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This photo was posted on FB by BaruchChani who noted in response to queries from friends: ” yes it’s a real car that was parked outside of Pomegranate in flatbush with several others taking pictures”

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:

  1. a male who would identify himself as a practitioner of “Torah true Judaism”

  2. a misogynist who likes his women docile and subservient

  3. a pathological homophobe

  4. someone who views God ….not as the source of wisdom, love and compassion but as a violent and vengeful magician

  5. 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

  6. 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

  7. 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

  8. 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

In short, this car is owned by someone who is ONLY POSING as a knowledgeable, observant, religious Jew. The person responsible for these bumper stickers is either unaware of or completely hostile to some of the most fundamental values and teachings of Judaism:  mutual respect, kindness, compassion, forgiveness, commitment to acts of charity; commitment to the kind of courageous life long learning that makes it possible for the individual and in turn the community to become more knowledgeable of and sophisticated about the physical and spiritual universe God has lovingly given to us.  

Don’t be deceived by the clothes or lifestyle, this person is a fraud.