The California Governor’s Race, Rebbi and Antoninus, and Israeli Ingenuity

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.


Great Expectations

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

Kids of Courage, the Commonality of Disability, and Elul

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?

A View From Afar

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

Chelsea’s Wedding and the Third Mesorah

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.

Divining Ms. Kagan

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 >>

Can't Get No Traction

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 >>

Abuse of Power

Seldom if ever has so much misinformation and ill will been sown by people ostensibly concerned with truth and Jewish unity. … Read More >>

A Visitation

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 >>

A Modern Orthodox Rabbi Reacts to Kabbalas Shabbos at HIR

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 >>

When Political Correctness Trumps Religion

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 >>

Conversions of Convenience, or Conversions of Commitment?

Lost in all the incendiary rhetoric are some basic facts about the conversion procedures of most US Reform and Conservative rabbis. … Read More >>

We Are All Children of the Same Man

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 >>

An Orphan In Shul

We become unmindful of things to which we are accustomed. Even important things. … Read More >>

Silly Season, Part 2

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 >>

Jews of Discomfort

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 >>

Silly Season Is Here Again

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 >>

Shimon Peres Looks Back

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 >>

Menschic Warriors

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 >>

In Brief:

Reality is No Obstacle

-- 6:23 pm

The recent Emmanuel litigation revealed a major flaw in Israel’s judicial system. In most suits against governmental authorities, the Supreme Court, sitting as the High Court of Justice (BaGaTZ), is a court of original jurisdiction. Yet the petitions to BaGaTZ often turn on complex factual issues, which the Supreme Court is unequipped to weigh or evaluate. The Supreme Court is not a trial court, and has no means at its disposal to examine witnesses or properly evaluate evidence.

In the Emmanuel case, for instance, the result hinged in large part on the intention of the defendants in setting up a special chassidic track within the Bais Yaakov. But the Supreme Court lacked the tools to evaluate that issue. Petitioners alleged that obstacles had been placed in front of Sephardi applicants to the chassidic track. That claim was contradicted by the report of Advocate Mordechai Bass, who was appointed by the Education Ministry to examine the school. Yet in the Court’s opinion the petitioners’ allegation was accepted as if it were a matter of fact.

The Supreme Court’s vast original jurisdiction not only gives it inordinate power to set the national agenda, compared to other supreme courts around the world, it also leaves many of its decisions curiously detached from reality.

1 Comment

Clueless at The New Republic

-- 4:02 pm

Marty Peretz’s diatribe against R Ovadia Yosef and fundamentalist Jewish oppression of women is not worth reading, save to remind us that even very bright people write very silly things when they comment about areas they know nothing about. Unfortunately, because it is so common for people to do this (even people like Peretz whose devotion to the Jewish people is beyond cavil), it places a bit more responsibility upon the rest of us to ask ourselves how our actions and words are going to be processed by others.

Herschel Ginsburg’s calm, convincing and well-reasoned response in the combox (Ginzy, at 8/28 7:03 is full of Kiddush Hashem (even if he often relies on chardal and dati-leumi behavior to rescue the totality of Orthodoxy), and a good example of how articulate Westerners can do a great job as ambassadors of Torah.

[Thanks to Dr. Barry Simon for the tip.]

17 Comments

The Burqa Quandary, Continued

-- 8:52 am

Three weeks ago, I wrote about the quandary posed for Torah Jews by the bans on the wearing of the burqa being debated in Europe. Not surprisingly, the Orthodox world has spawned its own burqa wearers – mostly centered in Beit Shemesh. If modesty is a good thing, they apparently believe, the more the better. The Eidah Hachareidis, which has never been accused of nonchalance in matters of tznius, begs to differ. The Eidah intends to ban the burqa.

Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim, a senior Eidah leader, labeled the wearing of a burqa an unhealthy “obsession.” He went so far to say that whenever one finds such obsessions, far beyond the requirements of normative halacha, one must be wary of “severe transgressions.” (That prediction has already proven to be the case with respect to the leader of the burqa wearers.)

