The wind howling outside my Connecticut hotel window was not only from Hurricane Irene. A political wind was beginning to blow too that in the storm's aftermath would prove far more damaging.

We were on vacation from our vacation; our travel plans canceled by a storm. Watching the mobilization of city, county, and state emergency services on the hotel room TV, I wondered if my second floor room, about a half mile from the Long Island Sound, was going to be high enough.
 
I was relieved to see those emergency workers at the ready. While in Boston a few days earlier, I had wondered if some Americans now thought first responders an extravagance.
 
In Boston, I had a chance to walk the Freedom Trail: a half day inner city hike that takes you through twenty or so sites with a bearing on the history of the American Revolution.
 
One stop was at the Old South Meeting House, where in 1773 when three tea carrying ships were docked in Boston Harbor, Samuel Adams and around 7,000 angry colonists protested the British tax on tea.
 
The Boston Tea Party took place soon after this fiery meeting. I was standing on a pivotal place in American History, and I wondered why I felt so bad.
 
There in the midst of hundreds of tourists, even in the presence of well-rehearsed re-inactors in full colonial garb, I just wasn't feeling it.
 
"It's the new Tea Partiers," I said to my son, who was walking next to me. "They have spoiled the tea."
 
Why get upset?  Other American entities like the New England Patriots and Colonial Penn insurance have appropriated words from our nation's early history, and it didn't bother me.

I even like tea.

Was I responding to the aftertaste of what the fiscally tight and libertarian leaning Tea Party had been brewing? My Jewish taste buds, steeped in public safety, education and workers rights, apparently didn't like the taam (flavor).

The "Tea Party" had ruined the taste of an historic event, alienating me from an important moment in American history.

From a Jewish perspective, I look at their patriotic tri-corner hats, and comparing them to the words of Hillel find one corner missing.
 
In his famous saying from Pirke Avot (Ethics of the Fathers), Hillel said:
 
"If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" T-Partiers certainly have that corner covered, filling our airwaves and e-worlds with their self-assured philosophy. And the maxim's third corner, "If not now when," certainly fits their demand for immediacy in the recent debt ceiling showdown. But what about that second, key corner: "But, if I am only for myself, what am I?"

Are T-Partiers willing to help someone else's child receive an education? Or, someone else's elderly parent get a meal? And if their lack of willingness to support first responders like firemen in Wisconsin is any indication, in times of emergency, will there be room for more than one in the shelter?
 
Back in Connecticut, the storm had passed. We emerged to find a nearby stream had risen almost to the point of overflowing its banks, trees large and small had been broken or uprooted, power lines dangled, and streets were blocked with yellow emergency tape.

As we stood in line in front of one of the few restaurants that were open, I heard locals nervously talking about flooded and evacuated homes. I wondered: would tight fisted T-Partiers in state houses and congress be willing to pay for first responders, or for the repair of infrastructure?

A day later in the LA Times in a piece titled, "Storm brews over disaster relief," I read that House Republican leaders want to use the need for disaster funds as a way to pry budget concessions from Congress.

How then would T-Partiers respond to the rising waters? Float us a speech on the need for personal preparedness, and the virtues of rugged individualism?
 
It's one thing to throw the tea into the harbor, it's quite another when what's being tossed in is us.

Edmon J. Rodman has written about making his own matzah for JTA, Jewish love music for the Jerusalem Post, yiddisheh legerdemain for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, a Bernie Madoff Halloween mask for the Forward, and what really gets stuck in the La Brea Tar Pits for the Los Angeles Times. He has edited several Jewish population studies, and is one of the founders of the Movable Minyan, an over twenty-year-old chavura-size, independent congregation. He once designed a pop-up seder plate. In 2011 Rodman received a First Place Simon Rockower Award for "Excellence in Feature Writing" from the American Jewish Press Association."