehood. Constantly crying “fake news” whenever you don’t like what the media is reporting is not just a sin, it’s become a lifestyle. 
9. יָעַֽצְנוּ רָע. ya’atznoo rah – we have given harmful advice. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu outright lied to credit rating agency Moody’s when he said no changes to the judiciary would be passed without consensus. U.S. President Joe Biden experienced similar misleading statements. Does anyone believe what this government says anymore?
10. כִּזַּֽבְנוּ.. kee-zahv-noo– we have deceived. In 2020, Netanyahu promised Benny Gantz that the latter would become prime minister in a rotation deal. It was pure deception from the get-go.
11. פָּשַֽׁעְנוּ. pah-shah-noo – we have been negligent in our performance of the commandments.Justice Minister Yariv Levin’s defiant refusal to convene the judicial appointments committee, when there are hundreds of empty positions in courts across the country, is practically the definition of negligence in the commandment of doing one’s job. 
12. צָרַֽרְנוּ. tzah-rahr-noo – we have caused our friends grief. Former friends on both sides of the divide no longer speak with each other. Our loved ones overseas are despondent and not sure what to do with us.
13. קִשִּֽׁינוּ עֹֽרֶף. kee-shee-noo oh-rehff – we have been stiff-necked, refusing to admit that our suffering is caused by our own sins. Why do we always look to blame others and never take responsibility? The tragic deaths in Meron are one example. Politicians who routinely evade paying their taxes are another. So-called “leaders” who would rather help sex offenders avoid trial or get to Ukraine than concern themselves with the national good are a third.
14. שִׁחַֽתְנוּ. shee-chaht-noo – we have committed sins which are the result of moral corruption. Racism, homophobia, misogyny and xenophobia all abound in the current coalition.
15. תָּעִֽינוּ. tah-ee-noo – we have gone astray. If a violent civil war leads to the end of this country, would there be any question that we have gone astray?

Fortunately, there is an alternative, positive vidui, composed by Open Orthodoxy movement founder Rabbi Avi Weiss. Here are seven excerpts that help to counter the ravages of the first list.

1. אָהַבְנוּ. ah-hav-noo – we have loved and בֵּרַכְנו. be-rach-noo – we have blessed. Is there any better encapsulation of how a government should act towards its people?
2. גָּדַלְנוּ. ge-dal-noo – we have grown – and לָמַדְנוּ. le-mad-noo – we have learned. Even corrupt governments can change. If there’s no learning, there’s no growth.
3. דִּבַּרְנוּ יֹפִי. di-bar-nu yofi – we have spoken positively. This is the antidote to slander and insults. 
4. וְחַסְנוּ. v’chas-noo – we have shown compassion; חָמַלְנוּ. cha-mal-noo – we have been empathetic; and נִחַמְנוּ. ni-cham-noo – we have comforted. So, you want to change the system of government? We may not agree on the best direction, but if you showed a little more compassion and empathy, could that lower the flames?
5. יָעַצְנוּ טוֹב. ya’atz-noo-tov – we have given good advice. That’s the job of legal advisors, the attorney general, the Supreme Court. We need to strengthen not eviscerate these systems.
6. טִפַּחְנוּ אֱמֶת. tah-fahl-noo emet – we have cultivated truth. Enough with the fake news! Where’s our local version of Walter Cronkite? 
7. תִּקַּנּוּ. ti-ka-noo – we have repaired. What do we need to do to fix this broken society? That’s what Yom Kippur is all about. I only hope our political leaders heed the right vidui.

I first shared my thoughts on Yom Kippur 2023 at The Jerusalem Post.

Shofar image by Megs Harrison on Unsplash

Was Moses Ben Maimon, the famous Middle Eastern doctor/rabbi known as the Rambam (RMBM), high when he wrote The Guide to the Perplexed? Judging by how he interpreted some of the most provocative stories in the Torah, that would certainly seem a possibility.

How else to explain the RMBM’s branding of Abraham’s binding of Isaac as, essentially, a hallucination, a waking nightmare? 

Or, on the question of whether angels can perform the physical act of eating (as in the story of Lot in Sodom), Maimonides was clear: What was depicted in the book of Genesis “did not occur in any other way than in a dream or in a vision.”

Were there really 10 plagues, a sea that parted and the Exodus of hundreds of thousand slaves? 

Dream.

The Garden of Eden with its seven days of creation and a sinister talking snake? 

Pure imagination.

The flood and Noah’s Ark?

Fantasy.

Balaam and his talking donkey? 

Delusion.

Moses at the burning bush? 

Well, someone was clearly smoking something when they wrote that.

Now, barring a time machine, we can’t know if the RMBM was actually high on mushrooms or some other psychedelic (and the sage’s well-known aversion to physical pleasure would suggest otherwise). 

