Below I share with you (with very minor changes) the e-mail letter I sent today to Dina Kraft, a JTA reporter, responding to her article on the JTA website regarding the controversy over the ruling of an Israeli beis din revoking a conversion performed many years ago. I hope to share with you any further correspondence between us in this matter as well.

Please note that I am entirely unfamiliar with the facts and opposing positions in this case. But, then, my letter isn’t really about this case, but about how journalists striving for objectivity, balance and moderation ought to go about their tasks.

Dear Ms. Kraft,

I read with interest your 5/6/08 article on the JTA website regarding the controversy over a rabbinic court ruling revoking a convert’s 15 year old conversion, and I have several questions and comments to which I would appreciate your response:

Stephen Schwarzman is a very wealthy man. And a very generous one.

The CEO and co-founder of The Blackstone Group, a New York investment bank, recently made the largest unrestricted gift to any New York cultural institution: $100 million, to the New York Public Library.

Mr. Schwarzman may well have made gifts to Jewish causes too. Although his current wife is not Jewish and their marriage ceremony was presided over by both a rabbi and a priest, many intermarried Jews maintain relationships to the larger Jewish community and its institutions. The $100 million, though, is going to the public library.

Untold millions of Jewish philanthropic dollars, sums to spin the head of those of us who think in $20 bill denominations, have similarly been donated to causes that, worthy though they might be, do not address needs exclusive to the Jewish community.

Just before Pesach, the front pages of all Israel’s major papers were filled for days with three cases of horrific child abuse. In two of the cases, some of the children involved will likely never recover from their physical injuries, and it is hard to imagine the emotional injuries ever healing in any of the cases. Each of the three cases involved chareidi mothers.

One chareidi commentator noted that the explosion of the cases in the headlines seemed perfectly timed to coincide with the release of national figures on child abuse. And huge headlines quoting investigators describing the abuse as the worse they had ever encountered will be true only until the next sickening case comes to light. But the secret long known to social workers in the chareidi community is out of the bag: Our children enjoy no immunity from horrible abuse at the hands of their parents.

Each of the cases involved its own sensationalistic details, and together they raise many questions. The mother in the case in Beit Shemesh was the charismatic leader of a group of women, almost all whom came from non-chareidi backgrounds, who have taken to covering themselves in 18 layers or so of clothing, and who had already managed to achieve a certain international celebrity. The mother in the case in Jerusalem had apparently fallen under the spell of newly religious “mekubal,” who directed her.

Among the issues raised by these cases is: How is it that so many newcomers to the chareidi world have imbibed so many strange ideas? Who is teaching them? What kind of connection do they have with rabbonim once they enter the world? Even if they come with longstanding socio-pathologies, why does no one notice this?

In the space of a single hour this evening, I heard:

The former President of the most populous Muslim country on the globe declare that he will not rest until his country recognizes Israel. He then dedicated the honor he received to an unnamed rabbi (in Indonesia!), deceased for a few years, who enriched his life by introducing him to Talmud and Kabbalah.

The previous Archbishop of Canterbury closed his remarks with a beautiful piece of derush based on a beraisa in the first perek of Berachos. Lord Carey has campaigned against anti-Semitism for over twenty years, and stood up to his own church when it moved to divest its funds from Israel

A French-Catholic priest with tears in his eyes tell an audience why he has trekked for a decade through the Ukraine to uncover the previously unknown mass graves that hold the remains of a million and a half Jews murdered by Nazi mobile killing units. So far, he has found over five hundred of such graves. Invoking the words of the previous Pope in his visit to a Rome synagogue, he called Jews his “elder brothers;” he considered it intolerable that so many should be killed and their memories obliterated without any remembrance.

Does the deeply-seated need for revenge mean that we are trapped between two approaches, each of which is unsatisfactory? On the one hand, acting upon our instinctive need plunges us into unending cycles of retaliation. On the other, the rule of law seems to demand the suppression of an undeniable part of our nature. Are we destined to give revenge either too much or too little? Jared Diamond, the fascinating cell membrane physiologist, turned evolutionary biologist of birds, turned ecological geographer, examines this question in a recent article in The New Yorker.

