Abe Foxman gets paid to worry about anti-Semitism. He worries about cemetery vandalism, about Jewish cadets feeling uncomfortable as tiny minorities at their academies, about the Pope saying or not saying the things Abe feels he shouldn’t or should. Most recently, Abe was heard demanding an apology from James Dobson for his over-the-top comparison of stem-cell research to Nazi death-camp experiments. (An aside: Given his touchiness about anything Nazi-related, will Abe also be demanding an apology from the IDF for expulsion exercises — televised in prime-time — in which soldiers wearing talis and tefillin, to resemble Gaza residents, were violently assaulted by Border Police?)

The list goes on, but the point here is not to debate the merits of whether these are things Abe is right to get exercised over. The point is, instead, that the things Jews themselves are saying and doing — and beyond specific words and deeds, that which Jews as a whole have likely come to personify in the minds of many Americans — ought to be a far greater source of concern in regard to our community’s future in this country.

Here’s a small sampling, culled from recent news reportage, of things that Abe ought really to be worrying about:

— The refusal of various American Jewish organizations to publicly promote the until-now embattled candidacy of John Bolton for U.N. ambassador. Despite direct pleas from the Bush administration to help overcome the Democratic filibuster of Bolton, these groups did little, and some did nothing, on his behalf.

The Jews for Jesus have come to Baltimore, as part of a multi-year campaign to blanket every major Jewish population center (outside Israel). Predictably and understandably, our local Jewish community is up in arms. In the past three weeks, the Baltimore Jewish Times has had a cover story on the campaign, an eight-page pull out section from Jews for Judaism, and, this past Friday, both the lead news story (on a meeting in Howard County) and an op-ed from Scott Hillman, director of Jews for Judaism, all addressing the missionary effort.

Jews for Judaism is a great organization — but on one thing even its directors agree: it would be far better if their work was unnecessary. Missionaries have tried to convert Jews for millenia, and in previous eras far more coercive measures were required than having a minister dress up like a Rabbi and talk about “Yeshua” rather than Jesus.

Why do we need Jews for Judaism now, when we never did before? The reason is rather simple, and was the subject of my own letter to the Jewish Times. If there is one thing we should learn from the campaign, one thing we should do in response, it is to shore up Jewish day school education as a priority for every Jewish child. Hebrew schools are simply not adequate to the task of educating the next generation — as the Jews for Jesus are entirely too willing to demonstrate.

London Jewish Tribune
August 26, 2005

In the long span of Jewish history, the uprooting of 8,500 Jews from Gaza will not rank as one of the worst tragedies, though it was unique in that those doing the uprooting were themselves Jews. This was not 1492 and the expulsion from Spain or the Holocaust. And the attempts by some in the settler community to appropriate symbols of those earlier tragedies — yellow Jewish stars, concentration camp uniforms — and by implication, and sometimes explicitly, to cast the soldiers executing the evacuation orders in the role of Hitler’s S.S. troops, only infuriated secular Israelis.

Yet if the expulsion from Gaza was not one of the worst tragedies in Jewish history, the trauma inflicted on the Gaza residents and indeed on the entire national religious community, is nevertheless overwhelming. Rarely has a democratically elected government treated a part of its own population so harshly.

The loss for those uprooted from their homes took place on many levels — personal, communal, theological, and sociological. The faith in the imminent redemptive process that has animated the national religious community since Israel’s miraculous expansion into the Jewish people’s historic heartland in 1967 has now suffered an immense blow.

The Jewish Press
August 24, 2005

Even as most Israelis, including those who strongly supported the withdrawal from Gaza, shed tears and felt and shared the pain of those who were being forced out of their homes and whose communities were being destroyed, there were those who continued to attack these Jews of faith and strength who surely are among the best that Israel has.

The ultra-secular Israeli world that is represented by the journalistic cesspool known as Haaretz did its sadistic best to add to the pain, to add to its long and ignoble record of hatred for Judaism.

