25 bEllul
Some time ago an ultra-Orthodox couple who are Harvard Ph.D’s and who live in Bene Brak, a haredi city here, initiated a meeting of Harvard alumni in Israel in order to discuss the gap between religious and non-religious Jews. The alumni who attended spanned the spectrum from haredi to anti-religious. One non-observant Israeli woman said that she wanted to attend synagogue with her husband, but when living in Israel this was difficult because most synagogues had separate seating and mehitza partitions or women’s balconies. But when she went to Harvard, she found many non-mehitza prayer settings and that was to her liking. She singled out this one problem as an obstacle to shul attendance.

This discussion led me to write an explanation for her of mehitza and its rationale. It was published today in the Jerusalem Post under the title “The mehitza that made waves in New Orleans.” At the end of the article I mention that several organizations (Tzohar, Byachad, Rav Melchoir’s office) organized 250 special Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur services in community centers all over Israel. These user-friendly services are abbreviated to the necessary minimum, have page numbers announced, have explanations of the mahzor, and have a non-obtrusive mehitza. The list of places can be accessed by calling a Tel Aviv number, telemesser 03- 606-6440 or by contacting Gidi Avraham at gidi@byachad.org.il .

I wonder whether others have formulated explanations of mehitza that conveyed the concept successfully to women (and men) for whom this has been a problem.

And the words of the prophet they are written on the subway walls… - Paul Simon

So many of those seers came forth after Katrina, that the walls of the 34th St Station could have run out of room fairly quickly. Some of the reverse prognostications even came, to the embarrassment of some of us, from pretty well placed persons within the Torah community. (My favorite, however, comes from outside of it. It is the one that holds George Bush personally responsible, since he refused to sign on to Kyoto. That, of course, directly produced enough global warming to cause the current spate of tropical storms.)

Many of us skeptics suffered in silence, as we listened to a march of authorities tell us what everyone else was doing wrong. My son Peysi reminded me of two levels of irony in the rush to judgment.

The first concerned the suicide bombing at the Dolphinarium in Tel Aviv. Some holy figure told the world that the reason for the tragedy was undoubtedly Divine retribution for the Shabbos desecration of the patrons of that disco. A few months later, a bomber struck at the entrance to Emmanuel, a haredi town with no Shabbos desecration to speak of. A writer in Haaretz couldn’t resist the opportunity to announce that the tragedy certainly was Divine retribution for the sin of being haredi.

I was recently asked to explain why in business settings many orthodox Jews do not shake hands with members of the opposite gender. Here is how I responded:

“Traditional Judaism places a premium on the family bond and emphasizes heavily the unique and exclusive nature of the husband-wife relationship. Judaism expects men to reserve their sexuality for their wives and women to reserve their sexuality for their husbands. While sometimes hard to appreciate in our over-stimulated and media-saturated world, the power of touching can (or should) be formidable, and many Orthodox Jews - even though it is ‘merely’ a business setting - do not touch or shake hands with someone of the opposite gender. This is not strictly speaking forbidden by Jewish law; it is more in the nature of being very attuned to the issue. (Similarly, although not strictly speaking forbidden by Jewish law, many Orthodox couples will not hold hands or show affection in public. This is not prudery, it is privacy. Affection and passion are inherently private matters.)

It is worth noting that traditional Judaism promotes one’s inner self over the outer, physical trappings. For this reason Orthodox Jews, both men and women, tend to dress more modestly than is generally common today in western society. For men in a business setting this does not pose anything unusual, as most business settings tend to conform to basic standards of modesty. For women, however, basic business attire has a number of variations, some of which do not conform to traditional senses of modesty.”

I would appreciate comments to my response.

With all the talk about freedom of religion in this country, we must recognize that not only minorities need that freedom. Sometimes it is the religious rights of others that are impaired — and sometimes by us.

On Sept. 18, the Washington Post ran an article entitled In Baseball Now, More Teams Pray Before They Play. In the middle of the article, Nationals ballplayer Ryan Church responded to Baseball Chapel Leader Jon Moeller’s comments about salvation and damnation.

