A few additional points following up on my last post:

1) Ms. Horowitz’ statement is by no means unique in today’s Jewish world. Come and hear, as they say, what Stephen Fried writes in the prologue to his recent, well-selling non-fiction work The New Rabbi: A Congregation Searches for Its Leader (it was one of the Publisher’s Weekly Best Religion Books in 2002). But first, sit down, on a firm surface, not too far off the ground. Now, I quote: “While its different branches have slightly different theology and observance, Judaism does not dictate belief. Its timeless appeal is as a religion of questions, not answers.”

Are you still there?

Note, please, that he refers to all of Judaism’s “different branches” including, presumably, Orthodoxy. Horowitz, too, in her one-sentence precis of Jewish theology presumably is being inclusive of Orthodoxy (I don’t believe our marginalization is that advanced just yet). Even if we were to say that by their actions the heterodox movements have somehow led the utterly uninformed to believe that the former don’t regard faith as essential, can the same possibly be said of the Orthodox? And do Judaism’s “different branches” truly have only “slightly different theology and observance” from each other?

To an extent kiruv (Jewish outreach) requires a suspension of reality. This is not necessarily a bad thing because from a religious Jewish standpoint, the reality of American life is harsh. The many good people who engage in kiruv blot out circumstances that suggest that their efforts are akin to a steady uphill climb. We should admire them all the more because of what they have accomplished.

As I point out in my latest Jewish Week column, we are in the second generation of mass intermarriage. In most situations, the consequences of intermarriage are not reversible. It is certainly true that the impact of intermarriage is cumulative, so that with the passage of time, halachic ties to the Jewish people are weakened and this is also true of social ties. Put otherwise, with each passing year, the percentage of those who are identified as American Jews who are not halachic Jews inevitably goes up.

Our kiruv activities appear to be oblivious to this truth. Far more than we may realize, kiruv is conducted today much the same as it was conducted a generation ago. For all of the efforts, real or imagined, to restrict kiruv to halachic Jews, the statistics of American Jewish life suggest that this is not possible. I am not suggesting that we abandon kiruv; I am suggesting that we be more cognizant to what is happening.

Interestingly, as we continue to reach out to those who are quite distant from religious life, we continue to do far too little to retain the many of a religious background who are falling away. One possible explanation is that kiruv efforts get more support and are more appreciated than inreach efforts.

Dostoevsky used to say that Russians imbibe anti-Semitism with their mothers’ milk.

Despite the terrible things it portends for our brethren in the FSU, I was somewhat underwhelmed by the news that the RussiState Prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation against Kitzur Shulchan an Aruch (an abbreviated form of the Code of Jewish Law), to determine whether it was racist and anti-Russian. The move came in response to a letter from 500 Russian public figures calling for the outlawing of the Jewish religion and closing of all Jewish organizations. Nothing all that unexpected there.

The news will make many uncomfortable, though, beyond the implications for Jews in other parts of the globe. I’m not supposed to say why, but I will anyway. There are no secrets in the age of the Internet.

Everyone knows that there are indeed items here and there in various texts that we would not like to see brought to the attention of our non-Jewish neighbors on network TV. They make us nervous. How do we explain them when we are put on the spot?

Following is a letter of mine appearing in this week’s Forward (although not online) responding to an opinion piece there some weeks back by social psychologist Bethamie Horowitz. Some of the data contained in her essay, although not groundbreaking, are quite disturbing; perhaps I’ll comment on those at some point. This letter focuses on her view of the role of belief in Judaism. The mere fact that her assertion appears, unchallenged, in a place of prominence in a serious Jewish publication is highly instructive; that, too, will wait for another day.

Opinion columnist Bethamie Horowitz describes a recent Notre Dame retreat for Catholic and Jewish educators at which the Catholic teachers exhibited “fluency in speaking about their faith and its meaning in their work,” while the Jewish ones found motivation in “feelings of belonging to the Jewish people,” but not in faith and the divine.