Indeed, I once heard from one of the generation’s leading ba’alei hashkafa that the extreme obsession with modesty among the Ishmaelites is a proof to Chazal’s statement that Yishmael inherited nine of the ten portions of licentiousness that came into the world – as is their picture of the world to come as a place of debauchery.

On the issue of the European bans, Claire Berlinski had an interesting take in the August 16 National Review. Berlinski lives in Turkey, where burqas have proliferated over the last five years. She examines various arguments why such bans might not constitute infringement of religious liberty, and concludes, on many of the same grounds that I did, that these arguments are weak: “Let’s be perfectly frank. These bans are outrages against religious freedom and freedom of expression. . . . The argument that the garment is not a religious obligation under Islam is well-founded but irrelevant; million of Muslims around the world believe that it is. . . . “ And she acknowledges that it is “cruel to demand of a woman that she reveal [what] her sense of modesty compels her to cover.”

Nevertheless, Berlinski argues, the burqa must be banned. If the burqa becomes the standard of modesty in European Muslim communities, any woman who does not wear one, whether she is Muslim or not, will find soon herself subject to physical assault by Muslim men who view any woman they consider immodestly dressed to be fair game. She adduced European crime statistics to support her point. Bans on the burqa, she concludes, are a “sign of a desperate society.” But things have gone so far in Europe that they are necessary.

I argued in the earlier piece that there is a compelling state interest in banning the burqa is with respect to airport security. Apparently Canadian airports don’t think so, according to Daniel Pipes August 3 weblog. Even though all air travellers are supposed to show photo identification, that requirement is frequently waived by security personnel in both Toronto and Montreal’s airports for Muslims (presumably women) whose faces are veiled. Air Canada even threatened to sue one traveler who took a video of these security breeches.

30 Comments

Smelly Justice

-- 12:43 pm

In this week’s Torah reading, Parshas Shoftim in Deuteronomy, Israel is commanded to have judges and officers, those who maintain both justice and order. A judge in particular is required to be entirely unbiased, and not to accept ‘Shochad’, usually translated as bribery.

The Torah warns us that “bribery blinds the eyes of the wise, and perverts the words of the righteous.” [Deut. 16:19] G-d is not talking about a corrupt person here, He is talking about the “wise” and the “righteous”!

The Talmud tells us that the ‘bribery’ discussed also goes well beyond passing money to the judge and back-room deals. In one case discussed in the Talmud, two litigants are sent to a noted sage for arbitration. One of them recognizes the judge and asks, “didn’t you stay in my hotel?”

The Rabbi answered, “yes I did, and now I can’t judge your case!”

Having previously conducted a commercial transaction, with no ulterior motive or quid pro quo, isn’t something we would understand as ‘bribery’ at all. But the scholarly Rabbi correctly understood that even this was enough to create a small connection, and perhaps was enough to intimidate the other party.

Like most other Orthodox Jews, I am troubled by the judge’s actions in the trial of Shalom Rubashkin. There are all sorts of things that can be said to justify her behavior, or chalk it up to a judge with a long history of apparent favoritism towards the prosecution. But having been so intensely involved with the planning of the immigration raid upon the Postville plant — which, in the end, had no direct relationship to the misreporting of which Rubashkin was guilty — certainly gives the appearance of a previous connection to the prosecution and bias against the defendant. The fact that she failed to disclose this, and it only came to light after suing the government to provide information about the raid, is entirely inexcusable and unseemly. Our Sages knew well that no matter what decision might be arrived at in a truly unbiased fashion, justice must not merely be done cleanly — it has to look and smell clean as well.

