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By Yitzchok Adlerstein, on August 27th, 2010 California voters face an unusual choice in the coming gubernatorial election. Interestingly, a recent Daf holds the key to the way frum voters are likely to go.
Elections are often a choice between tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum. (Too often, unfortunately, that should be spelled tweedle-dumb.) The two candidates in this election could not be more different, and each candidate’s claim to excellence in one area is unimpeachable.
Former Gov. Jerry Brown (D) is super-bright, a philosopher, and a deep thinker. He is reputed to outthink almost all he comes in contact with, often leaving them wondering what he is talking about. He had a frum roommate at Yale, and lots of ties to the Jewish friends.
Meg Whitman (R ) is one of the most successful managers in the US business world. She turned Ebay into the giant that it is and continues to be. She claims no special prior knowledge about many important areas, but that means she has no preconceptions or entanglements, and she knows how to learn. She is a visionary, and she gets things done. She is throwing enough of her own money into the campaign that she will be beholden to no one.
For those who do not vote strictly along party lines, the election offers real contrast, and much to think about, especially in a year in which the California economy is in shambles.
We all know that there is no “Jewish vote,” but several Jewish votes. Any candidate has to deal with Jews who were born with a Democratic spoon in their mouths (and will never, ever vote differently) and Jews who claim they have gagged on that spoon and will only vote Republican. Then there is everyone in the middle.
Arie Lipnick, who attended MTA for high school, and was formerly associated with NY’s Simcha Felder and other Jewish politicos, is managing Jewish outreach for Whitman. He came by the other day, looking for some insider tips regarding the frum community, one of the many he will have to address. While the nature of my day job does not allow for endorsing candidates, my colleagues will meet with all candidates, and offer any guidance and advice to all who ask.
Here is where the Daf came in. Avodah Zarah 10A presents a series of vignettes regarding the friendship between Rabbenu HaKadosh and (Marcus Aurelius?) Antonius. In one of them, the latter complains that the Senate has him hamstrung. He can only hope to have a single request acted upon favorably. Rebbi tells him to have someone sit atop a second person’s shoulders, and release a dove from his hand. Antonius (Antoninus in the Gemara) understood this to mean that he should ask the Senate to appoint his son as Emperor, with authority over himself (hence sitting on his shoulders – see Rashi) and the Senate. The son will be free to release the dove (freeing the city of Tveria from taxation) without being blocked by the Senate.
In other words, Antonius found himself with limited traction in the halls of government power; Rebbi urged him to work for a change in administration.
Without citing the Daf, I asked Ari why his job – at least insofar as the frum community – didn’t bore him to tears. My own perception, as someone who lives in the community, is that Republican candidates will secure the frum vote on the basis of the deep disappointment, and mistrust of the present Administration in Washington. (A good friend of mine, a lifelong liberal Democrat, claims that Barack Obama is the greatest President he has ever known. No one else, he says, could ever have convinced him to vote Republican!) The chief election goal of the people I meet in the ‘hood is to send a powerful message in the midterm election that will insure that Obama is a one-term President. Above all, they are looking for an administration change. (Many call it a regime change.) Republican contender Whitman, it would seem to me, has the frum vote sewn up.
Ari wasn’t satisfied with this. He wants people to vote for his candidate, not against Obama. He wanted to convince me that Meg Whitman understood the case for Israel in a different way than others. While the de rigueur calls for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel continue apace in pro-Palestinian circles, Whitman, he said, will find divestment unthinkable. To the contrary, the former CEO of Ebay understands from experience the value for California in enlarging economic investment in Israel. Others may have some general regard for Israel; his candidate understands the bottom line. (My counter, in part, was that given the pressures from conflicting groups, it was important that people understand not just the bottom line, but that they arm themselves against the repeated lies about Israel by understanding the justice of her case, historically and politically.)
To illustrate why California, plagued by air quality issues, must continue to have a stake in Israel for its own good, he told a fascinating story of Israeli R&D. While I regularly take a peek at what new gifts Israel brings to the world on Israel21c , I found this story particularly appealing as a Californian.
One of the key problems faced by the West is dependence upon Arab oil. Every major reduction in our importation of energy makes the Arab world more irrelevant. Transportation is a big part of the picture, which is why so many have tried to design and market electric vehicles.
One of the major issues with those vehicles is range. Battery-operated vehicles can seldom go more than about a hundred miles. Enter Israel, where you seldom have occasion to go more than a hundred miles! Israel is the perfect test market for new electric car designs.
Of course, we can’t shrink the rest of the world. Cars elsewhere will need to combine recharging while parked with some alternative on the go. Here is where Israeli ingenuity comes in. Better Place, an Israeli company headquartered in California and working in partnership with Nissan, is designing a battery that can be swapped at service stations in less time than a fill-up. This is no simple feat. Batteries are heavy, and must be secured in cars in a manner that keeps them immobile despite heavy jostling on the road. Usually, the more securely you tighten something in place, the longer it will take to undo it.