The question, of course, is: why? Ms. Horowitz suggests two responses, and it is here that she moves, unannounced, from the role of social scientist to that of theologian, with disappointing results.

For one, she speculates, talk of faith remains difficult only 60 years after the Holocaust. Undoubtedly, the Shoah was a watershed in the religious lives of most, if not all, survivors; for some, it shook or eradicated their faith, others emerged with their commitment strengthened.

Several weeks ago, I wrote that the Conservative Movement’s Rabbi Susan Grossman had mischaracterized Judaism’s understanding of when life begins, and the Jewish position on abortion, in an opinion piece in the Baltimore Jewish Times. This week, Rabbi Avi Shafran of Agudath Israel weighs in on this subject in the same journal.

While I emphasized her position on the beginning of life, Rabbi Shafran contradicted her more forcefully on the subject of abortion itself:

Abortion is expressly forbidden by halachah. There are different opinions about the nature and gravity of the prohibition of killing of a fetus, but no accepted halachic authority views feticide as a matter of personal “choice” subject to any individual’s will. Like most forbidden acts, abortion can become permitted, even required, in certain circumstances. Such circumstances include when a continued pregnancy threatens the life of a Jewish mother-to-be.

And whereis I brought up the opinions of Peter Singer to counter-balance her vision of the anti-abortion lobby, Rabbi Shafran chose to more directly confront her misstatements on that issue as well:

Only anti-Semites believe that Jews control the world. Yet anti-Semitism itself has choked and strangled the progress of nations. Writing in the June issue of Commentary, Paul Johnson calls anti-Semitism an irrational disease that brought monumental harm to those who practiced it.

Many of our readers will consider Johnson (History of the Jews, Modern Times, Intellectuals, among others) the greatest and most readable of comtemporary historians. A non-Jew, he waxes so rhapsodic at the beginning and end of his volume on the Jews that kiruv organizations have been known to use wholesale quotations from him to most perfectly frame the contribution of Jews to world society.

Most of our readers can anticipate the contradictions that Johnson points to that make anti-Semitism different from other forms of racism – the fact, for example, that in neighboring countries, Jews were accused of and demonized for traits of opposing polarity. Johnson’s art in this piece is in providing the less common insights. When Spain expelled its Jews, it not only lost some of its most talented to the Protestant Netherlands (and ultimately, to America), but it lost the ability to manage the riches it imported from its conquest of the New World. The silver of the conquistadors wound up bankrupting Spain, rather than enriching it, because it lacked the financial know-how that its expelled Jews possessed. The turmoil that the Dreyfus trial brought upon France weakened her enough to become easy prey to Germany in two World Wars. Hitler’s two greatest blunders – attacking Russia and declaring war on the US – were motivated in great part by his designs to expand his death machine to other parts of the globe. The apparatus installed by Czarist police to persecute Russian Jews became the model to enslave all the Soviet peoples under Stalin.

Johnson sees a connection between old and new anti-Semitism and the current intellectual disease of Europe – demonizing America as the source of all evil, while remaining blind to the corruption within. He does not attempt to explain anti-Semitism itself. We insiders will have no problem seeing the wisdom of the medrash which links the word Sinai with sinah – hatred. Hatred of Jews was assured by the giving of the Torah to the Jewish people. The message within that Torah was resisted by some societies with every fiber of their being, and inspired jealousy in others.

On a northbound train today, the passenger who sat down next to me turned out to be a Reconstructionist Rabbi, a senior staff member of the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation. We shared the opportunity to discuss organizational development, structures and leadership of modern Jewish movements, and, eventually, religion. He is obviously both sincere and devoted to Judaism and Jewish education, and was familiar with Torah.org.

I asked him how he decided to become a Rabbi. He said that his family was secular but joined a Conservative synagogue (where one of the early Reconstructionist thinkers was a mentor), and he attended a Conservative after-school program through his high school years. Later, he was learning advanced Tai Chi when his instructor said to him, “you have to return to your roots!” And he realized that he hadn’t “given religion a chance.”

