The unaffiliated Jewish woman attended three of the rabbi’s lectures in the 1950s, visibly intrigued by the ideas he put forth, about the historicity of the Jewish religious tradition. Then she abruptly stopped coming.

Another woman who had also attended the lecture series tracked her down and asked why she was no longer showing up. The first woman answered straightforwardly: “He was convincing me. If I continue to listen to this man, I will have to change my life.”

What a remarkably honest person. (I like to imagine that she came, in time, to pursue what she then fled.)

And what a remarkable man was the rabbi who delivered the lectures. He was Rabbi Yaakov Weinberg, of blessed memory, whose tenth yahrtzeit, or death-anniversary, will be marked on the fast day of Shiva Asar BiTammuz (July 9). He later became the Rosh Yeshiva, or Dean, of the Ner Israel Rabbinical College in Baltimore. He was my rebbe.

by Doron Beckerman

Clearly, the J-blogs have arrived. No event of any significance escapes their scrutiny. Public discourse is shaped, often even created, by those possessing a keyboard, internet access, and a way with words. Unpoliced and unrestricted, the information superhighway, shared by the cautious, the reckless, and the intoxicated, is not going away.

A crossroads is rapidly approaching. Perhaps, nay, likely, we are already there. And there are weighty decisions to be made. A wrong turn spells disaster.

To the right lies a path of passivity, where no questioning or criticism is tolerated, no mistakes acknowledged or allowed for, and frustration is kept in check for the sake of maintaining the status quo. One problem with this, is, of course, the hit counter. A more critical problem – it isn’t healthy. Input from the layman is critical to proper decision-making, and sometimes the best ideas come from them.

No, it’s not what you think. I am not referring to a healthy (and Biblically-mandated) fear of G-d and his Ineffable Name, but an aversion to mentioning G-d as a motivating force in our lives. Joel Alperson, a past national campaign chair for United Jewish Communities, wrote about this in a recent Op-Ed entitled “Don’t fear ‘G-d,’ ‘Torah’ and ‘Judaism’” published by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. He writes:

I’ve collected the mission statements of the largest 17 Jewish federations in North America, and not one mentions “G-d,” “Torah” or “Judaism.” Nor do the mission statements of the B’nai B’rith Youth Organization, Hillel, the National Council of Jewish Women, The Wexner Heritage Foundation, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, Hadassah and the Jewish National Fund. Of all the organizations I looked into, only United Jewish Communities mentions but one of the three words, Torah, in its mission statement.

Mr. Alperson’s theory is that these terms are avoided because they are “more particularistic. Tzedakah [Charity], tikkun olam [Repairing the World] and klal yisroel [the People of Israel] are considered universal and inclusive terms.” He bemoans this phenomenon, and considers this problem to be one with a uniquely Jewish angle. He believes that the reason these terms induce such discomfort is because communal organizations, aiming to serve the breadth of the entire Jewish community, are afraid of any mention of a term that might highlight our numerous and profound internal divisions.

He may be right. But at the same time, I am reminded of an article written over 20 years ago by Daniel Polisar* — today the director of the Shalem Center, and at that time a fellow student at Princeton University. He described an experience in a class in Philosophy and ethics, in which the students were asked to respond sequentially to a classic question of moral and ethical behavior: when confronted by an assailant who orders you to murder another, on threat of your own life, what are you supposed to do?

The deep global recession has forced many to reconsider the way they give their tzedakah. It is more than likely that some changes will stay with us even after the health of the world economy is restored, BE”H.
We can’t speak of a silver lining to storm clouds so ominous and dark that they have kept bread (literally!) off the tables of children.

Nonetheless, we must note with admiration that the Baltimore community has once again scooped the rest of the country, and come up with a protocol worth considering and copying.

The innovation is somewhat radical. Community rabbonim are urging that tzedakah be allocated according to the guidelines actually prescribed by halachah! Those guidelines state that local poor come before all others – including those of Eretz Yisrael.

