Here is a simple question: Which movie more egregiously defames Jews? Consider the meaning of the word defame : To de-fame means to undo the fame currently being enjoyed. Jews used to be known for having endowed the world with the notion of sexual restraint and modesty. Judaism is now being defamed by Jews.
We are the people who introduced the world to the notion of the covenant of marriage. It was the Ten Commandments that brought about the original sexual revolution helping to make the family and ultimately all of Western civilization possible. Jews taught the world that the safety and welfare of women and children depends upon sculpting the raw rock of masculine aggressiveness and sexuality into the work of art we call marriage. And Judaism has been prudently protecting it since then.
The shield of that protection is reticence. Judaism insists upon refinement about matters sexual. The poet John Milton in his epic Paradise Lost correctly captures the traditional Jewish vision of the Edenic tug-of-war between the Serpent and Adam and Eve for the future soul of humanity. The question was whether we humans were going to resemble angels or animals. Western civilization has always defined good manners as demonstrating that the angels won. That is why my mother probably just like yours remonstrated after a display of particularly bad manners on my part Stop behaving like an animal.
Most of us would agree that few behaviors more defiantly exhibit the triumph of the animals than public sexual exhibitionism. We Jews even consider suggestive clothing to be unsuitable in public. Unlike the ancient Greeks who sculpted their gods in their own image of animalistic sexuality the Torah has shaped Jews in the image of God’s wish for modesty.
The Torah’s emphasis on modesty in all matters underpins our lives and lovingly guides how we dress socialize and marry. It has a great deal to do with the well-known stability of families and the relatively low rate of teenage social pathologies within Torah-observant Jewish communities.
Yet as stated above Jewish leaders politely tolerate many of our fellow Jews producing cultural filth that masquerades as entertainment and explicitly violates this most vital of Torah values.
A paramount principle of paleontology is that failure to adapt is a symptom of impending extinction. Anachronistically obsessing on yesterday’s dangers blinds one to contemporary perils. It is true that mobs of European Catholics did murder Jews. That has never happened in this most philo-Semitic of countries. American Jews are not threatened by rampaging Christians seeking revenge for the blood of Jesus. Jews are however threatened by other forces against which we have precious few allies. Prominent among our allies are seriously religious – and for the most part conservative – Christians.
When will more Jewish leaders recognize who their friends really are? When will they learn that those who incessantly bludgeon their friends eventually won’t have any friends left?
It would be foolish not to realize that most decent Americans are bothered far more by the trashing of American culture today than they are by our alleged complicity in the killing of Jesus two thousand years ago. Because so many of the most prominent trashers possess Jewish names and proudly proclaim their Jewish ethnicity it becomes a Jewish responsibility to condemn the vulgarity by means of which they defame Judaism. Hagaon Rabbi Yom Tov Schwarz cites no less an authority than the Maharal of Prague on the responsibility of Jewish leaders to condemn Jewish misdeeds and try to end them.
We can’t stop the Woody Allens and Howard Sterns and in a nation that enshrined free speech maybe we ought not try. But we could redeem ourselves by protesting them instead of dissipating valuable energies and priceless goodwill by endlessly protesting The Passion.