Do you know what I mean? The people who understand a problem from personal experience and have overcome it tend to have strong opinions about it. Smoking is but one example, but it’s a common one to illustrate my point. If you are sitting with an ex-smoker, and you decide to have a butt, your friend will probably send you outside or at a minimum make a disparaging personal remark about your filthy and disgusting habit. Right? This happens all the time. They can do this with authority because they have earned the right, by overcoming the addiction, to point out the obvious fact that you still have a problem. It’s different, say, than having someone who has never smoked nag you incessantly about quitting. You can tune that person out, reminding them (as you will) that they don’t understand how hard it is to quit.

But you can’t say that to the ex-smoker. He knows exactly how hard it is to quit, but he did it anyway. The ex-smoker has credibility. He’s been there. You might as well shut your mouth, because you’ve got nothing.

This applies to all kinds of situations. You don’t know how much work night school is until you go to night school. You don’t know what’s involved in parenting until you become a parent. You don’t understand military culture until you join the military. You don’t know what it’s like to be dependent on other people until you get sick/lose your job/grow old. Et cetera.

This rule (which needs a name) also applies to politics and culture. We need to take responsibility for the groups we belong to, our identity politics. The natural tendency is for large groups to fan out into branches, which is what’s happened with American Christianity. The problem is that some branches get so far away from the original concept that they no longer resemble it at all. They root themselves in other soil and grow into another plant. For example, in this country we’ve seen bizarre theological distortions like the Gospel of Bling, a “theology” which bears no resemblance whatsoever to the teachings of Christ. (And there are other large, wayward branches on Christianity.)

Somebody has to point this out and lop this aberration off the tree called Christianity. And who is more qualified to wield the handsaw than other Christians, those who understand Christian theology? Christian theologians have credibility on matters of Christianity, just like Bill Belichick has credibility on football. And if you want to have credibility as a Christian, or a football fan, or a gardener, or a musician, or whatever you enjoy, you must know your topic. You have to study and learn the nuances. And when you do, then you can speak your opinion with some confidence. This is why we have leaders.

And the point is, sometimes we all need to speak up about things we know are wrong, especially when the matter involves our own group. When a group understands that some members have gone off in aberration and rooted themselves in other soil, the group must take responsibility to wield the handsaw. They alone can see where to make the cut so that the healthy part survives.

My Country Needs Jewish Liberals to Expose Neocons as a Jewish ‘Special Interest’

I’ve long argued here that American Jewry won’t be healed, and neither will American leadership, till we come to terms with the neocons as an expression of a hawkish Jewish interest in the Middle East, and a powerful expression at that. For this conversation to take place, it is necessary for liberal and leftwing Jews, even centrists, to turn on their cousins whose thinking they understand intimately–the hawkish neocons–and explain how fears for Israel came to pervade the Jewish establishment post-67 and ‘73. It means, in essence, trusting America enough to say, “Guess what, Junior just blew up the neighborhood with his rocket set…” Can the Jewish family do that?

That is the question.