(A topic for consideration some time should be why so many good and sensible ideas originate in Baltimore and only seem to succeed there.)

Rabbi David Mark of Temple Sholom in Pompano Beach, Florida, is anxious to fill a void. “There was a need out there among the public for something like this,” he said. “It hurt me so much to my very core that I could not help these people.”

Perhaps more to the point, though, Rabbi Mark was very anxious to help his Temple away from the old, stodgy, tradition-laden Conservative movement. The Temple “recently shed its ultra-conservative image” and now calls itself “progressive conservative.” I think there’s a confusion there between Conservative and conservative, because from a religious standpoint, it’s not the conservatives usually called “ultra-.”

And how better to prove how “progressive” they are by hosting the “first ever commitment ceremony in the county?” This refers, of course, to an alternate form of marriage for two people of the same gender. This was the “need out there” that Rabbi Mark found, that pained him so greatly while the Conservative Movement’s Committee of Jewish Law and Standards refused to give its blessing.

And now that that’s changed, he’s advertising. And advertising. And now it’s in the news: “Rabbi Searches in Vain for Kosher Gay Couple to Marry.” The Temple “wants to be the first of its kind in Broward County to hold commitment ceremonies for gay couples… But it has to find two people who want to take the plunge together.” And thus far it isn’t finding them.

Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, believed to be responsible for the murders and maiming of untold numbers of innocent African men, women and children, is now Jewish.

Well, at least in his own mind – and according to his wife Victoria, who also told the BBC that her husband still believes in the Christian savior.

Still, Mr. Taylor’s claim raises an interesting question, and at least one thoughtful reporter, the Forward’s Rebecca Dube, in a recent report, decided to ask it: What if a non-Jew with a criminal record genuinely wanted to become a Jew? Would he properly be considered for conversion? Could it be effected?

The answers – assuming the would-be convert is demonstrably sincere in his desire to join the Jewish people and accept Jewish observance (including renouncing crime) – are yes. By very definition, seeking conversion bespeaks a determination to change radically, and undergoing conversion creates precisely such a change. A convert, in the Talmud’s words, is “like a newborn baby,” detached from his or her previous existence.

by Dovid Landesman

I have an acquaintance in Los Angeles, a urologist who is also a well-respected talmid chacham. To establish his credentials let me say that he has completed three cycles as the maggid shiur in a local daf yomi. He told me recently that he received a call from a young man in Bnei Brak who was writing a sefer on hilchos k’rus shafchah and wanted to come to Los Angeles to consult on the medical aspects of the condition. The doctor agreed and when the mechaber arrived, they spent a week reviewing the material. One of the sources which they went through together was the Chazon Ish on Yoreh Deah.

My medical friend told me that he was absolutely astounded by the Chazon Ish’s mastery of anatomy as evidenced in his sefer and speculated what was the source of the Chazon Ish’s knowledge. Clearly he did not have a copy of Gray‘s Anatomy under his pillow. I raised the question to another friend, one of the local rabbonim, who showed me a teshuvah from Rav Wozner shlitah maintaining that the Chazon Ish had ruach kodesh. One of my more skeptical friends conjectures that since the Chazon Ish grew up in close proximity to the medical library of the university in Vilna, it is not unlikely that he may have spent some time in the reading rooms learning anatomy. Whatever the case, and it doesn‘t really matter which is the truth, many people will agree that the Chazon Ish was one of the outstanding minds of the past century.
As a means of reinforcing this let me relate another story. I once took a class of Russian students for a day trip to Yerushalayim. I arranged a meeting with Professor Willy Low z’l, an Israel Prize recipient in Science, chairman of the Department of Physics at Hebrew University, and founder and director of the Institute of Science and Halachah as well as the Jerusalem College of Technology, better known as Machon Lev. I introduced him to my students by pointing out that Professor Lev had studied with Einstein at Princeton as well as with the Chazon Ish. Professor Lev spoke to the boys about Torah and science and when he finished, asked them if they had any questions. One boy raised his hand and asked: “In your opinion, who was more brilliant, Einstein or the Chazon Ish?”

