RABBI SHMULEY: Three Predictions on Israel and Land-for-Peace

WASHINGTON, DC — Last week my wife and I met with our friend, Jason Greenblatt, President Trump’s chief Middle East negotiator, at the White House.

Jason’s a busy man, and I’m grateful for both his friendship and his time. I have published columns before attesting to Jason’s extraordinary competence, high character, and humble demeanor — qualities which make him an ideal envoy for peace. Most of all, Jason is a Kiddush Hashem, sanctifying God’s name with his respectful words and actions.

At our meeting, I gave Jason a copy of the Hebrew book I Called and None Listened, a collection of the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s speeches, essays, and letters about the Land of Israel and how peace in the Middle East might be achieved.

Jason is tasked with a herculean objective: to bring tranquility to the world’s most troubled region. It is a project that will demand every talent in his arsenal, and then some.

Joining him is our friend David Friedman as newly installed Ambassador to Israel.

Here is a duo in the field of American diplomacy unequaled in their dedication to American values and Israel’s security. How will they go about implementing the President’s sincere desire for a peace deal? How will they find the correct balance of pressure and incentive that might bring an end to conflict?

There were few issues about which the Lubavitcher Rebbe was more passionate than Israel. A man who spoke on Torah for hours at a time several times a week – always stoically and even-handedly – would suddenly transform when it came Israel. In his opposition to the belief that land concessions would bring peace, the Rebbe would alter his entire posture. He would become super-charged with passion, his voice would rise, his body language would surge. His language changed and he was prepared, for the first time, to voice strong challenges to those Israeli leaders compromising Israel’s security through territorial concessions.

The Rebbe’s followers treated him as something of a prophet. I’m not here to debate that point, and those who do not adhere to Chabad ideology would surely beg to differ. But his predictions about land-for-peace deals surely proved prescient.

In the late 1970’s, while Jimmy Carter, Menachem Begin, and Anwar Sadat debated the return of Sinai in exchange for peace, the Rebbe predicted three outcomes for Israel forfeiting territory:

1.         The world would develop an insatiable appetite for Jewish land. Rather than the return of Sinai satisfying the world’s lust for diminishing the Jewish state in size, the message to them would be that the Jews themselves had conceded to the claim that they were occupiers.

2.         Jews would be attacked. The return of land would compromise Israel’s security and embolden its enemies to strike. Terrorism would increase rather than decrease.

3.         Israel would be demonized. Rather than receiving a windfall of positive publicity and international goodwill for making peace, surrendering land would be used a PR baseball-bat to bludgeon Israel with deligitimization and international boycotts.

All three of the Rebbe’s predictions were unfortunately proven true. After Israel surrendered Sinai, pressure immediately began to build for Israel to return the Golan Heights and Gaza. Judea and Samaria followed in the crosshairs. Most importantly, Jerusalem was identified as the supreme example of Israeli occupation, and the eternal capital of the Jewish people became a city to which the Jews had little claim and would serve as the capital of a Palestinian state.

True, Israel has not had war with Egypt in nearly four decades. But it’s an extremely cold peace, similar to the cold war that Israel has with Syria, where there has similarly been no war for nearly four decades.

Still, Egypt remains one of the world’s largest exporters of official state-sponsored antisemitism, and its population is deeply hostile to Jews and Israel, according to all polls. In addition, Sinai today has become a mini-state dominated by ISIS with little to no Egyptian control. Israel has recently even remodeled entire sections of its military to deal with potential threats from the Sinai Peninsula.

True, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has changed course and has become a friend, perhaps even an ally  of Israel. In light of Egypt’s recent history — which has been an especially volatile period of rapid regime change — we can only hope that this continues and peace will prevail.

But even if we applaud Israel’s courage to make peace with Egypt, why did it lead to Israel’s demonization?

It began with Menachem Begin and Jimmy Carter. Scholars have pondered for decades as to how Begin, who had believed in the concept of “Greater Israel,” could have been the one to give away all of Sinai after Israel won it in a defensive war.

This question is especially potent when you consider the fact that Begin probably didn’t need an agreement. Egypt had, thank G-d, been crushed by Israel in three consecutive wars, and its inferiority to the Jewish state in conventional warfare was unquestionable. Like Syria, to whom Israel did not cede an inch of land, Egypt would have, in all likelihood, never renewed open hostilities with Israel. The consensus, though, is that Begin believed that the most important issue for Israel’s security was a good relationship with the President of the United States. And it was in that belief that he gave in to all of Carter’s demands.

How did that turn out? Carter became the single most hostile president to the Jewish state in American history. Begin’s capitulation left Carter not with admiration, but with contempt.

The same dynamic played out during the first prime ministership of Benjamin Netanyahu, when he withdrew from Hebron, the second holiest city in all of Israel — and the resting place of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sara, Rebecca, and Leah. Netanyahu felt compelled to abide by the Oslo terms that had been negotiated by Yitzchak Rabin before him. But in doing so, he did nothing to change the continued contempt that President Clinton had always shown him. The very next year, President Clinton would send his own political consultants to work with the Israeli opposition that would ultimately defeat Netanyahu.

I had the privilege of hosting the Prime Minister’s father, Benzion Netanyahu, at Oxford and Cambridge to talk about his noted book, Origins of the Spanish Inquisition. As fortune would have it, I was with him around the period that his son signed the Wye River Memorandum in Maryland.

I will never forget the great scholar-warrior, who died in 2012, telling me that his son had been subjected to unbearable pressure, otherwise he would have never relinquished land vital to Israel.

Of course, Israel’s reward for the Oslo Accords was a slew of suicide bombings in 1995 and then a full-scale intifada at the turn of the millennium that would claim over a thousand Jewish lives.

Netanyahu’s government lost the subsequent election and was replaced by one under the helm of Ehud Barak. But when Netanyahu returned to power in 2009, he learned from his earlier mistakes, and has since never conceded land. He now continues as almost the longest serving prime minister in Israeli history.

Donald Trump has thusfar proved a staunch friend and protector of Israel, and his defense of Israel at the UN through his emissary, Ambassador Nikki Haley, has no parallel. His warmth toward Prime Minister Netanyahu at their recent meeting was emphatically recounted by Netanyahu at AIPAC.

Jason and David are American patriots and proud Jews. They know that three great principles of the Jewish faith are, first, that peace is life’s highest goal; second, that every human life is equal and of infinite value, Jew and Arab alike; third, God gave the Jewish people a tiny little sliver of land called Israel as an eternal birthright and homeland.

