Here is the link to Wendy Shalit’s insightful essay in the New York Times Book Review about the depiction of charedim in contemporary fiction.

I had posted it here, but concerns have been expressed by loyal readers that the Times, having tolerated this dissenting pro-charedi voice, might just be grumpy enough to complain about the piece being posted on C-C.

Wendy reveals the faux-insider phenomenon that animates much of recent mass-market fiction set in charedi society and why it seems so often hostile. Wendy talks about insiders, outsiders and outsiders who pretend to be insiders. While she mentions some notable exceptions to the witheringly hostile treatment of charedim in fiction (these exceptions being primarily the work of recent baalei tshuva), it points I think to another inside/outside phenomenon - FFBs (or, at least CFBs) are far less likely to write popular fiction. Is it narrowness? guardedness? tznius?

In any case, Wendy’s is a perspective well worth reading.

My posting on the Slifkin matter has generated thoughtful comments that raise significant questions. I would like to elaborate on what I wrote previously and also indicate that a somewhat extended discussion of my views on book banning was included in the January 2003 issue of the RJJ Newsletter. It is available on my website established by wonderful son - www.mschick.blogspot.com. With respect to the current matter:

1. Orthodox Jews are obligated to be obedient to Torah authority. This obligation obviously pertains to situations where there is disagreement with what Torah authorities are mandating. As a guide, we have the poignant incident involving Rabban Gamliel and Rebi Yehoshua that is recounted in Rosh Hashanah, Mishnah 2:9. If I were instructed by Torah authorities – specifically persons who have condemned Slifkin’s writings – to withdraw what I have written on the subject, I would do so without hesitation. I would obey because obedience is an essential condition of our religious commitment.

2. Obedience does not necessarily negate our ability to express an opinion. I believe that we have a significant zone of freedom, a belief that should be evident from what I have written over a great number of years. Our thought processes are not reduced to sycophantic expressions. Our status as Orthodox Jews does not carry with it an obliteration of thought. There are limits, of course, one obvious one being that we are not free to challenge halacha. Another limit is the obedience referred to in point 1.

3. Even when obedience is required, there may be occasions when it is acceptable to maintain one’s previous position, the proviso being that whether in word or deed, maintenance of a previous position does not beget action that is contrary to the obligation of obedience. There is, in other words, a certain latency to some views that are being abandoned. I know of no formula that can guide us in these matters. It may be useful to reflect on the follow-up to the Rabban Gamliel and Rebi Yehoshua story that is presented in Berachos 27b.

January 30, 2005

ESSAY

The Observant Reader

By WENDY SHALIT

I have not read any of Rabbi Nosson Slifkin’s books but if I had, I doubt that I would be competent to judge the validity of his science or, for that matter, his hashkafah. I have looked at the overly long defenses of his work that he has posted. Whatever one thinks of his writings, the ban issued against his work is inappropriate and wrongful. Much the same can be said about several other celebrated recent condemnations of books, specifically including Rabbi Nosson Kaminetsky’s controversial works. There should be a more balanced and appropriate way of expressing disagreement with writers who are certainly shomere torah v’mitzvos without resorting to cherems and the like. In the present period, bans are counterproductive and not merely because they are likely to generate interest in the works that are being banned. More importantly, they turn off people whom we want to attract and others whom we want to keep. It is no secret that the kiruv movement is not what it used to be, primarily for reasons that arise from the openness of contemporary life and yet it is obvious that resorting to cherems and bans do not help the cause. It is also obvious that the outflow away from Orthodoxy is greater than the numbers whom we are attracting via kiruv. The condemnation of Rabbi Slifkin’s work and other works by Orthodox Jews has the collateral effect of turning people away from our religion.

We may not be able to do all that we want on the kiruv rechokim front, but we can do a better job in not being m’rachek karovim.

The other day I promised to write a 300-page book about the Slifkin business. Chapter 1 explained why I have not yet written it and probably never will. However, I will try to write at least a small part of the unfinishable book.

This is Chapter 2.

Today’s lesson, friends, is about one of the questions I posed on Monday: What is the difference between the Yated Ne’eman and the NY Times?

One of those papers is a chareidi newspaper published in Jerusalem and New York. The other could be called the ultimate anti-chareidi paper, although for such a behemoth, chareidim are just barely noticeable mosquitoes, to be flicked away with a finger.

…. Would the Lord the giftie give us
to see ourselves as others see us….
-Robert Burns

The resurgence of Orthodox Judaism - from down for the count to the most dynamic sector of Jewish life - calls for stock-taking. Here is a faithful paraphrase of the perspective recently shared with me by a highly intelligent baal-teshuva:

My seriously Jewish friends and I are in a state of confusion about where we belong in Jewish life. Reform is too far gone for my taste, and the Conservatives are wishy-washy. That leaves only the Orthodox, but the two major groupings in Orthodoxy -the Modern Orthodox/Centrists and the yeshiva/haredi world - both make me uncomfortable.

