Chosen for What?

It is with great pain that I place this entry into the Maven University library stacks. Maybe someday, someone will come along and read it.

Last week, I was listening to one of my favorite liberal talk-show hosts, when she told a caller on no uncertain terms that as a Christian, he has a lot of work to do, but that she is one of the Chosen People and doesn’t have to do anything.

Okay, so she was angry at the caller for blasting her earlier in the day on a right-wing radio show. Nonetheless, her declaration was a) Dead wrong; and b) Just the sort of grist that anti-Semites love to throw into the fire.

But never mind this normally clever young lady who knows she’s Jewish but has no idea what it means. If Judge Martin Leach-Cross Feldman is also Jewish (and I can’t imagine why else his daughter, Jennifer Pulitzer Feldman, would have been married by a rabbi), he’s left her standing still.

If Judge Feldman’s name had only sounded Jewish, then what he did was make a fool of himself and a mockery of our court system. However, it appears the good judge is indeed Jewish, in which case he’s also committed a hilul Hashem, Hebrew for the profanation of God’s name.

Why on earth would a judge with a long, apparently outstanding career, set himself on fire like that? Not only did he issue one seriously sloppy ruling in his placement of an injunction against the moratorium on deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, but he did so as a heavy investor in the oil industry. Really, did he think no one would find that out? He knows full well that his financial disclosure statements are in the public record.

Judge Feldman could have sold his multitude of investments in the oil industry as soon as he found out that the case was his. If that would have cost him serious financial hardship, he could have easily recused himself from the case. Why didn’t he?

Perhaps all those oil holdings didn’t just come from a judge’s salary or gifts from his wife. Perhaps the Judge has enjoyed the opportunity over the years to rub elbows inside the top private clubs in New Orleans, something not many Jews get to do. Perhaps he owed his friends in the oil biz, and it was payback time. Perhaps he could feel the screws being put to him by his friends. Or perhaps he fell victim to a bad case of hubris, and really thought he was above the laws of the land.

Perhaps all of the above. It doesn’t matter. The net result was to sully the laws—and name—of God. To flaunt the laws of human ethics that have guided the Western world since the time of Moses. The Book of Deuteronomy is replete with restrictions on the behavior of judges; Jews have studied these laws in minute detail for centuries, which may explain why so many Jews become lawyers. Even if Judge Feldman had been a Christian—or a Moslem for that matter—he should have known that the teachings of these religions also place high demands on judges.

Assuming Judge Feldman is indeed Jewish, he joins a long list of Jewish slime balls—from Jack Abramoff to Robert Stein and Phillip Bloom to Bernie Madoff—who haven’t a clue why they were chosen (some of that blame, I’m afraid, lies with Jewish parents and religious teachers). I’m sure some of them really believed that they were chosen for a privileged life.

Guess again. Jews were chosen for one thing and one thing only: responsibility. We were chosen to carry out the laws of Western civilization in general, and the Jewish commandments in particular. Jews were chosen to serve as a light to the nations, to set an example of moral, upright behavior.

If Jews don’t wake up and start living up to this responsibility, Helen Thomas will be far from the last one to tell us to go somewhere else.