The great events of Jewish Biblical history and most of its holy sites are in Judea and Samaria — which Jordan, in an effort to erase Jewish history, renamed the West Bank, just as the Romans, two thousand years earlier, had called Judea by a new name, “Palaestina.”

We all want peace, but I would beg to remind those charged with achieving it of a lesson we have learned: surrendering land has not brought peace, but war.

The Palestinians are my brothers and sisters, and Jason Greenblatt’s recent mission to Mahmoud Abbas — which  strongly encouraged economic development, self-sufficiency, and opportunity for the Palestinians of Judea and Samaria — was a noble and inspiring effort. The Palestinians deserve the same experience of human dignity and standard of living as do the people of Israel. It will not come, however, through their subjugation to the dictatorship of yet another Arab leader. Nor will it come through a land-for-peace framework that emboldens Israel’s enemies, compromises its security, and solidifies international enmity toward the Jewish state.

Far better for the Trump administration to work on its inspired idea of an outside-in approach, resolving to try and create peace between the Arab Gulf states and Israel, which will then demonstrate to the Palestinians that their hopes of Israel’s isolation and diplomatic capitulation are a thing of the past.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, “America’s Rabbi,” whom the Washington Post calls “the most famous Rabbi in America,” is the international bestselling author of 30 books, including his most recent, The Israel Warrior. Follow him on Twitter @RabbiShmuley.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach exploded on the Oxford Union in this epic speech

“Hamas is a genocidal organization that proudly touts its charter calling on the annihilation of Jews utterly unconnected to any conflict. It seeks the murder of all Jews, including those sitting in the Oxford Union chamber. It aids and abets honor killings of Palestinian women, shoots gay Palestinians in the head on false chargers of collaboration, machine-guns all Palestinian protesters who dare to defy its rule, violently punishes any form of criticism, engages in daily forms of deadly incitement against Jews, celebrates when Westerners, including in Britain, are blown up by bombs, ended any vestige of democratic rule once it was elected, and builds its military installations under hospitals and nurseries so that the infirm and the vulnerable can serve as human shields to its cowardly terrorists. Israel has tried since its creation to make peace with Arab states and has endangered its security with repeated territorial concessions that were met with nothing but terror attacks. Arabs in Israel live with greater freedoms and human rights than any Muslim country on earth. There is no excuse for terror. Jews even under the horrors of Hitler didn’t turn to blowing up German children. The justifications for terrorism that were being offered were an affront and an abomination to Islam which, just like Judaism, abides by the commandment not to murder.”

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach: Fighting the Global Anti-Israel Atmosphere

Fed Up With Dead Jews by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

There have been other murdered Jews at the hands of terrorists, countless in fact. Walk the streets of Jerusalem and see all the plaques on cafes', pizza shops, and street corners to Jews murdered by Palestinian terrorists.

But something changed with the murder of these three innocent teens. It was not just the senselessness of the act, three defenseless teen boys killed for no reason other than that they were Jewish, for no other purpose but to indulge Palestinian hate. Rather, it was a feeling that this had happened one too many times. That there was a critical mass of dead Jews that had now been reached beyond which the Israeli public and the world Jewish community was not prepared to mourn any more. That we were finally fed up. That we weren't going to take it any more. That we weren't going to make peace any longer with the fact that Jews are born to die. That Israel doesn't have to make do with the site of children's carcasses found rotting in caves. That Israel, even after all the innocent men, women, and children it has buried in the Arabs' 66 year war to annihilate it could still be shocked by the site of more young Jews dying just because they wore yarmulkes. That it was a gruesome site that should not come to be expected but should make our stomachs turn.

Israel and the Jews are fed-up with the site of dead Jews.

Fed up with some Palestinians justifying barbaric murder in the name of their grievances.

Fed up with the foul moral equivalency of Jews dying as targets of terrorists and Palestinians dying undertaking acts of terrorism.

Fed up with a world that has indulged anti-Semitism for thousands of years continuing to scapegoat the State of Israel and overlook dead Jews.

Fed up with Western media that makes more of Israelis adding rooms to apartments in east Jerusalem than 150,000 Arabs killed in Syria.

Fed up with the United Nations condemning the only democracy in the Middle East while overlooking the ghastly human rights abuses of its Arab neighbors.

Fed up with watching Jewish mothers and fathers wailing over the coffins of their children.

Fed up with certain Palestinians ululating at the same scene.

Fed up with Islamic terrorists believing they were getting sex with virgins in heaven for killing children on earth.

Fed up with haters of Israel being more concerned with how Palestinian terrorists are treated in Israeli jails - which is humanely - than with their victims families whose lives are destroyed forever.

Fed up with an American government which, with the best of intentions, pushes Israel to recognize a Palestinian unity government with Hamas when the United States would never even talk to Al Qaida who murdered so many innocent Americans.

Fed up with seeing Israeli communities in the West Bank surrounded by barbed wire to keep killers out while the Palestinian villages live openly and without fear because they know Israelis don't target children.

Fed up with the big lie that Israeli settlements are the reason for Palestinian terror when the PLO was founded before Israel ever conquered the West Bank in a defensive war and Hamas has launched thousands of rockets at Israel even after Israel forcibly removed every last settler.

Fed up with morally confused Churches like the Presbyterian Church USA initiating boycotts against Israel for simply protecting its citizens from terrorists while overlooking Arab atrocities against Christians throughout the Middle East.

Fed up with having to teach your children to fear basic neighborliness that was once so common in Israel, like hitching, lest your children never arrive home.

Fed up with Arab nations claiming to feel humiliated by, and swearing eternal enmity toward, a tiny little sliver of Jewishness that is a but a small fraction of total Arab land.

Fed up with a never-ending river of Jewish tears.

Fed up with a tragic history that never seems to recede.

And we have every right to be fed-up. No nation should have to live like this. No nation should have to die like this. Something has to be done. The status quo is unacceptable. No one quite knows how it can be remedied. But what we do know is that the option of dead Jews is no longer acceptable. We have a right to live.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is founder of This World: The Values Network, the foremost organization influencing politics, media, and the culture with Jewish values.

