Thanks, crooked ultra-Orthodox.

You, with your flowing white beards, black velvet kippot, black coats and blacker hats, have shown the world that we Jews love laundering money through corrupt charities. You, who present yourself to the world as the platinum standard of our religion and culture, have branded us all with the stereotype we’ve been fighting for over a millennium: the greedy Jew, the money-loving Jew, the cheating Jew.

Stop complaining about Muslim charities that may funnel money to terrorists (though that is reprehensible). Clean your own house first. Live up to your own moral standards.

Doubtless there are other Jews who cheat, Jews who lie and steal, giving no thought to ethics or the lives of others. Doubtless there are plenty of gentiles who do so as well. I’ll criticize them but they matter to me less than you, who make Judaism ostentatious, you whose appearance screams “Jewish!” more than anything else.

Because you make me look bad, me and everyone else who wears a kippah, a long skirt and long sleeves, a black hat, a t-shirt with Hebrew writing on it, a necklace with a silver chai. Every kid who goes to Jewish school and Jewish camp, every college student who attends Hillel, every Zionist and post-Zionist, Conservative, Orthodox, Reconstructionist, Reform, Sephardi, Ashkenazi, Hasidic, secular must now bear the brunt of those who read of your exploits and think: there’s another Shylock, another Madoff, another Jew for whom the bottom line is more important than his own community.

This concept, as I would think you know, is called a chillul hashem, a desecration of God’s name. The basic idea, as you learned and taught in your yeshivot and synagogues, is that we as Jews, especially those of us who manifest it in our appearance, represent more than our own persons. We represent our community, our culture, our people and, in the end, our God. If you take tradition at its word (as it seems you would, given your religious affiliation), the same God you pray to three times a day, the same God who gave you 613 ways to serve Him, has been defiled by this scandal. You have defiled Him, Him and the rest of the Jews you profess to love and help.

I thank God that we live in the United States, a country where Antisemitism is the exception rather than the norm, a country where a vast portion of the populace has learned to look past its prejudices and understand that what one criminal Jew does is not a reflection on the rest (and indeed it isn’t: no one in my Jewish community, to the best of my knowledge, steals from tzedaka). I’m grateful that I don’t live in an age of pogroms and expulsions, that you may have hurt the Jews of America but that the rest of us won’t suffer the aftereffects of what you have wrought, as we would have had we lived in another time or place.

As you rot in prison (as I hope you will), know that we have no sympathy for you. We will not pray for you nor will we blame the goyim for your crimes. We, as a Jewish community, will stand up and condemn you: You are wrong. You deserve punishment. You do not represent us.

Tags: charity, chillul hashem, corruption, deal n.j., God, money, new jersey scandal, rabbis

This entry was posted on Friday, July 24th, 2009 at 12:31 pm and is filed under Orthodoxy, Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.