I think I’ve discovered what makes me so uncomfortable about the assertion that global warming is a real and urgent problem.
A front-page New York Times story on May 1 concerned (thanks, Mr. Rumsfeld, for the pithy phrase) a “known unknown”: the earth’s cloud cover. Specifically, the causes and effects of its extent, altitude, and qualities—which are only very imperfectly understood. MIT professor of meteorology Richard S. Lindzen, the article explains, considers clouds a sort of planetary self-corrective mechanism that can counter the effects of greenhouse gases, the global warming drama’s villains.
Predictably, despite his unassailable credentials and the scientific community’s ostensible commitment to objectively consider all hypotheses, Dr. Lindzen has been excoriated by many of his colleagues, who, while they concede the enormous effect of clouds on climate, say he lacks proof for his contention and that, by raising the cloud issue, he is acting, in the words of one, in a “deeply unprofessional and irresponsible” manner.
The Times reporter mirrors that negativity, beginning his piece by stating that “a small group of scientific dissenters,” having had “their arguments… knocked down by accumulating evidence,” have “seized on one last argument,” namely, “that clouds will save us.” There is a reference to “withering criticism” of Dr. Lindzen and an assertion that the renegade researcher has been “embraced” by “politicians looking for reasons not to tackle climate change.” The sneering is subtle, but it’s there.
Less subtle was the environmental zeal of Al Armendariz, the erstwhile top Environmental Protection Agency official in Texas, who recently resigned after a video emerged of him discussing how to enforce oil and gas extraction regulations. He suggested the approach of “the Romans,” who “used to conquer villages” by taking “the first five guys they saw and… crucify[ing] them,” rendering the village “really easy to manage for the next few years.”
Of course, neither the hasty dismissal of rational speculations like Dr. Lindzen’s nor the over-enthusiasm of some environmentalists like Mr. Armendariz means that climate change isn’t real or that we have no responsibility to try to deal with it. We simply don’t know. The climate alarm-raisers may turn out to have been modern-day Chicken Littles squawking that the sky is warming. But they may turn out to have been environmental prophets. To be sure, most of the scientific community believes the latter. But in something as complex and long-term as climate change, even a scientific consensus—“groupthink,” Dr. Lindzen calls it—is only a contender for truth, not its arbiter.
Still, what those who preach with absolute certainty that our climate is in crisis bring to mind is the late writer Michael Crichton’s assertion that people who do not believe in G-d “still have to believe in something that gives meaning” to their lives, and that “environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists.”
Environmentalism, he elaborated, posits “an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature,” then “a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge”—i.e. technology and exploitation of natural resources—and “as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all.”
“We are all energy sinners,” he concluded, summing up the new religion’s world-view, “doomed to die, unless we seek salvation.”
What Dr. Lindzen’s contention and the reaction to it have helped me realize is that, whether or not Mr. Crichton is correct, a core credo of environmental zealots (whether or not they also believe in G-d) is the belief that human beings are where the environment buck stops, that we alone can make or break the planet.
Once again: the climate may in fact be in crisis. What discomforts me, though, is the stance of those who insist that they know with absolute surety—which they can’t—that it is. And that by lambasting any who dare dissent from their pronouncement, they show unwillingness to even consider the possibility that the world G-d created for us humans may not need our help to stay inhabitable—that, in His wisdom, He may have imbued not only our skin with the ability to heal its wounds, but the earth’s to do the same.
A few months ago, veteran political columnist James Fallows presented two opposing views of the Obama presidency in a cover story for The Atlantic. It generated much discussion, in part because of its balance, in part because of the depth that only someone who has been as close to the presidency as Fallows can bring. Fallows admits to leaning to a favorable view of the President, but it does not get in the way of pinpointing his flaws and errors. If you are open to two points of view on the subject, “Obama, Explained” remains a good read.
Fallows considers, inter alia, the gargantuan task that confronts any US president:
The sobering realities of the modern White House are: All presidents are unsuited to office, and therefore all presidents fail in certain crucial aspects of the job. All betray their supporters and provoke bitter criticism from their own side at some point in their term. And all are mis-assessed while in office, for reasons that typically depend more on luck and historical accident than on factors within their control. …Presidents fail because not to fail would require, in the age of modern communications and global responsibilities, a range of native talents and learned skills no real person has ever possessed. These include “smarts” in the normal sense…. A president needs rhetorical clarity and eloquence, so that he can explain to publics at home and around the world the intent behind his actions and—at least as important—so that everyone inside the administration understands his priorities clearly enough that he does not have to wade into every little policy fight to enforce his preferences….A president needs empathy and emotional intelligence….He needs to be confident but not arrogant; open-minded but not a weather vane; resolute but still adaptable; historically minded but highly alert to the present; visionary but practical… capable of being fully alert at a moment’s notice when the phone rings at 3 a.m.—yet also able to sleep each night, despite unremitting tension and without chemical aids….Ideally he would be self-aware enough that, in the center of a system that treats him as emperor-god, he could still recognize his own defects and try to offset them.
It struck me that much, if not all, of this analysis holds true of our expectations of gedolei Yisrael. We ask of them, expect of them, more than most mortals can possibly deliver.
We would be naïve if we tried ignoring or denying the murmurings in the tents of many yerei’im u-shleimim in the Orthodox world. Cross-Currents is one of the minority of blogs whose authors remain committed to the ideals of emunas chachamim and taking counsel with gedolei Yisrael. Yet even among our readership, it is clear that many people – if only anonymously – sometimes express disappointment with this or that gadol, or with the general manner of leadership of the Torah community.
There may be room for criticism, but we should ask ourselves many questions before we criticize too publicly or too vocally. One of those questions should be whether we ask the impossible of our gedolim.
In truth, the comparison to the President fails, for reasons that took a trip to Washington for me to appreciate. A few weeks ago, I was in DC as part of my day-job, and dealt with personnel at the White House. The subject is not suitable for discussion on a blog, and largely irrelevant. (It is not quite of “eeef I tell you, I have to keeel you” caliber, but still sensitive. It will wait for an appropriate time in the future.) Having to differentiate between doors upon which to knock, the complexity of government became much more immediate and real. The point is that there were offices, often multiple offices, for almost every kind of problem and program imaginable. Within the White House itself, there were people waiting on hand to assist the President with every kind need and every contingency, leaving him with as much freedom to make the decisions required of him.