Moreover, the RMBM was the consummate rationalist; he would argue it’s “rationality that demands we admit metaphysical beings do not assume physical form,” notes Dr. Elliot Malamet who spoke on the topic, “Can Myths Be True? Maimonides’ Philosophical Rewriting of Biblical Narratives” during a lecture at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies. 

Whatever the motivations, the RMBM placed “less weight on actual history [and more on emphasizing that what] is most sublime is philosophical and ethical truth,” writes Rabbi David Frankel in an essay on TheTorah.org website entitled, “Torah Narratives with Angels Never Actually Happened: Heretical or Sublime?” 

“So, if certain things didn’t really happen, it doesn’t really matter, since that isn’t what the text was ‘about’ to begin with,” Frankel continues. “Maimonides suggests that certain philosophically challenging parts of the Torah were really ‘visions,’ partly symbolic and partly imaginative, that came to teach us things rather than events that transpired in the external world.”

The conception that Maimonides cared more about what we can learn from the stories in the Bible than their historical veracity is not a new one. It’s part of why the RMBM was so controversial in his day, with many of his writings banned and even burned.

And let’s make no mistake: Maimonides was no ancient atheist. His belief in an incorporeal deity was uncompromising. 

“Maimonides thinks more highly of a Creator who creates a cosmos that functions well without tinkering than one who must constantly ‘pull strings and push buttons’ to make it work,” writes Prof. Menachem Kellner in the essay, “Maimonides’ Confrontation with Mysticism.”

The ever-rational RMBM makes his opinions abundantly clear in The Guide: “In the case of everyone about whom exists a scriptural text that an angel talked to him or that speech came to him from God, this did not occur in any other way than in a dream or in a vision of prophecy.”

The opposite – that God can take on human form and eat and drink – “would be tantamount to attributing physical characteristics to God which, for Maimonides, is both religious heresy and philosophical nonsense,” Frankel writes. 

We need the RMBM more than ever these days. Not to enhance our religious beliefs and practice, but rather to take them down a notch.

This is playing out daily in the news, where the current Israeli government, the most religious in its history, has fertilized a toxic environment where ministers feel free to spew some of the most offensive things imaginable, ostensibly in the name of that same religion. 

Hatred for the stranger, rampant misogyny, unbridled homophobia and xenophobia – every day there seems to be another statement coming from religious members of Knesset that should frankly floor any clear-thinking citizen, religious or otherwise.

These MKs are convinced they have God on their side. They are sure their interpretation of Torah is accurate, that history unfolded just as it says in the “good book,” and that if Lot invited the angels in for a snack, they must have transformed themselves, at least temporarily, into physical beings with working digestive systems. 

This fundamentalist interpretation allows our political “leaders” to act with what they believe is God-given impunity when they propose laws opposed by much of the population.

Maimonides’ approach suggests those politicians shouldn’t be so sure of themselves.

“Maimonides takes the radical step of turning all stories with angels into prophetic visions,” writes Frankel in TheTorah.org. “Since it is rationally impossible for [angels] to walk, talk, eat, fly or be seen, biblical stories that depict ‘angels’ in physical terms must be accounts of dreams or visions.”

Do I have any evidence that the RMBM was high when he wrote his seminal texts? No. But by subverting the literal-historical elucidation of key biblical stories, Maimonides pulls the rug out from under those religious pundits who state with absolute certainty what’s acceptable and who’s an abomination.

“Maimonides has completely rewritten the biblical text,” Malamet says. “He’s telling Jewish readers that we don’t believe this stuff. We don’t believe in magic. We don’t believe in fairy tales. We don’t believe in potions. We don’t believe gods visit the earth and take on human form and inhabit bodies.”

The next time you hear a so-called religious authority pontificate that he (and it’s always a “he”) knows “what God wants,” refer them to The Guide for the Perplexed.

Or find a friendly angel looking for an invitation to afternoon tea. Can’t locate one? That’s just as Maimonides would have thought.

I first explored Maimonides’ “motivations” in The Jerusalem Post.

The protests that have roiled Israel for months have been all about “dem-o-cra-tia” (the Hebrew chant equivalent for “democracy”). But that’s not the only message of this horrendous, historic moment we’ve collectively been living through. This has also represented a mass demand for freedom and that makes the demonstrations of 2023 a perfect Pesach metaphor.

What does freedom mean to you? It’s a question we ask at the Seder table every year. It’s one worth asking on this Shabbat of Hol Ha Moed.

What freedoms do we take for granted? What freedoms are we willing to fight for?

What rights and privileges might be lost if the coalition starts up the process again achrei ha hagim and it turns out the much vaunted “pause” was actually a bluff? It’s not such a stretch to imagine: Even as he announced he was delaying the votes after the dramatic events on that unprecedented March madness, Bibi took pains to emphasize he still plans to pass the “reform.” What if there’s no compromise and no dialogue in the making? 