I have read Diamond since my teens, and always been overwhelmed by his versatility. As a writer, he is engaging and clear. He won a Pulitzer for Guns, Germs, and Steel; it is one of the most important secular books I read in the last ten years. [Warning: this is not a pitch or endorsement. Those who believe in a six thousand year-old earth will only be offended by the book, and find nothing of value therein. Those who admit to other possibilities will find remarkable insights into how the Ribbono Shel Olam, by cleverly arranging geographical features within continents, may have engineered the emergence of key groups that would dominate the history of the most recent millennia, and facilitated key discoveries like plant and animal husbandry that would be important in the development of human civilizations. The list of early human achievements at the end of parshas Bereishis will never be the same after reading it.]

Diamond presents his dilemma by contrasting the behavior of a New Guinea society with that of his Holocaust survivor father in law. New Guinea comes first in the article.

In 1992, when Daniel Wemp was about twenty-two years old, his beloved paternal uncle Soll was killed in a battle against the neighboring Ombal clan. In the New Guinea Highlands, where Daniel and his Handa clan live, uncles and aunts play a big role in raising children, so an uncle’s death represents a much heavier blow than it might to most Americans. Daniel often did not even distinguish between his biological father and other male clansmen of his father’s generation. And Soll had been very good to Daniel, who recalled him as a tall and handsome man, destined to become a leader. Soll’s death demanded vengeance.

Boxing may be dead but those who still savor the sight of heavyweights throwing roundhouse punches at a fast and furious pace could do worse than the current donnybroook between Justice Minister Daniel Friedmann and former Supreme Court President Aharon Barak.

The verbal fisticuffs between the two – like those between Barak and Richard Posner, one of America’s leading jurists — have performed a valuable public service by bringing to the fore a long postponed debate about the nature of the Israeli legal system. No longer can it be claimed that criticism of the Supreme Court is confined to proto-fascist, right-wing thugs. Friedmann is both an Israel Prize laureate in law and a man of the Left.

Just how long this debate has been suppressed can be discerned from the hysteria that has greeted Friedmann’s proposals for reform of the judicial system. In a pre-Pesach interview with Ha’aretz’s Ari Shavit, Barak predicted Friedmann would turn Israel into a “Third World country.” At least he did not threaten to cut off Friedmann’s hand, as did his former colleague on the Court Mishael Cheshin.

In the Ha’aretz interview, Barak accused Friedmann of seeking to dominate the entire legal system. But that is precisely what Barak himself did as Court President. He enforced uniformity of ideology and judicial philosophy throughout the judicial system, and now he seeks to bequeath to his protégé Dorit Beinisch the same power.

My pre-Pesach column “Five-Star Pesach” generated, as expected, a larger than usual number of responses. The issue is a hot-button one for many.

One friend wrote that going away to a hotel allowed him to spend most of his week in the beis medrash, a luxury he would not have had at home, where he would have been the program director for his young children. A number of women described Pesach in a hotel as an opportunity to savor the Chag, rather than feel like slaves shackled to the stove preparing festive meals for their families and guests for eight days. .

Another husband told me how his wife used to present the classical symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder in the weeks leading up to Pesach, which typically left shalom bayis in short supply as they limped into the Chag. Now the family still cleans for Pesach and does bedikas chametz, before heading for a nearby hotel, but they do so without all the bitterness attached.

To all who wrote to explain why the hotel experience helped their ruchnios experience of the Chag, I can only say, “I was not talking about you.” As I already acknowledged, there are plenty of reasons why a family might decide not to stay home for the Chag.

Even before Senator Barack Obama unequivocally denounced Reverend Jeremiah Wright as the loon he is, I was willing to take the senator’s word for the fact that his erstwhile pastor’s rantings about America, the Middle-East, the September 11 attacks, Louis Farrakhan, AIDS and white people do not reflect Mr. Obama’s own feelings.