How different this support system is from the lives of our gedolim! Not only do we expect of them all that Fallows describes, but we demand that they provide the right answers without any of the support system available to the President, even on a much smaller scale. To the contrary, almost all of them have immediate responsibilities to their talmidim, boards of directors, alumni, members of their immediate communities, etc. These duties alone could take up every waking minute – but we still believe that they should be able to serve up insight and leadership that comes from entire offices at governmental agencies and corporate headquarters.
I am not arguing that all is perfect, or that it is heretical to look for ways to improve the system. But we ought to be able to cut our gedolim a bit more slack than some of us do.
We certainly ought not make things worse by making assumptions that are not true. A case in point is a clip of Rav Aharon Leib Shteinman, shlit”a, holding his own against two interlocutors. At age 100, he is so on target, incisive and strong that many viewers have found themselves cheering from the sidelines. It is a rare opportunity to watch an overworked and overburdened gadol at work – and turning in a command performance.
The power of human speech made the headlines once again this month — even before the WikiLeak shocks had worn off — with two gaffes by prominent American politicians. One of Mitt Romney’s top campaign strategists was asked if Romney would not be permanently locked into certain positions because of his primary promises. He replied with the unfortunate “Etch-a Sketch” analogy: You shake the picture a bit and start from the beginning. Which of course led the anti-Romneys to charge that this proves that Romney has no convictions and no principles. He is just a politician who blows with the wind — or the granules of the “sketch.”
A few days later, talking into a microphone he did not know was open, President Obama is heard assuring Russian President Medvedev that after his election he will have more flexibility in the area of missile negotiations. Which of course led the anti-Obamas to charge that Obama was more than willing to give in to Russian demands, but can only afford to do so after he is reelected, not now. (This followed an earlier embarrassing open-mike nasty putdown of Binyamin Netanyahu by both Obama and President Sarkozy of France.)
The ensuing outraged reactions on all sides brings to mind the creation of Adam. When God creates him, He breathes into him the “breath of life “ (Genesis 2:7), which Targum Onkelos famously translates it as ruach memallela” a breath of speech,” that which differentiates man from the beasts — the power to talk. And it is truly a power, fraught with possibilities for good or ill. Through his words, man can sustain or destroy, heal or wound, express kindness or cruelty. No wonder King Solomon declares in Proverbs 18:21: “Death and life are in the power of the tongue.” Because of this, the Torah is replete with warnings about the use and misuse of human speech: false vows and promises; gossip, blasphemy, obscenity, and more. Human speech is so charged that it requires constant monitoring.
The truth is that even without open-mike problems, we are beginning to sense that the words that emanate from our mouths do not simply evaporate in the atmosphere. Since speech is a gift from the Eternal One, it is not unreasonable to suggest that speech itself must contain some form of eternity. Somewhere in space, the words live on, in another realm and in another way. One gleans an inkling of this from a very common earthly illustration — from the world of computers. In word processing, nothing is ever really deleted or erased forever. Everything one ever wrote on his computer can ultimately be skimmed off the hard drive and recovered. Whatever one writes digitally is never fully lost; it remains imprinted even after it is deleted. (Which is both ominous and comforting at the same time.)
The unguarded comments of politicians constitute a morality tale. Whether they reveal or do not reveal their true inner thoughts and calculations no one can know. But one thought keeps bobbing to the surface because of these gaffes. Namely, we all realize that this is not a perfect world. But one way to make it less imperfect is to imagine that there is an open mike nearby whenever we open our mouths, and to behave as if others were listening in. Yes, it might inhibit us a bit, but why would that be a bad thing? After all is said and done, such self-imposed verbal discipline might be a net gain for us personally, for our marriages, our friendships, and for our relationships in general.
Truth to tell, there is no need to imagine that there is an open mike nearby. For there exists a real one in fact, one that is with us wherever we go. See the Mishnah in Avos 2:1, which offers the formula for avoiding sin: “… consider that there is always with you a watchful Eye, a listening Ear, and that all your deeds are recorded in a Book.” “A listening ear ….”: were the Sages possibly referring to the perpetual open mike that surrounds us? Hmm.
This article appears in the current issue of the New York Jewish Week and is shared here with that paper’s permission.
Haredi Jews have become accustomed to their portrayal in a variety of negative ways over the years, the result of our stubborn refusal to assimilate Western values and mores into our lives, our rejection of the notion of a multi-winged Judaism-bird (and, perforce, of conversions of non-Jews to “new Judaisms”) and, to our shame and chagrin, the inexcusable actions of some individuals in our community.
Still, it was eye-opening to read Rabbi Eugene Korn’s recent indictment of Haredim (NYJW, April 17, “In The Name of Judaism, Haredim Have Turned Inward”) on a new charge: embracing an isolationist worldview “adopted by early Christian monks and ascetics… in stark contrast to rabbinic Judaism.”
Who knew?
As the rabbi charges, Haredim do indeed inhabit “a universe far removed from society at large” – at least if society at large is defined as the sort of things that are the bread and butter (and mud) of popular tabloids and magazines.
But is it really accurate to see Haredim as, in his words, “a version of Christian monks, albeit with families”? Or to characterize the rabbis of the Talmud as embracing the broader societal mores of their times?
To anyone truly familiar with Haredim and the Talmud, both contentions are risible.
As is Rabbi Korn’s further assertion, that much of the Haredi community has “lost interest in relating to the entire Jewish people.”
Let’s start with asceticism. Jews, to be sure, are enjoined by the Torah to focus on their inner lives, i.e. their spiritual self-improvement. That is nothing to criticize; it is what all of us, no matter our vocation or degree of interaction with the wider world, are obligated – indeed privileged – to do as Jews. And Torah study as the center of a Jewish man’s life is, to understate the case, not something foreign to “the rabbis of the Talmud.” In dozens of places, the Talmudic rabbis extol Torah study and all who make it their mainstay.
And they repeatedly warn, too, of absorbing negative influences from surrounding societies. They certainly interacted with others outside of the Jewish community when it was necessary or prudent. As do Haredim today, something readily evident to any open-minded observer of the community.
