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Chochma BaGoyim Taamin.
Please share your thoughts.
Is there any famous Gentile, dead or alive who you admire, and for what reason?
Madeline L’engile – would be great if we could write such deep, thought-provoking books on healthy Jewish people as she does for goyim.
(i don’t know her personally, and really i don’t admire any goyim per se, cuz what i admire most is someone who truly works on their middos in order to serve Hashem, and not for ulterior motives – and see that to much greater extent among Jews than among non-Jews).
Rudy Giuliani-I think he was an exemplary leader during 9/11.
I don’t think that chochmah bagoyim means to be inspired from them. Just that if they tell you that 2+3=5 then you can believe them.
i would admire the queen of england because she’s tznius even though technically she doesnt have to be. also anyone who is a gentile and manages to stay sane and not get into trouble i think is pretty impressive. the world is like quick sand…
The American poet Edgar Guest. If you read some of his work you will see that he had a lot of “common sense” which he was able to convey in a beautiful way.
Derech HaMelech
Informative Contributor to the CR
I don’t think that chochmah bagoyim means to be inspired from them. Just that if they tell you that 2+3=5 then you can believe them.
Agreed 100%!
Just that if they tell you that 2+3=5 then you can believe them.
Why would you need them to tell you that? 🙂
I wouldn’t say that the person inspires me as a whole. There are certain things I admire about different people. One person mentioned Schindler before. Obviously what he did was amazing, and it inspires me. However, don’t forget Schindler’s darker side – he was a known womanizer who was not faithful to his wife.
You can be inspired by almost anyone. Just don’t forget that it’s only the one area, and you might not want to copy them in other areas.
Well said Derech Hamelech. Chochma Bagoyim has nothing to do with this.
BS”D
Winston Churchill
Ronald Reagan
Geert Wilders
Silvio Berlusconi (his personal life notwithstanding)
and all others who fight against darkness even when it is not popular to do so – this of course includes Chiune Sugihara as well as the names mentioned above and others who saved Jews during WW2.
Pope John XXIII (Angelo Roncalli)
Pope John Paul II
BS”D
(Purim list)
Laffy Ghadaffy
Charlie Sheen
Mel Gibson
John Galliano
Fred Phelps (the Moshe Ber Beck of notzrus)
David Duke
Pat Buchanan
Lindsay Lohan
Al Sharpton
Charles Rangel
Vanessa Redgrave
Muzzie Hussain (of beheading fame)
and of course Mad Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Justin Bieber
The American soldiers of World War 2 who went charging out of their landing craft onto the beaches of Normandy (to fight the nazis-yemach shemam), knowing full well that they very likely would not make it to the beach alive.
Those men had something most are missing today.
The feeling that there is something (a cause, a country) more important in this world than ME.
Today most young people feel there is NOTHING more important than ME.
Ronald Reagan
Mother Theresa
Corrie Ten Boom
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
John Locke
Oliver Cromwell
Grover Cleveland
George Wsshington
John Hagee
Robert Welch (Founder of the John Birch Society)
All of the Righteous Gentiles
All of the Bnei Noach
Jesse Helms
Dr. Larry McDonald
William Wilberforce
Sister Rose Thering
Joe McCarthy
BS”D
67, as brave as they were, they were drafted soldiers following orders. At home, they could have been the worst bigots, the most dishonest of men, the most violent wife-beaters, but once drafted they became part of something bigger than they were which was ordered to do something.
Anyone who has been in a situation where there is a crowd mentality, which, I am the first to admit, includes being part of a Jewish community, knows that following the crowd just about comes naturally, even when it comes to something you would not ordinarily want to do.
It is those who do right when they are ordered to do wrong, or those who do good when living in a society where evil is considered right, who are the ones truly worthy of admiration.
Oh, and some of those soldiers were Jewish: ” The American cemetery, in Colleville-sur-Mer, contains row upon row of identical white crosses and Stars of David, immaculately kept, commemorating the American dead.:” (Wiki which I assume is correct in this case).
I also have tremendous admiration for all of those who fight totalitarian oppression and genocide in all its forms- whether it was Nazism, Communism, or nowadays, Radical Islamism. Long live the US Military.
There are 50 Japanese volunteers fighting the nuclear meltdown of a reactor in Japan
These people are doing so at great risk to their own lives so that others will not be harmed.
edited. We get a little touchy about outside links.
William Wilberforce.
Ronald Reagen
Thomas Sowell
Raul Wollenberg (rescued tons of Yidden during WWII)
homer simpson
homer simpson
Interesting selection Mike. About as good a selection as most of the selections others made above.
Mark Twain
Raphael Molino (a current US army sargeant)
Mark DeLorenzo (another one)
Winston Churchhill
Thomas Paine (his attitude towards religion notwithstanding)
Alan Turing
and several others
I like Sowell and Walter Williams. Williams’ memoir, Up from the Projects, is an inspiration.
Dr ,suess. Berenstain bears, clifford ,Amelia bedila,
BS”D
We forgot Homer Simpson’s cousin, OJ.
Seriously, it is interesting no one mentioned Abraham Lincoln or George Washington.
And I forgot Rudolph Giuliani.