What pained me then, though, and still does, is the tragic subtext of Pastorgate – that the sort of rank idiocy that was spewed from the pulpit at Chicago’s Trinity Church may not be unusual in churches that cater to African-Americans. Senator Obama’s statement, back when he still sought to preserve some of his pastor’s dignity, was telling. “I can no more disown [Wright],” he said, “than I can disown the black community.” Did he mean to in some way equate the two?

Well, Wright certainly did. On his talk-show vanity tour, he boasted that “This is not an attack on Jeremiah Wright. It is an attack on the black church.” The same sentiment was expressed by Wright’s successor at the church, Reverend Otis Moss 3rd, who said: “You cannot caricature Rev. Wright. This is an attack on the collective black church.” The first assertion, although in a sense Mr. Moss may not have meant, is undoubtedly true; no caricature could convey Wright’s lunacy more vividly than the thing itself. As to the second, we can only hope it is not so.

That the Detroit NAACP – a branch of an organization traditionally empowered by mainstream civil rights advocates, including many religious men and women – saw fit to invite Wright to address its recent forum is not encouraging.

This is the time of year when even the non-kabbalist becomes aware of one of the most important notions in modern kabbalah – the ten sefiros. Every day of sefiras ha-omer, another combination of the seven “lower” sefiros stares out at you from the siddur. You get forty-nine points of contact with the mitzvah, and forty-nine separate opportunities to feel dumb about those two words in the small print in the siddur after each day’s recitation.

Many people are aware that those words not only mean something, but offer real structure and guidance towards the self-improvement that sefirah is all about. People have looked for a long time for a text that doesn’t leave the spiritual climb towards Sinai during these seven weeks so amorphous and uncharted. The person to write such a work would need to be a talmid chacham with a good command of a breadth of sources, including kabbalistic ones, good language skills, and a love for people and sensitivity to their inner dynamics.

Sefiros (the book; TorahLab ISBN 9780981497419) arrived on my doorstep this morning, a gift from my friends at AJOP and the book’s author, my old friend Rabbi Yaacov Haber (writing with Rabbi David Sedley), who possesses all the qualities mentioned above. I couldn’t resist perusing it, and I am enthusiastic about the parts that I’ve seen.

Most of what you will find in English on the sefiros is nonsense (or worse), the product of Kabbalah Center wannabes whose gray matter has been softened by the drivel they write. Some of the omer self-help manuals I’ve seen are well-meaning, but related in no manner of form to the pattern of progress (or more accurately regress) through the sefiros as we find them in the siddur.

Most communal rabbis find that Pesach is the time of year that generates more questions from congregants than any other. This year, amid the usual (important, but easily answered) ‘how do I kasher my oven?’, ‘may I take my regular medication?’ and ‘is product x reliable?’, three questions stood out in my mind, each for different reasons. For light Chol HaMoed reading, I thought that I would share them with the readers of Cross-Currents.

1) The Pesach Shabbos kettle (amusement value)

Two days before Pesach, someone approached me to say that she had decided to boil out her Pesach Shabbos kettle to check that it was working and to clean it ahead of Yom Tov. Having done this, she opened the lid to empty the water and discovered a piece of bread inside it. Yes, you are reading this correctly, she had actually boiled bread in her Pesach kettle.

2) The Pesach utensils (disorganisation award)

This time Tzippi Livni got it exactly right. “Davka because I am not a religious person, I want to preserve something in Tel Aviv that symbolizes the Chag; something in the public square that does not coerce anyone to do anything or refrain from doing anything in the privacy of his home,” she said in a recent discussion of the Chametz Law.

The Chametz Law, which forbids the public display of chametz (leavened products) for the purpose of sale during Pesach, benefits the secular Jewish state, not religious citizens. As an instrument of enforcing compliance with halacha, the law is totally ineffective, and would be counterproductive if it were effective: Many Israeli Jews – 70% of whom do not eat chametz on Pesach, according to a recent Yediot Aharonot poll – would davka do so if the state prohibited it.

