Now let us bury great men
I read the Obit today in the NYT for Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and I am once again wondering how to deal with the lack of greatness in a great man.
Here you have the leading Torah authority in Israel and the world, a Sephardic* rabbi, which in and of itself is odd since like here in the U.S. it is those of European descent who claim authority over any ruling, and yet the turn towards hawkishness (away from this land is your land) and the hatred of gays, makes me question any authority he ever had.
(*Sephardic Jews were originally those who left Spain or Portugal after the 1492 expulsion, many of whom settled in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. In modern Israel, the term generally refers to Jews who came from North Africa and the Arab world and who complained of decades of discrimination and humiliation at the hands of the Ashkenazim, Jews of European stock who made up Israel’s early leadership elite.)