My very first appointment last Friday morning (at a mind-numbing 6:30 a.m., I might add) was with Rabbi Mordechi Slivovitz, an august, erudite and truly imposing personage who also happens to be, among many, many other things, the current President of the Chosen Peoples’ Order of the Masada Machabee Martyrs, headquartered in Silver Spring, Maryland. To say he was livid would be a distinct understatement – the poor man was absolutely beside himself with rage and agitation as he uncharacteristically eschewed my office couch by the picture window overlooking the White House and plunked his substantial frame down in the chair directly in front of my desk.
“Gevalt,” he began, his face flushed with emotion, “I am on the verge of gnashing my teeth and rending my garments – literally, I tell you!”
“A khasuren di kalleh is tsu shayn,” I responded in his quaint vernacular. “A nar vert nit elter un kalteh vasser vert nit kalyeh. Der remez shlogt shtarker vi der emess. Please, elaborate – A kats vos m’yavket ken kain meiz nit chapen. An einredenish iz erger vi a krenk.”
“Mit Got tor men zich nit shpilen,” he cautioned. “This is about the fate of Israel, Tom – that’s as serious as it gets!”
“So, gosse rebbe, what’s troubling you, nu?” I inquired.
“It’s that meshuggeneh schwoogie, Barack Hussein Obama,” Slivovitz fretted inconsolably. “With the Arab middle name, no less! He’s about to appoint Chuck Hagel – from Nebraska, can you believe it? Nebraska! Nebraska, where they have what – Mutual of Omaha, with those two goyishe tier-fikeren, twenty thousand pig farms and not one decent kosher delicatessen, anywhere in the whole state? Appoint this shagitz Hagel, Secretary of Defense? I’m calling Bloomberg, I’m calling Liberman, I’m calling Spielberg, I’m calling Feinstein, I’m calling Wasserman-Schultz! I’m calling every influential Jewish person in the country, bubbeleh! And nothing I’m getting, not a call back, not an e-mail, not an instant message, not a poke on Facebook – I’m getting bupkis, I tell you, bupkis!”
“Perhaps,” I ventured, “your position is no longer considered… fashionable.”
“Fashion?” Slivovitz bridled. “What, has preserving the Triumph of 1948 become like what hemline and fabric combination is making the trades in Milan? Is it no more important than what basketball shoes the kids going to wear next year? What do you mean, ‘fashionable,’ anyway?”
“The word was intended,” I explained, “in the sense of the prevailing custom or philosophy.”
“Hagel,” he objected, “says the political reality is that the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people here in Washington. What’s fashionable about that? It smacks of nothing more than pure conspiracy theory!”
“You think,” I sought to verify, “that organizations such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee don’t wield a disproportionate amount of power within the United States Congress?”
“If you ask me,” he shot back, “they don’t wield nearly enough!”
“Not enough?” I wondered aloud. “What make you say that?”
“Okay, an example,” he shrugged. “Hagel says Israel does dumb things. Could we shut him up? No, we could not. He wants to negotiate with Hezbollah and Hamas. Could we get him to renounce that position? No, we could not! He says he’s a senator of the United States of America, not a senator of Israel. Could we get him to publicly acknowledge that it is the solemn duty of every member of the United States Congress to support the state of Israel? No, we could not! So – if we were as powerful as we should be, the Jewish lobby wouldn’t have to take that kind of guff off some goniff from Nebraska! When he was in the Senate, and my organization called any other senator or congressman, in either party, for an appointment, we’d get one, but Hagel’s office never even called back to refuse. So when we sent representatives there in person and got an appointment that way, and showed up for it at the agreed-upon hour, any time our representatives said anything, Hagel would come back with a fifteen or twenty minute speech so we could never get another word in edgewise; and when that happened, sometimes he’d arrange for one of his aides to come in to his office and ‘remind’ him of this or that important thing he had to do – you know, some kind of committee meeting or investigative hearing or Senate floor vote or something – so that just as soon as he got through shooting his mouth off like that, he’d have to leave. And then, after he announced that he wasn’t going to run for Senate again, he completely ignored us! Our people were kept waiting outside his office all day! They acted like we weren’t even there! And his policies on Iran – don’t even get me started!”
“Okay,” I dryly responded, “we can skip that, then.”
“What?” Slivovitz’ eyebrows shot up in surprise. “No, no, I only meant that rhetorically. Of course I want to talk about it!”