Nor is the law for the protection of the sensitivities of religious Jews. There is no prohibition against seeing chametz in someone else’s possession. What does – or should – pain religious Jews is that other Jews feel no connection to the performance of mitzvot, not that they are witness to that fact.

Rather the law serves to remind Israeli Jews that they are members of a people with a very long history and distinctive practices that set it apart from all other peoples of the world. Strengthening national identity, as many secular Israelis have come to recognize, is the key to Israel’s long-term survival. And symbols that have their origin in traditional religious practice – e.g., bans on the sale of pork, Shabbat closure laws, the closing of restaurants on Tisha B’Av – play a role in instilling Jewish national identity.

Funerary orators often begin their remarks by relating how they are at a loss for words to properly express their feelings. I don’t have that problem The thoughts and images cascade without end in reacting to the petirah of my rebbi, Hagaon Rav Alter Henoch Leibowitz, zt”l.

The reason, perhaps, is that I am not in the inner circle. When you are a member of the core group, you have to focus on the expected causes for adulation of a gadol – gadlus in Torah, devotion to the cause, leaving behind many talmidim and institutions, serving as a link to the glory days of pre-War Lita. These were all fully true of the Rosh Yeshiva, and a succession of Torah luminaries, yibadlu lechaim tovim – Rav Shmuel Kamenetsky, shlit”a, the Novominsker Rebbe, shlit”a, Rav Malkiel Kotler, shlit”a - extolled these virtues in their remarks at the levayah.

I left the yeshiva almost thirty years ago for the opposite coast. I’ve been back very few times, and my sons did not (with one brief exception) attend any of the many branches of Chofetz Chaim. I have had much time to look at the yeshiva and the Rosh Yeshiva (the two are really inseperable) without the constraints that come with proximity. It has left me with more to say, rather than less.

Despite my having gone “my own way,” much of what I am (at least the things I would take pride in) is attributable in no small degree to the Rosh Yeshiva – even the fact that I went my own way! The Rosh Yeshiva did not smother people in his personality. He was large enough to allow individuality and even non-conformity, even as he himself believed that rules and details helped the majority stay focused on the chief occupations of yeshiva life. He spoke openly about chinuch and pedagogy (come to think of it, he spoke openly and frequently about many topics that are ignored in other yeshivos), especially as part of the world of mussar in general, and Slabodka in particular. He would tell and retell stories about the uncanny educational abilities of the Alter, giving the credit not to the individual alone, but to the mesorah of mussar he represented from Kelm and before. It behooved an educator to take into account the needs and the talents of each talmid as an individual, and to address and nurture them. This could mean at times that he would refrain from imposing his view on a talmid who needed space, or something a bit out of the ordinary. (I was privileged to be part of a not-so-small chevrah who were all fiercely individualistic, and maintained their identities.)

Bnei Brak collaborates with Hollywood, and the result is a winner!

If preparations for Pesach are draining your energy, take a six minute break and watch this. You won’t be disappointed. Turning up the volume will increase the adrenalin - and the pride.

[Thanks to Michael Eisenberg, Esq., Los Angeles]

What better time to contemplate the state of the Jewish people today than on the eve of our birth as a nation on Pesach? (I shall confine myself to the state of the Jewish people in Eretz Yisrael.)

The immediate external threats to the Jews of Eretz Yisrael — well-armed proxies of the jihadist Iranian state on both our northern and southern borders, the distinct possibility of a Hamas takeover of much of Judea and Samaria as well, and a soon to be nuclear Iran — absorb most of our attention. Yet precisely because of the magnitude of the external threats is the greatest danger facing the Jews of Israel today internal.

The Palestinians have long predicated their strategy on the belief that time is on their side, and that no matter how downtrodden they are today, they will ultimately prevail. Their goal is to wear down the Jews of Eretz Yisrael by making their lives so miserable that they can no longer bear living here.

Nothing better captures the Palestinian game plan than a story that I have told before, related by Palestinian legislator Selah Temari. While imprisoned in an Israeli jail for security offenses, Temari came to the conclusion that Israel was far too powerful to ever destroy. He decided that when he got out of jail he would devote himself to tending his own olive tree and abandon the struggle against Israel. He even began to study Jewish history to gain insight into the perseverance of the Jewish people in the face of so much adversity.

