subYOSEF-REFER-articleLarge-v2Can you imagine how the 850,000 Israelis who turned out for the funeral of R’ Ovadia Yosef would react to seeing 850,000 Palestinians turn out to bury a someone who suggested that they were all evil and not to be trusted? 

Should I, as the child and grandchild of Holocaust survivors who bears the names of an Uncle and Aunt killed in the Shoah mourn a rabbi who 1380631_525130004240708_1834157545_ntaught that: Holocaust victims were reincarnated sinners? 

NY Democratic mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio expressed his condolences for a man who  said that the victims of Hurricane Katrina deserved the tragedy “because they have no God.”  Really?

And one of my hero’s in life, Shimon Peres wept over the remains over a man he respectfully referred to as “Maran,” master, even though this supposed master of Torah taught the “sole purpose of non-Jews is to serve Jews.”

Should I as a religious, committed Jew simply ignore one comment made by a great scholar who felt that God and Torah obligated him to say that  gay people such as me are the “enemies of the Jewish people?“

What am I missing?  How politics makes strange bedfellows out of people?  How political expediency forces people to put their own moral compass on hold in the cause of self-promotion?  Or am I the fool for refusing to respect the kind of judgmental, chauvinistic, provincial, churlish wisdom of yet another book-smart, but obviously unsophisticated common boor who was labeled by many as a “brilliant scholar” who “did so much for his people?”

Ted Cruz and Ovadia Yosef are two perfect examples of the total disconnect between impressive academic credentials and and having a truly humane spirit that is reflective one’s love for and understanding of, God’s teachings.