Where do you find the design solution? Israeli bombers. They carry 500 pound bombs, which are tightly secured for the ride. At destination, they have to be released quickly. Israel developed special hooks which keep the bombs in place, and yet are easily opened. Modifying those hooks provided the solution for the car battery. Yeshaya meant something far more profound when he spoke of turning swords into plowshares, but it is an interesting start on turning military hardware into civilian solutions.
The bottom line is that Israel is on the verge of implementing an electric car system that can then be further tweaked and developed to meet the needs of other countries. Keeping Israel on the cutting edge of creativity is part of HKBH’s hashgacha at work, keeping alive some respect and friendship for Israel in a world of alarmingly explosive anti-Semitism. Of the many tools He uses within the world of teva, it is one that we should be able to recognize.
(The Arabs realize this as well. In a well-planned countermove, a consortium of Arab designers unveiled their version of a personal transportation module that can travel similar distances, is fueled entirely by replenishable sources, and whose exhaust is biodegradable.
This module can seat one or two passengers, depending on the number of humps.)
The California election will be one of the more interesting ones to follow. Whatever the outcome, frum Jews, open to and expecting subtle displays of Divine hashgacha, will see nuances in a campaign that others will not.
By Avi Shafran, on August 27th, 2010 Thoughts of consequence can sometimes arise from the most mundane experiences, even a headache.
Opening the medicine cabinet one day, I was struck by a sticker on a prescription container.
“Not for use by pregnant women,” it read.
“And why not?” part of my aching head wondered.
Because, another part answered, a fetus is so much more sensitive to the effects of chemicals than a more developed person. Partly, of course, because of its very tininess, but more importantly because it is an explosively developing thing. While a single cell is growing to a many-billions-of-unbelievably-variegated-cells organism in a matter of mere months it is easily and greatly affected by even subtle stimuli.
Which thought led, slowly but inexorably, to others, about the creation of the world – the subject, soon, of the weekly Torah portion – and about the beginning of a new Jewish year.
“The Butterfly Effect” is the whimsical name science writers give to the concept of “sensitive dependence on initial conditions” – the idea that beginnings are unusually important. A diversion of a single degree of arc where the arrow leaves the bow – or an error of a single digit at the beginning of a long calculation – can yield a difference of miles, or millions, in the end. For all we know, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings halfway around the world yesterday might have set into motion a hurricane in the Atlantic today.
The most striking butterfly effects take place during formative stages, when much is transpiring with particular rapidity. Thus, the label on the medication; the gestation of a fetus, that single cell’s incredible journey toward personhood, is strikingly responsive to so much of what its mother does, eats and drinks. The developing child is exquisitely sensitive to even the most otherwise innocent chemicals because beginnings are formative, hence crucial, times.
Leaving the realm of the microcosm, our world itself also had a gestation period, six days’ worth. Interestingly, just as the initial developmental stage of a child takes place beyond our observation, so did that of the world itself. The event and processes of those days are entirely hidden from us, the Torah supplying only the most inscrutable generalities about what actually took place then. Thus, the Talmudic rabbis applied the verse “the honor of G-d is the concealment of the thing” (Proverbs, 25:2) to the days of creation. Honest scientists admit the same. E.A. Milne, a celebrated British astronomer, wrote “In the divine act of creation, G-d is unobserved and unwitnessed.”
Despite our inability, however, to truly know anything about the happenings of the creation week, to think of those days as a gestational time is enlightening. It may even help explain the apparent discrepancy between what we know from the Torah is the true age of the earth and what the geological and paleontological evidence seem to say.
Consider: What would happen if the age of an adult human since his conception were being inferred by a scientist from Alpha Centauri, using only knowledge he has of the human’s present rate of growth and development? In other words, if our alien professor knew only that the individual standing before it developed from a single cell, and saw only the relatively plodding rate of growth currently evident in his subject, he would have no choice but to conclude that the 30-year-old human was, in truth, fantastically old. What the Alpha Centurion is missing, of course, is an awareness of the specialized nature of the gestational stage of life, the powerful, pregnant period before birth, with its rapid, astounding and unparalleled rate of development.
If we recognize that a similar gestational stage existed for the universe as a whole at its creation – and the Torah tells us to do precisely that – then it is only reasonable to expect that formative stage to evidence a similarly accelerated rate of development, with the results on the first Sabbath seeming in every detectable way to reflect millions of years of development, eons that occurred entirely within the six days of the world’s explosive, embryonic growth.
