Elon, boychik, welcome to the tribe!

Another local Jewish person contemplates Elon Musk in 2018.

     Elon, my man! Bagrisn aheym mayn bruder! Welcome home, my brother!
     Oh sorry, Getting ahead of myself. Last Monday, the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, visited Auschwitz and declared himself “aspirationally Jewish.”
     As someone who is not aspirationally but actually Jewish, that is a slow pitch right down the pipe. A guy’s gotta swing.
     Judaism is a great religion. That fact often gets lost, what with all the people hating us and wanting us dead. Great food. Great traditions. Not a lot of rigid rules, except for the Orthodox.
     But is Jewishness something one “aspires” to? Does anyone need to aspire? The bar is very low. You wanna be Jewish? Be Jewish. It’s not like anybody’s going to stop you. Buy a pair of candlesticks. Say Sabbath prayers.
     You don’t even have to do that. In my book, you’re Jewish if you say you are.
     Which Musk pretty much did. Though he seems to think Judaism is something you get from close contact with others, like pink eye.
     “Two-thirds of my friends are Jewish,” Musk said. “I have twice as many Jewish friends as non-Jewish friends. I’m like, Jewish by association.”
     It doesn’t work like that. Having Christian friends doesn’t make me Christian, I hope. Rule of thumb: If you’re using your friends from a certain group as a human shield to deflect charges that you’re actually a bigot who hates that exact group, then you probably are.
     Which reminds us: Musk’s remarkable theological self-transformation doesn’t spring from nowhere. It was last November, not that long ago, particularly when discussing a faith that goes back to ancient Babylon, when Musk declared the idea of Jews — then a people quite apart from himself — pushing “hatred against whites” while welcoming “hordes of minorities” to be “the actual truth.”
     To his surprise — isn’t he supposed to be some kind of business genius? Because me, I’d have seen that coming (savviness; an alleged Jewish trait) — the X advertisers started bolting in droves. Leading to Musk’s in-the-trenches conversion.
     Supposedly. Skepticism is another Jewish quality. So let me roll my eyes and be so bold — again Jewish, though we call it chutzpah — as to point out that Musk doesn’t really want to be Jewish. Rather, he’s reading from the “Heck, I’m Jewish myself” playbook, a cliche among haters.

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