But seeking to live among members of one’s own religious community and trying to avoid the effluence of a coarse popular culture does not a monk make. Prudent, measured insularity is not medieval Christian asceticism.
As to the alleged Haredi loss of “interest in relating to the entire Jewish people,” tell that to the beneficiaries of the innumerable “community kollelim” nationwide whose fellows’ dual purpose is to study Torah in depth and to be a resource to members of their respective broader Jewish communities. Those Haredi kollel members interact in conversation, friendship and study with Jews of all affiliations, or of none. Tell it to the thousands of tri-state area Jews – of every conceivable background – who, hospitalized in Manhattan, have been visited daily and provided hot food by the famed “Satmar ladies.” Tell it to all the Reform, Conservative and unaffiliated Jews who have weekly phone-partners with Haredi men and women as part of Torah Umesora’s “Partners in Torah” project. Tell it to the untold numbers of non-Orthodox Jews who have been befriended and assisted in countless ways by Chabad emissaries.
Tell it to my colleagues at Agudath Israel of America, among them lawyers who interact with Jews and non-Jews daily in the interest of promoting truly Jewish values and all Americans’ religious rights. Tell it to all the thousands of non-Haredi participants who were invited to, and participated in, the Daf Yomi Siyum HaShas seven years ago (and to all those who are planning on attending the upcoming one, at the Metlife Stadium on August 1).
Tell it to the Jewish cancer patients and their families, whatever their affiliations, who have been assisted by Chai Lifeline – or, in Israel, by Zichron Menachem. Or, speaking of Israel, beneficiaries of Haredi social service groups like Meir Panim; medical resource providers like Ezra L’Marpeh; or of patients at the famed Laniado Hospital, in Netanya, under the direction of the Sanz-Klausenburger Rebbe, which serves the entire community (and has the distinction of being the only hospital in Israel that has never closed due to a strike).
All those efforts are not antithetical to the Haredi world’s focus on Torah; they derive from it, are informed by it, concretize it.
Rabbi Korn’s judgment of contemporary Charedim was sparked, he explains, by his experience on a flight from Israel where his young Haredi seat-mate was studying Mishnayos and, after exchanging pleasantries, seemed more interested in resuming his learning than in conversing. Rabbi Korn shouldn’t have been offended. The young man likely didn’t intend to be rude, or even monkish. One day he might surprise Rabbi Korn with the fruits of his internalization of the Jewish religious heritage.
The editorial in Ami did not promote such celebration, of course. It provided an original and thought-provoking reason to celebrate its non-celebration, so to speak. Survivors of the Holocaust would naturally take great comfort in seeing the creation of the State as a Divine Hand reaching down to comfort the bedraggled remnant of the Jewish people. It took principled courage, claims the author, to resist what he calls “the comforting interpretation of Jewish history.” Survivors refused the convenience of such an interpretation of the events around them out of fealty to their religious convictions, which had no room for a secular state replacing the yearnings of the Jewish soul. (You can and should read the original, which is posted here.)
The implication is that those who continue to ignore Israel’s Independence Day act in the same spirit today. “It [Yom Ha-Atzmaut] was celebrated last week throughout the world by countless Jewish people, though not by many in the Orthodox Jewish community. Yom Ha-Atzmaut is generally either ignored or treated with disdain by most Orthodox Jews.”
The piece has generated vigorous discussion. Is it true that most Orthodox Jews ignore Yom Ha-Atzmaut? Do not a majority of Jews who accept the Thirteen Principles of Faith, i.e. the Rambam’s definition of who is an “insider,” in fact celebrate the day? (We should probably accept the author’s protestation that by “Orthodox” he meant “charedi,” and was guilty of poor word choice, but not malice.) Is it true that “subsequent…military action stirred additional rabbinic opposition to Zionism, and was seen as proof that the Zionist idea was, from a perspective of Jewish tradition, illicit from the start?” Wasn’t this just the reaction of Satmar and Brisk, and in fact rejected in all other Torah circles? Can the position of Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik be reduced to nothing more than seeing the State as “a buffer against assimilation,” while dismissing “the idea that its creation was in any way associated with the concept of redemption?” Does Rav Kook merit any attention at all? Did the author ever see the newsreels of Novemeber, 1947 (the reaction to the UN partition vote), with circles of charedim and secular Jews dancing together in unbridled joy? They don’t really support the conclusion of a wholesale charedi rejection of the State. Nor does the signature of R Itche Meir Levin on Israel’s Declaration of Independence, nor all of those who did mark the first few anniversaries of the Declaration with joy and thanks to Hashem.
I will leave to others to develop those objections, and turn to one that I believe may be the most serious flaw in the editorial. Even if the facts would have been as the author has them (and I do not believe that this is the case), they would have little relevance to us today.
Yom Ha-Atzmaut is not a celebration of secular Zionism, or any kind of Zionism. It is the celebration of the coming into existence of an independent Jewish community – no, nation – in the land that is ours. Israel is the largest Jewish community in the world. Its continued existence, its thriving against all odds, is a gift from Heaven. It can, should, must be appreciated as an enormous chesed from HKBH, Who allows us to live in our holy Land and work again to slowly build up a Jewish nation. How can we fail to acknowledge the incredible saga, past and present of rov minyan and rov binyan of the Jewish people? What do we do to ourselves when we stand to the side as literally millions of Jews celebrate in their own way (even if not the way we would have designed such celebration), and we do not feel their simple joy of being Jewish? What damage to we foist on future generations of our people, as we propagate division and dissension by not smiling at them and saying “Chag Sameach,” even if it is not mentioned in Parshas Emor?
The author cited Rav Soloveitchik, and I will do so as well. Among other things, I admired (albeit from a distance, since I never attended YU) two elements in his life and thought that are actually intertwined. The first is that he was capable of changing his mind. He was an Agudah firebrand at one point, but he jumped ship. That doesn’t happen to gedolim in our revisionist biographies; it does happen to real people.
The second is his finding that halacha has its protocols of psak, which determine how to decide between competing positions. History, he said, is what sometimes determines the outcome of hashkafic debates. In the debate over the significance of the Jewish State, history was machria that it is significant.