Church was concerned because his former girlfriend was Jewish. He turned to Moeller, “I said, like, Jewish people, they don’t believe in Jesus. Does that mean they’re doomed? Jon nodded, like, that’s what it meant. My ex-girlfriend! I was like, man, if they only knew. Other religions don’t know any better. It’s up to us to spread the word.”

Some responded by decrying this as “hate speech.” Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld held a press conference outside RFK Stadium, calling the above “bringing hate into the locker room.” Who is Rabbi Herzfeld? Well, besides being the new, young head of DC’s oldest Orthodox synagogue, Ohev Sholom Talmud Torah, he’s also a protege of Avi Weiss. While I am often uncomfortable with Rabbi Weiss’ tactics, I at least felt his targets usually deserved opposition — anti-Israel conferences, desecration of Death Camp remains, etc. Here, however, I think Herzfeld entirely missed the point.

There are so many ways to appreciate and cherish the work of Simon Wiesenthal, who passed away last week. Although one of my jobs is with the institution that bears his name, I don’t feel that I should be writing the definitive piece. I will leave that to the more senior coworkers who new him best. Needless to say, Simon Wiesenthal threw himself with single-minded devotion into two related tasks – trying to insure that the kedoshim, the victims of Hitler would not easily be forgotten, and trying to rescue some sort of lesson from the unfathomable and incomprehensible that could be embraced by all people of good-will, not only Jews, that would add to the dignity of Man.

I will cite one story, if only because it transported me back to my cherished days in kollel.

Like many others, I moonlighted at several jobs, to augment a very meager kollel stipend. One of those was as a regular participant with the Chevra Kadisha of Queens, the group that prepares bodies for burial according to the complexities of Jewish law and custom. We brought kavod hames (the honor of the dead) to a much higher level than before, but yes, we did get paid. Given the amount of time – and the emotional costs – involved in this activity (almost always performed very late at night), the pay alone would not have kept us involved. We became hooked on chesed shel emes: acts of lovingkindness performed for the dead, who are not in a position to reciprocate. We were told that after 120 years, all those whom we had prepared for burial would come to the gates of Heaven to root for us in our individual day of judgment.

The story that I heard from Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Associate Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, struck a chord that is still resonating. Here it is, in his own words (reprinted from an article in the NY Sun) :

Network World was one of many newspapers and technology journals that carried a nice mention of the Contact Loved Ones project, which I wrote about earlier. I note, however, the entry below ours in the same article:

Always connected: virtue or vice?

VON being a diverse show with attendees from all over the world, a group of orthodox Jewish men at the show managed to find a quite place on the exhibit floor to form a minyan, or orthodox prayer group. As the men bowed and prayed, one person in the group appeared to be thumbing a hand-held mobile communications device. One observer noted: “If you’re going to make time in your schedule for prayers, just put the Treo away.”

I’m pretty familiar with that minyan, since it, like Contact Loved Ones, was organized in part by Yaakov Menken. The fellow holding the Treo was Mendy Newman, Product Manager at Kayote Networks. He had downloaded mincha [the afternoon service], so of course he was “thumbing” it!

As a general matter, national days of Holocaust Remembrance strike me as, at best, not worth the effort, and, at worst, harmful.

In theory, I suppose, such days are meant to sensitize gentiles to the evils of anti-Semitism and to forestall the recurrence of future outpourings of hatred against Jews. More likely they only serve as a further irritant to anti-Semites of all stripes, from the mild to the virulent – another example of Jewish guilt-tripping, whining, and finger-pointing at the goyim.

If the day is given prominence in the educational system and the media, it becomes for the anti-Semites but one more example of the Jews’ ability to bend the centers of power to their will. And if it is not, then the Holocaust is reduced to the level of national petunia day – yet another one of the endless days or weeks that serve as the occasions for the issuance of orotund proclamations hammered out upon demand by a team of speechwriters who excel at that type of thing.

Nor are such remembrance days beneficial for non-observant Jews, who tend to be their staunchest supporters. They are meant to instill some form of Jewish pride. But Jewish pride in what: That we are history’s champion victims? That we have suffered more and longer than any other people? Does the reduction of Jewish history to one long mural of suffering offer to the young, marginally identified Jew any reason to explore his or her identity more deeply? Why should it? In order to add his or her name to the long scroll of Jewish victims?