Rosh Hashana is called “the birthday of the world.” But the Hebrew word there translated as “birth” – haras – really means the process of conception/gestation. And so, annually, at the start of the Jewish year, it seems in some way we relive the gestational days of creation. But more: those days are formative ones, the development period for the year that is to follow. Beginning with the “conception-day” of Rosh Hashana itself, and continuing to Yom Kippur, the period of the early new Jewish year is to each year what the creation-week was to the world of our experience: a formative stage.
All of which may well lend some insight into a puzzling Jewish religious law.
We are instructed by halacha to conduct ourselves in a particularly exemplary manner at the start of a new Jewish year. We are cautioned to avoid anger on Rosh Hashana itself. And for each year’s first ten days, we are encouraged to avoid eating even technically kosher foods that present other, less serious, problems (like kosher bread baked by a non-Jewish manufacturer), and to generally conduct ourselves, especially interpersonally, in a more careful manner than during the rest of the year.
It is a strange law. What is the point of pretending to a higher level of observance or refinement of personality when one may have no intention at all of maintaining those things beyond the week?
Might it be, though, that things not greatly significant under normal circumstances suddenly take on pointed importance during the year’s first week, because those days have their analogue in the concept of gestation?
Might those days, in other words, be particularly sensitive to minor influences because they are the days from which the coming year will develop?
Observance and good conduct are always in season, but our tradition teaches us that they have particular power during Rosh Hashana and the “Ten Days of Repentance” – that we should regard these days with the very same vigilance and care an expectant mother has for the rapidly developing, exquisitely sensitive being within her.
Let us seize the days and cherish them; they are conceptual butterfly-wings, the first unfoldings of a new Jewish year.
© 2010 AM ECHAD RESOURCES
[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]
All Am Echad Resources essays are offered without charge for personal use,
sharing and publication, provided the above copyright notice is appended.
The above essay was distributed in 2004, and is a short version of
a longer treatment of Rosh Hashana that first appeared in The Jewish Observer
Communications and subscriptions: shafran@agudathisrael.org
By Yitzchok Adlerstein, on August 22nd, 2010 The one hundred and thirty children and young adults with whom I spent a few days share two things. They are all Jewish, and they all contend daily with serious and debilitating illness. Many of them have done so all of their lives. You would think that this might provide the ultimate mussar ride for Elul, an in-your-face confrontation with your own mortality, and the need to be grateful to HKBH for life itself and the parts of it we take for granted.
You might think so, but you would be wrong. It’s not the ultimate ride at all. It may be the teeter-totter compared to the Montezuma’s Revenge of lessons you can garner from these kids.
In the three years that he was supposed to be sitting in classrooms at Cardozo Law School, my son Ari – together with some valiant and dedicated partners – built up Kids of Courage, by offering gradually larger and more exciting programs for young people who face challenges you don’t want to know about. They include the Jewish genetic diseases, as well as the alphabet soup of development gone awry – CP, MD, CR, etc. And of course, various cancers. Some conditions are so rare, they have no names and no medical literature.
Armies are never better than their supply lines. When Kids of Courage moves, two lines move out with them, offering complex medical as well as logistical support. The sight of over a hundred kids, many in wheelchairs hooked up to elaborate apparatus, but all smothered with attention and love by their volunteer counselors (everyone – with the sole exception of a sole part-time secretary – in Kids of Courage is a volunteer) overwhelms the adults who meet up with them.
An entire Continental jet couldn’t contain them all on the flight from Newark to Los Angeles. Illusionist David Blaine turned up for the ride, and entertained en route. Nothing thereafter could contain their enthusiasm, or limit the Kiddush Hashem they made. Katie Couric sent a video crew, and CBS will be doing a segment on them. MLB will be running clips about them for two weeks, taken from their appearance at an Angels game. Returning from that game, the kids were taken, unannounced, to the block of Mann’s Chinese, where twelve Lamborghinis pulled in behind the buses, and their owners spent three hours hurtling them down Hollywood Boulevard. Tourists, expecting to be entertained by the over-the-top atmosphere of the Hollywood Walk of Fame, were instead enthralled by the sight of three hundred young people, led by identifiably frum counselors, singing and gyrating with a joy that has nothing to do with what is usually celebrated in LaLaLand. They stopped to watch and to photograph, as did the tourist buses. So did a media pool, resulting in clips of the event appearing on television stations across the country. The Lamborghini owners were so impressed that when their tour of duty ended, they followed the busses to a Beverly Hills home for a barbeque, where Laker legend AC Green presented “Oscars” to the kids, making each one feel like a superstar. (Green was a good choice, and a supermensch. Deeply religious, he spurned the womanizing foisted upon him by his incredulous teammates, arguing that he would wait for marriage.)
This was one day, out of nine. Kids of Courage took them to Disneyland, Knotts, Universal, a water park, Venice Beach, and gave them a beautiful Shabbos with Shloime Daskal.
Wherever they went, they radiated enthusiasm, forcing it inexorably on those who witnessed it.