11 bNissan
I have been searching the internet for the prayer to say upon eating bread on Pessah, and I found it by Googling “zachor Michlalah movies.” There you can see/hear the late Reb Yonah Emanuel who was a teenage inmate in Bergen-Belsen during the Passover of 1944 when the prayer over bread was recited. He reads the entire prayer (it is not a bracha) over bread and describes Pessah in that death camp in this 3 minute segment of a longer DVD. The reason for my search: The recent controversy over selling hametz in the public square during Passover in Israel.
I translated the prayer for bread during Passover into English at the end of this posting.

The controversy and court decision (by a national religious judge!) that permits selling bread in Israel during Passover reminded me of two Seder meals sixty-something years ago.

Passover 1943, Konin Concentration Camp

Before describing Pessah of 1943 in the Konin concentration camp in Poland, Rabbi Yehoshua Aronson gives us, in his memoirs, this startling description of a new arrival, one Dr. Hans Knopf.

The Rosh Hayeshiva of Yeshivas Chofetz Chaim, Horav Hagaon Rav Henoch Leibowitz, zecher tzaddik l’vrocha, has passed away. The funeral is scheduled to take place at Yeshivas Chofetz Chaim, 76-01 147th Street in Kew Garden Hills, at 1:30PM on Wednesday.

Rav Leibowitz was a Rosh Yeshiva for over 60 years, inspiring generations of students. This is a tremendous loss for all of Israel.

A symposium on the compatibility of science and belief reminds us of the power of the Seder night.

The Templeton Foundation is committed to supporting rigorous academic exploration of what it calls “spiritual realities,” and is generally G-d friendly, without shying away from hard questions. It’s current “conversation” shows up in full on-line, supported by a two page advertisement in the current issue of Atlantic Monthly.

Hard scientists, soft scientists, philosophers and others weigh in on the topic “Does science make belief in God obsolete?” and the result is predictable. Many of the participants talk past one another, staking out familiar positions while dodging the volleys from the opposition by hiding behind the usual platitudes.

One theme of the anti-theists (אפ”ל) is that science has obviated the need, or even the allowable place, for G-d by answering the questions that generated belief in the first place. Typical is the contribution of Christopher Hitchens, who while certainly not the participant most familiar with science, is such an effective writer that he probably bats cleanup in the lineup of authors who have promoted atheism to the public.

The very word הגדה (Haggadah) conjures up wonderful memories of Sedarim past, reliving the story of the Exodus with family, friends and students. It’s used to refer colloquially to the booklet — a compilation of texts and commentaries — read at the Seder, but the word itself actually contains a wealth of information about the way in which a truly memorable and effective Seder should be conducted. Allow me to share some ideas:

According to Rabbi Tzadok HaKohen, the way to discover the core meaning of a Biblical word is to look at the first time it appears in the Torah. In the case of הגדה, the root word first occurs in the story of Adam and Eve. When God addressed Adam after the Sin, we find the following dialogue:

The Lord God called to Adam and said to Him, ‘Where are you?’ He said, ‘I heard your voice in the Garden and I was afraid because I am naked, so I hid.’ [God] said, ‘Who told (הגיד) you that you are naked? Have you eaten from the tree from which I commanded you not to eat?’ (BeReishis 3:9-11)

Rashi explains that God’s question is to be understood in the following way:

It is not only the Torah’s words that hold multiple layers of meaning. So do those of the Talmudic and Midrashic Sages – even the words of the prayers and rituals they formulated.

Such passages have their p’shat, or straightforward intent. But they also have less obvious layers, like that of remez – or “hinting” – unexpected subtexts that can be revealed by learned, insightful scholars.

One such meaning was mined from the Four Questions that are asked, usually by a child, at the Passover Seder service. The famous questions are actually one, with four examples provided. The overarching query is: Why is this night [of Passover] different from all the other nights [of the year]?

