The group views its stated Jewishness not as a spiritual path but as a political identity.
New York, December 20 – A far-left organization that uses the Jewish heritage of some of its members to claim that its political positions flow from “authentic” Jewish values encountered a challenge today upon learning that this Friday features an important day on the Jewish calendar, but, because no one in the organization boasts much actual knowledge of the Judaism they exploit for performative political posturing, has been forced to plan an activity that has become a lackluster default program, namely the conduct of an end-of-Sabbath ceremony, in this case on the day before the Jewish Sabbath, instead of the group’s established custom of Saturday afternoon, hours before Sabbath in fact ends.
“It’s become something of a cliché,” acknowledged New York chapter president of If Not Now, Asa Juh. “Most of our member activists are volunteers. We don’t have much of a full-time staff, certainly not with enough time to conduct all the necessary research for all of our events. I’m sure we’ll come up with something else for our next event, but for now, afternoon Havdalah it is.”
The tenth of the Jewish month of Tevet, according to Jewish sources available with a few seconds of online searching, commemorates three separate events over the course of several centuries. Fasting daylight hours, Jews lament events that occurred on the eighth, ninth, and tenth of the month: the beginning of the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem that eventually saw the First Temple destroyed; the forced translation of the Jewish Scriptures into Greek for wider distribution, stripping the text of crucial nuance and allusions available only in the original Hebrew; and the death of Ezra the Scribe.
Basic Jewish education covers that information, but INN, consistent with other activist groups that see their stated Jewishness not as a spiritual path but as a political identity, attracts only Jews whose devotion to the tradition remains limited to stereotypically Jewish foods, affected use of Yiddish phrases, and the bizarre conflation of progressive politics with authentic Jewish values, in favor of invoking Jewish ideas but wresting them from their sources to serve a political agenda, in the process distorting and often contradicting the very message of the original. A glaring example of that phenomenon occurs with some frequency when If Not Now advocates the dissolution of Jewish sovereignty in the ancestral Jewish homeland, citing alleged injustices, while invoking a verse from Deuteronomy that begins, “Justice, justice shall you pursue,” but, unknown to the underinformed INN members continues, “in order that you live and inherit the land that the Lord your God has given you,” i.e. the land of Israel.
The often-absurd ignorance of basic Jewish concepts has seldom prevented mainstream news sources from citing INN and similar groups as representative of Jewish opinions.
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