Here are 20 examples to get us started. The question now is: What freedoms do you cherish?

1. Freedom to love and freedom to marry – whoever you want, however you want: traditional, secular, religious, gay, straight, with the Rabbinate, online via Utah, in Cypress or Prague, or simply by living together common law style.

2. Freedom to vote – that’s a right no coalition, right, left or center, should ever be able to restrict.

3. Freedom to work in a stimulating and satisfying profession that pays beyond the poverty level. Important corollary: The freedom to choose the core curriculum needed if one wishes to progress economically.

4. Freedom from tyranny and freedom from slavery – Moses experienced both while leading the Israelites out of Egypt. Modern Israelis have now woken up to what that means, too, both real and metaphorical. Who will be our contemporary Moshe?

5. Freedom to dance – even mixed if you so desire. Because we could all use a bit more rock and roll these days.

6. Freedom to eat – whatever you want, including a nice bready sandwich at Hadassah or Ichilov Hospitals over the Passover holiday.

7. Freedom to travel – inside our wonderful country or to one of many exotic destinations (I’m writing this from Ecuador – more on that next time.)

8. Freedom to protest and strike without being labeled a traitor or an anarchist; without being water-cannoned, skunk-sprayed, tasered, or charged by horses. Freedom from arbitrary politically-motivated detention.

9. Freedom from discrimination, whether based on gender, race, social origins, disability or age. No doctor, baker or candlestick maker should have permission to refuse service based on religious beliefs. 

10. Freedom to pray however you like, in whatever synagogue, church, mosque or shrine that suits you, to whatever god – or no god – that speaks to you (or doesn’t).

11. Freedom to speak up without fear of cancellation. May what happened to Defense Minister Yoav Gallant not be a harbinger of a future where the right to free expression is abridged for petty politics. For an in-depth non-Israeli take, listen to the fascinating new podcast, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling.

12. Freedom to complain …albeit in moderation. 

13. Freedom to say no to invitations – you don’t have to attend every wedding or bat mitzvah or accept every Shabbat dinner invite! Really.

14. Freedom to hold different opinions as long as it doesn’t harm anyone (other than climate change denial which most definitely causes harm).

15. Freedom from fake news. Here’s an abridged adaptation of the classic Serenity Prayer: Grant us the wisdom to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not, and the courage to change the things we can.

16. Freedom to raise kids with the values you want them to have. Freedom for our kids to then reject those values.

17. Freedom to walk safely at night. While Israel is far safer than strolling the streets of Quito after dusk, there’s still risk. Let’s work to end that.

18. Freedom to laugh at the absurd. Freedom to cry at injustice.

19. Freedom to partake ravenously from the buffet of life. 

20. Freedom to love this country unabashedly, no matter what happens.

A very happy Passover week to all democracy and freedom lovers in Israel and beyond.

I first wrote about freedom for The Jerusalem Post.

Photo by Kristina V on Unsplash

“You People” is a disturbing film that hews close to the memes of modern-day woke culture. 

The Netflix movie, which began airing in January, has been savaged by reviewers. Brian Tallerico at RogerEbert.com called it “a stunning misfire, an assemblage of talent in search of an actual movie.” Wendy Ide at The Guardian called it “frequently excruciating.”

My own take away after subjecting myself to two hours of cinematic torture: This movie plays like a primer on how to be a self-hating Jew in America today.

“You People” depicts a romance between Jewish 35-year-old Ezra, played by Jonah Hill, and Lauren London’s Amira, the Muslim Black woman he initially mistakes for his Uber driver. Their parents, Shelley (played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and David Duchovny as Arnold for the Jews, Eddie Murphy (Akbar) and Nia Long (Fatima) for the African-American side, are caricatures who straddle the line between tone-deaf and hateful.

It’s mostly played for laughs and there were a few decent chuckles in the film. But while Murphy’s Louis Farrakhan-worshipping Akbar doesn’t pull any punches in his contention that his daughter should not be going out with a white man (ironically, Lauren London has a Black mother and an Ashkenazi Jewish father), Ezra’sparents are just clueless. It’s not only their awkward attempts at being more woke than their potential machatunim, but about their Jewishness in general.

Which is to say that, other than an opening scene in a synagogue (actually the Skirball Museum in Los Angeles) for Yom Kippur, there are no positive depictments of what it means to be Jewish. Beyond saying,”We’re Jewish,” any actual Jewish content in the form of rituals, holidays or discussions of contemporary Jewish issues are simply missing. Suffice it to say the words “Israel” or “Zionism” are never uttered.