19 b Ellul

What was the most significant moment during the actual disengagement from Gush Katif?

I suggest there was one key scene, seen by all, and commented on by none.

Everyone who watched the evacuation on television, or listened to radio minute-by-minute descriptions was aware that in many communities in Gush Katif the residents & supporters made a last stand in the synagogues. Male soldiers escorted or dragged the men and boys out of the men’s section, and female soldiers took the women and girls out of the ezras nashim. What transpired in the women’s section symbolized a polarization in Israeli society. I would like to sketch my thinking on this, which I have not yet backed up by statistics and other materials, but what I think is indicative of a deep malaise in Jewish society. Let me explain.

Recently, Aish HaTorah produced a video presentation, called Inspired, featuring a range of Baalei Teshuva, returnees to Judaism, describing “what motivated them to change their lives and embrace Torah.” The goal of the movie, besides some combination of inspiration and entertainment, is to encourage members of the Orthodox community to involve themselves in outreach on a formal or informal basis.

The “inspire” brochure handed out to each attendee had a Rosh Kollel describing himself as “choked up” just by looking at it. He explained in an email, which I’ve translated where necessary:

Under websites not only is aish.com mentioned, so is torah.org and others.

Not only are Aish and Eyaht [the Aish-affiliated College for Women] mentioned as options for learning in Israel, so are Ohr Somayach and Neve, all listed as “options” among many.

Senseless in Gaza
Rabbi Avi Shafran

Those nefarious Jews did it again. They had the gall to not destroy their 19 synagogues in Gaza, leaving them to silently stoke the passions of uncontrollable Arabs. It was a “political trap,” in the words of Mohammed Dahlan, the Palestinian civil affairs minister.

“Civil” is not a word that comes easily to mind in the wake of the torching of several of those synagogues by Palestinians – people who would not likely be sanguine were their houses of worship in Jewish areas entered with shoes, much less set aflame.

Nor did civility shine very brightly from the words of Israeli Arab Knesset member Ahmed Tibi, who explained that the Palestinians should not have burned down the Jewish holy places but simply destroyed them as “their right.”

The title of this piece will be echoed in other writing. Forty years ago to this day, on September 15, 1965, Rabbi Moshe Sherer of blessed memory and I went out to Staten Island to meet with Reuben Gross of blessed memory, a noted Orthodox attorney. We discussed the growing independence of Orthodox Jewry and the need to establish a mechanism to give voice to our differences with the mainstream organizations that purported to represent American Jews. Out of this meeting came the National Jewish Commission on Law and Public Affairs, or COLPA. I was its first president.

COLPA is no more and that is a loss, yet the greater loss by far is in the abandonment of the attitudes and strategies that motivated those of us who were working on behalf of Orthodox Jewry. We were advocates, even fighters, and we weren’t afraid to be militant or unpopular. Our approach was reflected in an article that I wrote called “The New Style of Orthodox Jewry” that was published in the January 1966 issue of Jewish Life, then the publication of the Orthodox Union. We weren’t satisfied with photo ops or visits to the White House or meaningless ceremonies or glamorous trips to Israel or any of the other sterile glitter that now informs too much of Orthodox life. We focused on issues and outcomes, testifying before Congress and other legislatures, writing briefs and promoting through the media what we believe was right.

Although we were few in number and scarcely any Orthodox Jews were partners at major law firms, we gave abundantly of our time and talent and we achieved results. At the time, all three branches of the Federal government were essentially in the hands of those who believe that the First Amendment precluded any aid to parochial schools, yet when Congress passed – before COLPA was established – the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, parochial schools were included. New York enacted important legislation providing textbook and other assistance to parochial schools and the brief on behalf of a united Orthodox community had an impact on the Supreme Court.

We moved on to other fields, primarily the establishment of a body of law that I refer to as the law of religious persons. The main focus was on protecting Sabbath observers in employment, but we moved on to hospital and cemetery rights, milah and other areas. We were effective to an extent that we could scarcely predict and we gained the respect of organized American Jewry.