“In that case,” I sighed, “tell me how you really feel.”
“I feel,” Slivovitz angrily declared, “that based on his statements concerning Iran, Hagel is nothing more nor less than a traitor!”
“To the American people?” I sought verify.
“Huh?” Slivovitz exclaimed. “Ah, yeah, also that. Look, the man has made it abundantly clear that he prefers ‘engagement’ with Iran – which is nothing but a code word for appeasement – instead supporting the appropriate and necessary course of action.”
“Meaning,” I presumed, “Israeli military intervention?”
“Are you nuts?” Slivovitz responded, frankly shocked. “Of course not! The appropriate and necessary course of action is a massive attack on Iran by the United States!”
“And what makes you believe,” I probed, “that if President Obama, in his capacity as Commander and Chief, ordered US forces to attack Iran, a Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel wouldn’t follow those orders with aplomb and dispatch?”
“I would lack confidence in Hagel’s ability to perform his duty as Secretary of Defense,” Slivovitz asserted, “based on his remarks about – and his actions taken – concerning the war in Iraq. In 2007, he supported a one hundred and twenty day withdrawal deadline for our troops. He called the Surge ‘playing ping-pong with American lives’ and ‘the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam.’ And he repeatedly voted against declaring the Iranian Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization, even when they were supporting suicide and roadside bombers in Iraq.”
“Hagel knows about war from personal experience,” I pointed out. “He received five citations and medals when he was a sergeant in the US Army during the Vietnam conflict.”
“That’s the problem, right there,” Slivovitz griped. “Sergeants experience war much too close up. They can’t see past all that blood and gore and pain and screaming and guys getting messed up beyond recognition. There’s no way a person can understand the positive aspects of war if they have that kind of stuff on their mind all the time. And besides, he’s obviously an anti-Semite.”
“But didn’t Hagel say,” I asked, “that he doesn’t know of a better role model or individual than Yitzchak Rabin? And if you’re concerned about anti-Semites, why weren’t you up in arms when John Sununu joined the Mitt Romney campaign? I mean, that guy, he has a much more obvious and definite bias against Israel than anything you could possibly prove about Hagel.”
“John Sununu,” Slivovitz defended, “is a genunine, loyal ultra-conservative Republican who has always consistently followed the accepted wisdom and has never, ever voiced an original thought in his entire life – he not a trouble-maker, not an unpredictable… loose cannon like Hagel! Listen, Collins, with Hagel as Secretary of Defense and John Kerry as Secretary State, the chances of war will be greater than ever!”
“But isn’t a war what you want?” I wondered.
“Not if Israel can’t control it!” Slivovitz volleyed back indignantly. “Come on, Collins, work with me here – how can the Hagel appointment be stopped?”
“Well,” I observed, “he does have an Achilles heel, so to speak.”
“Really?” Slivovitz leaned forward expectantly. “What?”
“He has… issues… with gay rights,” I replied.
“Oh, okay, that’s great,” Slivovitz nodded. “I get it – you’re saying he’s a secret faygelah, right?”
“No,” I clarified, “quite the contrary. Hagel’s on record for some extremely anti-gay remarks. When Bill Clinton named James C. Hormel ambassador to Luxembourg, Hagel raised a stink about Hormel being what Hagel called ‘openly, aggressively gay.’ He said someone like that shouldn’t be representing the United States abroad in an official capacity.”
“’Aggressively gay?’” Slivovitz knit his brow anxiously. “I don’t know if I like the sound of that very much.”
“Be that as it may,” I continued, “The upshot of the issue is that, because of Hagel’s homophobia, your best allies against him in the upcoming nomination fight are going to be members of the LGBT community.”
“L… G… B… T?” Slivovitz slowly intoned. “I’ve heard of them, and I’m not going to say what those letters stand for, either, because it says right there in Leviticus every single one of them gets the death penalty.”
“Still,” I pressed, “they have their own reasons for not wanting Hagel as Secretary of Defense – he might set back the considerable progress they have made on their rights in the military by years, even decades. And actually, folks like them are considerably more popular at the moment than folks like you.”
“Oy vey,” he shuddered, “you mean, to keep Chuck Hagel out of the Pentagon, we’re going to have to form a… coalition with a bunch of… Sodomites?”
“Politics,” I reminded him, “makes strange bedfellows.”
“Please,” he implored with a profound wince, “I really wish you wouldn’t put it that way.”