What there is instead is a steady stream of pandering by the Jewish protagonists to position themselves as cool and acceptable to Amira’s family. As Andrew Lapin writes in JTA, “In a modern-day twist, the white liberal family, rather than expressing anxiety over the race of their child’s partner, fetishizes her family instead.” 

The one redeeming scene in “You People” takes place during the initial cringe-worthy meet-cute between thetwo families. When Akbar asks Shelley if she’s “familiar with the work” of Farrakhan, a notorious antisemite, Shelley briefly drops her solicitous smile and quips “Well, I’m familiar with what he said about the Jews.” 

Good for you, Mom, but then Ezra immediately changes the subject – to no avail. The disagreement comes back again in a rip-roaring shriek fest on which community – Black or Jewish – has suffered more oppression. 

“Are you trying to compare the Holocaust with slavery?” Akbar asks menacingly over dinner. 

“Oh, I would never do that,” Shelley recoils, before adding, “Although the Blacks and the Jews have a similar struggle.” 

“Jews were the OG slaves,” Duchovny’s Arnold offers sheepishly, which Murphy’s Akbar dismisses as being 3,500 years too far in the past. 

Arnold doubles down. 

“I don’t have to go back to Egypt. I just go back 75 years. Jews only make up one half of one percent of the world’s population because we were systematically annihilated,” he says. 

That small percentage “seems to be doing pretty good right now,” Akbar shoots back, employing a classic antisemitic trope that jettisons any trauma Jews have suffered for a transactional approach that defines us as no different than the white majority.

“Our people came here with nothing, like everybody else,” Shelley responds, to which Fatima, Amira’s mother, lets loose the conspiracy screed that the Jews came to America “with the money [they] made from the slave trade.”

That inflammatory indictment is never addressed further due to some slapstick hijinks involving a flaming kufi (cap) Akbar received from Farrakhan himself. The denigration is dropped like a hot knish, mustard-side down. 

And then the film reverts to its main message: Jewish apologetics and attempts to prove who’s the most woke. No one defends the Jews again over the next hour and a half. At one point near the film’s end, Shelley asks for forgiveness from Amira and her family “on behalf of all Jewish people.”

“Louis Farrakhan is actually the hero of this movie,” writes Allison Josephs on the Jew in the City website.

As this is a rom-com, we all know that the couple will hit rocky times before the inevitable happy ending. 

I didn’t buy it. 

After so much vitriol has been spilled on screen, and so much ignorance is left unrefuted, the idea of any of these unself-critical leopards changing their spots is as ludicrous as the making of this movie was. 

The film never acknowledges the partnership between Jewish and Black activists marching for civil rights together in the 1960s. Rather, in its ill-conceived attempt at showing how two very different communities could conceivably come together, it achieves the opposite. 

In that sense, “You People” is the ultimate anti-assimilation comedy. Perhaps representatives of the Jewish Agency should show this as an aliyah inducement?

The Jewish Internet has also been up in arms.

“There’s much Jewish apologizing for racism. None for antisemitism,” tweeted David Baddiel, author of “Jews Don’t Count.”

“It’s shameful when the groveling, oblivious, over-woke Jew is the best we can do,” added Israeli media consultant Linda Lovitch.

I’m not saying that all films must have an uplifting moral about loving the other unconditionally – strife and conflict are the propellant for much art – but I disagree with producer Kevin Misher’s assessment that “detailed discussions of antisemitism would have distracted” from the film being a character-driven comedy.

There were certainly characters in “You People.” Comedy, I’m not so sure about.

I first “reviewed” You People in The Jerusalem Post.

Will technology make halacha irrelevant? That was the question Moshe Koppel, emeritus professor of math and computer science at Bar-Ilan University and author of Judaism Straight Up, posed during a recent lecture in Jerusalem to mark 10 years since my friend Jeremy Barkan passed away. 

“Every generation thinks that they’re at an inflection point,” Koppel began his talk. And while there are very few actual such turning events in history, “I believe we are now at an inflection point, one that has implications for halacha.”

The trigger is “value malleability, where the values that have long been held by societies are changing,” Koppel said, citing religion in decline, lower birth rates and gender fluidity.

This is fueled further by technology, which is also at an inflection point. Koppel outlined four areas where technology could change the way Jews observe the law. 

1. Self-driving cars. No observant Jew is going to knowingly speed off in a car on Shabbat. But what if the car doesn’t have a driver but just arrives at a pre-determined time? The door opens automatically, and the vehicle departs with no action on the passenger’s part. 

Let’s take it one step further, Koppel suggested. What if some futuristic wearable device could read your mind wirelessly, “so all you need to do is think and stuff is going to happen?” If you conjure in your mind the thought, “I need a car at 2 pm on Saturday afternoon,” but you don’t open any app or tap any buttons, are you still breaking halacha?