This is not dependent on the ideology that is called Zionism. Many years ago, I heard a young rosh yeshiva argue that all of us were like the Japanese soldiers who remained holed up on Pacific islands many years after the end of World War Two, still keeping guard at their posts. They were living a war that had already ended. There was a war for the heart and soul of the Jewish people between secular Zionists and those faithful to Torah. Secular Zionism lost that battle! We in the Torah community should have declared victory and moved on! We now have a country of our own, and we should take our places in its development, without fear of supporting an ideology that died a long time ago. Yom Ha-Atzmaut is not about ideology today – it is about the privilege of having a place where we need bow to nothing but Hashem. Recall the words of the Rambam (Chanuka 3:1) writing about why Chanuka was important: “Jewish governance returned to for more than two hundred years, till the churban.” Those two centuries were presided over by rulers a good deal more evil than the people sitting in Knesset.
When I left kollel, I was an anti-zionist kana’i. I’m not sure if there is much of the old-style Zionism left to oppose. Today, there is only the reality of a world in which, as the Satmar Rov once said, “When they say Zionist, they mean us.” Like it or not, that exasperating, poorly governed, socially divided patch of land is seen by the rest of the world as identical with world Jewry. I support the State not because of speculative ideology, but because of the certainty that I want to defend Yidden. For many years, I felt jealous of those who could celebrate on Yom Ha-Atzmaut, who could share the thanks, the concerns for the future, and the joy. My previous training left no room for it. Gradually, I made some room. (I don’t say Hallel, because I am not bowled over by the arguments to do so. I do say tachanun, and don’t see any contradiction. I attended the local Consular affair, but left deliberately before the musical entertainment, because of Sefirah.) But I always looked over my shoulder, feeling a bit uncomfortable. As a yeshiva-trained Jew, did I belong there?
Ami’s piece was so wrong, that I now have reason to shake off the discomfort. That is important, because when you cannot bring yourself to sincerely join in the aspirations, dreams and joy of other Jews, it becomes so much easier to write them off as “the other.” It bcomes that much easier to see yourselves as the only legitimate emissaries of G-d. From there, you and your friends can spiral out of control, taking over neighborhoods and schools contemptuously, or wearing Auschwitz uniforms in Kikar Shabbos.
Faced with the choice of celebrating with people whose religious outlook I do not share, or accepting an outlook that is too narrow and off-putting to be true, I will go with the former.
Thank you, Ami, for making life a bit less worrisome.
Were the New Israel Fund a newly landed Martian’s only source of information about Israel, he’d likely imagine the country as a cross between Saudi Arabia and North Korea.
In the extraterrestrial’s mind it would be a place where women are forced to sit in the backs of buses and the sound of their voices prohibited from being heard. A place where religious extremists eschew democratic values and control the government and national discourse.
(Our Martian would be stunned to actually fix his multiple eyes on Tel Aviv’s Rechov Dizengoff—or, for that matter, Jerusalem’s Rechov Ben-Yehuda. He’d be stupefied by the unfettered operation of Reform, Conservative, and Messianic places of worship. The Knesset would utterly blow him away.)
The NIF’s latest Big Lie took the form of a big ad—a full-color full-pager, in fact—in The New York Times and the Forward. Maybe the latter periodical ran the ad gratis, but the Times charges $175,000 for a color page. Even discounted, it cost the NIF a pretty penny.
Actually, the one it cost is Murray Koppelman, as noted in the corner of the ad. Mr. Koppelman, an Upper East Side money manager, is a major supporter of the group—he … Read More >>
On Monday, Paul Miller, a Senior Editor at a “technology-focused news publication” called The Verge, announced that he was quitting the Internet for a year. He’s switched to a “dumb” phone, and has pledged to neither use the Internet nor ask others to use it for him, if he can.
His reasons for this drastic move are informative. He hopes that “leaving the internet will make me better with my time, vastly more creative, a better friend, a better son and brother… a better Paul.” He said that he was spending an average of over twelve hours each day using some sort of device with an Internet connection, not even including his smartphone.
By separating myself from the constant connectivity, I can see which aspects are truly valuable, which are distractions for me, and which parts are corrupting my very soul. What I worry is that I’m so “adept” at the internet that I’ve found ways to fill every crevice of my life with it, and I’m pretty sure the internet has invaded some places where it doesn’t belong.
This is a profound statement for a person who makes his living as a technology writer, a job … Read More >>
By the time you read this, the Great Debate may already have taken place. No matter. The issues will be around long after the hall at the Kraft Center at Columbia empties on Wednesday evening, May 2nd.
One of the contenders davens at an Orthodox shul. He is not the one for whom most of our readers will be rooting. Peter Beinart is not just an irritant. He is an irritant equipped with media power. His op-eds land where he wants them. He controls an entire section of The Daily Beast (called Open Zion) from which he can conduct his campaign to save Israel through tough love. Meaning, among other things, calling for a selective boycott of Israeli products, which puts him in bed with the worst of the Palestinian Israel-haters. (They don’t like him any more than I do, because he implies that there is such a thing as a progressive, liberated Zionism. This thought is anathema to the current crop of Palestinian leadership, which dumped the idea of a two-state solution a few years ago, and forgot to inform the benighted leadership of some mainline Protestant denominations, who are also contemplating selective boycotts of Israel as a … Read More >>
Having recounted the story in talks and in writing, I apologize if any readers are encountering it here not for the first time. It’s actually my father’s story; in fact, I only heard it from him when I was an adult (and not a particularly young one, at that).
It was the winter of 1941, the first one my father, may he be well, as a 14-year-old, along with his Novhardoker colleagues and rebbe, spent in Siberia, as guests of the Soviet Union. It was a most challenging season for the deportees, as they had no proper clothing for the climate.
As the youngest member of the group, my father, known then as “Simcha Ruzhaner,” after the Polish town of his birth, was assigned to guard a farm a few miles from the kolkhoz, or collective farm, where they were based. The night temperature often dropped to forty degrees below zero, and he had only a small stove by which to keep warm.
One night, he couldn’t shake the chills and realized he was feverish. He managed to hitch his horse and sled together, and set off for the kolkhoz. Not far from the farm, though, he … Read More >>
Just before Pesach, best-selling novelist Naomi Ragen was socked with the largest plagiarism judgment ever in Israel. District court judge Yosef Shapira ordered her to pay Sarah Shapiro 233,000 shekels for scenes “stolen” from Shapiro’s memoir Growing with My Children for Ragen’s novel Sotah.