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The Bedouin and the Haredi

-- 2:19 am

My day job brings me into frequent contact with members of other faiths, as I try to build bridges and alliances on behalf of Jewish interests. One of the first things I learned was how people with serious religious convictions have an easier time relating to Orthodox Jews – who believe in right and wrong, take Scripture seriously, and believe that G-d should be the focal point of their universe – than to non-observant Jews. I also learned – to my chagrin! – that I had an easier time making conversation with serious Christians than with my own Jewish brothers. I was still delightfully surprised by the secondt excerpt below, taken from an interview with Ishmael Khaldi on Aish.com

Khaldi grew up in a Bedouin village, and used the opportunities granted by the Israeli educational system to gain advanced degrees after serving in the IDF. I first became aware of his work when he served as a deputy Consul at the Israeli Consulate in San Francisco. Without saying anything, hi very position effectively counteracted the charge that Israel is a “racist apartheid” state; when he did speak, it was with wisdom. This is how he handled the issue of present inequities in the allocation of resources to the Arab population:

“There are African American diplomats representing the United States – now there is an African American president – but that doesn’t mean discrimination does not exist in America,” says Khaldi. “It also doesn’t mean that, because there is discrimination, African Americans should wash their hands of their country of birth.”

Furthermore, says Khaldi, given that the U.S. is 234 years old, and Israel is a mere 62 (plagued by external threats, massive immigration, and internal tumult), the status of minorities in Israel is way ahead of the curve, particularly compared with the treatment of minorities in neighboring Arab countries.

But it is details of his personal journey that I found most intriguing:

Most Bedouin struggle between a desire to embrace modernity and at the same time preserve their heritage and customs. Khaldi is no exception. “In a lot of ways I am stuck between worlds,” he says. “We are a very traditional and conservative people, and it is difficult for us to integrate, particularly into modern, secular, liberal mainstream Israeli society.”
Interestingly, it is for this reason that Khaldi says he feels most comfortable in the company of religious Jews, whose culture and values tend to be much more conservative.
Khaldi recalls when he first landed at JFK International Airport, where he was shocked to be met by such a chaotic mix of people and graffiti, and cars and jet engines. “All at once, my exhaustion and anxiety broke open. I felt like the world was collapsing around me, and I cried like an orphan newborn lamb whose mother had just died,” he writes.
Then suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, he spotted a Hassid in the terminal, on the floor above him. “My heart swelled and my mood brightened immediately. I felt as if I had been lost at sea and suddenly spotted a beacon of light,” he writes. It was that Hassid that pointed him in the direction of Borough Park, Brooklyn, where he quickly found refuge with another Hassidic family.

This incident is now part of a book that Khaldi (now serving as a political advisor to Avigdor Lieberman) has written about his life’s story. It is yet another reminder of the enormous capacity for both Kiddush Hashem and chilul Hashem that inheres in a world of instant communication.

4 Comments

The Left Falls Over the Edge

-- 5:11 pm

R. Avi Weiss’ Hebrew Institute of Riverdale will have a woman leading Kabbolas Shabbos tonight.

It will be hard to figure out a way that the rest of us will be able to regard HIR, YCT, and IRF as Orthodox, by any reasonable stretch. I do not say this with any sense of triumph. While no fan of their running roughshod over Torah hashkafah and accepted halachic protocols, major schisms in the community are rarely good. Some will appreciate the (perhaps necessary) havdalah. I still think it is a sad day for Klal Yisrael.

35 Comments

Matisyahu Made Him Cry

-- 1:50 pm

Matisyahu, for those who don’t know, is an American Jewish kid who grew up listening to reggae, became a BT, started singing Jewish-oriented reggae and became a (very) popular artist. His lyrics speak about Torah and Chassidic themes, but are sung in a “faux-Jamaican patois” to a reggae beat.

And one reviewer found Matisyahu’s “Jerusalem” speaking to his soul, lost his objectivity, and cried. “Critics aren’t supposed to cry at concerts. But I did.” Another Jewish heart yearning to come home.