Those witnesses could easily have missed the real point. They didn’t see the transition. They couldn’t see that some of the kids were apprehensive on Day One, withdrawn, timid, quiet, justifiably locked into their own problems and concerns as surely as their malfunctioning bodies held them captive. They couldn’t see that a day or two or three later, the same kids came alive with spirit and confidence. Disneyland didn’t do that. Carefully thought-through chesed, offered lovingly by counselors and staff after much deliberation and planning, did that, affording them an opportunity to be as fully human as anyone else out there, sometimes for the first time in their lives.
We return to the real Elul lessons of Kids of Courage. I’ve watched the organization grow from a handful of kids sitting around my Shabbos table, brought to Los Angeles by my son. I never quite understood the name. Courage? What kind of courage do you need to sign up for a dream week of visiting amusement parks? Despite what I saw in front of me, I too had missed it all.
Until Sarah spoke last Thursday. She explained what it took to summon up the energy to even attempt a plane flight. How so many kids had pushed themselves towards other activities that the rest of us take for granted, and how they had failed, and failed again, and yet again. How after failing too many times, you don’t want to risk the disappointment – and the pain – of failing again. How it took, in fact, superhuman courage to try again, plus circumstances that would make it reasonable to try.
Listening to her, it struck me that she was describing Elul. We’ve tried, and tried again, to correct our faults, to make it back to the Ribbono Shel Olam big time. After too many failures, we stop trying in earnest, not wanting to risk the disappointment of more failure.
Like the Kids of Courage, there is a neshamah inside that yearns to express itself, wants to be free of the limitations of our physicality. In our case, HKBH Himself provides the model circumstances to make the trip back – the month of Elul. The real mussar to be taken from these kids is precisely their courage to make the attempt. They are nothing but an inspiration.
Quite a few chassidishe kids were part of the group, as well as completely secular kids. One of them told his story to the entire group. When he first became aware of the organization, his parents nixed his participation. As he put it, “After all, the group included nekaivos.” (The organizers keep mechitzos in place. Buses are separate. The dining room is divided. Because of the volunteer nature of the organization and the scope of the trips, it is simply impossible to run separate trips for boys and girls. All the counselors are frum, representing all parts of the Orthodox world, including chassidish and YU/Stern. Deliberately. Most are still from the yeshivish part of the community, albeit from the more open parts of it.)
His participation was stalled, until my son intervened. He visited the parents, and made his pitch. “I understand your concerns, and your unwillingness to expose your son to anything less than taharas hakodesh. I can’t offer that. The program needs to run the way it does. But please consider what is ahead for your son. Think of his medical prognosis – how limited are the years allotted to him bederech hateva. We are not talking about issurim here, but about lack of lechatchilah. In the case of your son, is there any greater lechatchilah than to bring him the most simcha and joy in the time HKBH has assigned to him?”
This was the other wallop of a lesson for Elul. We are all on limited, borrowed time. Is there any greater priority for us than to bring simcha to as many of our fellow travelers as possible, and in so doing, to bring simcha to Avinu She-bashomayim?
By Avi Shafran, on August 20th, 2010 To name the Muslim country where she lives would compromise her security; the authorities there do not look favorably on citizens who communicate with Jews. Her husband is a Hindu and she, although born a Christian, long ago abandoned her family’s religion and pledged herself to the Torah.
“Tehilla,” however, as I’ll call her, has not converted, and has no plans to convert. She and her two adult sons are “Noahides” – non-Jews who have come to the conclusion that the Jewish religious tradition is true and who have undertaken observance of the “seven laws of the children of Noah” – the basic moral precepts that Judaism prescribes for all of humanity: the prohibitions against idolatry, profaning G-d’s name, murder, sexual immorality, stealing and eating a limb cut from a live animal, as well as the commandment to establish courts of law.
There are Noahides in Australia, Asia, Europe and here in the United States (a good number of them, for some reason, in Tennessee, Georgia and Texas). Many face formidable societal obstacles, though Tehilla, considering where she lives, likely faces more than most.
“Tehilla,” which means “praise” in Hebrew, is an appropriate alias for someone so filled with admiration for the Jewish people. Her studies of Judaism over years, by internet and e-mail, and her interaction with various rabbis around the world, have endeared the Jewish people and the Jewish religion to her – and endeared her to her mentors. Jews, to be sure, are enjoined from proselytizing to non-Jews, but Tehilla is self-motivated (an understatement); those, like me, who correspond with her are simply answering her queries – and being inspired by her observations, rendered in fluent English.
Her empathy for Jews, especially in Israel, is deep. And it is accompanied by a clarity of vision that eludes so many, and so much of the media. “With all the sufferings [the world has] inflicted on you all,” she writes, “I still cannot fathom how magnanimous you all are in being a light to all nations.”
“After meeting your people [by e-mail],” she once wrote, “I cannot understand how such a warm, compassionate and humane people can be so persecuted and so misunderstood.”
