Anthony Weiner’s problem is that he is no longer a good fit for New York. It might be New York’s problem.
One absolutely Aquarian mystery arose in New York City in the real time
of “Mad Men,” which was about when Weiner was born — the sudden
appearance of Jews with long whiskers and black overcoats riding yellow
school buses to the Diamond District.
When the orthodox Jews arrived from Russia, New Yorkers did not relate
to Torah as a guide. In the time of “Mad Men,” Israel was a secular
state, a socialist state, led by kibbutznik Golda Meir, born in Ukraine
but raised in Milwaukee.
But the return of religious, orthodox Jews to New York and Israel is one of the most important events in the post-war period and potentially in the history of faith. New York’s secular Jews, like everyone else there then, would have a difficult time relating to a sacred state — a state guided by God’s truths as prescribed by Torah, and not necessarily John Locke’s or Karl Marx’s.
Caroline Glick, a prominent Israeli columnist, writes that President Obama’s “icy glares at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office last Friday, his address before the AIPAC conference on Sunday, and his subsequent press briefings have all made clear that he is not sympathetically inclined toward Israel, nor does he consider Israel an ally worth defending.” Why are American Jewish leaders defending Obama, she asks?
One plausible explanation, she writes, is that “Jewish leaders are concerned that their fellow American Jews are more attached to their identity as Democrats than they are to their identity as Jews.”
That is, more attached to Obama or Bill Clinton (who married Weiner, a Jew) than to the path of Torah.
As I write about Israel rising today as a sacred state, I regularly receive mail from American Jews with anti-Semetic caricatures of orthodox Jewry and the followers of Dov Ber of Lubavitch.
Weiner has been a strong supporter of Israel, but his neurosis suggests a state of crisis of identity, and it is one that virtually all of my Woodstock Age Jewish friends are experiencing.
American democracy is a secular world (conquering) vision. Israeli today, and likely increasing into the future, is rising to be a Torah-based state.
They certainly cannot understand it to be a better state, a state of “higher law.” But in the end, the democratic, globalist vision which is the New York state of mind of recent times, and the sacred Torah-based state rising today in Israel, are incompatible.