The Courage of Cory Booker By: Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

President Obama has dropped the hammer on sixteen Democratic senators who have joined a bold Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, and Mark Kirk, Republican of Illinois, in co-sponsoring new legislation that will increase sanctions against Iran should they fail to follow through on their pledges to halt uranium enrichment. The Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act of 2013 has also attracted forty-three Republican co-sponsors bringing the total to 59. If they get to 67, they will have a veto-proof majority, something the White House is doing everything to prevent. One of those brave sixteen is my close friend Senator Cory Booker, who has had a unique and special relationship with the Jewish community since I met him as an undergraduate at Oxford University in 1992. As is well known, Cory served as president of my Oxford L’Chaim society, where he arguably became the first African-American-Christian head of a major Jewish organization in history. Cory and I then began studying Torah on a regular basis and he has probably been invited to lecture more American Jewish communal venues than any other political figure in the United States. What Cory has seen, as have his other intrepid senate colleagues, is that Iran is an immense danger to the world in general, and Israel and the United States in particular. Iran is a menace. This is a regime that exhibits brutality in every field. I just finished reading Days of God, by James Buchan, which is a phenomenal history of modern Iran, from Reza Shaw’s time, who ruled Iran from 1925-1941, to Muhammad Reza, who ruled as Shah until 1979, through Khomeini’s Iranian revolution of that same year to the regime currently run by the murderous and barbarous Ayatollah Ali Khameini. This is a regime that recruited boys from the age of twelve to fight against Saddam’s armies in the ten year Iran-Iraq war. This regime even had ruthless Iraqi soldiers crying as they mowed down Iranian boys attacking them across battlefields, and Iran used children in the Iran-Iraq war to clear minefields, as detailed in Ami Pedahzur’s Root Causes of Suicide Terrorism. It is the same regime that stones women to death for accusations of infidelity. It hangs homosexuals from cranes in the capital of Tehran. It is the regime that our state department lists as one of the foremost global exporters of terrorism. It funds Hezbollah, which blew up 241 American peacekeeping marines, soldiers, and sailors in 1983 Beirut. It is the regime which mowed down their own people in the streets of Tehran in the Green Revolution of 2009, when innocent Iranians protested a stolen election. And it is the regime that publicly shot 26-year-old protester Nada Agha-Soltan in the heart. Today Iran, like a heat-seeking missile, continues to seek out warm Jewish blood wherever it may be spilled, like the 2012 brutal murder of six innocent Israelis who planned simply to lie on a beach on a Bulgarian vacation but instead came home in a box. That Obama is placing all the pressure on 16 Senators from his own party rather than squarely on the Iranians where it belongs is, sadly, true to form. Whatever debatable successes the President has had in domestic policies, what is indisputable is his catastrophic foreign policy. Iraq today has turned into one giant suicide explosion and large parts of the country, like Fallujah, where so many marines died, are slowly going over to Al Qaida. Egypt is a mess and utterly distrusts the United States. John Kerry comes to Israel every week to make what he calls an urgent peace between Israel and the Palestinians yet utterly ignores the 130,000 dead in the Syrian Civil War, just slightly to the north. Russia has gained the upper hand over the United States in global diplomacy and Vladimir Putin bestrides the world like a colossus. And with all that, President Obama is insistent on pressuring brave Democratic Senators of his own party, who want to keep Iran in check, so that he can hand over to the murderous mullahs $10 billion so that they can prop up their regime without demanding that they dismantle their nuclear framework. A great deal of the President’s pressure is falling on our newly elected Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey. Last month I and Birthright-co-founder Michael Steinhardt, who is also a former chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, took out full page ads in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal promoting the message of my hero and friend, Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel, to whom I introduced Senator Booker, beseeching President Obama, as well as the United States Senate, to insist that Iran’s nuclear facilities be dismantled. Inspections, Wiesel said, are not enough as we discovered with North Korean who agreed to a similar deal in 1994 only to lie and detonate a bomb in 2006. Contrasting Wiesel’s call in the Jewish community was Peter Beinart, a member of Cory’s Rhodes Scholar class and someone I hosted at Shabbat meals at Oxford. While Beinart and I remain friendly, that did not stop him from savaging Cory (do I detect a hint of envy?) for his close relationship with the Jewish community in general, and me in particular, in a column where Beinart was forced to change the libelous subhead after he claimed it was written by an underling without his approval. Unlike Wiesel who is known as one of the most respected moral voices in the word, Beinart, of course, is best-known for calling for a boycott on Israeli products like Soda Stream because they are manufactured beyond the green line, the arbitrary armistice line of 1949 where the Arab armies, threatening Israel’s annihilation, were halted. Beinart’s column and forum, Open Zion, has now been canceled by the Daily Beast, presumably due to lack of interest, and he has been reduced to writing his screeds in Haaretz, where he has become yet another tiresome critic of Israel. Beinart has accepted my invitation to debate me on Iran and we hope to shortly stage the event. Beinart and his kind scapegoat Israel’s settlers as principal obstacles to Middle East peace while Khomeini himself scapegoated the United Sates for the same. Khomeini’s followers coined the now familiar Iranian chant of America as the great Satan. Today, Iran is developing intercontinental missiles with a range that could reach targets in the continental United States. But even if that were not the case, imagine how courageous it must be, to be a Democratic senator like Cory Booker, to oppose, as one of your first acts as a newly elected Senator, the leader of your own party, the President of the United States, on insisting that Iran now acquire weapons of mass destruction. In 1955 President John F. Kenney published his Pulitzer-Prize winning book, Profiles in Courage, which detailed gutsy actions on the part of United States Senator who followed their conscience on matters of principle even if it lost them votes or ran afoul of their own party. Since then the American people have significantly soured on Congress, which today has an approval rating of just nine percent. But what Cory and his 15 other Democratic colleagues have shown is that courage in the United States Senate is alive and well.

Read more at: http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/columns/america-rabbi-shmuley-boteach/the-courage-of-cory-booker/2014/01/21/

Rejecting the rabbi as spiritual sissy: A response to R. Steinsaltz, by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

I have been a student and admirer of Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz for 25 years. While I was rabbi at Oxford University it was my privilege to host him several times, including at a historic debate with atheist Richard Dawkins which I moderated. Years later, in 2009, Rabbi Steinsaltz was one of the keynote speakers at an International Conference on Jewish values which I hosted in New York. In 2012, Rabbi Steinsaltz was honored by Israeli President Shimon Peres with the Presidential Award of Distinction for his monumental commentary on the entire Talmud. Peres praised Steinsaltz “for his unique and extraordinary contribution to Jewish culture and education.” I agree wholeheartedly. Steinsaltz is a rabbinic giant of our time.