And, from other e-mails:
“One thing the mighty nations are not absorbing is history. Even if they don’t believe the Scriptures per se, history itself is proof enough that your nation’s survival is the living and continuous miracle personally brought about by G-d.”
“G-d will never allow you to fall, in the merit of your patriarchs and prophets… soon G-d is going to say ‘enough’ to your tears…”
“All I can pray is when Hashem decides it’s time for all your sufferings to be over, He will show us Gentiles the compassion we failed to show you all.”
Tehilla is not only an observer of history and the world around her but an example of commitment to self-betterment on a personal level. She keeps a picture of the Chofetz Chaim, the saintly scholar who died shortly before the Holocaust and who wrote definitive works on the laws of proper speech. She has studied his works because, as she once explained, “…when I am angry I speak without thinking. The Chofetz Chaim has really changed my life and I am really trying to live up to his guidance.”
She is a charitable woman as well, and personally cared for a dying relative by marriage who had for years ridiculed her for her choices.
“My sons and I are… trying our best to do our part for the needy,” she once explained.
And she looks forward to the Messiah’s arrival with eagerness: “The greatest blessing for believing Gentiles like us is to be able to live where we can study … without fear, and acknowledge Hashem as the supreme G-d and you all as His chosen.”
In fact, Tehilla’s dedication to our people and our faith can sometimes sting, forcing her readers to recognize their own imperfect appreciation of their wonderful lot in life as Jews.
“It’s sad,” she once wrote, “that some of your people do not seem to understand or realize the special and holy heritage given to them for eternity, not something they can disown…”
Tehilla worries about her adult sons finding proper wives – who will share her and her sons’ outlook on life. She has also suffered a number of serious medical crises. Even her reaction to that challenge, though, stands as a valuable and true lesson.
“You see, rabbi,” she recently wrote, “I know G-d is so kind and I am making atonement for my sins… sickness takes away a lot of sins…”
That idea may make some of us squirm. But the fact that adversity and pain can be atonements is a quintessentially Jewish concept, readily gleaned from the Talmud and, in these waning weeks before the Days of Judgment – when examining one’s spiritual state can yield deep discomfort of its own – a timely one.
May Tehilla’s lessons, and her example, be a merit for her good health – and for seeing her sons find their life-partners soon.
© 2010 AM ECHAD RESOURCES
[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]
All Am Echad Resources essays are offered without charge for personal use,
sharing and publication, provided the above copyright notice is appended.
The above essay was first distributed in 2003
Communications and subscriptions: shafran@agudathisrael.org
By Yitzchok Adlerstein, on August 15th, 2010 When the Clinton-Mezvinsky nuptials were announced, I played the role of Grinch, and opined that there was little cause for celebration. Nothing could change my mind. All of us certainly wish Chelsea Clinton all the happiness in the world. In any intermarriage, our bone of contention is with the Jewish participant, who becomes (at least in the case of Jewish males) the tragic terminal point of a Jewish lineage nurtured in by centuries of steadfastness and mesiras nefesh.
Mezvinsky, like so many others who intermarry, had to real possiblity to make the decision we would have preferred, so we can hardly assign blame there. Nothing but a rich and authentic Jewish upbringing can counter the attraction of romantic involvement, and Mezvinsky never had it. He proudly displayed his heritage – one insufficient to prevent him from doing what all Jews for millennia regarded as breaking with it – by wearing a talis in front of a watching world, and having a Reform rabbi co-officiate with Chelsea’s Methodist minister. That may be an accomplishment for him, but it can hardly be a source of comfort or pride to the rest of us. To the contrary, the melding of Judaism with Methodism should give neither Jews nor serious Methodists much to cheer about.
A different point of view appeared in a blog piece that was picked up by multiple outlets. An advocate of “Open Orthodoxy” claims that there is a silver lining to the cloud. The Clinton wedding, he argues, shows that Jews have fully arrived in America. For the grandson of a Jewish grocer to be accepted with open arms by one of America’s First Families shows that the gentlemanly antipathy to Jews common and accepted, especially with America’s upper class – has dissipated.
I received many pieces of mail about this blog piece. None were dispassionate, unlike the stream of mailings I get on any ordinary day. They were laden with emotion, running from indignation to contempt. They were not supportive of the piece. Why would this be? The rabbi neither endorsed intermarriage (he wouldn’t if his life depended on it!), nor pooh-poohed its halachic unacceptability. He simply pointed out a truth about this wedding. It said something powerful about the place of Jews in our wonderful medinah shel chesed.
Why am I not comforted?