Professor Lev reflected for a moment and then responded. “I would say that in terms of asking questions they were equal. But in terms of providing answers, the Chazon Ish was head and shoulders above Einstein. The Chazon Ish, by virtue of his Torah knowledge, had a more profound ability to discern truth.”

What happens when you mix the flair of a Southern Baptist preacher with a bit of Torah enlightenment?

Watch.

[Thanks to Dr. Shmuel Lebovics, Los Angeles]

My daily commute often puts me in the presence of one or another ear bud-wearing young person whose music device’s volume is turned up sufficiently high to be audible (and annoying) to others many feet away. The experience makes me think about the Middle East. No, really.

The tinny noise, surely astoundingly loud to the eardrums mere millimeters away, makes me envision a world twenty years hence in which millions of middle-aged are unable to hear. And unlike the congenitally deaf, the newly hard-of-hearing will find it hard to manage. I wonder about the toll a chronically cranky chunk of the populace might take on society.

And that is what brings me to wonder about a different toll, on Palestinians.

President Obama received much criticism from some Jewish circles for elements of his Cairo speech earlier this month. His every turn of phrase, his juxtaposition of topics, what he said and what he didn’t say – all were subjected to great scrutiny, and found wanting by some.

Where do we set the bar of observance for would-be converts? The row over standards waxes and wanes, but never quite disappears. A recent article in Tradition did not make the waves it should have. In an understated manner, it placed – not threw down – a gauntlet in a simmering conflict between two approaches to halacha that just do not talk to each other. I wish the author (my friend, frequent disputant, and oftentimes writing collaborator, Rabbi Michael Broyde) had finished the job he ably began. Without consulting him, I will herewith attempt to do just that.

Rabbi Broyde (together with Shmuel Kadosh) took sharp aim at a work that has proved nettlesome to many who engage in serious halacha, although most of them have never heard of it. When Rabbi Avraham Sherman, a member of Israel’s Supreme Rabbinic Court, invalidated some of Rabbi Chaim Druckman’s converts, he touched off a firestorm of criticism that has not abated to this day. At the eye of the storm was an assumption that if it could be determined by the later behavior of a convert that he or she had never fully accepted the yoke of mitzvos, then the conversion was of no legal validity ab initio. Many not particularly learned articles appeared, decrying this “innovation” in halachah behind Rabbi Sherman’s psak – part of a plot by the mullahs of Bnei Brak to beat the long-suffering masses of the general Orthodox community with cudgels of chumros. [Note: this is not an endorsement of Rabbi Sherman’s psak. He doesn’t need my approval – I do not approach his level of competence – but if asked, I would have a hard time giving it.] Without passing judgment on the specific application of halachic principle in Rabbi Sherman’s cases, it remains arguably true that a conversion, like other important changes in legal status including marriage and divorce, can be challenged and retroactively invalidated. There is nothing novel in this at all.

Many of the articles, written by people who identify with Orthodoxy and those who do not, make liberal use of Transforming Identity: The Ritual Transition From Gentile to Jew, by Avi Sagi and Zvi Zohar, two professors at Bar-Ilan. It is not a short work, and people – particularly those who are not at home with primary halachic texts – cite it as the last word, the exhaustive and definitive study of legitimate and exaggerated requirements for conversion.

Rabbi Broyde pulls no punches in his review in laying bare the serious methodological errors and simple misreadings that invalidate the work. The Conclusion section puts it simply and directly. “Its basic argument…is without precedent and includes glaring misunderstandings of the Jewish legal system.” Having read a few chapters of their work (I went straight for the halachic material), I would have been even less generous.

An e-mail arrived today from the president of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency appealing for money to enable the agency to stay afloat. I must admit that as a free subscriber to JTA’s daily news bulletin, I felt a twinge of guilt upon reading the letter’s postscript stating that while it is “JTA’s mission to offer content for free, . . . it is not free to produce. We need everyone who relies on JTA to pitch in. . . . ” And so, I’ve decided to contribute in my own way, by posting at least once each week regarding some aspect of the JTA’s news coverage.