“Night,” however, can mean something deeper than the hours of darkness between afternoon and dawn. In Talmudic literature it can be a metaphor for exile, specifically the periods of history when the Jewish People were, at least superficially, estranged from G-d. The sojourn in Egypt is known as the “Egyptian Exile,” and the years between the destruction of the First Holy Temple in Jerusalem and its rebuilding is the “Babylonian Exile.”

In one of my first posts to Cross-Currents I discussed the pros and cons of attending singles events on Shabbos and Yom Tov. I suggested that Shabbos and Yom Tov need to be ends in themselves and not just means to some other end, even the laudable objective of finding a life-partner. Those who use most Shabbosos as dating opportunities risk depleting their spiritual reserves and robbing their religious lives of transformative power. Interested readers will find the original post here.

In that post, I offered a specific (true) example:

A woman approached me recently for advice about attending a Purim party. She knew that there was only a slim chance of meeting someone suitable there, yet she felt that not going would leave her wracked with guilt. She took my advice and didn’t attend, instead devoting the evening to Purim pursuits: she later mentioned that focusing on the day alone enabled her to experience her most meaningful Purim for years.

Well, I am delighted to report that last Purim turned out to be more remarkable for the woman concerned than any of us could possibly have hoped (I am writing this at her request). Very late that Purim evening, she visited my home to help prepare for the Se’udah (Purim banquet) the next day. While I was reading the Megillah for my wife in another room, she got chatting over the kitchen sink to a fellow who was also planning to celebrate with us the next day.

I will never forget an address by Rabbi Ephraim Wachsman at an Agudath Israel of America convention on the topic “Living a Life of Ruchnios amidst Gashmius.” I had never before heard Rabbi Wachsman, and I practically jumped out of my seat when he thundered: This topic represents a fundamental mistake. There is no ruchnius amidst gashmius. To the extent that a person is living in the world of gashmius he is removed from ruchnius!

I was reminded of those words recently on a recent trip to Los Angeles, where I had a rare opportunity to speak with a rav whose wisdom has always impressed me. In the course of our conversation, he asked to me, “What would you say is the greatest threat to Yiddishkeit today?” I leaned forward eagerly, confident that he would mention one of my favorite subjects. But I must admit that his answer would not have been on my top ten-list.

“Pesach in hotels,” turned out to be the winning answer. And my friend’s central criticism was similar to that of Rabbi Wachsman: the Pesach hotel industry takes what should be one of the ultimate spiritual experiences of every Jew’s life and encases it in a thick wrapper of materialism. Read the advertisements, he told me: “No gebrochts” right next to “24 hour tea bar;” “Daily daf hayomi” next to “Karate, go-carts, and jeeping for the kids.”

“Olympic-size pool,” “state-of-the-art-gym” (to work off all the extra pounds from the non-stop eating), “five-star accommodations” and famous singers are de rigueur for the full Pesach experience. And many throw in exotic locations – Hawaii, Cancun, the Bahamas, and an eighteen-hole golf course. What exercised my friend the most was the way that well-known rabbis, and even roshei yeshiva, are impressed into service in the advertisements, as if to put an imprimatur of ruchnius on the festivities.

by Rabbi Elchonon Oberstein

As we approach the holiday of Pesach, our minds go back to the sedarim of our youth, when we were together with dear ones no longer alive. I have vivid memories of one Passover when my mild mannered father, who had nerves of steel, lost his temper because of something I had learned in yeshiva and repeated at the seder.

The Haggadah tells us “It is this that has stood by our fathers and us. For not only one has risen against us to annihilate us, but in every generation, they rise up to annihilate us.” It was at this point that I remarked that “Halacha hi, b’yadua sheh Eisav sonei et Yaakov,” it is a fact that Esau -the gentiles — hate Yaakov - the Jews.

My father came to Alabama from Tiktin, Poland in 1924 after narrowly escaping death as a youth in war torn Europe. He was put before a firing squad by the Bolsheviks for being outside during a curfew and at the very last second an old man on a mule came by and ordered them to let the boy go. He found a new life as a grocer in Montgomery, Alabama in an all black neighborhood. he had good relations with his customers and with the gentile majority. Jews were a very small and insignificant element in Montgomery.

