The group had tried to express its grief over Israel's killing of Salah Nimr; IDF troops shot Nimr last week when he attempted to run them down at a checkpoint south of Jerusalem.
New York, March 16 - The limited knowledge of the heritage they assert to represent tripped up a group of activists today when they confused a prayer recited by mourners for a series of passages and a benediction recited before Sabbath and festival meals, as they attempted to showcase their grief over the demise of a violent antisemitic thug at the hands of Israeli security forces last week, owing to the similarity in the names of the rituals to the uninitiated.
If Not Now, an organization that attempts to invoke Jewish tradition and sources in pushing a far-left progressive agenda at odds with the vast majority of the American Jewish community, sought to demonstrate its grasp of Jewish tradition in its political activities Tuesday by reciting the Mourner's Kaddish, a mostly-Aramaic selection of liturgy that for hundreds of years has functioned as a grieving person's declaration of God's greatness and glory despite the human experience of loss. Anti-Israel activists have employed the technique before, but this time the participants failed to notice that the person leading the recitation had opened not to the Kaddish, but to the Kiddush, one of several liturgical institutions that help set apart the Jewish Sabbath and festival meals from their mundane counterparts. The group's membership possesses only a rudimentary grasp of Hebrew, and those who can sound out that language's phonetics boast even less proficiency in understanding it. Thus only after its conclusion did one of those present realize that the benediction following the recitation of a Biblical passage constituted a blessing recited just before drinking wine - the opening of such ceremonial meals - and not, as in Kaddish, a plea for Godly peace to descend on humanity. The group had tried to express its grief over Israel's killing of Salah Nimr; IDF troops shot Nimr last week when he attempted to run them down at a checkpoint south of Jerusalem.
"That didn't sound right," recalled Timothy Lieberman III. "I know because it sounded too much like part of the Havdalah ceremony to mark the end of the Sabbath that we did a few months back in the middle of a Saturday afternoon. I pointed that out discreetly to Simone [Zimmerman], but she brushed me off, like it didn't matter. I get that - I'll be first in line to exploit my Jewish heritage for political ends - but I didn't expect it to be that blatantly wrong. I'm sure there are lots of other such errors in our activism; that's just one I'm informed enough to notice. It's not a big deal - it's obvious the activism is primary and the spiritual stuff is only important insofar as it serves the activism."