Let’s look at the M.O. first. Forgive my simplifications, but I am sharing broad impressions with you.

JB: Daniel Pipes ventures into unknown terrain in today’s New York Sun. Gets most of it right, some of it wrong - but generally is correct that the Jewish political demographic is changing rapidly.
————

The Future of Judaism
BY DANIEL PIPES
January 25, 2005

Until the 18th century, there was basically only one kind of Judaism, that which is now called Orthodox. It meant living by the religion’s 613 laws, and doing so suffused Jews’ lives with their faith. Then, starting with the thinker Baruch Spinoza (1632-77) and moving briskly during the Haskala, or enlightenment, from the late 18th century, Jews developed a wide variety of alternate interpretations of their religion, most of which diminished the role of faith in their lives and led to a concomitant reduction in Jewish affiliation.

These alternatives and other developments, in particular the Holocaust, caused the ranks of the Orthodox to be reduced to a small minority. Their percentage of the total world Jewish population reached a nadir in the post-World War II era, when it declined to about 5%.

Chapter One: Why I haven’t written it yet

Every day someone forwards me another little dig from the blogosphere about the conspicuous silence of Cross-Currents regarding the Slifkin business. The writers assume that we contributors must be under a Ban of Squelch forbidding all discussion of this dicey yet juicy subject.

In fact, the case is just the opposite: we are under pressure to write SOMETHING, and write it NOW. Some people can’t write a word under pressure. Me, I’m one of those people who can easily write all too MANY words–but they aren’t any good. When I got up to page nine of my Slifkin Opus, I began to sense that my readers might not want to read QUITE that much. Besides, the more I write, the more I write stuff that is repetitive, dull, banal, and obvious. The introduction alone is four pages long.

If you don’t believe me that I’ve written pages and pages (mostly drivel), send me an email, I’ll be happy to send you all nine pages.

The misplaced priorities of the general Jewish community that David Klinghoffer bemoans in his Disputation are sadly relevant to what is going on in Eretz Israel. In preparation for a lecture on critical reading of newspapers to a group of haredi teachers, I bought 10 different Israeli papers on Tuesday, Rosh Hodesh Shvat (Jewish new month, Jan.11) to compare how each paper treated the three top stories of that date. Here were the three top stories. a) The Hamodia haredi paper had front and back page coverage of a massive Tel Aviv prayer rally for the sanctity of Shabbat; six months in the planning, it was attended by 32,000 including rabbis from the entire Orthodox spectrum. b) The National Religious Hazofe featured a religious Zionist Rosh Hodesh eve demonstration in front of the Knesset, where 20,000 rallied against disengagement from Gaza. c) The secular Jerusalem Post and the NYTimes wannabe Haaretz mentioned these two rallies in small articles in their back pages. Their big, front-page stories, including color photos, were focused on what they touted as the forward-looking decision by the Israel Supreme Court in the case of

Although I am neither a lawyer nor a journalist, I’ve worked pretty extensively in and around the worlds of lawyering and journalism. A common element to both fields is the existence of specialized rules meant to facilitate each profession. These rules are known respectively as legal ethics and journalistic ethics. In my mind, however, I’ve come to think of them not as ethics all, but as hyphen-ethics or, simply -ethics. Yes, I know there aren’t hyphens in either; that’s just the way I think of them.

A number of readers took me to task for yesterday’s post in which I quoted the Jerusalem police spokesman’s description of the ethnic background of the youths involved in an altercation with an Armenian priest.

Those readers were correct. Though I was “only” quoting the police spokesman, and though I was — as one ardent defender noted — only trying to buttress my case that those involved were not, as Maariv had described them, “four chareidi yeshiva bochurim,” the quotation was extraneous and offensive.

My guess is that blogging provides rich opportunities to make mistakes in public.

THE DISPUTATION: Abdicating Our Priestly Duties

By David Klinghoffer

January 21, 2005

It’s tempting to let last week’s Prince Harry Nazi-uniform episode pass from memory as a moment of meaningless comedy. Tempting but wrong, and not for the reason you may think.

Someone pointed out to me that Mikey Butler’s first yahrtzeit was about this time — 3 Shevat was Jan. 13 this year (he passed away on Jan. 26, 2004). He was, according to his doctors, not supposed to survive infancy. The remainder of his twenty-four years were miracles.

Mikey had cystic fibrosis — a genetic ailment that kept him on large doses of medications, hooked to an oxygen tank, and which eventually led to his untimely passing. Yet with these limitations, he accomplished and grew in ways that those without such restrictions could envy.