0 Comments

“Their Souls Are Screaming Out For What You Have”

-- 2:36 am

Unlike many New Yorkers I know, I do not have an easy time listening to Michael Savage. I squirm when caught in a car in NY when the driver tunes in to his show. While appreciating his support for Israel, I find his manner over the top, and his content simplistic. All this makes his July 12 remarks more significant, for the pure genuineness of his observations.

Apparently invited to a leyl Shabbos dinner, he meets ten Chabad teenaged girls, and is overwhelmed by their purity. It leads him to contrast their life style with that of their non-religious peers, and to advise them not to be jealous of the lifestyles of cultural icons, because nothing that the beautiful people have holds a candle to what the G-d-fearing have. He notes how many belong in rehab – and can’t stick it out. Why does their stardom fade and fizzle? Savage tells these girls quite simply: “Their souls are screaming out for what you have.”

8 Comments

The New Israel Fund’s Israel Problem

-- 12:52 pm

Several weeks ago, an activist for disabled children, “Shlomit,” attended a seminar conducted by the New Israel Fund. She self-identifies as “left-wing, Zionist, and religious,” and she supports criticism of Israel. But she was unprepared for an NIF event in which she was surrounded by

activists who negated the State of Israel’s existence. With people who want to annihilate the State without ruling out violent means, who believe that the State of Israel was born out of sin and who apologize for its existence, who loathe Israel and its symbols, who justify harming Israel, its soldiers and all its institutions, who devote their lives and efforts towards turning Israel into a bi or multi-national country. In fact the above is inaccurate. These people are fighting for one nationality alone – Palestinian. These same people oppose communal or civil national service for Arabs within the State. They also equate Israel’s actions with those of Nazi Germany.

Ben-Dror Yemini, writing in Ma’ariv, added the following commentary:

NIF — no one understands you. When you say that you are for a Jewish democratic state, but you support organizations that work with all their might against a Jewish democratic state — no one understands you. When you say that you do not participate in the campaign to boycott Israel, but you fund organizations that support the boycott — no one understands you. When you say that you do not participate in the demonization of Israel, but your president says that “Israel is carrying out a massacre”- no one understands you.

Now Shlomit too does not understand NIF. At least she is in good company. She understands perfectly. You, NIF, are having trouble understanding…

You are like an ambulance rushing to help someone injured in a car crash who runs over several hundred people on the way. And the ambulance driver doesn’t understand what they want from him — “Me? But, my motives were pure.”

Hat Tip: World Jewish Daily

1 Comment

Arafat’s Legacy Lives!

-- 3:55 pm

Bill Clinton has said that one of Yasser Arafat’s biggest mistakes in their conversations was trying to convince him that there never was a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem – that it had stood instead in Saudi Arabia. Clinton knew at that point that Arafat was nuts. (Arafat probably forgot that the Temple in Jerusalem figured in some Christian narratives as well.)

The madness did not stop with Arafat’s death. Many Palestinians are committed to cutting any ties between Eretz Yisrael and the Jewish people. Even Tehilim are more than they can handle, as this AP story demonstrates:

RAMALLAH, West Bank — When the iconic 1970s disco group Boney M rocked Ramallah this week, the local music festival prevented the band from performing one of its biggest hits.

Lead singer Maizie Williams said Palestinian concert organizers told her not to sing “Rivers of Babylon.” The song’s chorus quotes from the Book of Psalms, referring to the exiled Jewish people’s yearning to return to the biblical land of Israel.

Palestinians often question the Jewish historical connection to the Holy Land. Organizers said they asked for the song to be skipped, deeming it “inappropriate.”

“I don’t know if it is a political thing or what, but they asked us not to do it and we were a bit disappointed that we could not do it because we know that everybody loves this song no matter what,” she said.

15 Comments

Answering For the President

-- 1:25 am

Not a question every rov has to answer….

