Random encounters with pious sincerity
Rhyme is the gift of greats and of murderers alike. “If you want to continue negotiating, go ahead, but not . . . with Hochstein, Frankenstein, or any other Stein coming to Lebanon.” Thus, from the terrorist leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, who undercut US-Lebanon maritime negotiations because the US envoy, born in Israel, was named Hochstein (Hamodia, May 18) . . . Keep in mind, anti-Zionism is never anti-Semitic.
Nor is food neutral. Food, in fact, is Russia’s weapon of choice. Via collectivization, Russia’s Stalin created the Holodomor to starve millions of Ukrainians in the 1930s for their sin of insisting on their independence in 1917, when the communists ended tsarist Russia. Thus, a century later, compliments of Russian’s Putin:
“Across Ukraine, farmers are navigating mines, traversing bombed bridges and risking dangerous maneuvers at overworked ports to circumvent a Russian blockade and get their grains to a world desperate for them” (Wall Street Journal, May 31). . . . Keep in mind, you can put your faith in Russia’s words that it is open to ending the blockade.
But, sometimes, it is farms that are the true foci of faith. “I have commanded My blessing” (Leviticus 25:21). Thus, the message to Jewish farmers in the Land of Israel, who are the deepest believers, relying on the Divine blessing as they leave their land fallow, renouncing their livelihood . . . not just when convenient, but once every seven years (shmita).
But if reliance is faith, it is, like rhyme, also the face of evil. The governing motto of Kim Jong-un, dictator of North Korea, is “Self-reliance.” Thus, he rejects millions of doses of anti-COVID vaccines and other medical supplies from abroad, while an estimated 1.5 million out of 26 million citizens sicken from COVID, untreated, at risk of death (AP, Reuters) . . . and that’s only the government-reported number in the notoriously unreliable government press.
Death is not the goal of, of all things, a tallit or tefilin. But, for your own safety, ditch them if you wish to travel to Jordan. Thus, Jordan’s border agents checked the bags of recent Jewish tourists, discovered the tefilin, and “took us to a room where they explained to us that religious symbols were not allowed . . . ‘for our security’” (Hamodia, May 18). . . . It is unsafe to be seen in Jordan with a Jewish religious symbol because, again, anti-Zionism is never anti-Semitic; and, you know, Israel regularly denies entry to Christians and Muslims carrying religious symbols, so what’s the big deal?
But, if the Jordanian border guards are, of course, only concerned for Jewish tourists’ protection, you can’t say the same for the medical profession’s protection of black kidney-disease patients. Thus, these patients, who benefit from a race modifier in the calculation of kidny function, will, in some leading medical facilities in the US, be treated exactly the same as, say, white kidney-disease patients, potentially resulting in “inappropriate dosage of chemotherapeutics, rejection of potential kidney donors and exclusion from clinical trials” (Sam Cox, WSJ) . . . The social demands of “equity” trump the medical demands of healing.
But if so, the medical profession deserves the annual Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize for Consistency is the Hobgoblin of Small Minds Award for its candid critique of the standard pulse oximeter, which measures oxygen levels. Thus, “the skin pigment melanin is a possible cause of . . . over-estimat[ing] oxygen levels when more melanin is present . . . in other words, in patients with darker skin,” the result in some patients of color with severe disease receiving delayed or no treatment for COVID-19 despite having low oxygen levels — inaccurately measured as high levels by standard pulse oximeters (JAMA Internal Medicine, reported in WSJ, June 1) . . . Better use of pulse oximeters trumps the demands of “equity.”
Even so, equity might be in for a long-term boost in the US, whose birthrate in the US is below replacement level (Bloomberg) (see “Russia” and “China” for the long-term implications of low birth rates for low economic growth). Immigrants scrambling to get into the US (not into Russia or China) is the country’s best prospect for long-term economic growth. If equity denotes racial and ethnic balance, the immigration into the US will enhance equity as it enhances the economy . . . provided we do not chew ourselves up beforehand with the likes of Hassan Nasrallah’s racist rantings about “Hochstein, Frankenstein, or any other Stein.”
But if we do become our own worst enemy, obsessed with suspending “the human being created in the image of G-d” by slicing humans into racial, ethnic, religious, gender and national groups, don’t call us “medieval,” as the Taliban were recently dubbed by the Economist. Thus, per a letter to its editor, “surely you [the Economist] don’t mean to suggest that the era of 500 to 1500 was so totally devoid of human accomplishments that it is comparable to how Afghanistan is run today? Where is the Taliban’s Eleanor of Aquitaine, Thomas Aquinas, or Hildegard of Bingen, let alone its Harun al-Rashid, Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides), Ibn Sina (Avicenna), or any of the other leaders, thinkers, authors, poets and scientists of that era, spanning three continents and dozens of civilizations? What new systems of banking has it [the Taliban] invented lately? What schools of art have flourished under its patronage? Where are its cathedrals, mosques, universities and libraries?” . . .
Debate it: What is the greatest sin of Nasrallah? His irrational hatred of Israel, or his disfigurement of Islam?
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