I trust my observations will pay great dividends to the agency in enabling it to fulfill its stated role as the “Global News Service of the Jewish People,” and will, ultimately be worth far more to its staff than the paltry monetary sum I’d otherwise be contributing. I take as my starting premise that as a self-described “Global News Service of the Jewish People,” the JTA is committed to a rigorously objective and non-partisan approach to its reporting, in both religious and political terms. So, here goes:

A June 15 news item headlined “Poll: American voters’ support of Israel drops” describes a new survey by The Israel Project which found that only 49% of American voters call themselves supporters of Israel, down from 69% last September. What the report fails to mention is that there was a huge divide in this regard based on political affiliation. Republicans favored Israel over the Palestinians by 65% to 3%, followed by independents who favored Israel 50% to 9%, and Democrats, at 38% to 9%.

On the question of whether they believe Israel’s government is committed to peace, 56% of Republicans responded in the affirmative (which was significantly down from 74% in March 2008), while a 42%-41% plurality of Democrats responded that the current government is not committed to peace.

There is no gainsaying the beauty and appropriateness of Rabbi Chaim Dovid Zweibel’s letter to the son of Stephen Tyrone Johns. It demonstrates both the chochmah and lev of talmidei chachamim.

There is also no gainsaying that the perception of the attack by much of the rest of the world is different than the way many of our readers see it. We regard it as the next of a seemingly infinite series of anti-Semitic attacks. We have been used to them since Sinai, and expect them till Moshiach. Outside our community, however, the attack took on iconic value. Because the Holocaust looms so large in the way non-Jews – friends and enemies, each in their own way – look at Jews, an attack on the US Holocaust Museum was seen by them as a dagger in the heart of all Jewry. (It is the non-Jewish analogue to the way we saw the attack on Mercaz Harav, and the massacre of its kedoshim.)

Because of this, the eyes of the world will be upon our response. Will Jews reach out and support those who pay a terrible price for them, just as they are renowned for always taking care of their own?

One appropriate way to do so is to make sure that the family of Stephen Tyrone Johns is cared for as best as possible. The US Holocaust Museum has set up a fund for the family. You might consider going there and demonstrating that the Jewish reputation for caring for those who cared for them is well deserved. This is one stereotype that we might want to preserve, not destroy.

by Brian Schrauger

The war that Israel keeps losing is the war of world opinion, the war for individual hearts and minds. Consider recent stumbles.

Israel’s military campaign in Gaza should have been named “8,000 is enough!” This would have communicated a determination to stop the barrage of missiles from Hamas, using surgical precision to destroy its arsenal, but destroying all of it, not just a part. Enough was enough: 8,000 missiles launched on the nation’s civilian population would no longer be tolerated.

Unfortunately the operation was dubbed, “Cast Lead.” The resulting image in the English-speaking world was not helpful. Lead is a soft metal associated with poison. The implication, then, was an unprofessional plan with ambivalent determination, biased motives and toxic methods.

In the wake of the shooting attack at Washington’s Holocaust Museum last week, many organizations issued public statements. Most of those were similar to these words from President Obama: “This outrageous act reminds us that we must remain vigilant against anti-Semitism and prejudice in all its forms.”

Agudath Israel, the Jewish communal organization representing the interests of traditionally Orthodox Jews, issued a statement as well. Its statement, though, was different — it consisted solely of an open letter to the young son of the security guard who gave his life defending the visitors to that Museum.

This letter’s personal touch reminds us all that this was not only an outrage against the national consciousness, but an acutely personal tragedy as well.

