Last night, I was at the new Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem, which was hosting the delayed US Embassy celebration of American Independence Day. (I’m British, but my wife is American, so they let me in.) We were invited to the VIP reception and so I got to chat with Ambassador Mike Huckabee, who is an exceptionally friendly and down-to-earth person. (At his speech later in the evening, he said that the first thing that he does every morning is check Twitter to see if President Trump has fired him!)
Now, I very much wanted to speak to Ambassador Huckabee about his meeting with the charedi “Gedolim,” in which they tried to get him to appeal to the US administration to intervene on behalf of blanket charedi exemptions from national defense, telling him a pack of lies about Torah and Israel. However, it wasn’t quite the right setting for it. So I contented myself with talking to him about Biblical natural history.
Ambassador Huckabee was fascinated by the topic - he’s a former pastor with a degree in religious studies, as well as an animal lover, and he was intrigued to find out that someone actually specializes in the interface between the two. I presented him with a copy of my new book, The Lions Of Zion, and told him about the Biblical Museum of Natural History. He told me that he would absolutely love to visit, and I spoke about it with his team (who said that they are also interested in getting the entire embassy staff - 1500 people! - to come). As for the army issue, I suspect that as someone with great familiarity with both the Bible and Israel, Ambassador Huckabee knows full well that Judaism does not require wholesale avoidance of army service.
I was less successful with the next person. Over three different locations, I spent a total of about thirty minutes standing about ten feet away from Prime Minister Netanyahu, who turned up slightly late due to being busy with something or other. Alas, there was no opportunity to speak with him. For the first ten minutes, he was busy with photos. For the last ten minutes, he was giving a speech. And for the middle ten minutes, I was standing outside the bathroom in the basement while he was inside, where we took shelter during a ballistic missile alert. Oh well.
But some of the people who share my worldview had considerably more success this week in getting the attention of some significant people.
As I wrote about previously in my post Diverting the Gravy Train, this week is when Keren Olam HaTorah has been hosting 27 wealthy philanthropists at a resort to encourage their support for the charedi freeloading lifestyle. During one of the presentations, a woman walked around handing out pamphlets with the event logo on it. But it was a Trojan horse. Inside the pamphlet was messaging about how important it is to support charedim who are combining Torah with army service! It also included a list of nine institutions that work on integrating charedim into the IDF, which are far more important causes than the bottomless pit of charedi yeshivos.
Eventually the event organizers evicted the woman - a religious widow whose husband fell in Gaza. But hopefully some of the pamphlets were read, and the entire incident certainly brought attention to the cause.
So many people, especially Americans, just don’t understand the reality of the situation. Mishpacha magazine or Yeshiva World News are not going to report on yesterday’s wedding for a 31 year old IDF reservist - a wedding that did not take place because when his friends came to collect him, they discovered that he had committed suicide. And he was just one of thousands of reservists with severe PTSD, brought about by endless months of reserve duty, due to the IDF manpower shortage that the charedim refuse to help solve in any way. It’s crucial to spread knowledge of the harsh realities of life outside the charedi bubble, as well as to expose the fraudulent “Torah” arguments presented by charedi religious leaders.
Here is a PDF of the Trojan horse pamphlet that was handed out at the retreat:
Meanwhile, I’m off to London tomorrow, and there may be a “Rationalist Judaism” get-together on Motzai Shabbos or Sunday evening - if you’re interested in participating, please drop me an email. (To those who already wrote to me - I will get back to you.) I’m also going to ask my UK readers if there is anyone who can collect something from Portsmouth that is approximately the size and shape of an orangutan. Don’t laugh, I’ve been extraordinarily successful with similar such requests in the past - a rhinoceros head from Vermont, a ten-foot hammerhead shark from New Jersey, a Noah’s Ark from Peru, even a special Biblical food from Iran. It’s all about the networking!
Looks like Ambassador Huckabee has entered his Obi-Wan Kenobi phase.
You are very cool! What an honor to meet Ambassador Huckabee.