
This photograph was taken in the NYC borough of Brooklyn which, second only to Jerusalem, is home to hundreds of thousands of rigidly Orthodox Jews. What does this picture tell us about the owner of this family van?
I don’t think it would be far-fetched to assume that the person responsible for all these hostile, in your face bumper stickers is:
-
a male who would identify himself as a practitioner of “Torah true Judaism”
-
a misogynist who likes his women docile and subservient
-
a pathological homophobe
-
someone who views God ….not as the source of wisdom, love and compassion but as a violent and vengeful magician
-
someone who is so confident of the nobility of his own piety that he is sure that anyone who doesn’t believe and practice Judaism the way he does is vulnerable to cancer
-
this person is a theological narcissist: God created only one world capable of sustaining life, only one holy people in that world, only one way of understanding God’s teachings, only one way of performing religious rites and rituals: this man is of course one of the very few gifted with true knowledge and understanding of what everyone else should be doing
-
this is a person so estranged, so unaware of and indifferent to the humanity that exists beyond the isolated parochial circles he travels in he assumes that most of the ‘other’ people he must unfortunately share with planet with exist without any moral compass and desperately need of guidance from him and his holier-than-thou cohorts
-
this person rejects any notion of change: There is nothing more to be learned; change is dangerous; new ideas are a threat to established the well established “facts” that he and his rabbi dare not question
Or, someone using satire in questionable taste.