September 14, 2022

I love to blame people. When something goes wrong, my first question is, “Who did it?” My family cringes when they hear it, but they already know the drill. 

I remember a family trip to Lake Powell several years ago. We had gathered all our children from Israel, New York, and Los Angeles and caravanned to a stark yet gorgeous landscape in Utah. The weather was hot. We all piled onto the houseboat, and I realized that the refrigerator had not been turned on, so there were no cold drinks. Immediately, my mind went to whose fault it was. Was it my son? My son-in-law? Maybe my husband? Someone had to be responsible! I snapped at my son, whom I see only once every few years, asking him why he had not plugged in the fridge. It turned out that it had been impossible to power up the fridge until that moment. And I had splatted blame all over our family gathering. I felt terrible, but the damage was done. After that, the energy was not the same.

Every Elul, I focus on one unfruitful trait. Throughout the month, I work on that middah, or character trait, and hopefully, make some progress toward reducing or eliminating it before I go before my Creator at Rosh Hashanah and plead for another year of life. This year, I have chosen to work on my tendency to cast blame. My Torah Mates study partner, Rebbetzin Mattie Plotkin, reminded me that saying, “I will NOT” do something keeps that thing at the top of one’s mind. So I needed to say something other than “I will not blame.” What, I reflected, is the opposite of blame, the positive side of the coin? For me, the opposite of blame is acceptance.

At Lake Powell, what if I had simply accepted that the refrigerator was not on? For whatever reason, that was reality at that moment. Sometimes, things happen, and no one is to blame. The documents arrived late because the delivery van got held up in traffic. The electrical circuits got overloaded, so the air conditioning isn’t working. The refrigerator wasn’t connected, so it couldn’t be turned on. Of course, we could make up scenarios by which someone would be “responsible” for these mishaps, but what would be the point? The solution, I have come to believe, is to take life as it comes.

The core problem with blaming others is that it betrays a lack of faith in God. When we blame someone else, we say, “I know how things should be happening here. I know why this situation has arisen. And my way is undoubtedly right.” What chutzpah!

Since I began focusing more consistently on welling up with acceptance rather than raining down blame, I have changed. Day by day, as the urge to incriminate pops up, I am gradually supplanting it with a readiness to accept reality the way it is.

A passage in the “Big Book” of Alcoholics Anonymous summarizes the value of acceptance beautifully. Here’s how it goes: 

“And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today … Nothing, absolutely nothing, happens in God’s world by mistake … Unless I accept life completely on life’s terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and my attitudes.”

The fact is that the urge to blame has nothing to do with the other person. Instead, blame is about the blamer and their need for the world to run according to their specifications.

The fact is that the urge to blame has nothing to do with the other person. Instead, blame is about the blamer and their need for the world to run according to their specifications.

They say that God treats us the way that we treat other people. How do I want my Maker to look at me? With the narrow eye of blame or the expansive embrace of acceptance? As Elul races by, I pray to keep noticing sparks of censure and transforming them into buds of embrace.

Elizabeth Danziger is the author of four books, including Get to the Point, 2nd edition, which was originally published by Random House. She lives in Venice, California.

For most of the 21st century, public debate over issues relating to religious freedom have largely focused on the Christian conservative community. Deep disagreements over whether merchants should be required to serve customers in same-sex relationships and whether religious institutions must provide abortion access in their employee’s health plans have roiled political and judicial debate, and the recently reconfigured Supreme Court seems poised to weigh in decisively on these controversies in the years ahead.

But Jews have considerable experience with questions of religious freedom too, and several millennia of being on the receiving end of faith-based prejudice should make us highly attuned to understanding the religious beliefs and practices of others. So it’s worth monitoring two court cases that have emerged this month, placing American Jews front and center in two highly-charged cases relating to our religious freedoms. 

The first and less complicated of the two is taking place at New York’s Yeshiva University, where the administration has been unwilling to grant official status to an LQBTQ student organization. The school’s lawyers have argued that recognizing the group would violate the university’s Orthodox faith, which prohibits sexual relationships between individuals of the same gender. A New York court previously ruled in favor of the student group, determining that Yeshiva University is primarily an educational institution, which is bound by a city human rights law, rather than a religious organization, which is not. But Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued a temporary ruling last week allowing the university to continue to withhold official status for the organization, almost certainly setting up an opportunity for the full Court to review the matter in their upcoming session. 