2. Lab-grown meat. Cultured chicken and beef are better for the planet – no need to dedicate acres of land for farms, no more cow farts contributing to climate change – and better for our bodies (no antibiotics required). 

Some top Israeli rabbinic authorities, including David Stav, Oren Duvdavani, Moshe Bigel and Yuval Cherlow, have even deemed meat grown in a lab to be “parve,” since no living animal need be shechted (slaughtered according to Jewish ritual) and the cultivation process uses embryonic stem cells rather than muscle tissue. (Embryos are considered a separate entity from the mother, according to halacha.)

Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi David Lau agrees. Last week he issued a ruling that Israeli startup Aleph Farms’ cultured steaks are indeed parve – although they must be marketed as a “meat alternative” to not cause kosher consumers to inadvertently sin by mixing meat and milk.

Still, “if there’s only synthetic meat in the world, then most of kashrut doesn’t matter anymore,” Koppel suggested. You can eat a cheeseburger or some Häagen-Dazs after cholent and you’ll still be within kosher guidelines.

3. Education. The university world has typically “been hostile to haredi (ultra-Orthodox) values,” Koppel said. But now it’s possible to “just go online and watch a recording of the best courses at MIT. You don’t need to be part of university culture. So, the ultra-Orthodox will soon be able to get a university education without paying a price.” 

By price, Koppel is referring to the attacks those in the haredi world might receive if caught studying outside the walls of the yeshiva.

Nor are the benefits of online learning limited to the Orthodox. We have friends whose three children all received degrees from Harvard almost entirely by attending courses on the Internet. 

At some point in the future, we may not even need to attend online classes. Like the “mind-reading” device for self-driving cars but in reverse, a computer-human interface could pump knowledge directly into the brain. 

4. Artificial intelligence. In a phone interview after the talk, I asked Koppel about ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot that’s taken the Internet by storm. ChatGPT is nearly good enough already to answer the kinds of basic questions about halacha that used to be the exclusive domain of one’s rabbi, Koppel explained.

“There will always be the hard questions requiring someone with human insights and sensitivity,” Koppel added. “But 99% of questions are basically ‘look up’ queries, which someone who knows their way around Jewish texts could answer.” Those are perfect for AI tools like ChatGPT.

Is there a point when things become too easy?

We already see that happening with other aspects of technology. Do you remember your friends’ phone numbers anymore? Or do you simply scroll for their name and tap your phone? 

Ditto for navigation. 

Uri Levine, founder of Waze, writes in his new book, Fall in Love with the Problem Not the Solution, about a time he asked his son to drive him to the airport.

“I can’t, Dad,” he told Levine. “My phone is broken. How will I get there without GPS?”

“I’ll be in the car with you,” Levine responded. “I know the way.”

“But Dad,” the son retorted, “how will I get back home?”

The bottom line is this: If you take away – or at least fundamentally alter – Shabbat, kashrut, education and rabbinic authority, what allure – if any – will a future Orthodoxy “that’s become too thin,” in Koppel’s words, have in the brave new technological world? 

The rabbis will, of course, push back. 

“There are two issues they need to address,” Koppel told me. “The strictly technical – like whether lab-grown meat is kosher and parve – and questions of public policy,” how their congregants should behave. “It’s possible some rabbis will conclude they need to remain strict against certain things,” even where there is a reasonable argument to permit them.

Koppel believes, however, that “the rabbis will need to stretch a little on the technical side in order to get to where they want on the public policy questions.”

How that stretching will evolve in the years to come will be among the most fascinating deliberations in the coming clash between halacha and technology.

The video for Koppel’s talk at Jeremy’s memorial is here.

I first explored how technology and halacha intersect for The Jerusalem Post.

Moshe Koppel headshot is byrebecca2

Hanukah has a bifurcated history. It’s a story of the Maccabean rebellion against the Jewish people’s then-Greek overlords, and at the same time, an apocryphal tale about a cruse of oil that lasted for eight days.

But Hanukah is also a warning for anyone looking at Israel today. Because behind the whole “noble Maccabees fighting the evil Seleucid Greeks” narrative is a much darker story – that of internecine, intra-Jewish fighting over the religious nature of this nascent nation.

And while it initially seemed to end well – the Maccabees defeated the Seleucids, ushering in 100 years of Hasmonean independence – the leadership in Israel quickly became deeply corrupt, setting up the ultimate defeat and expulsion of the Jews from the land of Israel by the Romans.

Are the same processes starting again now?

We like to imagine that the state of Israel in 2022 will be permanent and here forever. But that’s not what Jewish history has shown. Rather, our periods of true autonomy were relatively short.

Moreover, there appears to be something about those who opt for leadership in general – and Jewish leadership in particular – that leads to extremism. 

