It's almost never a good idea for a Jewish columnist to write a column about a story from the Christian Bible, and David Brooks proves that rule today with a column on the story of the prodigal sons. Mr. Brooks writes:
The father's lesson for us is that if you live in a society that is coming apart on class lines, the best remedies are oblique. They are projects that bring the elder and younger brothers together for some third goal: national service projects, infrastructure-building, strengthening a company or a congregation.
The idea seems to be that Jesus would somehow have been in favor of "infrastructure-building," i.e., President Obama's stimulus spending or high-speed rail. Mr. Brooks would have been better off skipping the Christian Bible and focusing on the Jewish Bible, which at times takes quite a skeptical view toward these sorts of projects, i.e., the Tower of Babel and the Egyptian pyramids and cities built by enslaved Israelites.