NY Sun Column by Hillel Halkin Fawns Over the Vatican's Attention to the Jews

This Halkin essay is a five star head shaker.

I'm still shaking my head - no, no, no. Take it as a compliment?

Mr. Halkin takes as a compliment the revival by the Pope and the Vatican of a disgusting antisemitic prayer. This just reconfirms my opinion of the NY Sun and its over the top neocon agenda.

If the little people would only realize how wonderful the world is and leave the decisions to the elite and the rich folk, that would be just dandy.

Here the elite is the Vatican. And whatever they do, well that is just another example of how utterly perfect the status quo is.

But Mr. Halkin is wrong beyond all boundaries known to me.

Look, let me try a story. Maybe Halkin will follow a story.

Let's just say for a minute that you are happily married. One day the man across the street announces to your wife and the whole neighborhood that as long as she stays married to you, she will go to hell. And that man sits on his porch and sings songs about how great it would be if your wife would leave you and come live with him.

Do you get it Halkin? It doesn't seem like anyone I know would consider that much of a compliment. Most of the people I hang out with would find that irksome, rude, insulting, antisocial, inciteful, hateful. Especially the part about how your wife will burn in hell if she doesn't leave you.

No, Halkin. I guess you are just a different sort of person. You'd think that part was a compliment too. The neocon trance. Everything is just hunky dory the way it is, under the caring rule of the beneficent elite.

[Halkin actually says in this essay, "What kind of Christian would it be who, convinced that his Jewish friend was bound for everlasting torment, did not do everything to save him from it? What kind of friend?" And he is not criticizing the Christians. He is justifying them. What kind of contorted logic?]

So here we go, half of the "conservative" article, gloriously continued in the Sun...where Halkin takes us Jews to task for our benign poetic prayers, which he somehow equates with the pernicious and insidious liturgical agendas of others.

Take It As a Compliment
By HILLEL HALKIN

It is certainly possible to understand, as an instinctive reaction, the objection of Jews to Christians praying that they see the light and accept Jesus as their savior. For long centuries, Jews were reviled, discriminated against, persecuted, and sometimes murdered for the crime of not seeing the light. A Christian prayer for a Jewish soul can trigger some scary reflexes.

Still, I must say that I find 21st century Jewish protests against such prayers, or other expressions of the Christian wish that Jews convert to Christianity, amusing. The era of the auto-da-fé is over. Atavistic reactions aside, it's hard to see what makes major Jewish organizations like the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League repeatedly do such things as send frantic messages last week to the Vatican, demanding that it change a newly worded Good Friday mass that reads in part:

"Let us pray for the Jews. May the Lord enlighten their hearts to accept Jesus Christ … Eternal and omnipotent God, You who desire all Your creatures to be saved and know the truth, let Israel be redeemed by passing through the gates of Your church."

Are the AJC and ADL worried that God might actually listen to such a prayer? If so, we Jews are in greater trouble than we thought. But it's more likely that they would explain their position by saying:

"We cannot acquiesce in Christians telling us on the one hand that, after all these centuries, they now respect Judaism as a legitimate faith, yet that on the other hand they intend to go on praying that Jews abandon it. You can't respect another person's religion and still expect him to exchange it for your own."

I just do not have the fortitude to reproduce the rest. Go here if you must have more.

[Hat tip to Steve B. ...]