Well, I suppose I’m going to have to address the whole Nazi thing after all. I had made a wide berth around the issue, content to observe from the sidelines as Rabbi Feldman ably acquitted himself on that topic. But now a parenthetical comment in a recent post of mine has upset one “Andrew” (his last name is immaterial), whose brief post I serendipitously found on another blog.

Andrew adjudges me guilty of “[comparing] Israel’s Border Police to Nazis.” What gave rise to that quite harsh verdict was my musing about whether “given his touchiness about anything Nazi-related, will Abe [Foxman] 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?” In order to respond –since Andrew apparently reads C-C on the sly, despite being too shy to comment here for us all to see — I’ll need to range a bit widely, so please bear with me.

Several years back, I came across an article by the very same Andrew, criticizing the writer David Klinghoffer for asserting in a NY Times book review that “the defining Jewish criterion must not be blood, or culture, or nationhood, or any of the innumerable substitutes for Judaism that have been proposed by factions among our people — compassion, tolerance, freedom, socialism, Zionism, Holocaust veneration, Jewish self-defense, Jewish unity — but Truth alone.” Permit me to quote at some length from an article I wrote some time later in which I described Andrew’s response to Klinghoffer:

What distressed [Andrew] about [Klinghoffer's] contention was its perceived “dismissal of the various ways some 83 percent of North American Jews live their Jewish lives,” as well as, apparently, what struck him as Klinghoffer’s insufferable temerity in capitalizing the word “truth”—an unpardonable no-no for enlightened moderns who quite absolutely detest those who profess a belief in absolutes.

The more sad news we hear out of New Orleans, the more I get the shivers thinking about the fact that Katrina passed right through my city. The eye of the hurricane was right here over my neighborhood, over my house. I live in North Miami Beach, and we got hit by Katrina when it was still a Category One storm, causing some damage, downed trees and power lines, some flooding, power outages. Seeing what that very same storm did a few days later is like finding out that a serial killer was in your backyard but then left and killed people in another neighborhood!

So the first lesson of Katrina is that those of us who dodged the bullet should be very, very grateful. I’ve written about some of the other lessons, but in thinking about this subject it occurred to me that one way to try to understand why G-d sent this storm is to see what actually resulted from it.

What resulted from the storm? An incredible outpouring

Among the responsibilities borne by a law firm practioner is conducting autumn interviews of extremely bright, articulate and eager law students seeking employment the following summer, prior to their final year of school. Lawyers are often trained in how best to phrase the interview questions, avoid asking questions that off limits, and answer correctly the students’ inevitable inquiries about the firm. Personally, I take advantage of the interviews to pose questions that allow me to test whatever ideas happen to be on my mind at the time, while affording the interviewees the opportunity to evidence their thoughtfulness and deftness.

Over the past several of weeks, I have asked each of about ten students the following question:

“If the federal government decides to provide direct assistance to victims of Hurrican Katrina, what is the appropriate relative allocation of federal funds as between two families comprised of the identical number of family members with identical ages, each family devestated by the Hurricane and left with absolutely no housing, belongings and savings. But, although the two families currently appear to be identical in composition and need, prior to Katrina they lived very different lives. One of the two families owned a lovely home, two cars and a profitable retail business (all destroyed by the Hurricane and not covered by insurance). Prior to the Hurricane, the second family, by contrast, lived in a tenement, the parents barely holding menial jobs, and the children suffering for inadequate nutrition and substandard education, but not lacking for love.”

The answers I received were as expected. Several of the students felt that the formerly comfortable family should receive larger grants since that family had lost more, and should be made as close to whole as possible, while the second family required less to be made whole. Others felt that once the two families had been thrust by the forces of nature into the identical poverty, each family should be treated identically. After listening to their respective answers, I asked each interviewee if there were any other alternative approaches. Only one of the students, having identified the two choices listed above (and preferring the former), could not fathom a third alternative, despite my reiterating the request for a third alternative several times.