To the Young Son of Stephen Tyrone Johns:

Upon his first visit to one of the liberated death camps, Allied Supreme Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “There are those who ask what are we fighting for. Let them come here and see what we are fighting against.” Eisenhower’s remark contains an important insight: Sometimes it is more essential that one define the nature of evil than that one define what is good. About the latter, there will inevitably be many opinions. But they need not prevent a consensus from coalescing around the definition of evil.

I was reminded of that point last week as I watched The Third Jihad, the third in a trilogy of documentaries on the threat of radical Islam produced by Raphael Shore and Wayne Kopping. Towards the end of the documentary one of the experts interviewed, former CIA intelligence officer Clare Lopez declared, “The real war is between the values of freedom and barbarism. If we are not willing to recognize the battle as one for our civilization, we might as well give up right now.”

The last time the West faced such a civilizational threat, many refused to recognize the nature of the conflict. In Troublesome Young Men, Lynne Olsen offers a gripping account of the group of youthful Conservative backbenchers, who eventually ousted British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain from power and brought in Winston Churchill in his place, nearly a year after the outbreak of World War II.

England entered that war totally unprepared, and lagging far behind Germany in every respect, apart from its navy. Even after Britain proclaimed war, following the Nazi invasion of Poland, Chamberlain pursued it half-heartedly and dreamed of an imminent peace. Britain and France bombed only German military targets most narrowly defined. Meanwhile Luftwaffe pilots in Poland followed orders to “close [their] hearts to pity,” happily machine-gunning women and girls picking potatoes, bombing churches and hospitals, and strafing toddlers being herded to safety.

While I contemplated writing this article before hearing from Rabbi Oberstein that he wanted to send his remarks as well, I believe that our two perspectives together provide yet more fodder for dialogue. Here, then, is where I stand on President Obama and Israel, in the wake of a visit to the Middle East that has the Israelis frowning, and its Arab enemies crowing.

It’s not always enjoyable to be proven right. Sometimes you’d much rather be wrong. My early assessment of President Obama’s attitudes towards Israel — which was joined, of course, by many other pro-Israel writers — is a case in point.

In advance of the election, when Obama called for “an even-handed approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,” I was sharply criticized for terming that “an inability to discern between good and evil.” Similarly, when I questioned why the President-elect refused to support Israel during the recent Gaza conflict — unlike so many of his colleagues in the Senate — I was accused of a “desire to assume the worst about Obama.” When Rabbi Avi Shafran posted words of hope about Obama, that same commenter asserted that “those who once vilified our incoming president are now scurrying to demonstrate their moderation and seek his favor.”

It wasn’t our moderation that was the issue, but Obama’s. And now we fast-forward to the present day, as the President charts out an anti-Israel course without precedent in the last 50 years of US-Israel relations. One is reminded of the Eisenhower administration, which refused to sell weaponry to Israel while simultaneously demanding that Israeli Naval vessels leave the Gulf of Aqaba — leaving Eilat defenseless from a naval assault.

by Rabbi Elchonon Oberstein

Last year I wrote about Obama on Cross-Currents . I recently received an email from a friend, who wants me to publicly repudiate everything I wrote and admit that I was wrong. I am not as scared as some that Obama is selling Israel down the river. I do think he is pressuring Israel more strongly than Bush Jr. ,but so did other Presidents and Israel is still around. I share this with the lively experts of Cross- Currents. On matters such as these, we truly live up to the phrase in the Hagada “Kulanu chachamim,Kulanu nevonim…” (We are all wise, we are all insightful) What do you think?

Another day, another indication that your Messiah’s “strong support” of Israel isn’t quite what you were hoping for. To be quite honest, I find your silence on this matter quite disturbing and wholly inappropriate. You predicted last year that Obama would be a strong supporter of Israel. You had nothing, absolutely nothing to base it on and no evidence to back it up; now that the opposite seems clearer and clearer every day, all you can say is, “The jury is still out”.

It’s not right, it’s not intellectually honest and I’m sorry to say, it’s a little arrogant. A heartfelt apology is in order.

