Liberals cry for help in a hundred different ways.

 "Why don't the orthodox recognize ME as a Rabbi?"

S Cohen, rabbi of the conservative movement, asked me that with passion, anger and even hurt.

This was after a talk he gave at Middlebury College, 1988.

I retorted, "do you believe that God gave the Torah?"

"How can I", he began, his manner felt coarse and scoffing, and I felt the need to back away from him, "when the Torah says that 70 Jews crossed into Egypt and when you count the names it adds up to 69!" 

He was not really asking a question, but making a statement, and contemptuously so.

"I'll take that as a no," I responded, "and you just answered your own question."

What amazed me is that he wanted validation from rabbis who are not only wrong (in his mind) about their belief in the divinity of Torah, but also wrong in a ignorant way that can be so easily disproven that he expressed total contempt for them. Not, say, "I know that the orthodox feel that the Torah is divine and have many reasons to think so, but I simply disagree, and here are my reasons."

Nope.

He could disprove them (so he claimed) in half a verse in thirty seconds.

Yet he still yearned for their validation.

At that time, he was a professor at Brown university...and was still looking over his shoulder. 

Part of me pitied him, and it led me to ponder that:

Liberals cry for help in a hundred different ways. 

They remain insecure and tormented. 

You may want to bail out. I did.

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Off topic:

ps He also declared that the Nida laws are because men fear menstruation. Um, what about the sexual liberation movement? Please forward to me any literature that reflects that during that movement, beginning in the 1960's, men expressed any sentiments that indicated that they feared women's periods. And, do date-rapists give pause and ponder whether their next victim will be menstruating? 

The tormented imagine falsehoods in a hundred different ways.