Ragen accused Sarah Shapiro of having sued her “out of a desire to silence my criticism of the Haredi community’s treatment of women.” On Israel TV, she derided the verdict as worthy of a “banana republic.”
In a lengthy interview in Yediot Ahronot published over Pesach, Ragen charged that she was the victim of a chareidi conspiracy. Asked how the chareidim had ensnared a highly respected jurist and former military judge with the rank of colonel into their plot, Ragen did not answer directly. Elsewhere in the interview, however, she implied some kind of improper political influence on the judge: “It’s no wonder Shas very much wants this judge to be the next state comptroller.” (I’d be surprised if one Shas MK has ever heard of Ragen.)
Later in the interview, Ragen expressed her wonder that the intelligentsia had not rallied to her cause: “Just as [they] did not initially understand what the mehadrin buses … Read More >>
If you ever wondered how to judge the success of a rabbi, you know how complex the matter can be. What are the criteria, the measuring rods, by which a rabbi is judged?
But fret no longer: Newsweek magazine on April 2 solved the problem by publishing its annual list of “America’s top 50 rabbis.” What yardstick was used is not made clear. Was it Torah learning? Apparently that was not a factor, since among the jurors there seems to be no one who could measure Torah learning. Was it the ability to uplift and inspire a community to return to Torah learning and living? That, too, was evidently not an issue, since among the jurors there was no one who could appreciate that quality. The magazine’s press release does mention “impact” as a criterion, but it is not clear how “impact” was weighed. Was it the size of the rabbi’s institution, or the amount of publicity he received? Or was it the rabbi’s popularity, which was gained by never taking a stand on anything not previously approved by the NY Times editorial pages? Rabbinic popularity, after all, is not difficult to attain: never push congregants to live … Read More >>
No one really had to be there. Attendance at the Ft. Hood Holocaust Remembrance Days ceremony was voluntary; I psyched myself up to present to a small crowd of soldiers. The important thing, I told myself, was that the US Army honored the memory of the kedoshim by wanting to understand the events of seventy years ago. My job, representing the Simon Wiesenthal Center, was to show effusive appreciation, and scrupulously follow the requests made by my hosts concerning the content of a short message.
I was wrong. Four to five hundred soldiers made their way into the hall. (A sure indication that Jews account for only a half a percent of our men and women in uniform is that the soldiers arrived early, and the program began at precisely 10AM.) Before taking their seats, the soldiers viewed The Courage To Remember, the Wiesenthal Centers’ traveling display of the history, context, and scope of the Shoah that the Center makes available for such occasions. A film clip from the US Holocaust Museum ran on a screen up front. By the time the program began, every chair was filled; many stood in the rear. The Army had upped the ante. … Read More >>
The lady on the Staten Island ferry the other day was clearly grunting for my ears.
With my unfashionable beard, dark suit and black hat, tagging me as an Orthodox Jew is pretty much a slam dunk. And, having commuted, along with my beard and hat, on those huge orange floating shuttlecocks four or five days a week for the better part of two decades, I have many memorable (at least to me) stories to tell. I’ve never gotten around to setting them down in writing (though choosing the imaginary collection’s title, “Ferry Tales,” was easy).
There was, for instance, the older lady, herself behatted, though hers was a broad-brimmed floral affair, who, standing next to me on the outside deck one glorious spring day, turned to me and beatifically emoted: “Can’t you just see him walking on the water?” (I told her, no, actually I couldn’t.) Or the young man sitting a row in front of me telling his young lady friend how he had read an article about genetic engineering on humans and that he planned on “gettin’ some of them Jew genes for my kid—he be takin’ over the world!”
With pride, we announce the third issue of the online journal Klal Perspectives. Is there an epidemic of spiritual malaise, even among people fully observant? How widespread are feelings of lack of connection with the Ribbono Shel Olam? What has changed in recent times? Have solutions been found that are effective in whole or in part? These are some of the most pressing questions to a large part of the Orthodox world, and once again, Klal Perspectives brings together a diversity of analyses and suggestions across a spectrum of Orthodox thought.
We thank HKBH and some of the shakers and movers of this project that we have been able to keep to our timetable as a quarterly. A personal observation that brought home to me how just how well the animating spirit of this journal has been received. (Full disclosure: I am a member of its editorial board.) For the first issue, board members had to put in significant time urging, convincing, cajoling prospective writers, after we assembled a list of those we from whom we thought we would want to hear. By the second issue, by and large, targeted contributors were willing to contribute without any arm-twisting. … Read More >>
This week, I cannot refer to “this week’s reading” and be universally accurate. The Torah portion read this week in Israel is “out of sync” with the rest of the world, a phenomenon that will continue for another month. This is because while Israel celebrates the holy days of the three festivals on one day each, those living outside Israel celebrate them for two. Since the last day of Passover was on Friday this year, in Israel they read Parshas Shemini on Shabbos, while outside Israel, we read the special reading for the eighth day of Passover, and will read Shemini this week.
This causes a minor inconvenience for many people. Many apps and webpages written in Israel, for instance, refer to a different Torah reading than those written outside it. This week, many who are about to travel to Israel will walk to places where they can listen to Israel’s reading in order to “catch up.”
Now of course, you can find some people today who say that we really should only have one Passover Seder. This usually comes from the same sources that claim that Ashkenazic Jews shouldn’t care about eating kitniyos (legumes, rice, etc.) on Passover … Read More >>
You wrote: “People read in their own thoughts to what they want a text to say – only skipping the nicety of reading their findings into a Maamar Chazal. The result is the same. People see Torah discourse about all matters outside of halacha is nothing more than a debating club, using bits of Hebrew and Aramaic phraseology to sound authentic. They therefore come to believe that there is no such thing as an authentic Torah view, or set of views – to the exclusion of those that are inauthentic.”
Can you please give one or more concrete examples of this (the ideas, not the persons who expressed them)? It would go a long way toward helping me (and probably others) understand the parameters of the discussion. Thank you.
