Steven Eidman Online

Tomorrow marks the first day of the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games in Vancouver, BC.  Years of training, hard work, discipline and relentless dedication have given the great athletes of Team USA the right edge to grab that gold.  To make sure you keep track of who is skiing the fastest and skating the hardest, register with TeamUSA.org where fans get chance to take part in all of the action.  GO USA!

Register at TeamUSA.org and you will:

• Receive exclusive updates during the Winter Games
• Get the inside scoop, event by event
• Hear directly from our Olympic athletes as they chase their dream
• Be able to download photo and video highlights, right to your desktop

There is more than one way to get involved with this year’s Olympics.  Show your support by making a donation or becoming a member the Sixth Ring.  Check out TeamUSAnews.org and get ready to rally behind the great USA!

Even Charles Barkley, the former NBA star who pointedly eschewed the “role model” mantle that society foists on athletes, would surely concede that for a spiritual leader, responsibility is a key part of the job description. So it puzzles me that Shmuley Boteach, who prominently sports the honorific of “rabbi,” cannot find a more measured and dignified way of expressing his disagreements with his co-religionists. From the very first sentence of his Sept. 18 diatribe against the pro-Israel lobby J Street, where he accuses the lobby of seeing all who disagree with its stance as “knuckle-draggers who see an anti-Semite behind every corner,” one cannot escape the ominous feeling that a person who is supposed to hold himself to a lofty standard of human intercourse and kindness is about to behave in a manner far, far below the requirements of his office. And, sure enough, the rest of the essay makes use of the nastiest and commonest propaganda techniques, such as quoting the adversary and then, subtly, dropping the quotation marks while still claiming to speak in the adversary’s voice. The object is to mock and to delegitimize, with one of two possible outcomes: either the reader succumbs to the argument and, in this case, a fellow Jew is seen as vile and despicable, or, more often, the reader feels embarrassment at the debasement of the writer’s religious office. Since neither of these reactions is particularly “good for the Jews,” I would respectfully suggest that it might be better for anyone choosing to play the role of spiritual guide to accept the constraints that come with the title and to argue one’s point in a reasonable, measured, and charitable manner. When posited in this way, one’s arguments, paradoxically, take on power and achieve a lasting impact, perhaps because in this case the reader senses a pleasing and inspiring congruence between the writer’s words and her/his title

Englewood

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