The Glee of the Gentiles
by: Schvach Yid

In Yiddish it’s called goyim nachas, but I don’t like the ‘G-word’, so I don’t use it. Biblical Hebrew is unfit to be perverted for pejorative use, and anyway, I have no reason to insult 6+ billion non-Jews worldwide.

So there I was, perched in front of my TV set. Just before Shabbos licht benchen. Watching Glenn Beck. Oy, the hazards of using a TV remote control!

Beck had in his lair Rev. John Hagee of the Cornerstone Church of San Antonio Texas, founder of CUFI (Christians United For Israel), author of at least two books on the subject of Jews, Israel, and Christians (Jerusalem Countdown, and In Defense of Israel), and all around evangelizing pastor. Ostensibly, he’s very pro-Israel, which might lead one to assume he’s also pro-Jewish. Here's a link to one of Rev. Hagee's pro-Israel spiels, delivered at the AIPAC Policy Conference in March, 2007:

http://www.aipac.org/Publications/SpeechesByPolicymakers/Hagee-PC-2007.pdf

In the course of the interview, Rev. Hagee, as he has often done in the past, expounded on the fate awaiting ‘The Jews’, according to Christianity’s Book of Revelation. In brief it goes something like this: ‘the Rapture’ will occur, in which those individuals faithful to Christianity’s Savior will be ‘saved’ by sublimating into Heaven from wherever they happen to be at that moment. Those who are not ‘believers’ – Jews – will then suffer at the hands of the ‘anti-Christ’ courtesy of atrocities more severe and horrific than have ever before been known to humankind.

No kidding! After 1½ millennia of rabid Jew hatred, a ‘pro-Israel’ evangelical preacher needs to inform Jews about this ‘vision’ of one of Christianity’s apostles. Surprise! We’re going to suffer the inconceivable, and Christians will have Gd in Heaven.

Thanks to an article by Nathan Burstein posted on the on-line edition of the Jerusalem Post I’ve learned that Vanity Fair magazine has compiled a list of the 100 most ‘powerful’ people, and that more than half are Jewish. Here’s the link: (http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1191257286817&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull). The highest ranking Jews occupy third place – Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the co-founders of Google.

What is one to think? Is there news here? Is something wrong? Should we Jews take pride in this, or should we circle the wagons? Our history has taught us to duck.

Jewish apologists will wane inane about social Darwinian selection pressures; you know, those individual Jews who managed to survive over the past 1½ millennia were the most talented, astute, insistent, motivated survivors, and their talents for social survival have been passed ‘to a new generation’ of Jew who, having been turned off to our religion, have succeeded wildly at secular pursuits.

Others, like Dennis Prager, have written that we Jews, after all, are Gd’s ‘chosen people’; we’re supposed to succeed. That we, as Gd’s-designated ‘nation of priests’ are commanded to function as a ‘light unto the nations’ (in biblical Hebrew ‘nations’ is goyim – the forbidden ‘G-word’ of pejorative application).

Then there’s my opinion. Sorry to get unpleasant, but I’m about to get unpleasant.

Does it occur to our Christian neighbors that the Savior of Christianity, the person they worship – some as the ‘Son of Gd’, and others as Gd Himself – was a Jew? The Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church states that the Church is Jesus on earth. A simple syllogism will lead one to the conclusion that the Roman Catholic Church is a Jew. I’m certain there can be no objection to Jewish social success from that quarter, nor that we Jews are damned to suffer for our refusal to share Christianity’s belief.

One day at work, one of my many former co-workers, from one of my many former jobs, announced for my aural pleasure, and for no other apparent reason, that he was Catholic. We were employed in an academic research lab in a university medical school. We were the only two employees in that lab, and we each worked for separate faculty members. ‘I’m Catholic’ he said, out of the clear blue.

As time went on he would, on occasion, pipe up with a spontaneous and inappropriate statement about his Catholic identity or my Jewish identity. One fine day I had enough of his jibes and so, in response to yet another of his off the cuff statements I asked him ‘where was Jesus crucified?’ He screwed his face with a most perplexed look and questioningly uttered ‘Rome?’ I then informed him of one of Christianity’s most fundamental facts, that the Savior of his religion had been crucified outside the wall of Jerusalem in Israel, then under Roman occupation (and I thought Hebrew school was lousy). This person, by the way, had a Bachelor’s degree, and was employed to do biochemistry.

My boss in that lab was a junior faculty member of that sponsoring institution. She too was Catholic (and co-habited in seemingly connubial bliss with a Jewish physician whose office was located next to hers). One fine day, following one of my co-worker’s forays into the wonderful world of comparative religious identity, she assured him that she ‘would take care of it’, a statement she made in my presence, and evidently for my benefit.

In the meantime, another bit of glee for and by the gentiles, and in the same lab. A Jewish physician (not my boss’ lover), a clinical practitioner, came to the same lab to participate in a lab-based research project. He was an Orthodox Jew whom I had previously met in one of the few Orthodox schuls in the area. His lab task was to dissect piglets (that’s right) that had been desiccated in an oven. And guess where the porcine baking oven was located? Yup, adjoining the lab in which I worked, and the only door leading into the ‘oven room’ opened into the same lab. He was assigned a bench opposite mine.

The Jewish MD put up with this apparent humiliation, as did I. He didn’t stay long, and was replaced by a lab technician.

Eventually I was asked (told) to submit my resignation. To this day, 20 years later, I’m still blacklisted from employment by that medical school (Bible Belt location).

Somewhere along the line I learned a tale/report of the sort of humiliation heaped upon Jews and our rabbis, which had to do with herding a town’s/city’s Jewish population into the public square; in the presence of all the rabbi was required to kiss the hindquarters of a statue of a swine, upon which pig feces had been smeared. I can easily believe it.