I write these words on a plane back from Israel, after a stay of more than a month. Each day I read the English Haaretz, a difficult exercise because without let-up the newspaper denigrated and demonized the Jewish Gazans and, more generally, religious Jewry. In my experience, I cannot think of a single issue of Haaretz that has not carried at least one rabidly anti-religious article or editorial.

Just over one hour ago, fully mindful of the negative reactions that my article has provoked, I approached an elderly neighbor of mine here in Jerusalem. This man is a survivor of Auschwitz who lost his entire family there. I asked him if he was aware of the Gush Katif children who had appeared with the “jude” ïnscribed on a yellow star. “Of course,” he replied. I then asked him the following: “As a survivor yourself of such horrors, what do you think of this action by the youngsters? Were you offended? Do you think it was a cheap stunt?” These were his exact words, translated from the Hebrew:

“Offended? Cheap stunt? Definitely not. I’m glad they did what they did. Of course, I am not saying that this is a Holocaust, not at all – obviously not – but the world needs to know that there are real parallels here to the real Holocaust. What these kids did was very very good..” (Name and address supplied upon request.)

This sentiment has been echoed by other Holocaust survivors whom I know. Not only did they not feel that this was a trivialization of the great tragedy, and not only did they not feel offended; they applauded it, because they felt that the message of Holocaust echoes needs to be broadcast far and wide. I do not think that we need be more “sensitive-than-thou” to Holocaust references than are Holocaust survivors themselves . (Granted, there well may be other survivors who were offended, but at the very least I do have some credible support on which I based my comments.)

I pray that my conversation with this man will serve to temper some of the indignation engendered by my essay. With his statement I coul rest my case. But I want to add something.

As you may have heard, a 21-year-old British student of the Mirrer Yeshiva Jerusalem was murdered Wednesday evening by an Arab terrorist in the Old City of Jerusalem. He was to be married in just a few months.

Moshe Simons, who has commented several times on Cross-Currents, is a volunteer with Hatzolah and was the first paramedic to the scene. He is quoted in the Ynet news article linked above — and he wrote the following in the aftermath of the attack.

I sit facing my computer, and words fail me. I have just witnessed one of the most tragic and traumatic events of my life.

A Jewish young man died in my arms tonight.

Mishpacha Magazine
August 25, 2005

Reading the lead essay in the June issue of The Jewish Observer, “Struggling with Success,” by Rabbi Mattis Roberts, I was reminded of the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “In every work of genius, we recognize our own rejected thoughts, they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.” In a series of essays in The Jewish Observer in recent years, Rabbi Roberts, the Mashgiach Ruchani of Yeshiva Shaar HaTorah in Queens, has established himself as a thinker of exceptional depth and insight.

Rabbi Roberts guiding insight is that the task of yeshivos has changed greatly from that of the yeshivos in Europe. The European yeshivos were “designed to serve an elite, to mold a select few into the Torah leaders of the next generation.” Those selected into the major yeshivos had already demonstrated “outstanding scholastic ability.” The European yeshiva can be likened to the Mishkan – a gathering place for loftiest of human endeavors, the learning of Torah lishma.

By contrast, the modern American yeshiva has had to take on a completely new function. It is not only a Mishkan, but also Noach’s Ark, a place of refuge from the pernicious influences of the surrounding society. Far from being elite institutions, modern yeshivos are institutions for the masses. As a consequence, students of differing abilities and from widely divergent backgrounds are all gathered under one roof.

Recently, my wife and I took our kids to a theme park for younger children. I made two observations — besides how expensive it is to take a family with several children to even a “lower-priced” park, and how convenient it can be, at times, to have two cell phones.

There were two differences between this park and most others, both of which made it better for our family — over and above the match between the ages of our children and the available rides. Number one, it had a dress code which was a few steps up from the parks with water rides. And number two, the median age of a ride attendant was more than three times what I had learned to expect.

