The president is now portraying himself as a great expert on Judaism, but we know–as I wrote some years ago–that this is false. He has demonstrated considerable misunderstanding of Judaism, including the significance of our holiest day, Yom Kippur.
But that does not stop him from lecturing twenty-odd rabbis on Judaism, nor claiming that no other president before him has understood it as well as he does. So he tells the Jews what they really believe, and therefore what they should do.
In the coverage of his alleged role in personally selecting the targets of Hellfire missiles in the Middle East, it was claimed that he arrived at this remarkable decision after reading Sts. Aquinas and Augustine on “just war.” Do you believe it? Did any journalist think to ask for specifics?
In any event, it is a further case of the president telling Catholics what to believe, and therefore how to act. We all know the other cases, which have led to an open revolt from American Catholic leaders against the president’s theology and his policies.
In his speech in Cairo–the one he addressed to the “Muslim World”–he made numerous false statements about Islam, including Muslim theology and history. He spoke as if he did not realize that the Muslim Middle East is a failed culture (as numerous Muslim scholars have said). Nonetheless, that did not prevent him from telling Muslims what they believed and therefore how they should act.
He probably told the Dalai Lama something similar, dontcha think?
In short, he’s not only commander-in-chief who thinks our soldiers serve him, not the nation and its Constitution, but the prophet-in-chief for all religions.
There are words for this sort of self-image, ranging from extreme narcissism to megalomania. Combined with his insistence on keeping secret the most mundane aspects of his life, it suggests a desire to create a personal myth about himself, a myth that entitles him to speak ex cathedra to all men and women.
If he really were a great religious scholar and a deep philosophical thinker, I might be inclined to celebrate the world’s fortune in having a transcendent, world-historical figure in the White House. But he isn’t. He keeps getting the facts wrong from “Polish death camps” to “all 57 states,” from “Muslims invented printing” to “my Austrian isn’t very good,”, which is not the way of the prophets.
It’s nuts, actually.
(Cross-posted at Faster, Please.)
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, after Obama leaves office, he lapses fairly quickly into full-on dementia.
There are some who say this has already happened.
Pretty soon people are going to start laughing at his face and mocking anyone who stands up for this nut.
“But that does not stop him from lecturing twenty-odd rabbis on Judaism, nor claiming that no other president before him has understood it as well as he does.”
I have seen this in other “Progressives/Liberals”. The belief is that the last guy (Bush) was such an idiot (in their eyes), that the mere fact they read one book on the subject means they are smarter. It’s the typical “undergraduate who just read the book” smugness that infuriates scholars and researchers.
“But that does not stop him from lecturing twenty-odd rabbis on Judaism, nor claiming that no other president before him has understood it as well as he does.”
It isn’t what he knows, it’s what he knows that just isn’t so. It’s like he got his knowledge of Judaism from “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and Louis Farrakan.
C’mon ! HE knows that on Pesach the Jews celebrate their escape from the Maldives to the Malvinas.
(Then the nasty imperialists occupied the islands and changed their name to Falklands, and the Jews had to run, and they occupied Arab land where they had never been before.)
HE knows it all.
His knowledge of Judaism is probably as real as the composite girlfriend he had in Tales From My Father. The shame is that the Conservative Rabbis, who are not conservative at all and who were listening to him dissemble, are going to support him.