THE FIRST CHURCH OF JUDAISM | 2006-09-29
I hate sermons. In the little Methodist Church my mother made me attend every other Sunday, the clock faced the preacher so he would see when his half hour was used up. It didn't help that back then a wool suit was the only formal attire, so I had to wear wool pants in the middle of the South Carolina summer.
As I had to explain at each conference I attended, I have spent fifty years writing speeches, giving speeches, listening to speeches, and I attend precious few and never for fun.
Within two miles of where I am sitting there are three synagogues, one of each major branch. If I wanted to hear about Jews all I would need to do is drive to one of them on Saturday. But I don't.
When I talk to David Duke, he almost NEVER mentions Jews to me. That is because he knows that I am sick to death of the subject. But most specialists on Jews, and he certainly qualifies on that score, are neither that polite and none of the others I have met have David's empathy.
I am an old interogator, so to me an anti-semitic lecture is much the same as a rabbinical sermon. There is something fundamentally unhealthy about a gentile building his world around Jews. But I am wrong to some extent. You see, an interrogator must not just go with his gut reaction. He has to take human motivations into account.
Being an interrogator is based on rule that are simple, but not EASY.
One of the most basic motivations of human beings, since our outstanding chraracteristic is a large frontal lobe, is that we become interested in what we know about. Overriding Joe's loud objections in advance, I myself am, to a surprising degree, human. I can prove this surprising point with one example.
I was Special Assistant to the head of the Civil Service for both Staffing and Security checks. There is nothing quite as mind-numbing as regulations for civil service jobs. But I had to study them in depth.
I knew that my studies had gone too far when I was trying to explain to someone the radical implications of a particular decision recorded in the loose-leaf, ten thousand page Federal Personnel Manual (FPM). I finally noticed that the person I was filling in on the background of my Great Discovery had a look on his face that showed clearly that he would be rather doing something more pleasant, like being in the last stages of tuberculosis or having a spike driven into his ear.
Remember that I was a professional interrogator, and it took me that long to catch on!
It bothers me that, in church, there is always a reading from the Old Testament. The curse of being from the Bible Belt is that we are exposed to Jews, Jews, Jews all the time, even if we have never met one of the sect that calls itself Jews today.
I am fighting human nature here. Anybody who has studied Jews on and on and on, for any reason at all, is going to find Jews interesting.
Whether he is anti-semitic or pro-semitic (philo-semitic is pretentious nonsense) makes no difference at all. Whether he is a rabbi or a Bible Belter makes no difference at all. A person tends to take an interest in whatever he knows a lot about.
My problem is that I don't HAVE to listen to the rabbis. But I have to show folks on my side polite attention, even when I would rather be sitting there having a spike slowly driven into my ear.