At most parks, at least as I remember (and now I have to admit to myself how long it has been since I stepped into anything with “Six Flags” in its name), the average attendant is just out of high school. At this park, the average attendant was just out of the work force and into retirement. They were grandfathers!

I mentioned this to one of them, who was taking his lunch break when we stopped for ours. He offered an explanation: there is an adult retirement community about five minutes from the park, for residents aged fifty-five and above. The park gets a reliable and responsible workforce, while the retirees get non-taxing work to fill their days.

When Israeli soldiers entered a barricaded room in Gush Katif, out marched a group of weeping children. Their hands were held up, and each one was wearing the yellow star with the word “jude” in Germanic characters emblazoned upon it.

Do such tactics trivialize the real Holocaust? Some say so. After all, as tragic as these evictions are, these Jews are being expelled not by Nazis who wish to destroy them, but by fellow Jews who, for the most part, have tried to display gentleness and sympathy.

Nevertheless, in the air there lingers a faint Holocaust aroma: forced evacuations; barriers of barbed wire; people forbidden to enter the area; notices from the government ordering residents to pack their belongings and be ready to leave their homes by a date certain, and threatening that those not leaving voluntarily will be forcibly evicted and will lose their compensation benefits; Jews barricading themselves in synagogues while other Jews forcibly pull them out. Synagogues and yeshivot are now dark, cemeteries are uprooted, thousands of Jewish refugees are bussed into the heartland not knowing where they will spend the next night, or what their future holds, and all the while an enemy sworn to destroy Israel proclaims victory and moves into the abandoned land. To be sure, not a Holocaust, but certainly redolent of it.

[By the way, did not secular Zionism promise us that if we only had our own land, such things could not occur? Was not this Jewish land supposed to put an end to forced exile? And through it all, these same secular Zionists, those whose “religion” consists only of fealty to the land, look with equanimity -- and some even with satisfaction -- as their religion is dismantled.]

#1

I don’t know if Paul Krugman reads Cross-Currents or what, but that far-left NY Times writer had a column today seemingly in reply to my post of a few weeks ago.

On August 5, I wrote,

http://www.cross-currents.com/archives/2005/08/05/comparing-our-troubles-to-theirs/

Myth has it that if the recount had been allowed to continue, Gore would have won. The NY Times and the Miami Herald (both of which endorsed Gore) conducted an exhaustive recount, at a cost of many thousands of dollars, extending over a period of several months. They issued a detailed, five-part report, which took up the entire front page of the Herald for five days in a row, as well as many inside pages.

Today, Sholom Simon commented there:

Along with other members of my family, I was at the massive Tefila and Tehillim gathering at the Kotel prior to the painful commencement of the withdrawal from Gaza. The event was extraordinary because it brought together perhaps 250,000 or even more religious Jews from all sectors. This was not a political event. Thus, I was surprised to read in the latest Yated Ne’eman (the U.S. edition) that the gathering was “futile” and “fruitless.” Such language which echoes the slant taken by Haaretz and other secularists is shocking when it comes from a newspaper that is rooted in the yeshiva world.

When we daven or say tehillim, even when the focus is on a particular individual or set of circumstances, what we are doing is strengthening our emunah, thereby bringing us closer to G-D and to an acceptance of what He has decreed. The person on whose behalf we are praying or the circumstance that we have in mind serves no more than as the instrumentality for the strengthening of our belief, in much the same way that when we give tzedakah to a poor person, the recipient is no more than the instrumentality for perfecting ourselves by accepting limitations and discipline in how we use the resources that we have been blessed with.

Tehillim and Tefila are never futile. We all understand this in the frequent situation when a sick person on whose behalf we are praying passes away. We do not say that our prayers were fruitless or futile. Accordingly, Yated’s characterization which as I have noted parallels the sneering characterization from the secularists is shocking and unacceptable. It is an affront to those who participated in the great gathering, it is an affront to hashkafa and it is an affront to all Torah observant Jews.