Which just makes his recent column, “Who will be our rabbis?” all the more bizarre. In it Steinsaltz essentially argues that rabbis today need to embrace the Bill Clinton model: they have to feel the community’s pain. It doesn’t’ much matter whether or not they have answers for the Jewish community’s problems. Indeed, Steinsaltz seems to prefer rabbis who are blissfully clueless, so long as they can admit to their ignorance and cry along with their congregants.

Drawing upon the analogy of the rabbis as “the head” and the Jewish people as “the physical body,” the heads feels the pain of the other organs. “Similarly,” he writes, “the leader is supposed to sense the problems and feel the pains of everyone.”

He illustrates his point with a lengthy story of a rabbi who was approached by a young man, a mamzer who was prohibited by Jewish law from marrying because he was illegitimate. The rabbi could do nothing for him. But “… the young man [was] sitting in the rabbi’s lap and both were weeping.” Rabbi Steinsaltz says, “This is the kind of rabbi I am looking for.”

I bet it’s not the kind of rabbi the young man was looking for.

Does anyone really believe that this poor adolescent was comforted by a life of loneliness because some rabbi with a rainbow vest felt his pain? Judaism is a religion of action, not empty emotion.

People are not looking for rabbis to mirror their agony – they are looking for someone to give them keys to redemption and to direct them out of the labyrinth of life. A rabbi, as its Hebrew name implies, is a teacher. Rabbis today need to be problem solvers. CEO’s of their communities and synagogues. They have to arrive in a city, see the empty pews, and figures out how to fill them up. If the service needs to be shorter and more explanatory, if the yodeling of the Cantor has to disappear in favor of a question and answer session, than do that. But sitting and weeping the death of the community will be seen by his congregants as cowardly and pathetic.

A rabbi is a man on a mission. His purpose: to rebuild Jewish life. To establish schools, mikvahs, adult education classes, debates, seminars, weekend retreats, and stimulating communal events. He is not empathizer-in-chief but programmer in chief.

Of what use does a man whose wife wants to leave him have for a rabbi who sits and weeps with him? Will that heal the man’s shattered heart? Will it stop his children from being yoyo’s pulled between parents on alternate weekends? Will his rabbi hold him tight at night and erase his agonizing loneliness? Is that the rabbi’s role or the role of a spouse?

Rather, the rabbi’s purpose in that situation is to counsel the couple and find out what went wrong. Perhaps the man never gave his wife a compliment? Maybe he paid more attention to other women than her. And if so, then the rabbis’ role is not warmth and comfort but tough love. He has to tell the man directly and forcefully that women marry men to feel special. That they give up everything – including their very names – to become a wife. And what they ask for in return is to be the one and only. And you’re job is to make her feel that way and win her back. And if you haven’t done it yet, then get off your lazy derrière and do it. You will not sympathy from me for allowing your family to fall apart.

It’s true, as both Socrates and the Zohar state, that a truly wise person knows how much he doesn’t know. That being said, we are not free to shirk our responsibilities to fix problems in the world. Neither Socrates nor the great Kabbalistic text implied that in our ignorance we could absolve ourselves of the responsibility of offering guidance where it was warranted. It just means that such advice has to always be offered with humility and a keen awareness of our own limitations.

Since I was a teenager, I have strived to follow King Solomon’s advice in Proverbs (3:5), “Betach el Hashem b’chol libecha, v’el binat’cha al tisha’en.” “Trust God with all your heart and do not rely on your own understanding.” In high school, I borrowed the passage for my yearbook entry, using the original Hebrew as a play on my own name (Betach/ Boteach).

Today’s rabbis aren’t being asked questions in Jewish law, like whether a chicken’s broken wing renders it unkosher, as Rabbi Steinsaltz rightly states. Today’s rabbis are expected to act as marriage and family counselors. They’re expected to help resolve questions people have about God’s goodness when they suffer. They’re expected to guide people as to how to find purpose and meaning in life and overcome feelings of emptiness and depression.

When I first started writing self-help books in the early 1990’s I was criticized by fellow rabbis. Such criticism became outright condemnation with the publication, in 1999, of Kosher Sex. But the book stemmed from all the dysfunctional sexual relationships I witnessed in counseling married couples. People trashed the book as something outside the remit of a rabbi. Rabbis should be teaching the Parsha, not teaching couples how to sustain erotic desire.

Such criticism was ridiculous, as time would bear out and as the book, and those that followed, garnered international audiences and mainstream embrace. And why? Because if Judaism cannot demonstrate that it has real-world guidance on how to have passionate marriages, raise moral and inspired children, overcome deadening materialism, and countless other real-life matters, then it has no shot at survival. Aside from a small band of the orthodox, it will die.

People in the West want guidance to overcome emptiness and lust for money that has come to define Western culture. They want more than investing in stocks and bonds. It’s why thousands of Americans still decide to go to college and study humanities and not business. Even in a world where Wall Street, in your first year, will pay you a million bucks, students study history, art, philosophy, and language. Many of them look to religious leadership and religious texts to find that same inspiration but walk away empty and frustrated.

I reject Rabbi Steinsaltz’s view of the rabbi-as-emotional-co-traveler, the rabbi who feels but does not guide. On the contrary, I want to see precisely the opposite. The muscular rabbi who, firm in his convictions, offers a definitive moral philosophy to his congregants. Who, armed with the facts, offers a robust defense of Israel. Who, having earned the respect of the men and women in his shul, tells them, directly, that infidelity is beneath them and that they must electrify each other in bed.

I reject the rabbi as spiritual sissy. The rabbi who cries while Jews die is a moral coward. He is guilty of abrogation of leadership. Jewish life is a living drama, not a soap opera.

The reason why Judaism is waning today, as revealed in this past fall’s Pew Research study on American Jewry, is because Judaism isn’t being shown to work for people. IPhones can make phone calls, surf the net, and give you hundreds of apps to make life easier. But why would anyone go to shul unless we can show that religious attendance makes us less materialistic, less stressed, wiser, more accepting of others, and more content?

