Scumbag politicians don't deserve Tsar-like praise.

"Leaders" that give it to them do not actually help anyone, least of all their own community

Religion and politics are difficult to separate, because a lot of matters of faith and society are affected by public policy. But if the politics start to distract from the meaning of the topic of discussion a line has to be drawn. Sometimes when I go to my Sunday Talmud class if someone says a remark that is political the rabbi objects saying “no politics!” and doing the incomplete pass signal with his arms. I’ve met people that can’t make that distinction, and one person that fits the bill is Rabbi Shmuley Boteach known popularly as the “rabbi to the stars”. Recently Rabbi Boteach announced a new initiative intended to promote pro-Israel positions among progressives. I am predicting that this initiative will have a disastrous and detrimental effect, most significantly because the face of the group for now will be former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. How am I so willing to make this prediction?

1. Shmuley Boteach is himself not a “progressive”, and his history of being an attention craving celebrity seeker was only briefly broken by a failed 2012 congressional run as a Republican in New Jersey.

2. Andrew Cuomo, the silver spoon son of another governor, is loathed by progressives as a corporate politician.

3. Cuomo’s career ended ignominiously with his botched handling of COVID19 and hospitalization of coronavirus patients in old-age homes, potentially leading to the endangerment and death of thousands of elderly New Yorkers.

Perhaps most embarrassingly Cuomo posted a video in support of the group where he proclaimed “Time for the ‘Shabbos Goy’” (meaning himself). For those that are unfamiliar, a shabbos goy in Judaism is a non-Jewish person who may be nominated to perform acts on the sabbath that Jews cannot do, such as turning lights or air conditioning units on or off. However it is also used as a term popular among Jew haters for a spineless gentile who allows himself to be a pawn for personal gain for the Jewish ruling class. That’s not Boteach’s fault, but the fact is that Cuomo is considered to be a corrupt, deceitful, manipulator. In short, he’s the worst possible person to be the spokesman of anything least of all a cause as maligned as Israel’s. Cuomo is also roundly despised for his imperious conduct during the COVID19 pandemic which led to the state legislature repealing his executive order powers.

The Stench of a tyrant’s embrace sticks forever

In my lifetime I've seen numerous self-proclaimed leaders use their position and influence within the Jewish community to cosy up to some rather despicable political or cultural figures. Part of the motivation of this is the adage "if you're not at the table you're on the menu", meaning that choosing to avoid involvement with unsavoury people in power ultimately leaves one unshielded to the consequences of their decisions. This made sense for generations and communities that lived totally at the mercy of temporal rulers, like the Jews of the Ottoman and Russian Empires. Nowadays in many synagogues the khazan (prayer leader) will recite on the sabbath the prayer for the welfare of the government. The origin of this practice was in Imperial Russia where every house of worship regardless of sect or creed had to recite a prayer for the welfare of the Tsar and the rest of the imperial family, so Jewish synagogues did as well and composed a special prayer for them. This wasn't out of genuine affection to the Tsars, who afflicted the Jews by using them as a scapegoat and permitting pogroms by their neighbours, and young Jewish boys would be conscripted at younger ages than their peers into the Russian Army. Nowadays the remainder of Jews living in Russia have greater rights, but are still beholden to the approval of a modern autocrat, Pres. Vladimir Putin.

We don’t have it quite as tough as the Jews of Russia, but here’s the rub: Speak to a Russian of any ethnicity or religion and they will tell you that there is no expectation of freedom there. Generations of Russians have grown up under tyrannical systems of varying degrees of cruelty. On the other hand there are idiots here in the United States that think our own tyrants like Cuomo are what safeguards democracy. For example Joy Behar, co-host of The View and its alpha hen, urged Democrats at one point to simply “ignore everything” when it came to Cuomo’s sexual harassment allegations because potentially it could lead to the governor’s office flipping parties.

This may seem like an odd topic for my newsletter, but I think that it fits a topic that’s troubled me for some time. It doesn’t matter how well meaning Rabbi Boteach’s initiative may be, it confirms to an absurd degree that he needs to use someone else’s glow in order to spread a message. But while his other celeb collaborators Pamela Anderson and Michael Jackson had merely unseemly personal histories, Cuomo’s indiscretions were matters of public policy. He also has a history as an enemy of freedom of speech dating to his order in 2015 for the removal of subway ads for the alt-history drama show The Man in the High Castle because it featured Nazi imagery. It is because of this inept leadership in the Jewish community that I’ve proposed a Jewish Alliance for the First Amendment.