Reb Gutman Locks #fundie

Reb Gutman Locks #fundie mpaths.com

It Almost Always Happens

Yesterday, I was trying to convince a surveyor from England to put on tefillin. He refused. Over and over again... he refused. Not only did he refuse, but he was strong in his refusal.

[...]

"Are you married? Do you have children?" I asked.

"Yes, of course," he answered quickly.

"Is your wife Jewish?" I asked.

"No, she is not."

Instinctively, I took a step back. I just reacted to what he had done by intermarrying and fathering non-Jewish children. "You have pulled yourself away from the Jewish people," I told him.

He quickly took a step forward. He was tough.

"All that matters is that they are good people," he said.

"Why not have them be good people and be Jews, too?" I asked.

"It makes no difference whether they are Jews or not," he said.

"Of course it does. Jews are good for the world. Only one of out 510 people in the world is Jewish, but one out of four Noble Prize winners are Jewish! Jews are a valuable commodity," I explained.

"That doesn't mean anything," he tried to push the statistics away, as if they were meaningless.

I said, "You're an engineer. You're supposed to be logical. But when it comes to seeing the amazing value of Jewish people, you refuse to see it."

I went on, "We see this all the time. When a Jew strongly refuses to put on tefillin, he almost always goes on to think that there is no reason not to intermarry. Now I understand your strong refusal. You don't want to pull away from your non-Jewish family, and you think that if you do anything Jewish you will have to leave them behind."

"As long as the children are good, it doesn't matter if they are Jews or not," he insisted.

"You have done to your family just what all of our enemies for hte past 4,000 years have wanted.... 'No more Jews!'"

He shrugged his shoulders, turned his back to me, and walked away.

51 comments

old comment by UHM

"You have done to your family just what all of our enemies for hte past 4,000 years have wanted.... 'No more Jews!'"
Lines like this is why I'm sometimes happy I don't have Jewish heritage.

@Mudak: AFAIK (someone will no doubt correct me if I'm wrong), there is some-what of a correlation. In the Middle Ages Jews were persecuted and banned from certain jobs and only allowed to do jobs that were considered not good. While most of those were really shitty jobs like grave digger, merchant was a very prominent one. Merchants at that time were neither rich nor had a good life, having to travel on unsafe roads, coming in contact with disease not often seeing your family but later when book keeping arose, merchants quickly became some of the most educated people around. Over generations this people became richer and richer and with that more and more educated - so arose the stereotype of the rich intellectual Jew and the Jewish mother pressuring her son to be a doctor while Christian parents had told their children not to read because it would make them stupid (I`m not kidding with that). Over the centuries, having been persecuted out of poverty, Jews became a good portion of the elite in the Western World. Whether this is cultural or economical is hard to tell.

old comment by Passerby

"You have done to your family just what all of our enemies for hte past 4,000 years have wanted.... 'No more Jews!'"

He shrugged his shoulders, turned his back to me, and walked away.

He loves his family unconditionally, wishes to teach his children right from wrong above all else, and stands by them even in the face of your antagonism. I don't know if it's his faith or his life experience that gives him such strength of character but I hope it serves him well in a long and joyous life. You accused him of leaving his people behind? You shoved him and the ones he loves away. In the end proved himself a better man by turning his back to you and leaving you as you will always be for as long as you wish to force your standards on others: Alone.

"Why not have them be good people and be Jews, too?" I asked.

Why not be a bigoted prick and be a Christian too? Or a Muslim? Or an atheist? Oh right, because forcing you to drop your beliefs to fit in with someone else's idea of societal norms is downright facist. Does irony mean nothing to you?

old comment by Hasan Prishtina

Only one of out 510 people in the world is Jewish, but one out of four Noble Prize winners are Jewish!

All of those Jews gained Nobel Prizes by turning away from chasidism and working in the rest of the world. Something tells me you wouldn't be proud of Albert Einstein's beliefs or the lifestyle of many of Isaac Bashevis Singer's characters. Neither of Nobel laureate Harold Pinter's wives were Jewish. Robert Fogel, who won the Nobel Prize for his work in cliometrics, married a non-Jew. Saul Perlmutter, who won the Nobel in 2011, is married to a non-Jew. And would you be counting Sir John Vane (1982), or Edmond Fischer (1992), who had Jewish fathers and non-Jewish mothers, people you would otherwise count as non-Jews?

When a Jew strongly refuses to put on tefillin, he almost always goes on to think that there is no reason not to intermarry.

1) There are millions of believing Jews who don't lay tefillin; they are Reform, Liberal etc.
2) And if they do intermarry? Most children of such marriages identify as Jewish.

Obsession with tefillin (his kind of tefillin)? Gutman Locks is Chabad. It figures.

You have the tragedy of Orthodox Jewry in a nutshell.

old comment by Dr. Shrinker

Okay, let's look at the most important mistakes you made:

1) Your self-righteous attitude isn't going to win you any friends.

2) Taking a step back was a HUGE mistake. The engineer may well have taken it as an expression of disgust, and it is very hard to connect with people after you have just expressed disgust for them. Apparently your religion does nothing for helping you control your instincts.

3) Despite your insistence, your statistics are, indeed, meaningless. Of those one in four Nobel prize winners who were Jewish, how many of them can you verify wore tefillin? You are making huge assumptions about the meaning of your statistics, assumptions that the engineer was smart enough to realize were foolish.

4) Once you fall back on guilt, it is clear that you are no longer doing anything except shoring up your self-righteousness. Guilt is a form coercion, and as a rule people do not like to be coerced. The engineer almost certainly sensed how desperate you are and, ironically, breathed an internal sigh of relief knowing that you would give up your harangue soon.

You, sir, are clearly not Nobel Prize winning material. You're not even a decent spokesman for your religion. And the really sad part it, you'll probably never develop the ability to connect with other people well enough to be one. In spite of your professions of love for your people, under that shallow veneer it is clearly all about you.