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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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It turned out that lot of his followers are Jews who do not appreciate being evangelized, especially by such D- apologetic piece. Massive dead bird storm ensued, and DC doubled, quartupled and octupled his efforts.

MartyrMade was actually responding to a comment from Rabbi Mike Harvey, who considers himself an expert on "interfaith dialogue" between Jews and Christians - and in the quintessential rabbinical fashion, this mostly involves cursing at Christians and calling for vague action against them. Rabbi Harvey has this odd habit of writing incendiary tweets calling Christians genocidaires, fascists, monsters, etc., then apologizing while claiming he was hacked, then deleting his account, and then doing the same thing all over again a few months later. He just deleted his Twitter account around the time MartyrMade posted that reply to him, and will probably be back by Christmas time to complain about the stifling environment of the holiday season. I don't know who he thinks he's fooling.

I'm sure Jews don't appreciate being mocked and evangelized, but posts like MartyrMade are really just returning the favor in kind. We put up with a lot of "interfaith dialogue" from them.

Part of the problem is that Rabbi is a much weaker designation than most Christian religious leaders (ie. priest/bishop/monk/reverend/whatever). The Christian designations typically involve actively leading a congregation, which means a moderate to considerable number of followers and/or having achieved some rank in the hierarchy of a large Christian institution (the Catholic church, Church of England, a large Evangelical denomination etc. that has standardized qualification for religious leaders and a hierarchy of power).

Rabbi means 'teacher' and the sole 'qualification' is that another rabbi declared you to be a rabbi. You don't need to be a religious leader, significant scholar or have any institutional role whatsoever. Even more organized Jewish groups that approximate some aspects of church credentialism are pretty lax when it comes to who counts as a rabbi, enforcement is usually reactive rather than proactive. In this guy's case he worked at a few reform synagogues and was then 'ordained' as a rabbi, but the Reform movement in the US has no real ordination process, so this is a pretty vague thing. You can't be kicked out of being an Orthodox or Reform rabbi, at most other Orthodox or Reform Jews might consider you less legitimate on some level. Only for Orthodox Jews in Israel is there some standard with the rabbinate (which can't declare you not a rabbi, it can only declare certain things you do illegitimate), and that obviously doesn't apply to an American reform rabbi.