Now anyone who has heard stories of Baalei Teshuvah, returnees to observant Judaism, or has read a book such as Rabbi Akiva Tatz’s Anatomy of a Search, can tell you that similar inspirational comments have motivated many others as well. So after discussing why he chose Reconstructionism over the Conservative movement, I asked him why not Orthodoxy. Again I got a sincere answer: he didn’t believe that the Torah, Written and Oral, were given to Moshe at Sinai. This being the case, Orthodoxy wasn’t an option.

In between question and answer, though, the Rabbi had a query of his own. The Chinese apparantly have a custom that before a large banquet, the hostess will address the group — and apologize for being unable to serve them food! Then, of course, she proceeds to do exactly what she said she couldn’t. So he wanted to know if, in fact, when the Orthodox claim to believe that the Torah was given to Moshe at Sinai, this is not a similar declaration, dictated by culture but not genuinely believed.

Sometimes, we can be our own worst enemies. And at other times, we can help our enemies when they are getting their just desserts — not quite as bad as “our own worst enemies,” but assuredly not beneficial.

Last week I posted that the US District Attorney is, once again, suing the Village of Airmont for anti-religious bias, specifically for keeping out Orthodox Jews.

Some of the responses — from Orthodox readers, mind you — were enlightening. “We ought not pretend that these people have no reason to be upset,” wrote Zev. “There is substantial merit to the claims of Airmont residents,” said Ari.

Both Zev and Ari appear to be good, thoughtful guys — there’s a certain subset of the Orthodox community that likes to snipe about what other Orthodox Jews who aren’t quite like them do, like in every society, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. Rather, along with some genuine dislike for what some of the Monsey neighborhoods look like, there’s a desire not to see bias that goes beyond objective truth. And that’s a mistake.

DovBear wrote:

“Why kill a convicted murderer if there is a chance new evidence might one day exonerate him,”

I don’t think a murderer should be executed unless his guilt is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. Nowadays, with DNA testing and other technological means, it is possible to prove guilt to a 100% degree of certainty.

However, I suspect that your “what if they get the wrong man?” argument is a red herring. In my experience, most liberals oppose the death penalty. Period.

One springtime ritual in many homes finds Mom bringing out the summer clothing bins and selecting the short pants that her kids will be wearing over the coming summer months. Here then, as the weather turns warm, are some Selected Shorts:

Hasidim Too, But What Are They?

JTA, May 15 - Conservative clergyman Lawrence Troster was the only Jew invited to attend the modestly-named International Conference on Environment, Peace and the Dialogue Among Civilizations and Cultures, held recently in Teheran under the joint sponsorship of the UN and the Islamic Republic of Iran.

But Troster’s opportunity to regale the folks back home in Jersey about being the solitary Yiddel there was spoiled when he spotted “two Chasidim there, fresh from a meeting with the country’s president, Mohammad Khatami. He quickly realized that the two were members of the anti-Zionist Satmar sect. ‘They weren’t participating in the conference,’ Troster said, ‘but they were welcome because they were anti-Zionist. It was the last place I expected to see a Chasid, but you never know who you are going to run into at these things.’ ”

Presumably, Troster’s statement that the two “were welcome because they were anti-Zionist” was a conjecture from afar on his part, unless we improbably assume that, upon sighting his Jewish brethren, he ran over to warmly greet them or, perhaps, invite them to join him in a mezuman (threesome for Grace After Meals).

Rav Shamshon Raphael Hirsch’s famous essay on teaching about science remains, as most of our readers know, at the center of an ongoing controversy. That controversy focuses on the final argument of the essay, concerning material in the Talmud that seems to conflict with contemporary scientific thinking. What too many people have forgotten is just how carefully Rav Hirsch crafted his advice– how many steps he went through before arriving at his conclusion as the final argument to be used when all else failed.

