Al Gore Letter 01 Questions for Joe Lieberman's rabbi

Al Gore Letter 01 23-Aug-2000 Questions for Joe Lieberman's rabbi

"I had personally witnessed an ultra-religious Jew refuse to allow his phone to be used on the Sabbath in order to call an ambulance for a non-Jew who happened to have collapsed in his Jerusalem neighbourhood." — Israel Shahak

"As the first Orthodox Jew in the Senate, he regularly commits political heresy by refusing to campaign on the Sabbath. In the election of 1994, due to numerous Jewish holidays, the devout Lieberman missed 17 days of campaigning during the crucial months of September, October and November. And in 1988, he even declined to appear at the Connecticut Democratic Convention to accept his own nomination on a Saturday." — Arianna Huffington

August 23, 2000

Al Gore, Vice President
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Al Gore:

I write to you out of concern for your nominating as running mate for the upcoming Presidential elections the Orthodox Jew, Joseph Lieberman.

Allow me to begin by calling your attention to the following excerpt from the writing of Holocaust survivor and Israeli citizen, Israel Shahak:

Picking up the telephone to save a life:

I had personally witnessed an ultra-religious Jew refuse to allow his phone to be used on the Sabbath in order to call an ambulance for a non-Jew who happened to have collapsed in his Jerusalem neighbourhood. Instead of simply publishing the incident in the press, I asked for a meeting with the members of the Rabbinical Court of Jerusalem, which is composed of rabbis nominated by the State of Israel. I asked them whether such behaviour was consistent with their interpretation of the Jewish religion. They answered that the Jew in question had behaved correctly, indeed piously, and backed their statement by referring me to a passage in an authoritative compendium of Talmudic laws, written in this century. I reported the incident to the main Hebrew daily, Haaretz, whose publication of the story caused a media scandal.

The results of the scandal were, for me, rather negative. Neither the Israeli, nor the diaspora, rabbinical authorities ever reversed their ruling that a Jew should not violate the Sabbath in order to save the life of a Gentile. They added much sanctimonious twaddle to the effect that if the consequences of such an act puts Jews in danger, violation of the Sabbath is permitted, for their sake.

Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, Pluto Press, London and Boulder Colorado, 1994, p. 1.

The question that the world might like to hear an answer to is the degree to which the branch of Orthodox Judaism that Joseph Lieberman subscribes to backs the seemingly unanimous judgement of all rabbinical authorities that it is forbidden to pick up a telephone on the Sabbath to save the life of a non-Jew, but permitted to do so to save the life of a Jew. More specifically, before continuing one day longer with Joseph Lieberman as your running mate, I wonder if it is not incumbent upon you to ask Joseph Lieberman's rabbi whether he backs the judgement of the Rabbinical Court of Jerusalem described by Israel Shahak above, or elects instead to be the first Orthodox rabbi to venture to oppose it.

It would be a misuse of opportunity if having the attention of Joseph Lieberman's rabbi, you put to him only a single question when so many others press to be asked. For example, the public might also be grateful to learn the reaction of Joseph Lieberman's rabbi to the following statements made by other Orthodox rabbis:

Rabbi Kook the Elder explains the relationship between Jews, non-Jews, and cattle:

Rabbi Kook the Elder, the revered father of the messianic tendency of Jewish fundamentalism, said, “The difference between a Jewish soul and souls of non-Jews — all of them in all different levels — is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.”

Excerpt from Allan C. Brownfeld's review of Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Pluto Press, London, 1999. Brownfeld's complete review is available online on the Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs web site.

Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson explains why non-Jews are allowed to exist:

The late, highly revered Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the "Lubovitcher Rebbe" who headed the Chabad movement and wielded great influence in Israel as well as in the U.S., explained that, "[...] the body of a Jewish person is of a totally different quality from the body of [members] of all nations of the world.... A non-Jew’s entire reality is only vanity. It is written, ‘And the strangers shall guard and feed your flocks’ (Isaiah 61:5). The entire creation [of a non-Jew] exists only for the sake of the Jews....”

Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh comments on the ethics of liver transplants:

Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh is another member of this group. An immigrant to Israel from the U.S., Rabbi Ginsburgh speaks freely of Jews’ genetic-based, spiritual superiority over non-Jews. [...] “If every simple cell in a Jewish body entails divinity, is a part of God, then every strand of DNA is part of God. Therefore, something is special about Jewish DNA.... If a Jew needs a liver, can you take the liver of an innocent non-Jew passing by to save him? The Torah would probably permit that. Jewish life has an infinite value.”

I wonder if there is any question concerning your candidacy for President that can have greater urgency than whether you have chosen as a running mate an individual who subscribes to beliefs that are not only alien to core American values, but contemptuous and destructive of them.

Lubomyr Prytulak

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