This is not usually a technology blog. But then again, the project I’m about to describe isn’t the usual technology project.

Last Friday afternoon, Dan Schoeffler (whom I have never met) sent an email to an alumni mailing list of which both of us are members, describing a free voicemail system for those affected by Hurricane Katrina. Called Contact Loved Ones, his concept was a system of free voicemail boxes, accessed by dialing the (inoperative) phone number of the family — thus allowing the family to announce where they have taken shelter, and for others to leave messages seeking contact with them.

For the last few months, our office has been venturing into Voice over IP (otherwise known as Internet Telephony), using an open-source system called Asterisk. I looked at Dan’s description of what he needed, thought about it for a little while, and fired off an email: “This is a great idea, and I think I can help you.”

For those who may have wanted to contact me for the past week, now you know why I haven’t been available. I haven’t been sleeping too much, either. But the potential to help people with this service is truly amazing, and I learned a lot at the same time. Many others came forward — to provide incoming phone lines, programming expertise, voice-overs, media relations, and more. Many of the tech-focused web logs took note, like Jeff Pulver, Om Malik, and 24×7 [given that Dan tries to avoid work on Shabbos, and I'm observant (I told him in my first email that I'm "Sabbath observant" and explained what that meant, and he responded with "Shabbat shalom!"), perhaps we only qualify as 24x6].

Efraim Zuroff, Director of the Israel Office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, is greatly disturbed by the conduct of the religious settlers opposed to the Gaza withdrawal. In a September 1 piece in the Jerusalem Post, he hurls his ultimate thunderbolt at the settlers: they remind him of charedim in their “political and cultural norms.” Who do their long peyos and large kippot remind you of? Their consultation with rabbinical authorities? Their encouragement of refusal of army offers to uproot settlements? The charedim, of course.

Zuroff, whose animus for the charedi public knows no bounds, even manages to connect charedim to the settlers’ appropriation of Holocaust symbols for their cause – yellow stars, prison camp uniforms. Somehow Zuroff links that misuse of the Holocaust to the charedi attitude towards history, which he describes as “purely instrumental, with historical accuracy of no inherent value.”

Over the last five years, Zuroff and I have clashed frequently, both in public debates and print, over historical issues, in particular his claim that “ultra-Orthodox rabbis” showed themselves indifferent to the fate of millions of murdered Jews during World War II and concerned themselves solely with the rescue of a handful of yeshiva scholars. Our debates concerning this scandalous charge attracted considerable attention over the years, and I have now summarized the controversy in an article in the last issue of The Jewish Observer entitled “Anatomy of a Slander,” to which could be added the words “Case Closed.”

I invite all those who are interested in the controversy, or who have participated in discussions of the issue on other websites, to both read the article and also circulate it on other websites.

In response to most tragedies suffered by others not close to me, I, like many others, limit my practical response to praying for the well being of the victims or donating charity on their behalf. When particularly catastrophic events leave me feeling that there is more that I should be doing for the victims, I ask others to join me in praying for the well being of the victims or, more often, asking others to donate charity, as well. (Reminds me of the story of the the pilot who announced to the passengers that the plane’s final engine had gone dead and urged everyone to do something religious. And so the sole Jew on board stood up and made an appeal for the UJA.)

Some may save a baby from an inferno or flood, others counsel the bereaved. I, by contrast, hope that my prayers and gifts are well received and ease someone’s plight.

For those confined to offerring prayers and donations, we (the silent majority of frustrated do gooders) certainly hope that our praying and donating is at least done correctly.

An exploration of prayer is probably best left to the spiritually sophisticated, but charity should be pretty simple. The problem, however, is that the charity obligation is fraught with so many twists and turns that I wonder why our formal religious education taught us little more than that charity is an obligation and that “a tenth” is usually enough. Every year, I segregate my charity allocation in a special account, and then engage in repeated turmoil regarding the appropriate and responsible allocation of the moneys. I consult with rabbis for parameters and activists regarding causes. Alas, the advice I receive always leaves me with choices and decisions.