He strongly advocates not hiding from any part of science, but inoculating students against conflict by first and foremost teaching them about how science works. What are its assumptions? Just what is scientific truth? What are the roles of probability and extrapolation? What are the strengths – and weaknesses of scientific method? I have successfully used this essay with bright high school students to show them just how and why scientific method – while the best application of human rational thought that I am aware of – can sometimes fall short of the goal. More importantly, they learn how the method can be abused – as can most things in life – in the hands of the unscrupulous or the agenda-driven. The rest of this piece is a behind-the-scenes look at agenda-driven science, drawn from a recent high-profile case.

[UPDATE: The memo mentioned below is now available for download.]

My son forwarded to me a memo he received from Edward Sisson, a partner in his law firm. Mr. Sisson had come under attack for devoting some of his pro bono time to assisting a group that recently appeared before the Kansas Board of Education in an effort to include “intelligent design (ID)” in the curriculum. Mr. Sisson (whom I thank for giving me permission to share his memo with our readers), an MIT grad himself, wrote convincingly about the case for reconsidering Darwinian orthodoxy. For those who have not read up on ID as much as they should (briefly, ID people do not reject the evidence for evolution, but dismiss on scientific grounds the likelihood that it could have taken place without the guidance of a higher intelligence), the memo is worth reading in its entirety.

I have a hard time separating soul from mind.–Lisa
Terri Schiavo’s body once had belonged to a person, but it hadn’t for a long time before she stopped breathing –Murky
If I had the choice as I lay in a hospital bed, and knew that either people could keep on pouring money into me when I would never get better, or that money could go to someone else who could then live/ recover- would I not chooose to allow the money to go to someone else? –Chana

In Judaism, the soul is not the same thing as the mind. As long as a person is alive, he has a neshama. His neshama existed before he was born and will continue to exist after it leaves his body. His essential self is his neshama, not his body. Even a newborn baby who cannot think or speak, or an elderly person in the final stages of Alzheimer’s disease, still has a neshama. It is true that the neshama makes thought and speech possible, but without thought and speech, the neshama is still present as long as the person is alive.

The neshama has a mission to fulfill, and as long as G-d has not taken that soul, it still has a mission in this world. The person may be basically a tzaddik who may have had only a few sins, and his neshama may need further refinement through suffering in this world, so that all his sins will be atoned here and he will not have to go to Gehenom. Or he may not be suffering here at all — he may be completely unconscious — but his neshama enjoys tikun by virtue of the fact that it elicits chessed and prayers from others.

As long as G-d thinks that soul still has a mission here on earth, we dare not say differently. As for the money spent to keep a person alive, woe betide a society where purely material considerations determine who will live and who will die.

If there were but one slice of bread and you had to choose whether to keep Reuven or Shimon alive, perhaps you could say, give it to the person most likely to survive. But Baruch Hashem we live in an affluent society where such triage is not necessary. Keeping elderly, comatose and handicapped people alive does not cause the death of younger, healthier patients. Our resources may not be infinite, but we are certainly the wealthiest nation that ever existed.

On May 18 (10 Iyyar) I wrote about Generalizations and Stereotypes of Muslims. The following comment arrived from my neighbor, the former British barrister who made the original comments that so upset me. It deserves its own entry; my own comments follow.

Shira Schmidt telephoned me, and told me of this blog. She wanted me to read the comments. I confess it. I am the one who made the comments that so angered Shira.

It is true that not all Muslims behave like barbarians. However, the discussion [I had with Shira and others] took place in the context of talk about the current Middle East situation. I said that there could not be peace for at least a generation, given the nature of education in the Arab world, and the success of the educators and their rulers in inculcating a culture of hatred for, and mindless brutality towards, Jews.

We all saw, and were horrified by,

I wrote about Terri Schiavo while she was dying. Today the autopsy report came out. Todd Schnitt, a local radio talk show host here in Miami, was among many in the commentariat who crowed that the autopsy “proved” Terri’s husband was right to withdraw food and drink from her. The autopsy showed that she had suffered extensive and irreversible brain damage in the original stroke that left her in a persistent vegetative state.

