I was shocked that when President Trump called Josh Shapiro, the Jewish Governor of Pennsylvania and a major supporter of Israel, “retarded,” no Modern Orthodox Jewish leader, lay or religious, publicly rebuked him. And I was stunned when Trump called all Israeli Jewish immigrants to the United States “garbage,” and then, for good measure, said the same about Israel, without a word of condemnation being heard from Modern Orthodox leadership. I was further astonished . . . .

(Oh, excuse me. One of my daughters, who reads early drafts of my columns, is whispering something in my ear. “What? Really? Ooops.”)

Sorry; let me correct myself and start again. It seems it wasn’t Shapiro or Israeli immigrants or Israel that the president nastily disrespected with his invectives. Rather, it was Tim Walz, Democratic governor of Minnesota, and the African nation of Somalia and the thousands of Somali immigrants, including citizens, who were shamefully insulted.

But what I was correct about is that not a word of protest was sounded by the leadership of my Modern Orthodox community to these slanders from on high. (Note: I write as an insider about my community; I leave it to others to write about theirs.) While the silence was overwhelming, it was not, sadly, surprising.

And I think I know why. Because it wasn’t about us. It’s wasn’t about Israel or antisemitism or the importance of governmental funding of yeshivot which are the only matters of current events that my leadership has talked about for the past several years. Everything else is allegedly “politics” and thus banned from discourse. But issues about us – these “Big Three” – are drilled down on time after time after sermon after statement after article after social media post. So had my opening paragraph actually been true about the targets of the attacks, I’m confident that our leadership would have loudly decried them. When others are the victims, we are relegated to the sounds........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)