The similarities between then and now are simply too striking to ignore.

The Maccabees wanted Torah and Jewish Law to rule the land. Today?

“We would all like the state to act according to the Torah and halacha,” chairman of the Religious Zionist party Bezalel Smotrich said in 2019, before adding sheepishly that, “There are other people who think differently, and we need to get along with them.”

But now, drunk with political power, Smotrich has returned to his incendiary ways. Referring to his incoming role as finance minister, he told the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) weekly magazine Mishpacha, “If we follow the Torah, we’ll be rewarded with financial abundance and a great blessing.”

Meanwhile, Avi Maoz, head of the horrendously homophobic Noam party, who incoming Prime Minister Benjamin (“Bibi”) Netanyahu plans to put in charge of both “Jewish identity” and extracurricular programming in schools, stated that “Anyone who tries to harm real Judaism is the darkness. Anyone who tries to create a new so-called liberal religion is the darkness.” 

What a lovely message of light for Hanukah.

Then there are the haredim, who have never shied away from hurling invective on any politician or pundit who demands they provide more secular education for their underemployed masses. One of their coalition demands was that all mixed gender prayer at the Western Wall – including in the small egalitarian section – be nixed. 

This comes on the heels of United Torah Judaism’s new leader, Rabbi Yitzhak Goldknopf declaring, in the run up to the elections, that he “never saw English and mathematics actually advance the country economically.” This while Goldknopf was expressing interest at the time in running the finance ministry.

The opposition to these inflammatory statements has come fierce and fast. 

— Outgoing Prime Minister Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party declared it would open a “hotline” for parents to report if schools are teaching hateful, intolerant material. 

— Over 50 municipalities have declared they will not comply with Maoz’s policies. 

— National Unity MK Gadi Eisenkot called for “a million people” to take to the streets in protest.

In a panic, Bibi has been telling journalists – primarily overseas – that Israel is not going to be governed by Talmudic law. His Diaspora interlocutors are desperate to believe in this highly improbable alchemy. 

That message hasn’t gotten through to Smotrich, Maoz and Goldknopf, apparently, who, at least so far, are plowing ahead with their attempts to impose a fundamentalist ideology on a resistant public. 

How did that work out last time?

When the pro-Athens High Priest Menelaus was reinstated in Jerusalem following Greek Emperor Antiochus’s missteps in failing to capture Egypt, Menelaus embarked on an aggressive operation to further Hellenize the Jews. 

That prompted Mattathias of Modi’in and his five sons to launch a guerrilla campaign – not as much against the Seleucids as their fellow Hellenized Jews. 

Menelaus, in response, summoned the Greek armies to Judea. The Maccabees managed to beat back multiple waves of Greek fighters until, in 167 BCE, Parthia attacked the Seleucid Empire. Antiochus was forced to refocus his troops and the Jews had an opening to retake Jerusalem, in 164 BCE. 

It took another 24 years before an independent Judea rose again, but it managed to stay free from foreign rule from 140 to 37 BCE.

It didn’t take long, though, before the Hasmoneans shamelessly grabbed power and combined the priesthood with kingship, becoming ever more corrupt and oppressive. By the time Herod rose to power; Jewish sovereignty was over. Soon, the Jews would be exiled entirely.

The uncomfortable question we must ask this Hanukah: Can it happen again?

Will the theocratic extremism of Smotrich, Maoz and Goldknopf result in another civil war between the Jews? 

Will our enemies take advantage of our infighting? 

Will our allies abandon us when the Jerusalem Pride Parade is canceled, or large swaths of the West Bank are annexed by those who believe it is “God-given?” (Note that I haven’t even mentioned Itamar Ben-Gvir here, since his main agenda, for the moment, is more about policing than religious coercion.)

Or will the rapidly shrinking population of Jews in Israel who still support pluralism and democracy simply give up and leave?

Theodor Herzl wrote in his book The Jewish State, “Will we allow the priests of our religion to govern us? No! While faith is something that unites us, we must seek out – with force – wisdom and sciences.”

We may be too late. And this time, I’m afraid, not even a miracle of oil will save us.

I first compared Hanukah past and present at The Jerusalem Post.

Photo by Gaelle Marcel on Unsplash

When our youngest son Aviv moved to New York this summer, I was worried. Not about him finding his way in the big city, but about what he might encounter on campus when it comes to Israel. 

While The New School, where Aviv will be studying music, has not been a hotbed of anti-Zionist controversy, other schools in the city certainly have.

The most shocking stories have come out of the City University of New York, where an antisemitism watchdog reported that more than 150 incidents have taken place on CUNY campuses since 2015.