Some would say that he missed the point. If intermarriage is the price we pay for acceptance, bring on the ghetto. Advocates of Open Orthodoxy might not concur, but lots of us would argue that the tragedy of intermarriage is not worth the temporal advantages of acceptance by our neighbors. (Or, as a variation on this theme too deliciously phrased to pass up, “If a black hat will keep you frum in America, you should wear two black hats, not just one.” That’s the way Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff, quintessential Torah Umadda enthusiast and biographer par excellence of R. YD Soloveitchik zt”l put it a few days ago in the Jewish Press.)
I would say that we have still not gotten to the point.
For hundreds of years, some Jews reacted to the then-much-rarer incidence of intermarriage by sitting shiva. (No, it wasn’t always much rarer. Historians argue that before the Spanish expulsion, intermarriage rates mimicked what they are today.) We generally don’t do this today, but not because we are more enlightened, or because we are more open. We don’t because there is so much divorce today, that we still hope to reclaim the lost soul. Were it not for pragmatic reasons, the only legitimate response for an authentic Jew is to sit shiva.
Why? Because Jews have to think with more than their brains. R. Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, zt”l, declared that there are three mesoros in Yiddishkeit. We are most familiar with the mesorah of activity, how a Jew must act. The rich and nuanced literature of halacha is our lodestar, and has never failed us.
The second mesorah is a bit more complex, and somewhat more difficult to access. We have a mesorah on how Jews must think. We access it by studying Chazal, by immersing ourselves in all parts of Torah – whether the strictly normative portions of Shas (which shape our thought processes, not just our actions as we delve into them), or the all-important guidance that comes to us from midrash, aggada, and sifrei mussar.
What’s left? Rav Soloveitchik said that the third mesorah is the hardest to properly locate and grasp. It is the mesorah of lev, of the heart, of how we emote. If we received a traditional chinuch, we saw many sources promoting the need for emotions not to run helter-skelter with a life of their own. The heart needs to be guided by the moach, by the intellect. (The most beautiful development of this theme to this author is the Meshech Chochmah on the pasuk of mishchu u-kechu lachem tzon.) We have a sense of the power of emotions to mislead us, and recognize the need to channel their power.
This is not, however, what I believe R. Soloveitchik meant. The sur me-ra, the keeping out of trouble, is not the hard part. Where we often fail is in understanding how and where HKBH wants us to apply the rich force of emotion to get us to a better place. If, as Shlomo wrote, there is a season for all emotions, when should we react with sadness, or even anger? What should (as opposed to what does) make us happy?
A Jew will gain some appreciation of this mesorah only if he or she has wrestled with the problem, and then been fortunate enough to spend time in the company of true Torah giants. The very fortunate will have had the opportunity to have lived directly in their shadow. Others will at least have gotten a sense of their greatness and their reactions by reading and valuing the biographies of Torah luminaries.
Whatever the mind tells us is true about the Clinton wedding, there is no question about how a Torah Jew should react to an intermarriage, even of the rich and famous and secular. The lev allows no room on this one. There is no room for happiness or consolation, for whatever the reason.
By Avi Shafran, on August 13th, 2010 Imagining that one can divine how a new Supreme Court justice will rule on the sort of fundamental issues often brought before the High Court – particularly when the justice has never before served as a judge – is a pastime best left to gamblers and fools.
Even Justices who had long judicial records before ascending to a seat on the nation’s highest court have sometimes surprised observers with positions they subsequently took. Certainly a Justice who has no track record on the bench whatsoever – our newest member of the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan – cannot at this point be counted on as a safe vote for anything.
Still, there are subtle indications of the new Justice’s legal philosophy that can be at least noted with – depending on one’s beliefs – either hope or dread. Certainly, the fact that Americans United for Separation of Church and State expressed concern during the nomination process about Ms. Kagan’s views on religious liberty and the funding of religiously sponsored social service programs is, at least from an Orthodox Jewish perspective, cause for hope.
The descriptively named organization’s concerns were about Justice Kagan’s attitude toward the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, which … Read More >>
By Eytan Kobre, on August 11th, 2010 In my last post, I quoted the late director of the American Reform movement in Israel, David Forman, as stating that Reform’s “inroads into Israeli society have been marginal at best.” Back in 2005, the same gentleman estimated the number of dues-paying Reform Jews in Israel to be about 5,000, and, rest assured, there hasn’t been a dramatic uptick since then. Indeed, Forman added that “while it is convenient for us to blame our unequal treatment by the government for our limited numbers . . . it is highly doubtful that if we were granted full rights tomorrow our membership would grow significantly.” This, despite the millions that have been poured by American donors into building the biggest, most modern edifices for the heterodox movements and running the most sophisticated ad campaigns for religious pluralism that money can buy. So, why is that with all that, the heterodox have gained so little traction in Israel?