Forgive me if I only meet you half way. I am reluctant to point a finger at ideas that can be associated with specific authors who are fine people. As I mentioned previously, Rav Yisrael Salanter bemoaned the fact that rabbonim in his generation cheapened Chazal in his estimation, by turning it into nothing more than a springboard for their rabbinic imaginations. Those he criticized were surely fine talmidei chachamim. … Read More >>
After a hail of French police gunfire relieved humanity of the noxious presence of Mohamed Merah, the 23-year-old Algerian-Frenchman who murdered seven people, including three children, in cold blood and declared himself ready to enter paradise, his soul must have really been surprised. If, that is, he had a soul and wasn’t just some demon in human guise.
Unsurprising for those of us back in this world was the revelation that when Mr. Merah was holed up in a building, his mother had refused to urge her son to surrender; or that, after Mr. Merah’s dispatching, his brother told police he was “very proud” of Mohamed and “approve[s] of what he did”; or that the murderer’s father plans to sue the French government over his son’s death.
Even the act of Lorraine Collin, a 56-year-old high school teacher at Gustave Flaubert High School in Rouen, Normandy, who asked her class to observe a moment of silence in memory of the deceased murderer, was not terribly surprising; it was pretty much par for the contorted conscience course.
What did come as something of a surprise, and a happy one, was the French Education Minister’s suspension of Ms. Collin’s … Read More >>
Rabbi Yaakov of Lissa famously asks in his commentary on the Haggadah, Ma’aseh Nissim: If someone were released from prison and subsequently imprisoned again, would he invite his cell mates to gather with him to celebrate the day of his initial release?
Yet the servitude of Mitzrayim was hardly the last time that Jews were enslaved by another people. The Babylonian, Persian, Greek and Roman exiles followed. The Promised Land flowing with milk and honey has been ours for but a brief portion of our national existence.
Still Jews have gone on celebrating the Seder even in the midst of the most brutal oppression, whether hiding in caves from the Romans or in dark cellars evading the Inquisition.
Even in the Nazi death camps, Jews collected kernels of wheat grain by grain in order to bake matzos. Despite working endless days at backbreaking labor, on a diet about half of subsistence level, they traded away their major source of sustenance for less nutritious matzos. Others who could not find matzos exchanged their bread and soup for raw potatoes to avoid eating chometz, even after being told by rabbis that the commandment to preserve their lives required them to eat … Read More >>
The group of Novardhoker yeshiva bochurim and their rebbe (and his rebbetzin)—along with a number of families—were packed into the train’s stock cars in the summer of 1941. Since Rav Yehudah Leib Nekritz, zt”l, and his talmidim, then in Soviet-conquered Lithuania, had declined the offer of Russian citizenship, the Soviets were providing them an all-expense-paid trip to Siberia. Occasional pieces of bread and cups of water were also offered at no charge during the weeks of travel. Not to mention the cruise across a lake on a barge to the work camp where my father, may he be well, the youngest of the yeshiva group, and his rebbe and friends, would spend the years of the Second World War.
The Siberian summer is oppressive; insects left the exiles at times unrecognizable for their swollen faces. Winter in the taiga, of course, brought challenges of its own, including 40 degree below zero temperatures.
In his short memoir, “Fire Ice Air,” my father recalls that even as the yeshiva exiles arrived in the East, Pesach was already on their minds.
And so, as they worked in the fields, some of the boys squirreled away a few kernels of wheat here … Read More >>
From the feedback we’ve been getting, the current edition of Klal Perspectives dealing with connectedness has touched many people. Besides the runaway success of Rabbi Moshe Weinberger’s contribution, two other factors have been played a role in the popularity of the Spring 2012 issue. Firstly, the topic seems to have resonated with many people who were ready to confront the uncomfortable realization that their relationship with HKBH was not as rich as they wanted. Secondly, between the different authors, the issue offered a plethora of suggestions, appealing to all kinds of different backgrounds and needs.
Several authors spoke of people possessing inadequate understanding of the whys and wherefores of Yiddishkeit. There are too many bright people who realize at some point that their comprehension of what a Torah life is all about conceptually still operates on a grade school level. When they were younger, they did not have any questions; decades later, they go through the motions, but have no idea about where to find answers.
Some authors suggested that for some people, the most satisfying way to gain a sophisticated appreciation of the inner workings of Yiddishkeit is to study the great classics of Jewish philosophy and machshavah. The Rishonim asked all the key questions, and provided approaches that have weathered all the centuries that followed them. So much of what was written after is based upon their contribution. Their approaches, when properly understood, satisfy the thirst for understanding far better than their more recent competitors.
Unfortunately, many people are so overawed by the most important works, that studying them is not an option for them. They believe that to do an adequate job, you need to understand the philosophical underpinnings of the works of the Rishonim in particular, and they do not have the tools to proceed. Such people have a rare opportunity to study with someone who does, free of charge.
Rabbi Chaim Eisen of spent many of his early years in Flatbush before settling in Yerushalayim. He has the love of Torah and textual competence of a real Ben Torah, having spent many years learning and teaching in both “black” and “white” yeshivos (including R Tzvi Kushaleveky’s and the Mir); he has the rich depth and academic background of an accomplished academician. (My love for Maharal is no secret. Yet, when Rabbi Eisen published his magisterial treatment of Aggada and the Maharal in Hakira, I called him to ask him whether he published the piece just to make me look juvenile! It is the best piece I have ever seen on the history of explicating Aggada.) He knows R Sadya, R Yosef Albo, Kuzari, and the Moreh like few people I have ever met.
As part of his new Yeshivat Sharashim, he is offering an online, interactive, web-based video series on Kuzari beginning this Sunday. There is no charge, but registration is required to keep the class at a size that students can interact with the instructor in real time. (The time, by the way, for the hour long first class is 11AM, EDT.)
This is a wonderful opportunity that does not come up very often. We hope and trust that it will be followed by another in-depth series on the Rambam’s Moreh.
In the wake of President Obama’s sharing of his personal feeling that the millennia-old institution of marriage should be redefined in contemporary America, National Jewish Democratic Council chair Marc R. Stanley declared his admiration for the president’s demonstration of “the values of tikkun olam.”
A political group is entitled to its opinion, no less than a president is to his. But to imply that a religious value like “tikkun olam” – and by association, Judaism – is somehow implicated in a position like the one the president articulated, is outrageous, offensive and wrong.
We hereby state, clearly and without qualification, that the Torah forbids homosexual acts, and sanctions only the union of a man and a woman in matrimony.