The newspaper compounded its wrongdoing when after a close relative of mine sent an email questioning its usage, the editor responded that the gathering at the Kotel was a political event. This, too, parallels what Haaretz and the secularists have said.

We were privileged to have Dr Judea and Ruth Pearl at our Shabbos table a week ago. They left us a copy of their book, I Am Jewish, which collected reactions of several scores of Jews to some of their son Daniel’s last words to his killers: “My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish. I am Jewish.” (What I did not know, until I looked at the book, was that they were not his very last words uttered freely. Those in fact were “Back in the town of Bnei Brak, there is a street named after my great-grandfather, Chayim Pearl, who was one of the founders of the town.” Daniel, on his father’s side, came from stock aligned with Kotzk and Ger.)

In the course of Shabbos, I found myself sampling the contents, looking for familiar names to see how they distilled the essence of their Judaism. Predictably, I loved the contribution of former Chief Rabbi Lau. Less predictably, I was taken by the response of Arno Penzias, a Nobel laureate whose eavesdropping on the “background noise” of the universe provided the confirmation of Big Bang – and of a beginning to our universe – that its backers had been hoping for.

Big Bang was Big News. One writer at the time wrote that it was as if scientists had taken thousands of years to climb the mountain of ultimate knowledge, only to find when they got to the top that a band of theologians had preceded them there.

In time, those who could not share the summit with such people developed their responses. Penzias deals with one of them, another laureate in physics, Steven Weinberg. I excerpt a few lines from the essay. While I suspect that Penzias and I would not see quite eye to eye regarding the extent of Hashem’s Providence and micromanaging of the universe, there is much to think about in the way he takes on Weinberg.

Today, Erev Shabbos Nachamu, my brother wrote the following, which I am taking the liberty of posting here:

Newspaper-reading Jews all over America have doubtless found it quite vexing that in the reporting of the evacuations carried out in Gaza over the past week, very little has been noted concerning the remarkable restraint shown not only by the “psychologically prepared” soldiers, but by the “fanatically religious, half-crazed, zealot settlers,” as described by the press.

Actually, the word “remarkable” hardly does this restraint justice. The word “incomparable” is much better suited.

To all those in the American media who have failed to perceive just how incomparable this restraint has been, I have just four words — The Branch Davidian Complex.

Mishpacha Magazine
August 18, 2005

The first casualty of the Gaza withdrawal has been the sundering of the relationship between secular Israel and the national religious camp. The national religious have become the new chareidim as far as the secular media goes.

The anti-disengagement campaign has been an unsurpassed failure in terms of winning over wavering secular voters. The use of Holocaust imagery — prison camp uniforms, Jewish stars — strikes most Israelis as an egregiously offensive example of the trivialization of the Holocaust as universal metaphor. The charge that the Gaza withdrawal is anti-Semitic in its essence enrages those who support the withdrawal as the only way to preserve Israel as a Jewish state. And comparisons troops carrying out the uprooting to Hitler’s S.S. infuriates parents of all those who serve in the army.

Repeated efforts to close major highways — including in a few cases by pouring spikes and oil onto highways — has succeeded only in trying the patience of the average Israeli. Even the manner in which young teenage demonstrators have been imprisoned for up to a month has failed to stir the secular public. They see their incarceration as further evidence of the fanaticism of their parents, who refused to ensure that their kids would not engage in further illegal demonstrations.

I mentioned that I’d read two articles in the NY Times. If you haven’t already, please read my other post first. Here’s the second one:

August 15, 2005
Gazans Harbor Modest Dreams Amid Concerns
By JAMES BENNET

“Modest Dreams” — almost touching, isn’t it? That’s just the headline, care to guess how the rest of the article reads?

Two articles in the NY Times in the last few days caught my attention. The first:

August 12, 2005
After Decades of Disappointment, Gazans Are Preparing to Rejoice
By GREG MYRE

Already from the headline you get a sense of whose side the NY Times is on.