As for me, I never thought she had any mental activity and never thought she had any hope of recovery. I just thought, and still think, that it is a terrible moral wrong to murder brain-damaged people.

Terri Schiavo was still a person. She still had a neshama. If she were a Jew and her family had to decide what to do according to halacha, they would have to continue food and water, via a feeding tube if there was no other way. At least that’s the halacha according to R’ Moshe Feinstein, the greatest posek of recent Jewish history.

If the person was days from death, there might not be a halachic obligation to put in a feeding tube in the first place. But she was not near death. She could have lived for years. To take the tube out once it was in would certainly be forbidden for a Jew. I don’t know the wrongs and rights of the case from the point of view of Florida law or of Noahide halacha, but just want to point out that Jews should not view the taking of human life with equanimity. Nor should they give orders to have their loved ones, or themselves G-d forbid, put to death when they lose consciousness.

The question that forms the title for this posting is from the concluding line of a communication sent to me by an Orthodox Jewish mother whose son cannot get into a Jewish school. He is a teenager whose siblings are in yeshiva. He is not, apparently because he is ADD and there is no Jewish school that will accept him. So he is in a private school outside of New York where just about everyone there is not Jewish and where the atmosphere is warm and promotive of self-esteem.

The mother’s communication is doubtlessly overwrought. But we cannot deny that there is something wrong in our schools. Too many children are turned away, too many children are sent away. The explanations are many and, at times, they ring true. Far more often than not, they come from people in authority who do not care enough, people who for all of their religious credentials do not adequately sense the pain of parents and children, people who do not understand that Torah chinuch must embrace and not turn away.

We are a people who ask all kinds of halachic questions, too many of them trivial pursuits that take precious time away from Torah leaders. Rav Moshe Feinstein, ztl, said frequently that for all of the questions that he was asked – and they probably were in the tens of thousands – few concerned chinuch situations.

When a child’s presence in a class has a deleterious effect on his classmates, there is justification for removing the child, although even in such situations it is necessary to have process and not to have a single person – usually the principal – make the decision. The fact is that we tolerate arrangements where one person, at times in the blink of an eye, decides alone who is admitted and who is not, who can remain and who will be expelled. Far too often children are literally thrown out of yeshiva because of the most minor transgressions or, perhaps worse yet, because there may have been a minor transgression.

The United States District Attorney for the Southern District of New York is suing the incorporated village of Airmont, NY, for violating the civil rights of Orthodox Jews… again.

Back in 1991, the District Attorney traveled this same road. The DA claimed that the Village was using zoning laws to exclude Orthodox Jews, by prohibiting small houses of worship where similar non-religious gatherings were permitted. That sort of unique clause is an unconstitutional intrusion into the free exercise of religion.

The DA went further, however, arguing that the Village’s very raison d’etre was bias and bigotry. “The Village was formed for the purpose of excluding Orthodox Jews by, among other things, imposing restrictions on Jewish forms of residential worship. Specifically, the Airmont Civic Association (”ACA”), an organization whose purpose was the incorporation of the Village, was to enact a zoning ordinance completely preventing worship in homes — a primary method of Orthodox Jewish worship” [emphasis added]. In other words, the village was formed — in the DA’s opinion — not simply for self-governance, but in order to zone the undesireables out of the neighborhood.

The Court found in favor of the DA (and, independently, in favor of the Park Avenue Synagogue and several individuals), as reaffirmed by the Court of Appeals in 1996. According to the Rockland Journal-News, “the village was forced to rewrite its zoning code to allow residential synagogues and to pay $1 million in legal fees.”

Jews are smarter than everyone else. This is the opening premise of an explosive study released last week, and given extensive coverage in the New York Times and the Economist. There is no cause for Jews to gloat.