The Orthodox Jewish constituency represented by Agudath Israel of America, as well as countless other Jews who respect the Jewish religious tradition, remain staunch in their opposition to redefining marriage.
First it was the BBC telling the truth about Israel’s humane efforts against terrorism, and the desires of Gazans to continue to fight the “occupation” of Jerusalem, Haifa and Tel Aviv.
For those who have been following the case of George Zimmerman, who claimed to have shot an African-American teenager in self-defense, was believed, and then was charged following protests and a media willing to charge him with racism (despite Zimmerman, who is Hispanic (and, despite the name, not Jewish) serving as a mentor to two African-American children), something similar happened last week. ABC News first joined the media’s conviction of Zimmerman in abstentia, scanning grainy security camera footage and hastily pronouncing that there were no signs of injury on the back of George Zimmerman’s head, casting doubt on his story. Last week, however, ABC not only released an exclusive photograph claiming to show the bloodied back of Zimmerman’s head, but also pointed out that the image, taken with a cell phone, included encapsulated information showing that it was taken near Zimmerman’s location 3 minutes after the shooting was heard on 911 tapes. In other words, his claim of self-defense appears quite likely to have been true all along.
But the clincher comes from HaAretz, which reported Friday on the release of the Shin Bet transcripts of the interrogation of terrorist mastermind and Arafat aide Marwan Barghouti. To the surprise of no sane, informed, philo-Semitic individual (which is to say, to the surprise of all of the Jewish left and the entire population of Europe), Arafat was behind the wave of terrorism that followed the failed Camp David talks. “Barghouti’s confessions indicate that PA Chairman Arafat issued a general directive to carry out terror attacks, but made sure not to get personally involved in any way that might incriminate him.”
What has happened to the media? Has it suddenly gone honest? If the media keeps this up, and continues to tell us the simple, unspun truth even when it doesn’t go the way the media prefers… Obama will have little chance, coverage of Charedim will be much more positive… who knows, Moshiach may come…
What’s wrong with this picture? Plenty. And not what some people think.
JTA ran an article about a couple that moved from the States, and found their niche of service. They provide Shabbos hospitality to soldiers who do not have homes that welcome them when they get a weekend off. Last year, they served some 3000 Shabbos meals.
Scott and Teresa Johnson, however, are not Jewish. They are evangelical Christians, and do not hide it. That makes their sacrifice even more significant. (I believe that it is more than likely that the journalist got it all wrong in making the assumption that evangelicals support Israel because they wish to see all Jews gathered there for conversion before the second coming. While there are evangelicals who believe that, they are not the majority, and not even close. The majority support Israel and the Jewish people because they take Hashem’s brachah to Avrohom (“I will bless those who bless you.”) very seriously.)
So while I am not discomfited by the actions or motivations of the Johnsons who deserve accolades rather than criticism, I can’t be comfortable with their providing a service we ought to be providing ourselves. Indeed, there are organizations in Israel devoted to the חייל בודד, the lone soldier. Did those who gravitate to the Johnsons fall between the cracks? Are those organizations not interested or not capable of providing a Shabbos table for those who want it? I tried to get some answers through contacts in Israel, but have not come up with them yet.
The gemara in Bava Basra 10B frowns upon accepting tzedakah from non-Jews. The practical application of that gemara is nuaned and complex (see Shut Tzitz Eliezer v.15 33:5-13, and Shut Mishneh Halachos v.5, teshuvos, #178). One of the ideas that emerge, however, is pretty straightforward: we don’t accept donations when they will be a chilul Hashem. This happens when others mock us for their having to provide what we should be offering our own brothers. Providing Shabbos meals to soldiers defending our country and having no place to go seems to me to be precisely the kind of service that anyone looking in would expect of our community. How could this not be a chilul Hashem?
Even harder hitting were these lines. We should not accept the report as accurate without corroboration. Yet it is disquieting that we cannot instantly reject it as impossible either. The fact that we can entertain its possibility is reason enough to mourn:
Oved Ben Yosef, 20, whose family originates from Yemen, ended up at Miflaht after his haredi Orthodox parents rejected him for joining the military. He hasn’t spoken with his parents in more than a year, but he says he’s found surrogates in the Johnsons. On weekends when he’s not on military duty, Ben Yosef stays in their guest room.
Since the BBC, like most British media outlets, isn’t highly regarded for balanced coverage of Israel, I felt it worth pointing out a notable exception. “Gaza-Israel clashes: The view from each side“, although nearly a month old, reflects a level of accuracy and fairness we’ve seen rarely, in a far longer time.
In typical BBC fashion, “the view from each side” includes not a word from anyone in Israel. But they do quote the residents of Gaza a little too accurately when the citizens, untrained in propaganda, wander away from the pre-packaged Palestinian narrative.
A four-storey house had been completely destroyed. Its roof had collapsed inwards; tables and chairs, bedclothes and children’s toys spilled out of its squashed floors like shopping from a torn plastic bag…
On first inspection it looked like one of Israel’s missiles must have gone astray, a case of collateral damage.
But on closer questioning the picture changes.
“I have already lost one son to the struggle for liberation,” the man told me. “I have two more, and I am willing to sacrifice them too.”
One of his sons is in the al-Qasam brigades, he says, the other in Islamic Jihad…
I asked another local how it was that so many people could have escaped relatively unscathed from a building that was so completely destroyed. “Sometimes the Israelis call up the person beforehand and warn them that they have 10 minutes to leave the house, then they strike.”
Whereas the Palestinians aim at Israeli population centers in order to kill as many civilians as possible, the Israelis warn residents even before depriving terrorists of their homes.
“What do you mean when you say you are struggling against the occupation?” I asked one Gazan. “After all Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005?”
“We mean the occupation of Jerusalem, and Jaffa and Haifa and all the other places that belong to us,” he said without hesitation.
As expressed by this typical Gaza resident, the idea that Palestinian terrorism will end with “self-determination” is a pipe dream, the pursuit of which has already cost thousands of lives. Palestinian terrorism will only end once the Arab residents of Gaza and the West Bank recognize that the destruction of Israel is an unattainable goal, and abandon it in favor of a better life. Either that, or they attain it. Forcing Israel into further concessions weakens the first possibility, and strengthens the second.