GAZA, Aug. 11 - In this land of poverty, violence and dashed dreams of statehood, the Palestinians are revving up for the rarest of events in the Gaza Strip: a celebration.

I received the following communication, which was written anonymously on an individual level, yet on behalf of all of us on a communal level. In essence, it says that the Government of Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in no way compromises our eternal title to all the lands promised to the Jewish People, any more than did the forced exiles under Babylonian and Roman rulers.

Initially, I didn’t really see the point of saying this — especially for those of us in more charedi circles, who never claimed that the modern, secular state was the herald of the Messianic Age. On further reflection, though, with “Disengagement” upon us, I understood what the author perceived all along — that for our own reinforcement, and the understanding of others, we do need to declare that this land, even that piece of it which the state is now leaving, is our People’s.

That is, in essence, what is said, but the full text is printed within.

John Buchanan, pastor of the Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago, is one of the good guys. His denomination was the first among those in the Protestant mainline to vote for divestment from Israel last August. Buchanan announced at the time that his own congregation would choose to invest in Israel, rather than divest from it – supporting projects in Israel that help the peace process. He was one of many, many Presbyterians who expressed displeasure with the misguided moves of their church’s leadership.

Nonetheless, Buchanan threw some cold water on the situation in a letter in last Wednesday’s New York Times. Those who criticized his church got it all wrong. Citing some Jewish claims in the press, he wrote, “What it is not is ‘a brilliantly organized political campaign to hurt Israel’ nor is it ‘functionally anti-Semitic.’”

I beg to differ.

A few weeks ago, I found myself with a colleague in Portland, Oregon, involved in a struggle against yet another mainline Protestant denomination, poised to pass a resolution inimical to Israel’s security. We came face to face with some of the engineers of that “organized political campaign,” and I am more convinced than ever that measures calling for divestment or for Israel to tear down its security fence are indeed “functionally anti-Semitic.” I will explain only briefly in this forum, because it is another point entirely that I wish to make.

My friends, Aharon and Jennifer Ungar, went on Aliyah about a year ago. Aharon has been keeping a journal of their experiences in Israel, which he sends to his friends. The following is from his latest journal entry, posted here with his permission:

Journal No. 24, August 11-12, 2005, Menachem Av 6-7, 5765

So far, I have seen two newspaper reports and three first-hand online accounts of last night’s Kotel Prayer Vigil/Rally and none of them even come close to truly expressing what it was like—and I hesitate to write my own because I know that I will fare no better, as it cannot be put into words. The personal tales that I have read were from people who never actually made it to the Kotel.

Jennifer, I, Nachum (15) and Yaakov (13), on the other hand, in the spirit of the nine days, decided to go in the early afternoon and take a tour of the extended Western and Southern Wall excavations and then go immediately over to the Kotel Plaza for the prayer rally.

During this pre-Tisha B’Av week, my wife casually mentioned something to me about this period of national mourning. What she said struck me as having relevance for contemporary Jews, and I suggested she write it down.
—Emanuel Feldman

Just this week I was on a plane landing in New York City, and as I looked out my window at the gaping hole in the skyline where the Twin Towers once stood, an inchoate melacholy enveloped me.

This was not a new sensation for me. As a native New Yorker, I have always been fascinated by the elemental strength and grace of her towering skyscrapers. But ever since 9/11, my heart -­ like that of millions of others - aches whenever I see pictures of Manhattan, and I find myself searching the pictures for those lost Towers. And this almost irrational reaction is from someone who left New York before the Towers were built, and who never even saw them.