A team of anthropologists and geneticists at the University of Utah studied the relationship between a group of Jewish genetic diseases and Ashkenazi intelligence, which has been demonstrated in numerous studies to be significantly greater than that of any other group tested. The diseases cluster around discrete areas of functionality, including the storage of a family of substances called sphingolipids, important in the quality of neural transmission.

The horrendous conditions that the Church forced Jews to live in created a selective pressure for intelligence. Unlike their neighbors, who were busy demonstrating their prowess on the battlefield so that 21st century moviegoers could get a distorted appreciation of their exploits in The Kingdom of Heaven, Jews were forced to use their heads to survive, in fields like commerce and finance. Along with the good changes, some nasty chromosomal stuff came along for the ride. The way the researchers see it, the connection is not accidental. Natural selection tweaked the gene pool, to favor some high performance souping up of the old gray matter. In some cases, however, having too much of a good thing backfired, and when two of these recessive genes get together, they produce a variety of conditions like Gaucher and Niemann-Pick. (A group at Shaarei Tzedek in Jerusalem found that its Gaucher patients – representing in effect the entire Gaucher population of Israel - included engineers and scientists far in excess of what one would expect in an equivalent number of Israelis taken from the general population.) One of the researchers sees a parallel to a computer phenomenon called “overclocking,” or pushing a chip’s capacity beyond its safe rating. Sometimes it works beautifully; at other times, the system crashes.

The implications of the study are huge, for people who can get beyond the very un-PC thinking about innate differences between groups. Are the changes that conferred an intelligence advantage upon Jews important enough that they should be artificially introduced in other populations? Should we mimic the changes on the biochemical level to produce “smart pills” for the intellectually challenged? Will Jews get dumber if we control Jewish genetic diseases by eliminating the smart genes from the gene pool? Will the optimum shidduch for Jewish intelligence be a potential mate who is a carrier of these genetic diseases, providing that you test negative for precisely the ones he/she tests positive for?

Subscribing to the daily e-mail bulletin of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (as I’ve recently done) has its pluses and minuses: decreased work productivity, increased fodder for blogging on Cross-Currents, increased heartburn with a concomitant increased yearning for Moshiach’s immediate arrival, etc. What follows is a recent representative news item, along with a bit of commentary.

Item: A new survey (conducted by a group strongly sympathetic to Jewish intermarriage, though the article doesn’t make this entirely clear) of adult children of intermarried parents shows “a population that ‘feels Jewish’ in many ways, despite a lack of Jewish education or affiliation.” Many of the respondents “describe themselves as half-Jewish, seemingly unaware that the Reform and Reconstructionist movements accept patrilineal as well as matrilineal descent.” (An aside: isn’t it possible that this self-description is not due to “unawareness”; that these young people, only 30% of whom “identify with Judaism as a religion,” frankly don’t give a darn what any movement says about their status?)

In light of these findings, the CCAR’s Committee on Jewish Law (a/k/a, to paraphrase Eric Yoffie, the Committee on Jewish Practices Deriving From the Individual’s Autonomous Personal Choice to Feel Commanded) will likely be facing some tough, momentous decisions. Since 1983, Reform’s position has been that Jewish status may be conferred on a child of mixed marriage by either a Jewish mother or father, but that such status must be confirmed by the child’s particpation in mitzvot such as brit milah, acquiring a Hebrew name and receiving a Jewish education leading to bar/bat mitzvah and confirmation.

What this means in practice is that individuals born to Jewish mothers, i.e. people who have been regarded as Jews by thousands of years of Jewish tradition and by the entirety of observant Jewry today, are treated as non-Jews by Reform if they lack that movement’s self-dictated indicia of Jewishness. I know a woman who was required to undergo Reform conversion for this reason (and I’d be interested to hear from others with similar or disimilar experiences). The outrage of this disenfranchisement of full-fledged Jews is almost beyond words, particularly when juxtaposed with the oft-voiced calumny alleging that the Orthodox regard the non-Orthodox as less than fully Jewish.