Meanwhile, a half continent away, opponents of Indiana’s newly-passed abortion ban have filed a lawsuit on behalf of Jewish plaintiffs challenging those restrictions as a violation of a state religious-freedom law passed by Republican legislatures several years ago. The tenets of Reform Judaism do not recognize a fetus as a living person until birth and states that the health of the mother takes precedence until that point. The suit follows a similar action taken in Florida earlier this summer and raises many of the same arguments that the Yeshiva University case and similar lawsuits from conservative Christians have offered over the years – but from the left end of the political spectrum.

Presumably, if legal doctrine recognizes the primacy of religious belief when those beliefs represent conservative values, a consistent interpretation would give the same consideration to liberal values represented by the reform Jewish plaintiffs in Indiana. But as we watch the Supreme Court navigate this unfamiliar judicial turf, it also raises broader questions about the extent to which the inalienable rights granted to Americans in the U.S. Constitution can be restricted when they interfere with the rights of others.

Some of these questions are fairly easy: we know that the right to free speech does not allow us to scream fire in a crowded movie theater and the right to bear arms does not permit us to mount a loaded Uzi on the front lawn of a public elementary school. But legal disputes over libel and slander law, campaign finance reform and conditional gun ownership are much more complicated.

The strong temptation is to avoid the intricate constitutional questions and simply retreat into our ideological comfort zones. 

The strong temptation is to avoid the intricate constitutional questions and simply retreat into our ideological comfort zones. If you favor abortion rights and same-sex marriage, it’s easy to overlook the legal inconsistency and support the pro-choice plaintiffs in Indiana and oppose the religious conservative petitioners – whether Orthodox Jews or evangelical Christians. It’s just as convenient for cultural conservatives to line up on the opposite side of both questions.

But religious freedoms – and all individual liberties – must apply to everyone equally. That’s not an easy path to follow, but it’s why many Jews famously supported the right of the American Nazi Party to march in Skokie, Illinois many years ago. And why those of us who have faced so much religious oppression in the past must defend the rights of other religious minorities in the future – both when we share their beliefs and when we oppose them.

Dan Schnur is a Professor at the University of California – Berkeley, USC and Pepperdine. Join Dan for his weekly webinar “Politics in the Time of Coronavirus” (www/lawac.org) on Tuesdays at 5 PM.

About 40 years after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued his fatwa calling for Muslims to murder Salman Rushdie, the Indian author was finally attacked and nearly killed.

Stabbed 10 times by a young Muslim living in America, Rushdie is still recovering. His prognosis as of this writing is partial paralysis and the loss of an eye.

What was Rushdie’s “crime”? He “insulted” Islam.

Tens of millions of Muslims believe that if a person insults Islam, Muhammad, or the Quran, he should be killed. And any Muslim who does kill someone deemed to have insulted Islam goes straight to heaven when he or she dies.

The most famous case of Muslims murdering people charged with insulting Islam occurred in 2015, when two French Muslims entered the Paris editorial offices of the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, and murdered 12 people and wounded 11 others. Charlie Hebdo had printed cartoon images of Muhammad, which most Muslims consider forbidden even to non-Muslims.

That same week, Muslims also entered a kosher supermarket in Paris and murdered four Jews. For many Muslims, Jews don’t have to do anything to insult Islam; their mere existence is an insult to Islam.

It is instructive to compare Christian reactions to insults to Christianity with Muslim reactions to what they perceive as insults to Islam.

If Christians reacted to insults to Christianity the way Muslims react to insults to Islam, there would be daily murders in America and elsewhere. Christianity is constantly insulted in America and elsewhere in the West, and Christians are regularly murdered by Muslims in the Middle East and Africa.

Perhaps the famous example of the former is the “artwork” by Andres Serrano titled “Piss Christ,” which features a crucifix in a jar of urine.