“Which rabbi or rabbinic organization in the State of Israel cares about the young prostitutes at the Tel Baruch beach?” Rabbi Steinsaltz asks his audience. “Most of them do not even know what is happening there.” Yes, Rabbi Steinsaltz is courageous in calling on rabbis to care for those Jewish society has forgotten. It is paramount for Israeli rabbis, who are often aloof and detached from the fringes of Israeli culture, to know about the problems in their own backyard. We need to care about the myriad of problems that promotes these awful circumstances – poverty, destitution, drug addiction, and the breakdown of the family. But in invoking the prostitutes of Tel Aviv as one of the first callings of a rabbi, Rabbi Steinsaltz sounds like he wants us to emulate Jesus who famously tried to save prostitutes like Mary Magdalene, even as the Jewish people as a whole went to pot. Romans were torturing and murdering Jews by the tens of thousands. The priesthood was corrupt. Israel was under foreign occupation by a brutal power that suppressed their faith. But Jesus was focusing on saving the prostitutes. (And incidentally, I reject this view of Jesus utterly in my book “Kosher Jesus”). Yes, those seemingly smaller challenges are very important. Every individual counts. But let’s also have a sense of proportion and priority.

Rabbi Steinsaltz is an exalted spiritual leader and a giant among men. But his calling seems so much smaller than the grandness of his once global vision. The Jewish people are suffering on a global scale. On campuses throughout the Western world Israel’s reputation is nearly as bad as North Korea. Our shuls are empty except for the Yom Kippur appeal. The Jewish community is approaching a 50 percent divorce rate. According to the recent Pew Research Poll, a third of Jewish Americans own Christmas trees. The same number believe that Jesus is compatible with Judaism. The rabbis at Hillel and Chabad are losing the battles for Israel on campus because they are often afraid of appearing right-wingers and alienating the largely left-wing student body.

The last thing we need is rabbis to weep over this stuff. Empathic rabbis are nice. But give me a real leader any day over some mushy, emotional sissy-man who feels my pain. Give me a Martin Luther King who is prepared to march. Give me a Billy Graham who fills stadiums with a call to Christians to return to the gospel. Give me a Pope Francis who sees his Church obsessed with gays and abortion and says, finally, enough, let’s rescue the Church from terminal decline.

We need rabbis of courage and gumption to go out and fight the battles of the Jewish people, not a bunch of warm-hearted flower children who cry while the Jewish people go to the grave.

Above all else, give me leaders like my own teacher, and that of Rabbi Steinsaltz, the great, wise, and incomparable Lubavitcher Rebbe, who saw the Jewish people people in cardiac arrest and applied defibrillators. He was a man with answers and transformed the Jewish world because he had solutions. Yes, he offered comfort to the bereaved and hope to the afflicted. He helped single mothers raise proud Jewish children (I am an example) and extended his tender heart to all in need. But above all else, he flexed his muscles and transformed the Jewish world as we know it. He did not ask, but demanded of his students to leave the comforts of New York and Jerusalem and travel to Katmandu. Witnessing the ravages of the Holocaust and the destruction of assimilation, he didn’t weep, he didn’t wail, he didn’t mourn. Rather, like a brazen lion, he went into action. He sent his followers to Vietnam and South Africa, Kentucky and Australia. He told them they would live there and if need be die there. But the one entity that would not die is the Jewish people, into whom they would breathe new life.

When the world condemned Israel for holding on to its ancient lands of Judea and Samaria, conquered in wars of annihilation launched by Nasser and Hussein, the Rebbe railed and thundered that returning these lands would invite further aggression and more dead Jews.

He did not care for the price he paid in popularity. He did not care if he was labeled immoderate. He had seen too many dead Jews during the Holocaust to simply cry over more. He made up his mind that, so long as he led them, the Jewish people would live.

My Week in Israel with Dr. Oz By: Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu shows Dr. Oz and Rabbi Shmuley the challenges Israel faces from its neighbors in the Middle East. Everything over the past week was memorable and magical as Dr. Mehmet Oz, America’s foremost daytime TV host and the world’s most famous doctor, toured Israel. From dancing the horah outside the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, to dancing Friday night at the Western Wall with Israeli soldiers and thousands of worshippers, to meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu for ninety minutes of substantive conversation about Israel, Turkey, and the United States, Dr. Oz and his family showed the Jewish state extravagant love and admiration. Mehmet is a remarkable man and seeing him up close reinforced the high regard in which I have always held him, ever since we started working together for Oprah at her radio network. First there was his attention to his children, all four of whom accompanied him, along with his son-in-law. Mehmet would go nowhere without them and pulled them in to hear every last explanation about Israel’s ancient and modern history. Then there is his dedication to his wife Lisa, a remarkable and brilliant woman in her own right, and vastly knowledgeable of the Bible. Lisa was correcting me constantly on Biblical quotations (I purposely got them wrong so she could feel superior). Mehmet is a man who honors his wife at every opportunity. Of course, there were the legions of fans – Jews and Arabs in every part of Israel – that pleaded for a picture and he turned noone down. But more than anything else there was his attachment to the Jewish people on display at every moment. Mehmet is a Muslim, perhaps the world’s most famous Muslim who is not a head of state. He is a righteous and proud Ambassador of his faith and feels an innate kinship and brotherhood with the Jewish people. He praised Israel constantly, from lauding its treatment of its minority citizens at our joint lecture at Rambam hospital in Haifa, to noting Israel’s phenomenal medical breakthroughs at several news conferences, to highlighting his amazement at Israel’s capacity to turn deserts into thriving cities. In Hebron, at the tomb of the patriarchs, we prayed together publicly for peace and understanding between the children of Abraham. At the tomb of Maimonides we noted the role reversal. Maimonides, a Jew, was the world’s most famous physician, and he served the Muslim ruler Saladin. Now, a Muslim doctor – the world’s most famous – was visiting his Jewish brothers in the Holy land 900 years later. Joined with Natan Sharasnky at the Jerusalem Press Club for a public discussion, the three of us debated whether there was an obligation to hate evil. Mehmet maintained that hatred harmed he who harbored it, even for the best of reasons. On this Sharasnky and I disagreed. Natan spoke of the evil he encountered in the KGB. I spoke of Hamas’ genocidal covenant and Hezbollah’s commitment to annihilating Israel. Terrorists deserved our contempt. Only by truly hating evil are we prepared to fight it. In the end we compromised in agreeing that hating evil should not be obsessive and internal but rather externally directed at neutralizing those who slaughter God’s innocent children, whoever they may be. As I walked Dr. Oz and his family through the old city of Jerusalem on Friday night, we passed through Zion gate, still riddled with bullet holes from the heavy fighting of 1967 that liberated the city. At Shabbat dinner at the home of Simon and Chana Falic, my friend Ron Dermer, Israel’s newly appointed Ambassador to the United States, explained to Mehmet that even after Israel conquered the Temple Mount in the Six Day War it left control of Judaism’s holiest site to the Muslim waqf and that such an action had no precedent in all human history. Ron said that there could no greater illustration of Israel’s desire to respect its Muslim citizens and seek peace. At the Christian holy sites, like the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem and Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth, and Muslim Holy Sites like the Dome of the Rock and the vast Muslim crowds that filled mosques for Ramadan, Dr. Oz saw first hand how Israel is a country of thriving religious liberty. But the highlight of the visit was the conversation with Prime Minister Netanyahu where Ambassador Dermer joined Mehmet and me as we heard the Israeli leader deeply engage Mehmet about Israel’s search for peace and the challenges it faces with the destabilization of Syria and Egypt on the one hand, and the changes in its relationship with Turkey, on the other. The Jewish state needs more visitors like Dr. Oz, with vast global followings, to highlight the justice of Israel’s cause. These trips should never be about propaganda but rather presenting the facts as they are. Israel’s best case is made by Israel itself. I told Mehmet and Lisa, with whom I deepened an already special friendship, that I had no interest in presenting Israel as a perfect country that never made mistakes. Rather, Israel is a just country, committed to righteous action, that struggles to do the right thing amid existential threats from every side. It is a small nation that is home to a people who have vastly contributed to the positive development of human civilization yet have been victimized throughout history and now simply wish a secure place among the nations. One need not agree with Israel on every detail on policy but is self-evident when visiting that its large heart is in the right place. It was providential that our visit to the Holy Land ended on Sunday, August 4th, mega-philanthropist Sheldon Adelsons eightieth birthday. We flew to Turkey where Dr. Oz, the country’s biggest celebrity, was to hold a press conference. As we left we called Sheldon and his wife Dr. Miriam Adelson, whose addiction clinic we visited in Tel Aviv, to thank them for making the trip possible. Because that’s how it works. People who love Israel are infectious and produce other people who love Israel.