Perhaps the most egregious was a 2022 letter that declared Israel to be a “settler colonial state” that commits “ethnic cleansing,” “genocide,” and “funds Nazi militia groups.” The letter further called for Jewish groups to “unlearn Zionism” and labeled the Jewish student group Hillel “a known anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, Islamophobic, and anti-Palestinian organization.”

New York is certainly not alone. I just wrote about anti-Zionist activities at UC Berkeley’s School of Law in my last column. 

So, it was particularly timely that the Magazine recently published a special section marking the 125^thanniversary of the First Zionist Congress. Ten influential Jewish leaders weighed in on the question of what the future of Zionism should be. 

The entire section should be mandatory reading for American college students – Aviv included. 

Israeli President Isaac Herzog got first crack at cracking down on the detractors who, he writes, are trying “to turn ‘Zionist’ into a dirty word.” Indeed, “Zio” has becomes the latest antisemitic pejorative.

“We have a duty to reclaim Zionism,” Herzog says. Zionism has created “a powerful vehicle for Jewish collective action. It is through Zionism that the Jewish people are making some of their most dramatic contributions to humanity.” 

Herzog is not saying that Jews on their own can’t have an impact – one need only look at the number of Jewish Nobel prize winners around the world – but rather that Zionism allows those achievements to reflect on the Jews as a whole, not specific individuals.

Moreover, Zionism has created a “safe space,” Herzog notes, “where the Jewish people can continue arguing and debating about their big questions, safe from the fears that had always haunted them.” 

Fears like persecution, on the one hand, and “erasure of their distinctive culture on the other.”

Former head of the Jewish Agency, Soviet refusenik and member of Knesset in the 1990s and 2000s Natan Sharansky shares concern for the second part of Herzog’s equation.

“There are only two factors that can slow down assimilation,” Sharansky writes. “Tradition and Zionism. If you don’t have any connection, neither to tradition nor to Israel, your grandchildren will probably not be Jewish.”

Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. from 2009 to 2013, recalls how, at the height of Operation Protective Edge in Gaza in 2014, he was called to an emergency meeting with a major U.S. donor to Israeli causes. The donor wanted Oren to come up with a substitute for the word “Zionist,” one that “was less provocative and toxic.”

Oren “disagreed, forcibly.” Zionism, he argued, “had produced one of the most dynamic, creative, powerful, and unerringly democratic nations in the world – the only “ism” of the 20th century to succeed and succeed massively. All that we would forget just because some American students were labeling Zionism racist?”

Zionism by any other name “would still mean all of this,” Oren writes, “and Zionism by any other name would still be condemned by those who hate Israel.” 

By disavowing the nation-state of the Jewish people, home to the world’s largest Jewish community, “the anti-Zionist Jew is opting out of our nation, a fugitive from sovereign responsibility, a refugee from Jewish history, a footnote,” Oren concludes.

It was Gol Kalev, author of the book Judaism 3.0, who really drove it home for me.

“We are in the midst of a historic transformation of Judaism,” Kalev writes. “Zionism is becoming the organizing principle of the Jewish nation-religion. It is the primary conduit through which both Jews and non-Jews relate to Judaism, whether positively or negatively.” (Which would explain the international obsession with the run up to this week’s elections in Israel.)

Kalev divides Jewish history into three eras: Judaism 1.0 covered the days of the First Temple and a Jewish physical presence in the land. Judaism 2.0 came during our 2,000 years of exile and the development of Rabbinic Judaism. 

For Judaism 3.0, Zionism is “the one aspect of Judaism that cannot be ignored,” Kalev writes. “It evokes emotions, passions, anger, pride and engagement.”

Kalev proposes that more Jews embracing Zionism could take the wind out of the Israel denigrators’ sails. 

“Israel-bashing is by now too entrenched in mainstream society to be countered through rational argument,” Kalev posits. But “once there is a broad recognition that Judaism has transformed to Zionism, Israel-bashing becomes Jew-bashing [and] while being anti-Zionist is a rite of passage in certain circles, being anti-Jewish is a career-ending taboo.” (Witness the slow but steady fall of Kanye West.)

Kalev’s analysis resonates with my own Jewish journey. If I’m being honest, I’d say I made aliyah for the kosher food. That is, my family and I moved to Israel for religious reasons. But as my observance waned, I discovered myself without the religious anchor I had held onto for some 20 years. To my surprise, something else had taken its place: Zionism. 

That said, I’ve been guilty of not embracing my Zionism with the enthusiasm I’m espousing here. When I interview someone in the U.S. for an article and they find out I live in Israel, I’ll usually be asked, “So why did you move there?” 

I’ll typically hem and haw a bit before responding, “This is a historical moment and I wanted to be part of it, to make Israel – which certainly has its share of problems – the kind of place in which we can all be satisfied.” 

That’s a kind of subtle Israel-bashing, too, I realize now. 

Going forward, there’s only one response to that question, one that I’d recommend to Aviv, too.