The late William F. Buckley famously quipped that he’d rather be governed by the first one hundred people in the Boston phone book than by the first one hundred academics on the Harvard faculty roster. Confirmation for Buckley’s bon mot – if such was needed – now comes from a study just published in the journal Science featuring the research findings of two professors, one at Harvard Business School and the other at the University of British Columbia.

According to an article in the Boston Globe, the two were familiar with the many studies showing that, barring extreme poverty, having more money doesn’t translate into being much happier, if at all. A 2006 study in Science summed up decades of research on the matter:

“The belief that high income is associated with good mood is widespread but mostly illusory. People with above-average income . . . are barely happier than others in moment-to-moment experience, tend to be more tense, and do not spend more time in particularly enjoyable activities. . . . The effect
of income on life satisfaction seems to be transient.”

In fact, the researchers contended, their data demonstrated that the more money people have, the less likely they are to spend time doing certain things that are enjoyable.

What do Rav Isser Zalman Meltzer, Artscroll, and the RCA all have in common? They figured out that outsourcing was the key to intelligibility.

Rav Isser Zalman gave a weekly shiur, for which he would intensely prepare. He was a stickler for clarity – end users of Even HaAzel are all the better for it. His touchstone of clarity was the projected shiur’s comprehensibility to someone who was not “holding” in that area of study. So each week before offering the shiur to his students, he tried it out first on his wife! At least at one point in time, Artscroll is rumored to have employed the same thinking. One of the final editors of the Gemara was – by design – a woman. She was chosen because she was bright, but had not learned in Brisk for fifteen years. The thinking was that if the commentary really succeeded, she should be able to follow the discussion.

Tradition Magazine has taken outsourcing a step further, sending decades of content to India (where else?) to parse articles for internal subject subheadings to help in the online search function.

The Torah world is continuously enriched by projects that put vast amounts of material within the grasp of every person, especially material that is not available in every beis medrash. The really sophisticated student has found some way to access the digital mega-library of Otzar HeChochmah; others do with more modest contributions. One of these is Tradition, the quarterly of the Rabbinical Council of America, whose archives are now accessible I wish I could report that access is free, but you still need to pay $2 an article unless you are a subscriber. Still, the price is a bargain relative to getting in a car and driving cross-town to borrow a back issue from a friend.

My wife took one look at an advertisement in B’nai B’rith Magazine, and said “I see a post in your future.” She was right. At first, I was tempted to offer the following as if such an ad had actually appeared in the Jewish Observer. But given the level of careful thought and analysis which characterizes much of what is written on the Internet these days, I thought the likelihood that someone would half-read my post and go off on an inflammatory rant about the evil “ultra-Orthodox” who actually wrote this sort of book was entirely too high. So let’s understand from the beginning that the following has, to my knowledge, never happened. At least, not from those who favor traditional Judaism.

Imagine, for a moment, an advertisement in the august pages of the Jewish Observer, promoting a book aiming to convince you of the authenticity of traditional Judaism. There are, of course, any number of such books, discussing various aspects of the topic from a number of philosophical angles. But instead of laying out a series of arguments about why traditional Judaism is good, this book is entirely devoted to the idea that “liberal” Judaism is evil and wrong.

Imagine that the book is titled “Bondage of the Mind,” and the subtitle is “How Liberal Judaism Perverts the Torah and Enslaves the Jewish Soul — Toward a Better Understanding of the Religious Experience.” The ad calls the book “a powerful new message about truth and freedom,” and invites yeshiva and seminary students to participate in a $30,000 essay contest, discussing the following topic:

In his new book, R.D. Gold takes the following position: The doctrines of Reform Judaism — and, by extension, the doctrines of all liberal “denominations” of Judaism — are false. Therefore, it makes no sense for an individual to abandon his or her Jewish soul to the foolish and temporal pleasures of secular Western living and its demonstrably false promises of a happier and more satisfying life.