I believe I have at least one of the answers to that question, one that is well illustrated by the recent blowup over conversions. As much as religion and relations between the religious and secular communities are incendiary topics in Israel (although, it … Read More >>
By Avi Shafran, on August 6th, 2010 Seldom if ever has so much misinformation and ill will been sown by people ostensibly concerned with truth and Jewish unity. … Read More >>
By Guest Contributor, on August 5th, 2010 By Shimon Stern
News item from the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism: [Women of the Wall activist Anat] Hoffman points to a photograph on the wall of her office of Rosa Parks being fingerprinted, and likens her experience this week to that struggle for civil rights.
Anat had just dozed off at her desk under the photograph of Rosa Parks — the one she always liked to point out to guests — when suddenly she felt the presence of someone else in the room with her.
Slowly moving her hand to a letter opener, she grabbed it and swiftly turned around. Relief washed over her and she smiled. It wasn’t a haredi, only an elderly black woman.
“Who are you?” she asked.
Without a word, the visitor pointed to the photograph on the wall, of when she was younger, and alive. It showed her being fingerprinted by a Montgomery, Alabama police detective.
Anat was incredulous. “It’s you?” she gasped.
The apparition spoke. “Yes,” she said, nodding her head. “I understand that you have been invoking my memory.”
“Yes, yes!” Anat enthused. “I am like you. Look, see!” And with a flourish, she held out her finger, … Read More >>
By Guest Contributor, on August 4th, 2010 By Dov Fischer
NEWS ITEM: In a special news report published online by the NEW YORK JEWISH WEEK, a woman was designated by Rabbi Avraham Weiss to lead Kabbalat Shabbat services on Friday night, July 30, for the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, an Orthodox Union synagogue.
First, a review of the “Key Players” associated with American Modern Orthodox (MO) Judaism: Most MO pulpit rabbonim typically have hailed from Yeshiva University (YU) in New York and its Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS). MO synagogues typically affiliate with the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America (UO) or the National Council of Young Israel (sometimes both), and the rabbis tend to be members of the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA). Ten years ago, Rabbi Avi Weiss, who taught for many years at YU’s Stern College for Women and who is Rabbi of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale (HIR), founded Yeshiva Chovevei Torah (YCT) to provide an Orthodox seminary to the Left of RIETS. Rabbis in YCT tend to associate in their own rabbinical body, the grandly named International Rabbinic Fellowship (IRF), because the RCA does not admit most of them to membership. A few of RCA’s 900-plus members also join … Read More >>
By Yaakov Menken, on August 3rd, 2010 Despite the encouragement of the Jerusalem Post’s editorialists, and despite several signatures from friends and colleagues in Jewish outreach, I believe that last week’s “Statement of Principles” regarding those “in our community who have a homosexual orientation” was a grave mistake.
The statement isn’t entirely objectionable; mostly it is neither new nor newsworthy. Over a decade ago, the Dean of the Ner Israel Rabbinical College, Rabbi Aharon Feldman shlit”a — of the Council of Torah Sages of Agudath Israel of America, those whom the Post would categorize as the reactionaries and extremists — published an open letter in which he provided support and encouragement to a newly-Orthodox Jew challenged by homosexual desires. Rather than calling upon others to treat those with homosexual attractions with respect, Rabbi Feldman provided a paradigm of compassion, warmth and understanding from which we all can and should learn.
To borrow a turn of phrase from another context, the Statement is thus both original and good; the problem is that the good parts are not original, and the original parts are not good. Without attempting to create an exhaustive list, I will focus upon merely three major problems with this Statement.
The first … Read More >>
By Emanuel Feldman, on August 2nd, 2010 Lost in all the incendiary rhetoric are some basic facts about the conversion procedures of most US Reform and Conservative rabbis. … Read More >>
By Guest Contributor, on August 2nd, 2010 by Dovid Landesman
This evening I had an experience that reinforced my sense of the singular quality of the Jewish community living in Eretz Yisrael. There is a unique familial relationship that this land can and often does evoke from its citizens. In place of the divisions along ethnic grounds or according to the level of religious commitment, I was privileged to witness an example of klal Yisrael at its finest hour of achdut. For a short period of time there were no barriers – just a group of brothers working together in perfect harmony.
The scenario: My son, who serves as a volunteer medic for Hatzalah and Magen David Adom, is also on call as member of a police unit responsible for search and rescue in the Judean hills. Tonight, as we were about to begin learning, he received a call from the police dispatcher informing him that a cyclist had fallen in Nachal Sorek, a popular trail that begins near Hadassah hospital and ends near Beit Shemesh.
The area where the cyclist was injured is accessible only by four wheel drive vehicles, so we got into my son’s pick-up and set off. My son-in-law, a paramedic in … Read More >>
By Avi Shafran, on July 30th, 2010 We become unmindful of things to which we are accustomed. Even important things. … Read More >>
By Eytan Kobre, on July 29th, 2010 As the controversy over the Israeli conversion bill heated up, in other corners of the Jewish world, too, ‘twas the season to be silly. In a New York Times opinion piece so rife with howlers that a “Corrections” note of several paragraphs would not suffice, a Jewish magazine editor suggested that future historians would wonder why “as Iran raced to build a nuclear bomb to wipe the Jewish state off the map, did custodians of the 2,000-year-old dream of the Jewish people choose such a perverse definition of Jewish peoplehood, seemingly calculated to alienate supporters outside its own borders?”
