Eli Valley makes you laugh, roll your eyes or get a little angry with his cartoons. Again.

Man About Town EV has some new doodles with messages that are sure to make you laugh, roll your eyes or get a little angry…at least judging by some of the comments left.

The 1 in 5 majority:
http://www.forward.com/articles/14680/

and Chagall in Postville:
http://www.jewcy.com/post/chagall_postville

(CK has a lengthy back and forth after the comment which Muffti is WAY too lazy to read but you might enjoy.)

And, while this isn’t Jewlicious in any way. Muffti’s friend Shechar sent him the following stock tip:
BJ services.

It’s immature but Muffti can’t stop snickering.

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grandmuffti

20 Comments

  • OK lazy Muffti. The back and forth dealt with the notion of animal souls in the Tanya. Goys being possessed of animal souls sounds horrible until you realize that everyone, Jews included, have animal souls. Animal souls are simply the part of one’s soul that tells you you are hungry, or you are sleepy. To be sure the Tanya is not kind to non-Jews. It states that non-Jews are incapable of doing anything good and that while a Jew has a complex soul capable of perfection, non-Jews are consistently evil.

    Of course all of this is narishkeit. I’m no fan of Hassidic Judaism at all. Secular Jews will find these pronouncements horrific and totally politically incorrect. However, the Tanya was written by Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of Chabad in 1797. The historical context was one where Jews were under both physical danger by their traditional anti-Semitic enemies, and spiritual danger by the emancipation and its threat of greater assimilation and the challenges it posed to traditional Judaism. So of course Rabbi Shneur was not enamored of anything emanating from the non-Jewish world, including the emancipation that so many of his co-religionists were clamoring for. Ironically, the Reform movement sprang from the German emancipation but the realized threat that emanated from Germany was not spiritual, but rather physical as witnessed by the Holocaust 100 years later.

    You can’t get that kind of context and nuance from a one page cartoon. Not Valley’s fault.

  • Pardon Muffti’s ignance, but wasn’t the point of EV’s comic not that you can’t explain away offensive parts of the Tanya but that people (not you) still believe in it and respect it’s authoritah? Furthermore, if we are going to take a historical explanation to explain away what famous, authoritative rabbis claimed, why can’t we widen our net an start doing that for more things that rabbis (And the Torah!) say?

  • ck’s not a Lubavitcher Hasid, Muffti. For non-Lubavitchers, the Tanya don’t mean squat.

    I certainly don’t respect its authoitah. I don’t give a shit who wrote it.

  • heheh, agreed…Muffti knows ck pretty well and knows that he isn’t a Lubob. He was just pointing out that part of the point of EV’s doodling was that there is a large group of people who do respect it’s authoritah!

  • I know. It’s one of the problems I have with them. I’ve met plenty of Ortho rabbis, but I’ve never heard any of this “Jews and goyim are different species” shit.

    If it were true, Jews and gentiles couldn’t breed (now, that would solve the intermarriage problem, n’est pas?), nor would conversion be possible.

    The Torah is the only thing that makes any difference between jews and gentiles. Avraham Avinu wasn’t born a Jew, he became one through a process of spiritual growth. Anyone can do that. If the souls of goyim really were of an inferior nature, or composed of something intrinsically different from Jewish souls, Avraham could never have possibly done what he did.

    What a bunch of shit.

  • Hey, there wasn’t a Jewish Adam and Eve and a goyish Adam and Eve. There was only Adam and Eve. If you believe that, even in just a metaphorical sense, then any intrinsic, physical difference between souls is simply not possible. One can only believe in that sort of nonsense if one believes that Jews and gentiles have a different origin (a belief held by some Xian Gnostic sects, IIRC). I don’t know of anything in normal Jewish thought or practice that holds by something that is, essentially, blasphemous.

    Personally, I see this as a sad example of Jews taking on some of the worst of the goyish ideas. Perhaps, as ck sez, as a dfense mechanism, but still.

    It is quite true that a Jew who believes in the Torah will consider all other spiritual paths to be of a somewhat inferior nature. But that’s just the same as a Democrat thinking Republicans are afflicted with cranial-rectal inversion (and vice-versa). Nothing that a hit with the Clue Stick wouldn’t cure.

  • Ephraim…I am curious…what is your new prescription? And is it something I can get on the street?

  • Re BJ Services: damn, where was I for the initial public offering? Count me in for a private placement.

  • Ephraim, muffti agrees with the conclusion but he really doesn’t understand the argument. So what if there was only one adam and eve? Are you coupling a ridiculous theory of souls with a ridiculous theory of genetic transmission of souls? 🙂

    No worries, Tom, BJS never goes broke and probably does more business during hard times. bwahahahahaha.

  • No, all I’m saying is that if one accepts the premise that all humans spring from the same source (Adam and Eve, monkeys, take your pick) then the idea that the raw stuff of peoples’ souls could somehow be intrinsically different and therefore fundametally incompatible, strikes me as essentially impossible.

    It is only when one accepts the idea that different races spring from different origins that differing values can be ascribed to different races and an ubermensch/untermensch heirarchy can be developed.

    This is different from assigning a hierarchy of value based upon culture, religion, political beliefs, class, etc. People make value judgments about other people on these bases all the time.

  • Muffti has no idea why you would find any relationship between how people come about and how souls are assigned to them plausible truth be told…

  • “Souls assigend to them”? What are you talking about?

    Just to be clear here, while I do my best to be shomer mitzvot, I make no claims to be particularly learned or have the inside track on Jewish mysticism on how Hashem “assigns” souls to individuals, or even if He does such a thing. My point is that I believe that all humans are made from the same stuff, both physical and spiritual, and that it culture and upbringing which shape us. If this were not so, nobody could “become” a Jew by conversion. Of course, believing that all gerim are Jewish souls trapped in goyishe bodies, is one way to explain gerut, although this seems like an impossibility if you believe that G-d assigns souls to people, since this would assume that G-d somehow got His souls mixed up.

    However, if such a thing is possible, then it must also be possible that goyish souls can somehow find their way into Jewish bodies.

    This would explain people like Norman Finklestein, so perhaps it’s as good a hypothesis as any.

  • Well, Muffti guesses he was thinking that even if we really did all come from 2 particular people, that would dictate physical constancy at best, but he had no clue why that would lead to common spiritual ‘stuff’ being transmitted. Is the jewish view really that when a sperm penetrates an egg it leads to the development of both a fetus AND a soul, or that there are souls that get embodied but are created (if they are created at all) separately?

    What is the jewish view about the relationship of soul and body? How do souls become ‘connected’ with the body?

  • Ephraim your conclusions are based off of your limited understanding of Tanya and most likely most Jewish Text outside of Art Scrolls translation of the Chumash.

    Im not a mechanic therefore I can make many comments about how I think I know how an engine works and how to fix one or even build one, but the fact is just because I read the English Translation of Tanya, I mean a Ford Engine manual doesnt mean i know a thing about Chabad or Chassidus or anything Jewish, I mean engines.

    It is not worth my effort to explain and justify what the Tanya was really saying and show you just how uneducated you are because that goes against Chassidic thought.

    If the Chassidim wasted their time trying to prove how right they were to the Anti Chassidic Movement, then they would not have become the success they are today.

    So with that said, continue spreading Lies about things you know nothing off, and exploiting the minds of uneducated Jews who read your blog.

    Hatzlacha.

  • If you truly know the Hell we have gone through over the last year and a half, You would not wish it on anyone…All I see is that you are uneducated in Tanya and the Torah…Love for all Jews…

    Two Words…Grow Up!