This is a letter that was sent to me privately:

I am not blaming you for what happened in Bet Shemesh. However, the antipathy that is displayed by many teachers cannot be helping the situation. I’ll even say that by the way you try to excuse the situation on Mr. Schick’s blog implies that you do not totally disagree.

Yet I do totally disagree! The entire chareidi community in both Eretz Yisrael and America rejects Yom Atzmaut as a holiday, including virtually all the Litvishe roshei yeshiva and chassidishe rabbeim. This includes the Torah-only stream, the Torah-plus-a trade stream and the Torah-im-Derech-Eretz stream of Orthodoxy. Even Lubavitch doesn’t celebrate Y”A.

There are many people who have a basically positive view of the Jewish State and view it as a sign of amazing Hashgacha Pratis that Jews can again live in E”Y after 2000 years of exile, and yet at the same time have very serious reservations about the secular anti-religious nature of the Israeli government. We don’t see that the Redemption has yet advanced sufficiently to warrant adding a holiday to the Jewish calendar.

I imagine that most of us know Americans who made aliyah and settled in Beit Shemesh. These are in the main people who can be characterized as Leumi Dati, with a bit of charedi instinct thrown in. They are men and women with wonderful values, good midos, sincere religiosity and a love for Israel and the Jewish people. They are certainly among the best that we have.

When the first English speaking olim came to Beit Shemesh or actually Ramat Beit Shemesh, they encountered a fair amount of difficulty. As I recall, there were many burglaries and there was tension between the newcomers and the poorer Israelis, mostly Sephardim. After the initial period of adjustment, relations improved and the newcomers went about their jobs and their important contributions to the Jewish State.

As Ramat Beit Shemesh grew, there were sections that were occupied by charedim, mostly Chassidic families coming from other parts of Israel. There have been a number of incidents involving attempted intimidation by charedim of the Anglos and the situation has worsened considerably in the past year. On Yom Ha-Atzmaut, there was an event for school girls, a number of adult charedim pelted the girls with eggs for the sin of celebrating Yom Ha-Atzmaut. This has had a traumatic effect on the children, some of whom are questioning whether a religious path is for them, and it has been traumatic – in conjunction with other incidents – for the English-speaking residents. I have been told of one meeting in which some of these residents discussed the question of whether they should move away.

I have heard about this from a Beit Shemesh resident who is as sweet a person as one can imagine. He is worried about the impact on his daughter and he is worried about the impact on how he looks at the charedi community. What happened on Yom Ha-Atzmaut has for him “burst the bubble,” and tainted how he looks at the community and other Jews.

In honor of Yom Yerushalayim, which was celebrated yesterday, I lit a small match in a great darkness. Before I explain, some background:

Every day I listen to a local Miami radio station, WIOD, which is a completely schizophrenic station. It has twelve hours a day of conservative talk radio. But it also has, every half hour, the standard liberal news, from the CBS network. So the talk show hosts are all very pro-Israel, for example, while the news is more like al-Jazeera.

I’ll give you an example of liberal-skewed news I heard on WIOD, just to give you the flavor of what I hear every day.

The day the new pope was elected, the news described him as “unbending in his views on abortion and gay marriage, but not a trained actor like his predecessor.” No other information, nothing about his being scholarly, speaking many languages, etc.

A note from a reader tells me that I may have been too nice to the Rabbi turned TV Consultant who wrote a letter saying that she, too, was upset with the portrayal of Orthodox Jews on the show in question. According to the reader, said Rabbi’s previously-expressed opinions of the Orthodox are not inconsistent with how the Orthodox were portrayed on the show. This might explain why in her initial discussion of the show with the Jewish media, she said nothing about the negative portrayal, and only wrote in response to Rabbi Avi Shafran’s justified critique.

I also find her juxtaposition of the “the way the Orthodox girl was portrayed” with “how Reform Jews were portrayed as ‘not even knowing the 10 plagues’” more than a bit jarring. One was portrayed as a foul-mouthed, ungrateful boor. The other was portrayed as not knowing the details of the Passover story. Not only are the two hardly comparable, I dare say the latter has more than a bit of truth to it. Anyway, if anyone can help clarify the Rabbi’s previous attitudes and statements, please tell me.