Lets see (Sticking to people who are more or less modern)
Dave Ramsey, I find his advice on personal finance and the number of people he has helped amazing.
There are others but most of them are computer people.
Oh and anyone who will charge into a building burning to save strangers!
Current prime minister of Canada Stephen Harper. He is ready to put his whole political stance in jeopardy just to prove that Israel is right and the arabs are the murderers.
??? ?? ?????
Big Bird
in the post of 600 kilo bear, he says:
Fred Phelps (the Moshe Ber Beck of notzrus), i don’t think this belongs on ywn…
Our Governor Rick Perry:
He has kept Texas business friendly and prosperous, encouraged doctors to see Medicare patients thru malpractice reform and welcomed the evacuees from Katrina.
600kilobear…
re: Your comments to Moderator 67…
It is of course true that the draft existed then.
My father, z”l, was part of that draft, and part of that army, so I am also well aware that there were many Jews in the army.
I am also well aware that during the Vietnam war era, there was also a draft, but despite that, despite “having to follow orders”, many opted to go to Canada or to jail and NOT to serve. I am not judging them, but we really did not find that happening in WW2. Many even enlisted and were not drafted because they wanted a chaylek in fighting the nazi (and japanese) enemy. Many even enlisted when they were too young to be drafted, and faked their age on their ID.
Of course, without question, everything is ultimately decided by HKB”H, but let’s just say that b’derech ha’teva, without those men Mod-67 spoke of, WE would all be dead, and our goyish neighbors would be speaking german.
I am sure it is true that many American troops were not tzadikim in their personal lives, especially by our standards, but let’s not take away or minimize the huge zechus that these men earned by risking, and in many cases sacrificing, life and limb for a cause greater than themselves.
Second Wallenburg.
Also all those who keep the sheva mitzvos. It really isn’t easy.
Willie Randolph
Wallenberg, Sugihara, Nicholas Winston.
Noach. Yisro, Rus.
Walter Mitty
Re 600 Kilo Bear,
A few years ago I read a diary written in the 1930’s by a lawyer who was clerking on the Supreme Court at the time who has a digression about his friendship with a group of Civil War veterans who came to Washington. He goes on at length about how he doesn’t think anyone in his time would be capable of the sort selflessness that those (now very elderly) men had had. 10 years later, it was clear he was wrong. People do rise to the occasion when their times demand it.
Really for that reason also seconding the 180 nuclear scientists in Japan. I almost cry thinking about it.
“Oliver Cromwell”
He was a rasha who committed genocide.
Cromwell was a philo-Semite, and readmitted the Jews to England. He was a close friend of Menashe Ben Israel, and Cromwell permitted Jews to worship in private as they had done prior to the petitioning, and within months a synagogue and burial ground were allowed. He is responsible for a significant advance in Anglo-Jewish relations.
Charges of genocide are debatable and do a disservice to those true victims of genocide. Who did Cromwell “genocide”? The Jew-hating Irish?
George Washington
Benjamin Franklin
John Adams
Thomas Jefferson
Alexander Hamilton
James Madison
Abraham Lincoln
Theodore Roosevelt
Franklin Roosevelt
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Walt Whitman
Sam Clemens (Mark Twain)
F. Scott Fitzgerald
William Faulkner
Ernest Hemingway
Bill Cosby
Benito Juarez
Giuseppe Verdi
Georges Clemenceau
Winston Churchill
Carl Gustav von Mannerheim
Edvard Benes
Konrad Adenauer
Nelson Mandela
Andrei Sakharov
Erasmus
Thomas More
Isaac Newton
Cardinal John Henry Newman
Pope John XXIII
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Abdurrahman Wahid
I could probably come up with a lot more if I spent more than five minutes on it.
Arguable. The Irish Campaign was really the best way to get them out of the way, after they had signed a royalist treaty. He still did have to worry about the rest of the Isles. Placing the fear of G-d in them to never rebel possibly saved the most lives, over having additional rebellions.
‘Who did Cromwell “genocide”? The Jew-hating Irish?’
At the same time he as letting a few Jews into England, he was committing genocide against the Irish. Who, by the way, are not Jew haters at all. Please name a single Jew who has been killed in an Irish pogrom. There has been less anti-Semitism in Irish history than in the history of any other country in Europe. Not for nothing was Rav Herzog z’tz’l called the “Sinn Fein Rabbi”. (Would that the modern Sinn Fein would pay attention to its history!)
How about the FDNY and NYPD members who ran up the WTC AFTER they were hit by the planes and many gave up their lives to save others
Eli Manning, Derek Jeter & Amare (although he might be jewish), they seem like nice people and they play for the Giants, Yankees and Knicks respectively. 🙂
John Adams
Antonin Scalia (there are a lot of other people in the law that inspire me, but most of them are Jewish, e.g., Brandeis and Posner)
Warren Buffett
“Placing the fear of G-d in them to never rebel possibly saved the most lives, over having additional rebellions. “
I’m horrified that this can be written on a Jewish site. Gavra, by that logic Hadrian’s genocide after the Bar Kochba revolt was justified. Ditto Nebuzaradan’s murder of three million of our fellows.
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