It’s good the writer is concerned enough about the Iranian nuclear threat to make the rather strange connection between it and, of all things, the Israeli conversion controversy. Perhaps her next article can muse about what future historians will say about why the American Jewish establishment and its constituents — including her magazine’s readership — who are an important part of Barack Obama’s liberal base and are, even as his popularity plummets, still among his staunchest financial and political backers, failed to object strenuously — or at all — to his reconciliation to the reality of an Iranian bomb.
… Read More >>
By Yitzchok Adlerstein, on July 28th, 2010 Judea Pearl, or Reb Yehudah as I call him, is a UCLA professor of computer science, with a strong interest in artificial intelligence. He is the father of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal writer murdered by Pakistani Muslims. No one can forget his last words. “I am Jewish….My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish….Back in the town of Bnei Brak there is a street named after my great-grandfather, Chaim Pearl, who was one of the founders of the town.”
The following article (appearing in the Los Angeles Jewish Journal) is not only insightful, but demanding. If you cannot do what he asks in the last paragraph, you are deluding yourself about your commitment to Israel as much as the yefei nefesh whom he targets in this piece.
What makes fog float in mid air, while raindrops fall straight down to earth? Physics teaches us that it is all a matter of “surface-to- weight ratio” — a simple parameter that determines whether soap bubbles rise or fall, and how many passengers a jet plane can carry. The larger the surface, so the theory goes, the easier it is for an object to lift its weight against … Read More >>
By Eytan Kobre, on July 28th, 2010 It’s silly season again in the Jewish world. In other words, yet another fight has broken out over conversions in Israel, and ostensibly smart people have taken to saying some truly risible things.
In one corner, we find David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Congress, reviving an old chestnut, one I’d thought had been laid to well-deserved rest years ago, but is apparently hardier than I assumed. His argument: When Hizbollah bombed a Buenos Aires Jewish center, killing scores, all that mattered for the terrorists was that the victims identified as Jews; likewise, there were no separate Nazi box cars, ghettoes and barracks for different Jews based on degree of Jewishness. Ergo, anyone with a sustained hankering for kasha varnishkes or Israeli folk dancing has a moral right to join the Jewish people.
There are a number of ways to respond to Mr. Harris, such as testing the logical limits of his position by asking if he knows how to spell unmentionable phrases like Jews for Jesus – but, honestly, there’s other silliness to cover, so we’ll have to suffice here with saying this: No thanks, we’d prefer not to hand the ultimate authority for defining … Read More >>
By Yitzchok Adlerstein, on July 28th, 2010 Benny Morris’ interview of Shimon Peres in Tablet has to be one of the most interesting and refreshing reflections upon history that I have read in quite a while, yielding much insight into the personalities of Israel’s elder statesman and those with whom he interacted. With all his faults, he emerges far more heroic than before, and serves as a reminder of the days in which those who toiled to found the State – for all our ideological differences with them – were made of stronger stuff than the self-serving bureaucrats of the present.
Benny Morris is himself an intriguing character. As one of Israel’s New Historians, he was the darling of the left for challenging the mythic orthodoxies of Israel’s early days, particularly the War of Independence. He argued that in fact not all of Israel’s Arabs had fled on their own; some had been pushed out. (This position peeks out at us in the course of this interview.) Arab civilians had been killed as well. He then stood his findings on their head by concluding that while such incidents had occurred, they were the exception, and quite within the range of behavior of other armies. Moreover, … Read More >>
By Yitzchok Adlerstein, on July 27th, 2010 This article, appearing in the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, omits only one significant fact in this kiddush Hashem of a piece. There is something that Benish Kaplan is even more passionate about than basketball. He is unswervingly loyal and dedicated to his illustrious relatives, the Feinsteins, shlit”a. Benish knows how to stick with a winning team!
Menschic Warriors By David Suissa Month after month, a few years ago, my little boy would nudge me. “Daddy, I want to try out for Kaplan,” he’d say. I knew Kaplan was a basketball program in the Hancock Park area, but I knew little else. My boy Noah was already playing for his Maimonides team in his school league, which meant practice every week and a game every Sunday – so why add a whole other layer of practice and games? It’s tough enough to juggle after-school activities for three busy kids; who needs another carpool headache to the other side of town?
Obviously, I hadn’t done my homework. If you’re a Jewish kid in a Jewish day school in Los Angeles, especially an Orthodox school, and you love to play basketball, the name “Kaplan” is like the name “Harvard” to an aspiring … Read More >>
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