Imagine how many people radical Muslims would kill if a Quran or an image of Muhammad submerged in a jar of urine were displayed in museums across America. It would never happen because museums would never put their staff or their visitors in that kind of danger. Museum staff and visitors to museums that featured such a work would be killed.

Some scholars argue that Muslims and Muslim civilization were morally superior to Christians and Christian civilization at various times during the Middle Ages … No one charges those scholars with an anti-Christian phobia or with harboring anti-Christian bigotry. 

Why doesn’t that argue for the moral superiority of most Christians relative to most Muslims at this time in history? After all, some scholars argue that Muslims and Muslim civilization were morally superior to Christians and Christian civilization at various times during the Middle Ages. Whether or not that is accurate, no one charges those scholars with an anti-Christian phobia or with harboring anti-Christian bigotry. Yet, anyone who would argue that contemporary Christian civilization is on a more elevated level than Muslim civilization — while of course acknowledging that this does not apply to all Muslims or to all Christians — would be attacked as an “Islamophobe,” lose his reputation and quite possibly his job and career.

This inability to judge the West — which was created by Christians and has, with all its many flaws, been rooted in Judeo-Christian morality — as morally more elevated than the Muslim world goes to the heart of the crisis facing the West: the Left’s desire to destroy it.

Western elites in academia, media, politics and the business world — in short, everywhere — claim to be unable to make moral distinctions between the two civilizations — because of Western slavery and treatment of native populations, for example. Yet, they either do not know or simply ignore Muslims’ far worse history of slavery and wiping out native populations. And they know but choose to ignore the fact that the worldwide antislavery movement began in the West and was founded by Christians. It did not begin in the Muslim world, which had no such widespread movement.

The Left has the same morally bankrupt view regarding Israel and its Muslim enemies. On the Left, Israel, with its robust freedoms that extend to its large Muslim minority, is not morally superior to its unfree, terror-honoring Muslim neighbors (e.g., Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Hamas).

It is true that it was only one Muslim who stabbed Salman Rushdie. But it is millions of Muslims who believe anyone who “insults” Islam should die. It was also one Muslim who murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh for “insulting” Islam’s take on women. And it was a lot more than one Muslim member of the Islamic State who slit the throats and beheaded countless infidels — that is, non-Muslims.

Author Taslima Nasrin fled her native Bangladesh, fearing for her life, after a court said she had hurt Muslims’ religious feelings with her novel “Lajja” (“Shame”). Unlike virtually every Western author and leader, her reaction to the attack on Rushdie noted that the would-be murderer was Muslim: “I just learned that Salman Rushdie was attacked in New York. I am really shocked. … If he is attacked, anyone who is critical of Islam can be attacked.”

Exactly.

Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and founder of PragerU. His latest book, The Rational Passover Haggadah, was published by Regnery on March 1. He may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

Labor Day weekend marked the unofficial end of summer, which technically doesn’t end until September 22. But I prefer to bypass this date in preference to the Starbucks calendar: Once the coffee giant rolls out its annual pumpkin-flavored beverages, summer’s end is forced on us once and for all.

Of course, I felt ridiculous as I recently tried to blow on a boiling cinnamon and pumpkin concoction I had ordered during a heat wave in Los Angeles.  It was a blistering 99 degrees outside. Still, according to corporate America, which also ensures that Halloween-themed products are on the shelves by mid-August, summer’s over. 

Some readers may have noticed that for the past few years, I’ve written an annual column devoted to my summer exploits. The first, published in the thick of the pandemic in August 2020, was titled, “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” and highlighted my attempts at growing corn on my cramped and polluted Pico-Robertson balcony. In hindsight, I may not have possessed stellar mental health that summer. 

The second column, published in September 2021, was titled, “How I Spent My Summer Vacation, Again,” and described my attempts to grow mini-watermelons on my balcony while also incessantly fighting with a local squirrel. In hindsight, I still hadn’t recovered from the mental toll of the pandemic. 

I’m thrilled to share that this summer, the only thing I grew, and grew aplenty, was a robust mustache above my upper lip, which I neglected to trim due to my total inability to multitask work and family obligations. And, for the first time, I enrolled my young children in extracurricular activities, which meant that I always came last.