Meanwhile, the Baltimore Jewish Times this week features another misportrayal — this time, of Judaism itself. Rabbi Susan Grossman writes that “all rabbis permit and even require abortion where the mother’s life is endangered.” So far, so good. But then: “This is because, for Jews, human life begins only when the baby’s head or the majority of its body exits the mother, and not before.”

Thus Rabbi Grossman presents as “the Jewish position” a statement expressly and unanimously contradicted by the Mishnah (Ohalot 7:6), the Talmud (Sanhedrin 57b), The Codes of Maimonides and Rav Yosef Karo, and others. According to “Induced Abortion According to Jewish Law” by Dr. Avraham Steinberg (of Sharei Tzedek Medical Center, Journal of Halacha and Contemporary Society, Spring 1981), “the Rabbinic authorities who have determined and interpreted Jewish law have unanimously taken a negative attitude towards abortion.”

Yaakov Menken’s recent postings (which I just saw, having returned from my son’s wedding and related festivities) set off a cascade of inner reactions.

If you are at all a public figure here in LA, you have to try hard to ward off the invitations to comment to and consult for media. They often come back to haunt you. I have tried (usually successfully) to do the opposite of what many of my neighbors here are doing. They work feverishly to get as many “credits” as possible; I try stipulating that my name should be left out. Occasionally, there is a slip-up, and some gracious director figures that I have spurned the limelight out of a sense of rabbinic humility, and puts my name in anyway. He thinks he is doing me some sort of favor. Mercifully, Divine providence has insured that they usually misspell my name, so nobody finds out about it, and my kids can still find shidduchim (matches).

The worst case I can remember is a constant source of irritation. I have been told that the single most popular segment of the Discovery Channel concerns the Bible Codes. They continue to use it as a favorite rerun. Travelers on Jet Blue alleviate transcontinental boredom by watching it on their personal TV consoles. As a result, every few weeks, different people walk over to me and say, “Hey, rabbi! I saw you on TV last night!”

Small problem. What they see me say was the polar opposite of what I actually said in the taping. How it happened demonstrates some important realities about the news business and our role in it.

A friend and dedicated reader passed along the following, which relates to my earlier comments concerning a Rabbi as TV Consultant:

Dear Cleveland Jewish News,

I saw the article you ran in today’s paper entitled “Anatomy of a prime-time smear” by Rabbi Avi Shafran. I happen to be the rabbi in the episode of “Gray’s Anatomy” to which he referred to in his story. I just wanted to go on record saying that I too was angry at the way the Orthodox girl was portrayed on “Gray’s Anatomy” as well as how Reform Jews were portrayed as “not even knowing the 10 plagues.” I agree with Rabbi Shafran’s frustration. In addition, the way the episode milked the issue of using a pig valve was absurd. I told the writer before hand that it’s use was a non-issue, that any rabbi would support the use of a pig value if it came down to pikuach nefesh (saving of a life), but she didn’t want to listen to me. It’s too bad that the one time a woman was selected to be a rabbi on T.V., the episode was so misleading.

Rabbi Michelle Missaghieh
Temple Israel of Hollywood

On May 30 I posted below some sketchy thoughts (”American versus Israeli haredi sector”) I had in my initial reaction to a Jerusalem Post op-ed by Elliot Jager “American haredi triumph” . There were quite a few comments by people who read my blog entry and this stimulated me to write a more formal essay, which appeared in the Opinion section of the Jerusalem Post today (24 b Iyar, 2 June) as US Haredim versus Israeli and subtitled: Viennese Pastries versus Pickled Herring. (BTW the Post was very fair and added a complimentary photograph of Ponivezh yeshiva students in heated debate). In the essay I try to respond to and incorporate some of the issues the Cross-currents comments raised and I want to express my appreciation here for the feedback.