As an Orthodox Jew, Jack Lew, President Obama’s choice to Director of the Office of Management and Budget, observes the religious restrictions on the Jewish Sabbath, which runs from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. He leaves the office Friday afternoons in time to get home before sundown, and does not use electric or electronic devices, including the telephone.

Once, while working in President Clinton’s director, Lew’s home phone rang one Saturday. He didn’t answer and a familiar voice could be heard from the answering machine, urging him to pick up the phone. Mr. Clinton said he understood the sanctity of the Sabbath, but that it was important that he talk to Lew. He even said, it was later reported, that “God would understand.”

Lew later consulted with his rabbi, who said that taking an important phone call from the President of the United States would be permissible on the Sabbath under the Talmudic teaching that work on the Sabbath is allowed in order to save a life.

I imagine that the answer to the question would also turn on the likelihood that the Jew’s area of expertise could impact upon the lives of people, as well as some sense that the President knew enough about Shabbos and respected it sufficiently, that his request to pick up the phone indicated a real crisis. Bill Clinton, for all his other faults, had a deep love and respect for Scripture. Rabbi Menachem Genack, the head of OU Kashrus, sent Clinton a “parshah sheet” every week. If it came late, he would hear from the White House. Sometimes, the sheets were faxed back to Rabbi Genack with comments or questions scribbled in the margins.

[Thanks to Dr Barry Simon for the tip.]

12 Comments

Supreme Court: “Blatant” Bias

-- 11:33 am

From Arutz-7: The Regavim Association has issued a report showing that the Supreme Court gives blatant preferential treatment to left-wing associations.

Regavim, The Association for the Preservation of State Lands, conducted a four-year review of lawsuits brought by various groups, and how those groups were treated in the “pre-ruling” stages, “when the legal merits of the various cases are not yet known.”

The report shows the Chief Justice Dorit Beinisch, in particular, is biased towards the left wing.

The preferential treatment towards lawsuits brought by the left wing is manifest in the following areas: Rushed proceedings, Beinisch’s participation on the judicial panel, the issuance of restraining orders against the State, intervention in government decisions, and especially the final rulings…

Regavim explains that its report concentrated on the procedural matters of a given suit, which take place before its merits are considered. “At this stage,” the report’s author, Betzalel Smutrich, explains, “the decisions reflect the judges’ basic positions and biases, if any, towards the matter. This is why the tremendous differences between the right-wing and left-wing petitions, as we show in the report, cannot be attributed to scholarly legal hairsplitting.”

“The facts described in the report clearly indicate a consistent and conscious policy that is based on political outlooks,” Smutrich says, “and it is led unequivocally by Chief Justice Dorit Beinisch.”…

“The public cannot be expected to place its trust in its judges under such circumstance,” he concluded.

Given that the Supreme Court is largely self-selecting, and in its bias simply follows the model of judicial activism of previous Chief Justice Aharon Barak (rightly described during Elena Kagan’s Senate confirmation hearings as the “Most liberal activist judge in the world“), Israel’s “alternate government” by judicial fiat is unlikely to end any time soon.

4 Comments

Letter to the editor in the Five Towns Jewish Times

-- 4:57 pm


The letter below, from the Philadelphia Rosh HaYeshiva, appears in the current issue of the Five Towns Jewish Times

Dear Editor:

It has come to my attention that a recent article published in this paper by Rabbi Aryeh Zev Ginzberg has resulted in much negative reaction. Several rabbonim encouraged Rabbi Ginzberg to write his article, and he wisely chose not to state their names and expose them to the anger he feared might result from his words (though they were respectful and measured words throughout). As one of those who encouraged him, and to whom he submitted his article to ensure that I approved of it, I would like to publicly commend him for what he wrote.

The subject of Rabbi Ginzberg’s article was an invitation by an Orthodox shul to a speaker who is prominent because she received an “ordination” from an Orthodox rabbi. The invitee was asked to address the entire congregation as a “scholar in residence” and Rabbi Ginzberg correctly saw that fact as a subtle but clear embrace of what her “ordination” represents – an erosion of mesoras avoseinu, the holy Jewish heritage that governs the lives of all believing Jews.