Read more at: http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/columns/america-rabbi-shmuley-boteach/my-week-in-israel-with-dr-oz/2013/08/05/0/ | The Jewish Press

Rabbi Shmuley & Cory Booker at AIPAC - Chicago 2008

Cory Booker & Rabbi Shmuley at Jewish Federation 10/17/11

Cory Booker & Shmuley Boteach a few years back...

Twenty years ago this Monday, corresponding to the Jewish festival of Simchat Torah, a young African-American Rhodes scholar walked into a Chabad Jewish student center in Oxford, England. He had had a date with a Jewish woman who told him she was going to be at the Sukkot festivities at Rabbi Shmuley’s and would meet him there. As it turned out, he was stood up, and as he waited sheepishly in the corner of the room not knowing what to do next, he was approached by the Rabbi’s wife who invited him to sit in ‘the hot-seat’ next to the young Chabad Rabbi. Being the most joyous night of the Jewish calendar, the young student would later join with hundreds of other students dancing with the Torahs. This accidental meeting would change both their lives.

Cory Booker had little exposure to the Jewish community prior to that evening and I, who was serving as the Rabbi to the students of Oxford University, had only sporadic exposure to the African-American community. But in the days, weeks, and months that followed we began studying together almost daily. We studied the great texts of Judaism and discussed the great speeches of African-American leaders. Cory would later serve a full term as President of our Jewish student organization, which was then the second largest student group at the University with thousands of members. Together we hosted luminaries like Mikhail Gorbachev and other world leaders who lectured on values-based leadership.

Twenty years, countless conversations, and hundreds of Friday night Shabbat dinners later, Cory today is a much-loved honorary member of the American Jewish community, regularly lecturing at Synagogues and Jewish conferences across the country. More significant, Cory has challenged the Jewish community to live up to its Biblical calling to serve as ‘a light unto the nations.’ In many of the speeches we deliver together he asks the Jewish participants if they study the weekly Parsha, if they honor the commandments, and cherish the Sabbath. What allows an African-American Christian Mayor to challenge Jewish leaders to deepen their Jewish commitment? Because those same leaders are amazed at Cory’s knowledge of Judaism and appreciation of the Jewish contribution to civilization.

I have long believed that the next wave of Jewish commitment will be inspired by non-Jews. In massive conferences like Christians United For Israel we are already seeing a great wave of Christian interest in Judaism and a desire to reconnect Jesus back to his Jewish roots. But Cory has taken this a step further, studying Judaism with a view to teaching it to Jews.

A few years ago AIPAC invited Cory and me to address a large group in Chicago. It was the week where we read the story of Genesis in Synagogue and Cory delivered a moving speech on the creation of Adam and Eve, culled from a speech by the Lubavitcher Rebbe. The wife of a prominent American Jewish leader approached me after the speech and asked if I would study the Parsha of the week with her, as I do with Cory. I asked her why now. She responded, “When you hear someone so prominent in the American political landscape deriving inspiration from the Torah, and he’s not even Jewish, you become a little embarrassed that you are ignorant of your tradition and you want to discover what he has discovered.” I have heard similar sentiments expressed by other Jewish listeners on many occasions.

My friendship with Cory also sparked a lifelong closeness between me and the African-American community. I became the first-ever white morning radio host on America’s legacy black radio station, WWRL in New York City. I took the Rev. Al Sharpton to Israel to alleviate the enmity between him and the Jewish community, I was the driving force behind an effort to have 600 evacuees from Hurricane Katrina find permanent homes in Utah where they have been moved only temporarily, and I preached at the Martin Luther King chapel at Morehouse College at a conference with Coretta Scott King. And as part of my current run for Congress in New Jersey, I travelled to Rwanda to highlight the 1994 genocide and help combat efforts to deny it. The Rwandan government invited me to meet President Paul Kagame in New York last week and I hosted a reception for Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo with American Jewish leaders.

There are those who believe that the black and Jewish communities share a common history of persecution. But being among the world’s foremost victims is not the basis of our bond. The relationship between blacks and Jews is built on shared faith rather than shared oppression, common destiny rather than common history, shared values rather than shared interests, and a mutual commitment to social justice rather than a mutual alienation from the mainstream.