While most of us are busy looking for Chametz, others are looking for something very different and nefarious. Yakov Horowitz posted some sobering and sane advice for parents about the prevalence of child molestation around Pesach. One rov who sent this message on to his shul received three responses from members who said they had been abused o Pesach. His words of warning also include some stats on the number of molesters from the Orthodox community now doing time, and a list of resources on addressing the problem.
Last week, I gave two shiurim that may be of interest to those who get desperate enough. I’m making them available through this post.
The first was part of a series of shiurim with serious content for women, given before every Yom Tov, and graciously hosted in the Beverly Hills area. Thanks to Mara Kochba, who is responsible not only for rallying the troops, but for twisting my arm to give it. The shiur is a potpourri of material from various seforim, all keyed to the Haggadah. Running time is about an hour.
The second was my contribution to a panel on “The Mystery of the Afikoman.” Rabbi Ruvein Wolf of Maayon Yisroel puts small groups of presenters together several times a year to not only explore different topics, but treat the audience to a diversity of opinions and approaches. I chose the incredibly elegant comments of Rav Kook in Olas Rayah, and strung them together in what I hope was an organized presentation. The original is gorgeous beyond words for anyone who can manage it; I hope I preserved a sheminis she-b’sheminis of its beauty. Running time is about 15 minutes.
The chairman and vice-chairman of Israel’s Media Watch, in a Jerusalem Post Op-Ed, question the failure of Israel’s dominant media outlets to cover “happenings which could appeal to audiences coming from different cultural backgrounds.” They point out that none of the major TV stations (channels 1, 2 or 10), nor Israel HaYom the following morning, bothered to cover the funeral of HaRav Chaim Pinchas Sheinberg zt”l.
It’s not as if the funeral could have been missed. The website of the largest bus company, Egged, reported “disruptions of the bus service due to the funeral procession of 300,000 of his Hassidim.” Neither Rav Sheinberg nor his students were Chassidic, but that’s at least an understandable error, especially given the passing of the Vizhnitzer Rebbe just a week earlier (which was at least mentioned by most media outlets — but, they say, perhaps because “Netanyahu’s office as well as Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin communicated to the press their sorrow and condolences”).
When a haredi reader complained to Israel Hayom, Mr. Gonen Ginat apparently responded that “This is a spiteful, redundant and baseless complaint.” Of course, the fact that the complaint was “redundant” is precisely because it was neither spiteful nor baseless.
To the writers, the fact that Channel 1 TV covered the inclusion of an Orthodox Rabbi and his wife on Stylecaster’s list of “most stylish New Yorkers” is “a relative exception to the rule.” In this, I disagree. What made the couple worthy of coverage was their inclusion in a style magazine — which, to the media, is “close to them culturally and with which they easily identify,” the very criteria used by the writers to identify the media’s limited field of vision.
There is no question that Rav Sheinberg’s life was far more influential upon Israeli life than that of Whitney Houston, but you wouldn’t know that from the media — which is exactly the point. Like an ostrich in the sand, the media minimizes burgeoning charedi growth by ignoring its existence.
Judge Yosef Shapira accepted a settlement on Tuesday between American-Israeli authors Naomi Ragen and Sarah Shapiro, whereby Ragen was ordered to pay Shapiro 233,000 NIS (over $62,500) for copyright infringement, representing an unprecedented amount in a plagiarism case in Israel.
The agreement followed a verdict issued December 11 determining that Ragen, the defendant, committed plagiarism in her novel “Sotah,” and had stolen both text and ideas from Shapiro’s autobiographical memoir of her life as a young orthodox mother, “Growing With My Children.” The court ruled that in writing “Sotah,” the fictional account of a young woman living in Jerusalem’s Haredi community and accused of committing adultery, Ragen had committed “theft, negligence, and a violation of copyright.”
In her defense, Ragen claimed that she “accidentally” copied Shapiro’s work, a claim the court rejected as being “unthinkable, unlikely, and unbelievable.” Following the December verdict, the court recommended that the two sides settle upon an exact amount. In addition, all phrases and sentences which violated Shapiro’s copyright will have to be eliminated from new editions of “Sotah.” [UPDATED: previous version stated in error that the material will not have to be removed.]
Professor Amy Kaplan at the University of Pennsylvania explains to faculty how to inculcate hatred for Israel into the college curriculum — even if the course in question has nothing to do with politics or history. As she makes clear, it is very easy for a professor to not merely “expose young students to new ideas” but to influence as well. This is why students — and their parents — must choose carefully whom they wish to influence their thinking.
Audio courtesy of StandWithUs; video posted by ElderofZion.
These are trying times, to be sure. Without trying very hard, the Orthodox world finds itself united in the way it deals with its heavy hearts and foreboding thoughts. People are all doing the same thing – only differently.
What we are all doing is employing the Kol Yaakov. To be sure, we are doing it in many different ways, but across the Orthodox landscape, we are all turning to tefillah.
So many different concerns weigh heavily upon us: the heart-wrenching events in Toulouse, and images from the levayos; the unusually long list of Torah luminaries who are ill; the mounting danger of war with Iran. Various communities have prioritized them differently, but they have all recognized that we can come closer to the Borei Olam in times of stress, and when that happens, the Shechinah comes moves towards us with a caress of soothing love. The tefillah programs vary as well. The RCA has called for special tehillim and prayer on Shabbos; others have organized Yom Kippur Katan tefillos on Thursday. The common denominator is the call for us to open our hearts and lips in beseeching Divine compassion.
May HKBH take note of what unites Torah Jews internally, even in the face of all the differences in external trappings.
Rav Shlomo Amar, shlit”a, the Rishon LeTzion, penned a beautiful letter in response to the tragedy in Tolouse. He has a special neshamah. (You can enlarge the image by clicking on the letter.)
The murderous attack on the Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse, France this morning is a tragedy that rightly tears the hearts of Jews and people of good will everywhere. More than a tragedy, though, it is an expression of evil, of the Jew-hatred that masquerades as many things but in its essence remains wickedness alone.
Agudath Israel of America joins in the mourning for our four brothers murdered in cold blood today, a teacher and his two children, and an 8-year old child. And we pray for the wounded 17-year-old’s full and quick recovery.
We also call upon the French authorities to leave no stone unturned in the search for the perpetrators of this repulsive act. Evil left to fester will only spread.