One Sunday more than a decade ago, I lay in a curtained-off cubicle adjacent to a hospital’s emergency room, my chest bared and awaiting the sort of wired paddles that make still, supine bodies on medical dramas jump like chopped onions in a hot, oiled frying pan.

The procedure I was about to undergo, though, was relatively routine and quite safe; it had been scheduled weeks earlier in response to my heart’s march for several years to the beat of a different drummer. One means of discouraging such nonconformance is to teach the offending muscles a good, swift lesson with a well-placed jolt of electricity. Same principle as a cattle prod.

No private room had been available at the hospital for so minor a chastisement as a cardioversion (or “conversion” in medical parlance; I warned the men of the frocks that they stood little chance of successfully “converting an Orthodox rabbi,” but from the rolled eyes I realized I hadn’t been the first bearded, beyarmulked patient to make the comment). Thus my decidedly unprivate, if off-the beaten-path, digs.

As I lay there, head propped on a pillow, awaiting the arrival of the anesthesiologist and the executioner, I watched a parade of patients being chaperoned from the emergency room through the hub of activity just beyond the half-parted curtain. A bloodied head here, a broken limb there, a macabre march, the yield of a sleepy city and its mistakes (or worse) on the sober morning after a Saturday night.

by Rabbi Dovid Landesman

I hate to always be the harbinger of discomforting tidings, but the older I get, the more pessimistic I become. Instead of being proud of the unprecedented growth of the olam ha-Torah, I find myself increasingly critical of its shortcomings and that is enormously disconcerting.

I can already hear those who will complain that my words should not be publicized because they represent rechilus about an entire community, an enormous sin. I can only respond to them that I am confident in this case that my words are meant completely l’toles and I will be as careful as possible to hide the identities of those involved.

Others may feel that I am blowing the problem way out of proportion, that it concerns only a insignificant minority of the subject population. To them I reply that none of has real statistics. Moreover, if what I say is only true of one small group of yeshiva students, it is still too much and must be dealt with.

by Rabbi Doron Beckerman

In a previous post, I alluded to the fact that the current implementation of Kollel has “significant drawbacks”. Not being the focus of that essay, it seems that that that statement was construed by some as a mere afterthought to a critique of broad ideological opposition to Kollel.

That was not my intent. As I clarified in the comment section, my criticism was aimed toward those who use the Rambam as a springboard for principled antagonism toward Kollel per se, which, in my opinion, is both factually incorrect and should be a catalyst for introspection. I fully recognize, though, that there are flaws. In our world of limited resources and widespread Kollel, there is a need for some sort of accountability, for a number of reasons.

Even if we were to turn a blind eye to extrinsic factors, there is a glaring deficiency in the present state of affairs – the detrimental effect of the lowering of standards within the Beis Medrash itself

Obvious, you say.

Perhaps to us. But these are the words of Justice Antonin Scalia, in a dissent from the Court ruling on the legal need for a judge to recuse himself from a case involving a major donor to his election effort:

A Talmudic maxim instructs with respect to the Scripture: “Turn it over, and turn it over, for all is therein.” The Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Aboth, Ch. V, Mishnah 22 (I. Epstein ed. 1935). Divinely inspired text may contain the answers to all earthly questions, but the Due Process Clause most assuredly does not. The Court today continues its quixotic quest to right all wrongs and repair all imperfections through the Constitution. Alas, the quest cannot succeed—which is why some wrongs and imperfections have been called nonjusticiable. In the best of all possible worlds, should judges sometimes recuse even where the clear commands of our prior due process law do not require it? Undoubtedly. The relevant question, however, is whether we do more good than harm by seeking to correct this imperfection through expansion of our constitutional mandate in a manner ungoverned by any discernable rule. The answer is obvious

[Thanks to Dr. Irving Lebovics, Los Angeles]

Sometimes one hears a story that does not, at first, seem so remarkable, but the more one reflects upon it, the more lessons one discovers.