I thank God for a friendship that has endured for two decades and the enrichment it has brought to us and our respective communities.

A Hitler Wannabe Visits New York By Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

Autumn is here and with it the annual trip that makes Mahmoud Ahmadinejad positively giddy. The Iranian President gets to leave the country whose citizens he mowed down in the streets to seize power and travel to New York to show the Jews they have no power. Lecturing each year from the rostrum of the United Nations is Ahmadinejad’s equivalent of popping Viagra, a yearly demonstration of his own virility amid utter Jewish impotence. For all Ahmadinejad’s protestations of a Zionist world conspiracy and how we Jews control everything, he is well aware of just how weak we Jews are and he loves to rub it in our faces. Like clockwork he is here in late September each year to call for the destruction of the Jewish State right smack in the heart of Jew York, a city that has more Jews in it than any other on earth. He accomplishes the unique feat of calling for a new holocaust while simultaneously denying the original ever took place. And do you know what the Jews do about it? Nothing.

OK, not quite. There is a protest or two featuring a few hundred brave souls with a megaphone and I plan to join them. But Jewish economic power cannot stop the perfidious Warwick hotel from hosting Ahmadinejad and his retinue. The billionaire Jewish mayor of New York cannot stop him from landing in his city and touring its landmarks. And the 2.5 million Jews of New York cannot stop his motorcade from moving about the city like he owns the place. How helpless must a people be to watch someone calling for their extermination in a city where they are so entrenched and numerous.

I often wish that we Jews could produce a leader with the courage of Martin Luther King. When King’s people – our fellow Americans whose only crime was to be born with a darker shade of skin – were treated like garbage in the South, King shut the place down. He boycotted their buses, staged sit-ins at their cafes, sent freedom riders to coopt their transportation routes, took over their highways with long marches, and even sent fearless children into the fangs of dangerous canines, all while being pushed back by fire hoses operating at maximum strength. He ended up forfeiting his life so that his people could be treated with dignity and equality.

Contrast that with near inaction of 2.5 million Jews in the greater New York metropolitan area who this year, on the holy day of Yom Kippur itself, will bear witness to the spectacle of a man calling for the genocide of all our Jewish brothers in Israel. Amid his call for the annihilation of the Jewish state, we Jews don’t shut down the streets where he travels, don’t impede the buses that pass in front of his hotel, and don’t call for an economic boycott of the hotels with the chutzpa to host a mass murderer. No, we go about our business, content to allow an aspiring Hitler invade this town while he separately desecrates the memory of six million martyrs who have already paid with their lives for the earlier Hitler that the world similarly did not take seriously.

And still some people believe that the Jews control the banks, the media, and Hollywood. It turns out they control nothing at all.

Even as we witness an Israeli Prime Minister having to humiliate himself by pleading for a meeting with the American president, Obama has no fear snubbing Netanyahu, so confident is he of there being no price to pay from Jewish voters. I have even heard more than a few pro-Israel activists say that Bibi needlessly pokes his finger in Obama’s eye, which is a strange allegation to make against the leader of a nation who had one third its number gassed just 70 years ago. Surely one can forgive that leader for pushing hard to insist on American red lines in the Iranian nuclear program.

Lest we forget, it was not the Israeli Embassy that was taken over by Khomeini’s hoodlums in 1979 and it was not Israeli diplomats who were held hostage for 444 days. No, it was the United States of America, the country that Iran hates above all others that experienced the wrath of Iran’s mullahs. And it is the United States which is the foremost target of an Iranian nuclear program that speeds to the production of a bomb that is squarely aimed at a nation that stands for the freedom and liberty that Iran so fanatically hates.

The conservatives’ liberal rabbi - Rabbi Shmuel (Shmuley) Boteach

Rabbi Shmuel (Shmuley) Boteach hopes to become the first rabbi serving in Congress this coming November. If he is elected, he will bring a great deal of interest, and also quite a bit of color. He supports civil unions for same-sex couples, but is running on the Republican ticket in the ninth district of New Jersey. Who said that only Democrats could be liberals?

America's most famous rabbi: Rabbi Rabbi Shmuel (Shmuley) Boteach.  |  Photo credit: AFP

After being dubbed “the most famous rabbi in America” by Newsweek, Rabbi Shmuel (Shmuley) Boteach (45 and the father of nine) hopes to become the first rabbi serving in the United States Congress this coming November. If he is elected, he will bring a great deal of interest with him, and also quite a bit of color.

Rabbi Boteach studied in the Torat Emet yeshiva in Jerusalem and was ordained in 1988 by Chabad in New York — which puts him in squarely in the Orthodox camp. He has written 21 books, including "Kosher Jesus" and "Kosher Sex," and was also a close friend and advocate of pop star Michael Jackson.

There is no argument that Rabbi Shmuley is an unusual rabbi, in the positive sense of the word. Yes, he is also a man of contradictions. He supports civil unions for same-sex couples, but he is running for Congress on the Republican ticket in the ninth district of New Jersey. Who said that only Democrats could be liberals?

How many rabbis do you know who sit at a computer to write a book that answers questions such as: What is the connection between love and lust? Should one give in to the temptation to have an extramarital relationship in order to revive one’s sex life? Is the Kama Sutra kosher? And that is just the beginning. In "Kosher Sex" (published in 1999), which was translated into Hebrew by the Modan Publishing House, Rabbi Boteach also wrestles with questions such as whether oral sex is kosher, wonders whether size really does matter and firmly states that the “hole in the sheet” is against Jewish law. On the contrary, the couple is supposed to be completely undressed so that there will be no barrier to intimacy.

Kosher Sex was chosen to open the issue of Playboy Magazine celebrating its 45th anniversary. Now you are just beginning to understand how unique this rabbi is. Once more, this is just the beginning.

Q. Rabbi Shmuley, before we start, I’m curious to know how your wife felt about "Kosher Sex."

“She accepted it. I wrote the book because my parents divorced when I was eight years old. It really affected me. I wanted to see how a couple stayed together. I realized that when things aren’t going well for a couple in the bedroom, they aren’t going well in the living room either. I wrote the book to explain to couples that the best way to save a marriage is by preserving the sexual attraction between them.”