6 b Menahem-Av, Thursday

Below two topics: a very short one, and a very long one.
a) LAKEWOOD:

Haaretz Magazine Friday 29 b Tamuz (Aug.5) had a 4 –page feature on the Lakewood yeshiva world titled “Only in America”. Given Haaretz’s often anti-religious stance, this was an unusual piece. I wonder if others read it and thought it was fair and accurate.

b) DISENGAGEMENT:

An interesting article in the Jerusalem Post, from the director of an outreach center in Rana’ana, Israel, discusses the rebuilding of Jewish institutions in European communities whose Jewish populace was essentially wiped out.

He makes a good point: “when the motivation is to reestablish a Jewish presence in places where Jews were brutally evicted and murdered, the effort is misguided and misplaced.” There’s no need to reestablish a Jewish presence in a place where there are no Jews. But he says that the “prime movers” in this drive come from Chabad, and he himself says that the Chabad emissaries’ motivation is “the late Rebbe’s conviction that no Jew ought ever to be abandoned.” He also writes that “when this effort services native or visiting Jews… it is surely a noble cause.”

If Chabad is at the center of this drive, and Chabad’s motivation is to reach Jews, then on what ground does his criticism rest? He agrees that when the aim is to serve Jews it is “surely a noble cause,” and says that to Chabad, the effort is always about reaching “native or visiting Jews.” So his argument collapses under its own logic.

An outreach effort in Denver, Colorado is probably going to be more cost-effective than one in Boise, Idaho. But if the intent is to reach Jews with a Torah outreach program, well, the Jewish world has done worse. Torah for one Jew is going to be more effective, in the long run, than bongo drums for 50. The phenomenon of Jews without Judaism is much more alarming than that of Judaism without Jews.

“They’ve Got Rhythm,” says the article, accompanied by a large photo of participants in a Jewish drum circle. It dominates the front page of the Washington Jewish Week, and runs for several additional pages. The story appeared several months ago (though it first came into my hands this weekend), but is a paradigm for many similar articles about “building community” and “up and coming new Jewish traditions.” These pieces deliver a message with poignant eloquence: the “organized Jewish community” now recognizes that there is a crisis — and has no clue what to do to stop it.

With assimilation barreling along at unparalleled rates, and accelerating by the day, our communal bodies look for new ways to keep and attract Jews. They will take any activity and try to stick a yarmulke on it, no matter how tenuous the connection — comparing a group banging on drums to the sublime and glorious prayers of King David’s Book of Psalms, for example.

They believe that new and innovative Jewish outreach means trying the latest fad. In June, JESNA — the Jewish Education Service of North America — announced that it is providing incubator support for a new project. What is this new program that the Education Service is incubating? A Jewish record and events production company, “promoting artists who use secular forms like reggae, hip-hop, and electronica.” They claim to be “evoking a strong response from young Jewish audiences” — and I do not doubt for a moment that they get young Jews to come out and listen.

Their mistake is quite simple. Looking back from today, they imagine that what Jewish groups were doing in the 1940’s and 50’s was old and outdated, and that’s why they couldn’t keep up. They are wrong. What Jewish groups were doing then was, at that time, the newest, hippest activity — but it was a pale imitation of what the non-Jews were doing, and everyone knew it. Perhaps the parents never figured it out, but their kids did: if the non-Jews are doing the same stuff, but better, why do we need to identify with the facsimile?

This item, from David Bedein in Efrat, more than speaks for itself.

A newsworthy side-bar to the funeral of the four Israeli Arabs who were killed on the bus in Shfaram in Thursday was that the only Jewish Israeli to deliver a eulogy at their funeral was an Israeli “settler”,
Rabbi Menachem Froman, the Rabbi of Tekoa in the Judean Hills and a
fierce ideological opponent of the current Israeli government
disengagement policy.

Rabbi Froman spoke for ten minutes and read aloud a letter from the
Rabbi Shlomo Amar, the chief Rabbi of Israel.

As Rabbi Froman ascended the platform to give the eulogy, there were
chants of “Death To Settlers”, because press reports had mistakenly
reported that the bus killer was an Israeli Jewish “settler”. (The
killer was from Rishon LeTzion, founded in 1882)