A rosh yeshiva recently told me about an avreich who had come to discuss a problem with him. The avreich, an exemplary ba’al middos, described a chavrusah (study partner) who not only argued with everything he said, but did so in an extremely aggressive fashion, as if determined to destroy him.

On the one hand, the avreich did not want to lose the chavrusah, whom he said was the best he had ever had. On the other, the chavrusah’s aggressive stance was causing him a severe case of nerves.

It looked like a bumblebee but something was odd. It seemed too shiny and too black, too large-limbed and lumbering. Maybe, I thought, it was just an aged member of the species.

I watched as it crawled slowly across a wooden beam that I had mounted last summer above the metal railing of the deck outside our dining room. Since our home’s main floor is its second one, there was a halachic need – as per the Biblical law of “ma’akeh,” or “roof enclosure” (Deuteronomy 22:8) – to extend the deck’s waist-high railing upward. Hence the home-made wooden extension the bee had discovered.

I have always enjoyed the company of bees. As a child I would watch them, capture them, observe their behavior and occasionally endure their stings. Even to this day, in the sukkah, as others recoil at the sight of yellow-jackets, I will happily hold out my hand for the insects to crawl on, and escort them outside. Bumblebees, though, with their amazing flight maneuvers, have always been a personal favorite. And this one was strange.

What he did was even stranger, crawling to the underside of the wood and just parking himself there, upside down. Investigating, I saw that he had found, and apparently found to his liking, a perfectly round hole, about a half-inch in diameter. Compounding the strangeness, I didn’t remember ever noticing the hole.

Few ideas exercise such superficial appeal as the belief that the major threat to the Jewish people today is our small and ever declining numbers. And few ideas are ultimately more counterproductive and potentially dangerous.

Michael Freund’s “Size Counts” (April 21) is the latest example of what is by now a familiar genre in these pages. The bulk of the article consists of depressing statistics about the Jewish people’s declining numbers – both in absolute terms and as a percentage of the world’s population. On the eve of World War II, for instance, Jews constituted eight of every thousand people in the world; today the figure is two per every thousand.

In part that decline is a consequence of the Holocaust, without which, Hebrew University demographer Sergio Della Pergola estimates, the number of Jews today would be approximately two-and-a-half times its current number. But only partly. In absolute terms, the Jewish population has continued to decline since the Holocaust.

What Freund fails to do, however, is to explain why numbers per se matter. He asserts that “to live up to our national mission as Jews, we need a much larger and more diverse ‘team’ at our disposal.” Yet he never defines that mission, or explains what he means by a more diverse team, or in what way greater numbers would help us fulfill that mission. At most, he invites us to contemplate the “cultural and spiritual riches” that would have been produced but for the Holocaust. But those cultural and spiritual riches will not be replaced by tracking down every obscure tribe in the world that has an oral tradition that they are one of the Ten Lost Tribes, which is Freund’s own pet hobby-horse; doubling our numbers in that fashion will not double our number of Nobel Prize winners.

Uri Benenfeld was called to the Torah for the first time this past Shabbos. On the face of it, that does not sound so remarkable; no doubt many Jewish boys had their first aliyah on Shabbos.

The difference, however, is that Uri cannot move any part of his body. He lives wracked with pain. But Uri can speak. And he can do mitzvos. For years, his father Moshe has been taking him in a wheelchair and special ambulance to the Satmar Bikur Cholim so that he can offer chizuk (encouragement) to the sick.

Before his bar mitzvah, he told his parents that he wanted to use his bar mitzvah money to sponsor the meals at Masbiah Soup Kitchen in Boro Park on the day of his bar mitzvah. So the day before he visited Masbia to personally oversee the preparation of the meals.

At the end of his visit, Uri told the manager of the restaurant, “Thank you very much for letting me come here and do mitzvos. I think that I did at least three mitzvos today. Probably some of the people who come here to eat are sick. So there is an aspect of bikur cholim (visitation of the sick). And for sure, the soup kitchen qualifies as hachnassas orchim (feeding and housing guests). And then, there is the mitzvah of tzedakah itself.”