Two prominent rabbis are condemning as inaccurate a meme that President Trump is firing off his most destructive or off-message tweets on Saturdays just because daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner are observing Shabbat.
The rabbis are not persuaded by the timing of the missives, which have sometimes occurred on Saturdays, when Ivanka and Jared, who are both Orthodox Jews, are observing the Sabbath.
Last Saturday, for example, Trump fired off a series of tweets accusing President Obama of tapping his phones – only to lob another mocking successor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ratings on ‘The Apprentice.’
It is a ‘dangerous misconception’ to assume that Kushner is unreachable or couldn’t otherwise provide guidance to the president because of his religious observances,’ said Rabbi Avidan Milevsky, the interim rabbi at Kesher Israel, an Orthodox synagogue that has been mentioned as a possible congregation Kushner and Trump would join.
He told Politico: ‘It implies that anything disastrous is somehow indirectly to be blamed on Jared’s absence—and by extension, Jews.’
Moreover, there isn’t anything in Jewish law that would prevent Kushner from providing advice – although restrictions on doing work on the Sabbath prevent many practicing Orthodox Jews from driving or even using electronics.
‘It’s a dangerous narrative — this idea that he’s not allowed to discuss these things on the Sabbath is absolutely false. Take a few steps, and it reaches the conclusion of, ‘here’s another thing we can blame on the Jews.’ Jared is not locked in a room. It was a cool idea, and it got some press, but it is a dangerous and false narrative,’ he told the publication.
He said the rules for Shabbat aren’t ‘black and white.’
Read the full article by Dora Spenlow at The Marshalltown.