Because I’m a Zionist and proud of it.

I first wrote about reclaiming Zionism for The Jerusalem Post.

American social psychologist and professor of ethical leadership at New York University Jonathan Haidt published an alarming article in the Atlantic magazine earlier this year that has since gone viral. 

In the piece, Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid, he asked provocatively: Is social media compatible with democracy? His somber conclusion: Probably not.

Dr. Micah Goodman, a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and author most recently of The Wondering Jew, thinks he has a solution. And it’s taken straight out of Jewish tradition. 

We all need to do a better job at “living Talmudically,” he said during a webinar discussion with Haidt sponsored by Hartman.

In his Atlantic article, Haidt described the impact of sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram on democracy by invoking the metaphor of the Tower of Babel. 

Hubris! God declared, before destroying the tower and “confusing their language so that they may not understand each other.”

“That’s the curse of Babel,” Haidt explained during the webinar. “You live in this modern city, the tower comes down, and you can’t even talk to the people next to you. In the world today, our technology has fragmented our ability to communicate. Ironically, the more connected we are, the more difficult it becomes to share a common story.”

The issue really took hold in 2009 when Facebook added the “like” button and Twitter debuted “retweets.” If, before then, social media was about sharing pictures of your kids, after that it was “all about ‘performing’ to get more engagement,” Haidt said.

And what gets the most engagement? Anger. Fights. Entrenched positions

Social media users have become adept “at putting on performances and managing their personal brand—activities that might impress others but that do not deepen friendships,” Haidt lamented.

By 2014, college campus culture was in the throes of change, “so that we became afraid of saying anything, lest you be publicly shamed and maybe fired,” Haidt noted. When Gen Z began to graduate, “they took those norms into journalism and the arts. So, you see the use of social media to destroy people. We call that cancel culture.” 

The result is “a political and moral homogeneity that leads to structural stupidity,” he concluded. “If people are afraid to say, ‘wait a second, I think that’s wrong’ or ‘here’s some evidence against this or that view,’ then we lose dissent and stupid ideas get elevated. When our institutions also become structurally stupid, our society collapses. We cannot have a liberal democracy without strong institutions.”

Responding to Haidt in the webinar, Goodman blamed our contemporary social pickle on “the law of unintended consequences where, instead of being radically connected, we’ve become radically separated.”

Goodman compared what’s happening today in the “digital revolution” with a previous revolution. “If you were able to ask the entrepreneurs living in London during the industrial revolution if building a steam engine was a good idea, they’d have no clue that, 200 years later, the unintended consequences would lead to global warming and climate change.”

Fast food is a similar story. “French fries are very tasty. They’re cheap and fast,” Goodman exuded. “And now you see a crisis in health in the U.S., with rates of diabetes and obesity soaring.”

What are the unintended consequences of the digital revolution? “Political polarization,” Goodman said. “The only difference is that, because everything is so fast these days, it’s only taken us 10 years to see we’re all going crazy.”

The answers, according to Goodman, lie in the Talmud.

“The Talmud is an ongoing argument,” Goodman said. Unlike most other legal codes which focus on the finalized law, “the Talmud erased the conclusions and canonized the arguments!”

This can be seen most evocatively in the inclusion of opinions from both the houses of Hillel and Shamai. “When we study Talmud, we’re obligated to learn about ideas we don’t live by,” Goodman explained. 

In that sense, the Talmud is essentially a metaphor for dialogue, for hearing opinions we may not agree with, for the sake of unity. 

“Jews are expected to know the opinion of Abaye, but to uphold the opinion of Rava; to study the positions of Shammai but live according to the positions of Hillel,” Goodman wrote in the article, Our Technology Sickness and How to Heal it.

The problem with social media,” Goodman said, is that “it is shrinking our mind to the size of our opinions. And that is an anti-Talmudic world.”

I experienced a dose of social media-powered toxic discourse firsthand recently when reading through the hundreds of comments on my article about puberty blocks and trans teens. Half the posts praised my arguments; the rest were largely vitriolic.

The comment that upset me most was the insinuation that I had no right to write about this topic because I had no skin in the game.

Nothing could be further from the truth. 

The inability – on both sides – to seriously entertain an opposing viewpoint, or to express an opinion without resorting to insults, is exactly what’s tearing society apart. 

Unfortunately, this is not one of those columns where I end with a bit of feel-good advice on how to solve a vexing problem. Yes, we would do better if we could all “live Talmudically,” as Goodman exhorts. I’m just not sure how we get there – or if we even can. 

Let’s just hope, if there’s another flood, metaphorical or real, the survivors on the next “ark” will have the foresight to pack a copy of the Talmud with them.

I first wrote about structural stupidity and the Talmud in The Jerusalem Post.