Yes, this summer, it finally happened: I officially became an unpaid chauffeur. Naturally, I’d been driving my kids, who are four and six, around town for years, but the frequency of unpaid driving time that occurred this summer was particularly impressive. It wasn’t uncommon for me to drive my kids to appointments or playdates at 9 a.m., 10 a.m., noon, 4:30 p.m. and again at 6 p.m. And when we arrived home, there were only two questions on my kids’ minds, which they vocalized repeatedly: “When’s dinner?” and “Can we watch something?”

My only respite from serving as an unpaid Muber (“mother” and “Uber”) driver was granted each Shabbat, when, for 25 hours, I was able to stop driving and instead, serve Shabbat dinner, breakfast, lunch, snacks and another early dinner while folding many loads of laundry and begging my children not to use the lint roller on each other’s faces.

Here’s a little secret: Not all families associate summer with fun vacations and juice boxes by the pool.

Here’s a little secret: Not all families associate summer with fun vacations and juice boxes by the pool. Many mothers, particularly those who work and lack enough access to childcare, dread the end of school and mentally prepare for summer as though they’re about to face a short-term prison sentence. We love our children more than anyone, but we also know we won’t have any privacy in the bathroom again for three months. 

I was blessed to be able to enroll my kids in camp for over a month, so that summer was passing along in a tolerable fashion until late July, when our youngest son woke up in the middle of the night with a fever that lasted a miserable seven days. He also endured nonstop headaches and stomach aches. Our pediatrician believed that he had contracted an adenovirus which mimicked the flu (both flu and COVID tests continued to yield negative results). Suffice it to say, he missed an entire week of camp, which meant that I missed an entire week of work and mustache-trimming.

The day that our youngest child fully recovered and returned to camp, our oldest one began showing symptoms of adenovirus. In his case, he was also afflicted with viral pink eye (as part of the virus) and endured eight days of fever, as well as flu symptoms. He also missed an entire week of camp — the last week, in fact, which included an ice cream sundae party and a visit to Universal Studios. Naturally, I missed another week of work and tried my luck at pulling out my mustache with the lint roller. 

And then, exactly 10 days after adenovirus entered our home, I woke up one morning with a hideous bout of viral pink eye that, amazingly, was exacerbated with a severe allergic reaction to an eye drop. My left eye (and cheek) were so swollen that it almost closed shut; I looked as though I had been punched with brass knuckles. I spent the next seven days donning large sunglasses indoors, as though I was a celebrity. According to our pediatrician, this virus has an unbelievably long incubation period.

Parents (and especially mothers) train themselves to “check off” as many personal and professional tasks as possible before camp ends, because we know that once camp does end, our kids own us. 

Parents (and especially mothers) train themselves to “check off” as many personal and professional tasks as possible before camp ends, because we know that once camp does end, our kids own us. And I was really counting on my kids enjoying camp until August 5. Thanks to adenovirus, they actually finished two weeks earlier. Let’s just say I wasn’t ready for their early arrival. And each day, the tantrums seemed to increase. It was intolerable.

Eventually, the days began getting shorter and our family kissed summer goodbye from the comfort of a booth at a local kosher Persian restaurant during Labor Day weekend. I knew it was time for my children to stop being home with me when our four-year-old had a complete meltdown because I had only ordered beef kabob, rather than his preferred chicken kabob. 

As he screamed and other diners stared, he offered his first threat: “If you don’t get me chicken, I won’t be Persian anymore!” I turned to him, pointed to the robust mustache above my lip, and said he would always be Persian. 

His next threat was even more serious: “If you don’t get me chicken kabob, I’m not going to be part of our family anymore!” I turned to him once again and gently asked if kabob was more important than family. His grimace said it all. 

Finally, he whimpered, wiped the tears from his eyes and proclaimed an eternal truth: “But Mama, chicken kabob is life.”

And that’s how my summer ended. The next day, my kids were off to school with chicken kabob and Persian rice in their lunchboxes. I drove back home, poured some liquor into my morning cup of coffee and commenced writing this column.

Tabby Refael is an award-winning LA-based writer, speaker and civic action activist. Follow her on Twitter @TabbyRefael