Dennis Prager knows how to indict the folly of modern Jewish intellectuals.
Bitter over the perceived abandonment which their have suffered at the hand of a (seemingly) distant God, many have turned to atheism, secular humanism, socialism, and communism for a relevant world-view to explain the hardships of this life.
Yet no set of ideologies, all neatly categorized under the heading of "leftism", has contributed more to the persecution and systematic demise of the Jews since their diaspora in 70 AD than all of these man-made and man-centered "isms". State sponsored terrorism under the Nazis and later the USSR decimated the Jewish people for decades. Socialism, and ideal economic philosophy in the abstract, in practice has contributed to the demise and death of nations and peoples around the world.
In conjunction with the week's Torah Portion, Prager identifies the pervasive and perverse leftism among Jews as a god which has done more damage than the gilded heifer that Aaron fashioned for the Israelites to worship at the foot of Mount Sinai.
What moved the Israelites then and the Jews now to worship a subject of their own creation? They trusted themselves instead of God, whom they thought was distant and uncaring, time-consuming in His seeming reticence to arrive in their lives.
Yet the arrogance of fear-induced self-reliance proceeded from the mouths of the Israelites before Moses ascended Mount Sinai, an arrogance of man depending on his own efforts, an arrogance which had resulted in casting the first man from the Garden of Eden.
This presumption of man's self-reliance is nowhere more clearly displayed than in Exodus 19:
"And all the people answered together, and said, All that the LORD hath spoken we will do. And Moses returned the words of the people unto the LORD." (Exodus 19:8)
The original language gives off an overt air of boasting. The Israelites then and now, as many people throughout the earth to this day, take pride in what they can think, say, and do; yet none of it can bring solace or reconciliation to the heart of man, who is restless until he rests in the Finished Work of God through the Messiah Jesus Christ.
The self-centered independence of defining and refining the world according to one's limited dictates characterizes all the "isms" of man, including the chief idol and indolence of many Jews and intellectuals at large: Leftism.