Personally, I only met him a few times — always with oxygen in tow. But he was happy, vibrant, and giving. Except for that narrow oxygen line, you didn’t get the impression that he was carrying a fatal condition. To the contrary, he gave off life. He had a love of other people and a love of G-d that was obvious and quickly shared. And others recognized it — not only did he attend Yeshiva University and pursue his Torah studies while gaining his degree, he became Vice President of the Student Council. He was active in NCSY, and gave motivational talks to Jewish youth.

Jonathan Rosenblum wrote more about him, in an essay called Mikey’s Song. May Mikey be remembered for a blessing.

A few weeks ago, I opined that a single incident of a national religious boy spitting on an Armenian priest in the Old City of Jerusalem did not warrant the Anti-Defamation League’s call upon the Israeli Chief Rabbinate to issue a public apology to the Armenian Church. That post also noted that the newspapers had incorrectly described the teenager in question as ultra-Orthodox, i.e., chareidi.

Whatever the merits of my position, I was nevertheless embarrassed when not long afterwards there was another incident involving this time four “chareidi yeshiva students” and an Armenian priest.

I called Avishai Ben-Chaim, Maariv’s reporter on the chareidi world, and asked him whether he knew what evidence his fellow reporters had for identifying the four teenagers in question as chareidim. He told me that he would look into it and get back to me.

As I had suspected, the description was a pure assumption on the part of the reporters, unsupported by any evidence. Avishai also spoke to the Jerusalem District police spokesman, who said there was no information to identify the four as yeshiva students, chareidi or otherwise. All he knew is that they were from outside Jerusalem and had “Mizrachi” sounding names.

More than thirty years ago, the great literary critic Lionel Trilling published a priceless little volume called Sincerity and Authenticity, in which he contrasted two cultural ideals: the modern ideal of authenticity and a more traditional ideal of sincerity. According to the latter, a man’s life is basically a work of art, and he himself is the artist giving shape to that life. According to the former ideal, a man is nothing more than the sum of his many impulses, and the purpose of his life is to explore each of these competing and contradictory impulses, rather than attempting to give form to his life in light of some overarching principles and goals.

What does this distinction have to do with the tsunami?

Dear Prof. Kamenetz,

Thank you for your thoughtful comments.

Indeed, I had read only Jeff Jacoby’s briefer citation of your remarks, not the fuller version. Having now read it, I am not sure that I would say anything different.

There is much that you say that I fully agree with. At other points, I am not so sure.

Could it be that after too many years of sending out the message that basic Torah education at the elementary and high school levels is not a community responsibility or tzedakah priority, Torah leaders are coming to realize that yeshivas and day schools, as well as their faculty, are suffering and a new message advocating support for our most vital institutions needs to be sent out?

This is an issue that I have trumpeted for far longer than I care to recollect here. The exercise has been akin to knocking one’s head into a stone wall. I am frustrated and I am angry because I know who is being hurt, including the many for whom no yeshiva or day school chinuch is available.

But now at the Agudah convention, both the Novominsker Rebbe and Professor Aaron Twerski picked up the theme, with the latter following up with an impassioned article in the latest Jewish Observer. He asks that “yeshivas be put at the top of our agenda” and that “the next Agudath Israel convention be dedicated to the problems of our yeshivas.” It’s startling, even scary, that the Torah world needs to be told that yeshivas – and Professor Twerski makes it clear that he is referring to basic chinuch – need to be put at the top of our agenda.

We should be thankful for this progress, yet we are a long way off from reversing a dangerous trend which inadvertently has promoted the wrongful view that yeshivas are a consumer product and therefore the responsibility of parents who are the consumer. So long as Torah leaders send out an endless stream of communications promoting chesed and other causes which they disregard basic Torah chinuch – just look at the mail we get or the weekly Yated – it is unlikely that there will be much improvement. Right now, many yeshivas and day schools are in trouble and contributions continue to decline.

Here [with thanks to Shira Schmidt] are the two main things wrong with Orthodoxy:

1. It is ossified, petrified, will not acknowledge new information, scientific discoveries or social changes, refuses to change with the times.
2. It is hypocritical, since it changes constantly and yet claims not to change. It accuses Reform and Conservative of playing fast and loose with tradition, yet does the exact same thing itself. It has evolved so far from what it was originally that a Second Temple Jew would not recognize it as Judaism — heck, a 19th century shtetl Jew would not recognize it! — yet criticizes the heterodox movements for evolving in just the same way. Just because they have stepped up the pace of evolution a bit, Orthodoxy hypocritically accuses them of being inauthentic.

Actually, there are elements of truth to both of these images of Orthodoxy. Its combination of resistance to change and flexibility within certain parameters is what has given Judaism its longevity — 3000 years and counting.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote that I felt ambivalent about making a party for my daughter’s bas mitzva, because the very idea of a bas mitzva party was a Reform innovation. I was taken to task for denigrating Reform when we Jews need unity in the face of common enemies.