Q. Were you criticized for it?

“I wrote the book using Jewish values and people criticized me, but the book became an international best-seller in 20 countries, including Australia, France and Belgium. The book was a great success, particularly among non-Jews. It was translated into 20 languages. God loves the love between man and wife. According to Jewish tradition, God was the first matchmaker.”

Q. How does a person with a list of friends like yours and such liberal opinions run on the Republican ticket?

“The Republican Party is Israel’s strongest and most steadfast ally. They also invited the prime minister to speak before Congress. There’s no comparison between the Republican policy toward Israel and that of the Democrats.”

Q. Such as what, for example?

“I don’t like the whole idea of aiding the Palestinians when Hamas is sitting in the government. President Obama has stated consistently that the settlements are the reason for the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Factually, that’s not correct. The real reason is that the Hamas terrorists have no desire to recognize the existence of the State of Israel.”

Make no mistake: Rabbi Shmuley has no particular problem with the Arabs. “We have to remember,” he says, “that President George Bush is the one who overthrew Saddam Hussein, the man who murdered 800,000 Muslims. The Republicans were the ones who helped the Arabs win freedom. In my election district in New Jersey, the percentage of Arabs is the second largest in the U.S., and I call upon my Arab brothers and sisters to vote and remember on that day that George Bush saved more Arab lives than anyone else.”

While the current upheaval in the Arab world interests Boteach a great deal, it also disturbs him. He says, “If democratic Israel had not been established in 1948, there would have been no Arab Spring.”

“The Arabs observe the nakba of 1948, but actually the opposite is true. That same year, they got the hope to live a different kind of life — the hope that they would live in a state where they would read the truth in their newspapers and feel that they were free. On that day, they realized that they could be free, like in Israel.”

Continuing that train of thought, Rabbi Shmuley returns to the present: “Where is Obama’s voice when it comes to Syria? He comes to New York City often to raise money, so let him find time to go to the U.N. headquarters there and state from the podium that Bashar Assad is a murderer and that America is putting $25 million on his head to lead to his capture. This is a matter of human rights.

“I can’t understand why Arab-Americans support President Obama, who is doing so little to save Muslims.”

Q. He intervened in Libya.

“It’s true that the U.S. intervened in Libya, but we have to remember that Obama was dragged in after France and the U.K. They initiated the military action.”

Good — so now you understand that Rabbi Shmuley is not an admirer of Obama. He criticizes the president a great deal on almost any international topic. “Obama did not do a thing to stop the rise of dictatorship under Putin,” he says. “Why didn’t he recall his ambassador from Moscow after there was found to be fraud in the Russian presidential elections?”

Rabbi Shmuley continues: “Why did Obama remain silent for three weeks about what went on in Iran in 2009, when the Iranians went out into the streets to protest the fact that the election had been stolen from them? Also, take note that what I am telling you has nothing to do with the administration’s attitude toward Jews. Ahmadinejad killed Muslims in his country, and the administration did not respond.”

Q. But the president’s respect for human rights in general and in the Arab world in particular is above suspicion.

“Obama is the first African-American president, so he has a historical obligation. He has a constant duty to act against any kind of oppression.”

Q. I’m guessing that you didn’t vote for Obama in 2008.

“I didn’t vote for him, even though I have many liberal Democrat friends — Samantha Power [the president’s special adviser on human rights — B.B.] and, of course, the icon of the Democrats, the mayor of Newark, Cory Booker. When I say that many of my friends are liberals, that is no joke — it’s reality. I’m not a man of any political party. I’m a man of principles.

“I joined the Republicans because they matched my principles. The Republican Party matches my scale of ethics. In my scale of ethics, an administration intervenes when genocide is taking place.

“Think of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. Could I have supported an administration that didn’t intervene in what was happening in Europe then? It’s precisely for that reason that I can’t support a Democratic administration, such as Bill Clinton’s, for example, which did nothing when there was genocide in Rwanda in 1994.”

Boteach also criticizes Obama for the administration’s interference in citizens’ lives. “I’m a Republican, and I believe in respecting the citizen. Obama believes in interference by the state. I want to be clear — the more the state interferes, the smaller the citizen’s place becomes. Independence breeds respect.

“There were times when I asked my family for financial help. Even though I was asking my parents, I saw that as very humiliating. Today, American citizens do not want the state to give them gifts. They want jobs.”

Q. In your opinion, could Obama lose the November election?

“I believe that he will lose the next election. That can be seen from the difficulty he is having raising money today. Also, the unemployment that did not come down from 8.5 percent was also a problem for him. Even though I like him very much as a person, he does not deserve to be re-elected. He failed as a president.”

Q. Do you have anything good to say about him?

“Although he is no friend of Israel, I have a lot of admiration for Obama. His friendship with and admiration for Judaism and Jews cannot be disregarded. Take a good look at the people around him. Look at who his chief of staff in the White House is (Jack Lew) and was (Rahm Emanuel). Every year, he holds a Passover Seder in the White House.

“On the one hand, he admires the Jews and their heritage. But regrettably, on the other hand, he doesn’t understand that Israel’s enemies want to destroy it. Like Clinton, he believes that pressure must be applied on Israel in order to reach peace. He thinks that Israel has to be changed, but not the Arabs.”

Q. Incidentally, do you support his having invited Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi to Washington? After all, he is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.

“Yes. He must be respected. He was elected in democratic elections. If the Egyptian people want to elect a religious or secular candidate, that is their own problem. But it must be made very clear that economic support for Egypt is conditional upon its support of the peace process.”

Q. In your opinion, is it true that Israel is no longer as popular in the U.S. as it was in the past?

“Israel is not in a contest of which country is the most popular. The U.S. is not popular in the world either. All that says is that Israel is in good company. Being popular has nothing to do with being good. That said, I don’t remember there ever being as much support for Israel as there is in the U.S. today. People should know that there are whole Christian communities that vote for a presidential candidate according to his policy on Israel.”

Q. Does Mitt Romney meet the expectations that the Americans, and not necessarily the Jews, have of a president?

“We need to remember that elections are, first of all, a referendum that you conduct regarding the incumbent president. The question today is whether Obama deserves four more years. Economically, he is taking America backward — today, America is on its way to bankruptcy. Romney will have to bring America back to work, stimulate employers to hire workers. He will have to implement a smart tax policy.”

Boteach has another stinging remark for Obama even though he is liberal on the following subject. “We don’t have to keep talking about same-sex marriage and abortion. That’s not the subject of the election.”