That mesorah does not allow for women to fill certain roles of men, and rabbanus is one of those roles. This is not a matter of prejudice against women. It is a matter of recognizing that Hashem created men and women to serve different roles in life. Nor it is a matter of any dispute among recognized poskim. It was not only the rabbonim of the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah who drew that line but rabbonim who are looked up to for direction by Orthodox Jews outside the haredi world as well.

Knowing Rabbi Ginzberg as I do, I am certain that he does not, cholila, have any ill will toward the speaker. What motivated him to write what he did was a rightful obligation to defend the integrity of our mesorah – an issue larger than the invitee, larger than her rabbi, larger than the differences between various Orthodox shuls and their respective standards.

An Orthodox shul, whatever “stripe” it is, has a responsibility to avoid promoting, even unintentionally, departures from our mesorah. Rabbi Ginzberg saw the invitation here as inconsistent with that responsibility. And I feel, as I felt when he approached me, that he is absolutely right.

Rabbi Shmuel Kamenetsky

Comments Closed

Anti-Sefardi Discrimination – a Time Honored Tradition

-- 2:01 am

It may have a longer history than many of us realize. Thumbing through a Seder HaDoros in the Philadelphia Kollel, my son chanced upon the following passage:

From the Portuguese Expulsion they spread out to the four corners of the earth. Some of them came to Italy. The Roman community pledged a thousand ducats to the Pope, so that he should not allow the Jewish Sefardim to enter his territory. The Pope was angered by this, saying, “How can you be so cruel to your brothers?” He decreed that they should leave his territory, and the Sefardim should enter instead of them. They were compelled to expend much money to annul this edict.

14 Comments

An Elegant Afterword on Emanuel

-- 5:10 pm

One of the several Emanuel pieces in Mishpacha this week concludes with one of the most helpful summaries I have seen to date. No posturing, no delusions. Enough open-mindedness to distribute blame and responsibility all around – and to dream of a better day. Let no one say that the haredi community stifled the voices of introspection.

It would be wrong for the chareidi community to point fingers at the Supreme Court and not take a moment for some serious introspection as to what this story means to us.

First of all, while the race allegations against the Slonimer community are wrong, we cannot whitewash the facts. There have been schools in which families weren’t accepted into the school for no other reason than their creed or background. It is very possible that the parents now in jail are serving a sentence because of the actions of some haughty school principals in other communities who ignore the calls ofgedolei Yisrael to run admissions based solely on academic standards and other objective criteria, such as tzniyus and the kedushah of the home.

The second lesson, then, is that there are no free lunches. When you take money from someone — and certainly when you take 90 percent of your funding from them — they call the shots.

Third, in regard to chareidi public relations efforts. Last week’s massive rally finally conveyed to the public at large the true issue in Emanuel. The chareidi community got the message out to the people, but it was too late. There should have been efforts — both in the Supreme Court and in the secular media — to tell the true story of Emanuel. Had the Sefardic parents whose children are enrolled in the chassidic track spoken earlier, much heartache could have been avoided. Furthermore, hiring a competent Sefardic lawyer to fight the case would have gone a long way towards convincing the court that the parents were not racially motivated.

The community as a whole failed, and parents from Emanuel are paying dearly for the failure.

And so, Thursday’s rally. According to police estimates, some 30,000 people filled the streets of Bnei Brak, and more than 100,000 participated in the rally in Jerusalem. The rallies carried an important message: when forced against the wall, the chareidi minority will not cave to the secular majority, and unless it is willing to exert full judicial power on religious Jews, the country will need to reestablish a system of respect and understanding of each other.

But only by learning the above lessons can the chareidi community in Israel hope to change the dynamics from within

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