So then I said,

In the wake of British Prince Harry’s poor choice of costume, a host of condemnations have poured in from around the globe. This began at home, where the Sun Newspaper (England’s largest) reacted with “Harry the Nazi.”

I agree, of course, that Harry should have thought twice, and his advisers should have as well. But it seemed obvious that especially given his own intent to enter the British army, and thus his attention towards military protocol, his outfit with a half-open shirt wasn’t intended to honor the Third Reich.

But more to the point, I’m not sure why so many Jewish spokespersons pushed to be among the most prominent critics. As already said, condemnations were pouring in from around the world. We don’t need to antagonize the person who is fourth in line for the Crown of the British Empire over this admittedly dumb choice. Our Sages caution us to be careful with our words, and we could afford to have him as a friend.

Many, many people in the blogosphere have challenged Cross-currents to comment on the letter of the Roshei Yeshiva, shlit”a, regarding Nosson Slifkin’s books.

The challenge, in my opinion, is inappropriate. Cross-currents, at least in the mind of this blogger, should be looked to as a place in which Orthodox thinkers can carefully and creatively use their Torah knowledge to cast a different light upon timely issues. It is not a place for debating hot gossip, reporting Jewish news item, or airing complaints about the community – however legitimate they may be. There are other forums for that. We hope that our readers will understand the wisdom of attempting this focus, and not expect Cross-currents to treat every news item, particularly if there is nothing novel to say.

This issue may be different. There are many stakeholders in clarifying the relationship between Torah and science. So many people have desperately voiced their concern as to whether any figures within the Torah community will weigh in with a position different from that expressed in the letter.

The senior bloggers of Cross-currents come from, and represent, a wide diversity of backgrounds within the Torah world. Many have not yet examined the issues well enough to have formulated an opinion. It is probable that by the time they finish, the ten bloggers will be of ten different minds.

Christian Evangelicals Launch Daily Western Wall Vigil

Shawn Landres wrote in to criticize the piece about media silence in the face of certain Muslim countries’ rejection of Jewish/Israeli aid for tsunami victims. I thought he missed the point, so didn’t post it - but as he seems pretty agitated and commented a second time, I thought I’d throw it up here together with my reaction to see whether people think the truth lies with him, with me, with neither.

Mr. Landres writes:

Apparently I need to repeat myself. It’s not always about the Jews. It’s not always about Israel. Give me a break. This catastrophe was not about the Jews!!! It’s about the 150,000+ victims and countless survivors who are suffering unbelievably.

Why do you need to repeat yourself? You made your point, but it was beside the point of the piece - which, imho, you completely missed.

PLEASE DAVEN FOR ESTHER MALKA BAS SARAH

I’m at the Emergency Room. I look around. Everyone should come here, I think, to remember how insignificant the imperatives of life can become in the blink of an eye. In that respect, it’s always a tsunami here.

But, incongruously, with the consciousness of vulnerability comes a vague and undeniable sense of well-being. Relative to the patients here, I feel, thank G-d, healthy and strong and young. It’s not just well-being, I’m feeling, I realize - it’s a somehat perverse feeling of superiority. I’m upright - I feel tall - and I’m dressed well, and they are in various stages of undignified undress, flimsy hospital gowns riding up to expose unhealthy, slack, bruised, ancient flesh, splayed out on gurneys, lining the halls because the rooms are full. I try to avert my eyes and discipline my thoughts.

I am here because my grandmother, Esther Malka bas Sarah, is here.

A reader writes:

I always find it somewhat hypocritical when Chareidi apologists’talk critically about the “nanny state” when so much Cholov Yisroel milk is paid for with WIC…

Silly ad hominem swipe. When and how did I become a “Chareidi apologist”? I guess I’m honored on the one hand - since one man’s apologist is another’s philosopher, thinker, spokesman, representative, whatever - but flummoxed on the other, because I don’t represent anyone’s POV but my own.

Anyway, my thoughts on the subject are that there is way too much reliance on government dollars in some Charedi communities. I also think that the gov’t should stop treating our kids’ education as less valuable than anyone else’s and that parents should have complete and unfettered school choice and tuition tax credits.

Lost in the flare-up over precisely what the Catholic paper wrote or meant to write, is the deafening silence everywhere else:

J’ACCUSE..! Isralert.com source: subscriber/commentator Mike Levine
===============================================================

I, Mike Levine, citizen of Israel and the United States, accuse you, NY Times, LA Times, Boston Globe, Denver Post, Atlanta Constitution, CNN, Times of London, and thousands of other newspapers and TV networks worldwide.

I accuse you of gross bias against, and naked hatred towards the Jewish state of Israel.