Fake Rabbi Showdown

In response to the request of several people wanting an explanation (religious, biblical or otherwise) on the video of the coronation of Bishop Eddie Long, we here at Rhetoric Race and Religion will collect responses and place them on our blog. If there are responses you find, please share them with us. Thanks

By PETER MANSEAU
Religion Dispatches

A few years back I worked at a Jewish cultural organization, and from time to time we had events that called for the inclusion of a chazan, a cantor, to add a bit of religious yikhes—lineage—to our mostly secular mission. Usually this provided the workday with a pleasant musical interlude, but on one occasion the cantor seemed totally unable to carry a tune.

As we listened to him warble, I was approached by an elderly man who waved me close so he could whisper something in my ear. A Polish-born former chicken farmer from New Jersey, he had been a Nazi-killing partisan in his youth, but now walked with a cane and the stoop of age. He sounded like he’d learned English from gangster movies, which in fact he had. Hooking a thumb in the direction of the tone deaf cantor, he said, “This guy’s a chazan like I’m a dancer.”
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