Is it plausible that the expulsion from Gaza may have yielded some unforeseen benefit? I can’t help but feel that, to some degree, things backfired for the left. Some of its pundits described it as the triumph of the secular state over religion, of the will of the people over the Will of G-d. I will speculate that the polar opposite may have occurred.

We saw the reactions of two groups. On the one hand, the residents of Gaza left with their heads held high, with their pride intact and their love for their people and land so evident it was almost palpable. We saw people at the limits of their endurance who, with the exception of the statistically insignificant crazies, acted with non-violent restraint. On the other hand, we heard the cold, cruel and sometimes unfeeling analysis of the Haaretz and Tel Aviv U crowd, eager to criminalize the contribution of those who had previously been hailed as heroes. We read of their complaining of the “crocodile tears” of the settlers, while the rest of us shed real ones in empathy.

For those who observed both groups from the sidelines, it is hard to believe that commitment did not resonate far more than callousness. There is much truth in the old saw about the choice of the sabra as the national fruit of Israel, because it is, like the average Israeli, tough on the outside but soft and sweet on the inside. The reaction of the soldiers in charge of the evacuation should be an effective and telling barometer. Deliberately chosen from secular – not religious – circles, we saw again and again the shared pain, the way that the soldiers responded, even while obeying their orders, with succor and solicitude. (Graphic evidence of this that is worthwhile looking at can be found in a short and touching video by Chabad.) Could the rest – or at least the majority – of the country be all that different? Could it be that millions of Israelis, while supporting the notion of throwing off the albatross of protecting Gaza, did not react with a Jewish heart?

Does it matter? Sure. For one thing, how Israelis felt about the expulsion will directly impact upon any future ceding of territory. The 9000 may yet learn in the next few years that they saved far more land elsewhere in Israel than they had originally held in Gaza.

Last week’s edition of the Forward features an article entitled “So a Soldier Goes Into Gaza . . .” The reader might well be getting the same queasy feeling that I did whern first I saw that title in the paper’s table of contents, but please read on anyway.

The piece begins: “The Gaza disengagement may be among the Jewish world’s most divisive and emotional events in decades, but for late-night TV hosts, it’s proved to be comic gold.” It then proceeds to describe at length the grand old time that Jon Stewart’s Daily Show had with the topic. And just so that any readers who happened to miss the late-night shows that week shouldn’t feel they’re missing out on the fun — I honestly have no other way to account for what I’m about to describe –the article concludes with the actual “jokes” uttered by Bill Maher, Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien, seven in all.

The closest the article comes — not very — to providing any sense at all that there was something morally egregious about what it was describing was in quoting the editor of a political humor website to the effect that comedians usually stay away from Israeli news “since it often involves bloodshed. But in this instance, he said, the situation offered ‘punch lines that fall on safer, less controversial ground.’ ” Makes sense, doesn’t it? No actual blood spilled, so let’s have some good clean fun with thirty-year-old homes, synagogues and businesses being destroyed, graves of terrorist victims being exhumed and Jews being dragged out of their homes by other Jews to make way for Ahmed Yassin City.

Words failed me on this one, so instead I went to the computer and e-mailed the following letter, which appears in this week’s edition of the Forward:

A reporter called our office this week, looking for someone to reflect on the phenomenon of Faux Mitzvahs. For the heretofore blissfully ignorant, a “Faux Mitzvah” is a party thrown by non-Jewish parents on behalf of their son or daughter, in order to give them the same kind of coming-of-age blast given to Jewish boys and girls.

One of my associates discovered an opinion piece, Faux Mitzvah is Faux Pas, from the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix late last year. In it, Barry Kluger writes:

How do you think the non-Jewish world would react if I threw a faux baptism, just to enjoy the ritual of dunking my head in water, and tossed in a little glass of wine and one of those yummy chewy wafers? I don’t have to guess. Blasphemy, sacrilege and heresy are three of the words that come to mind.

With all due respect, it is not the non-Jews who are to blame. And when Mr. Kluger asks, “I am not aware if the pretenders to the faith pictured on television have started inserting a Haftorah reading into their faux mitzvah events, but can doing so be far behind?” — the answer is a most resounding yes. It can be extremely far behind, and is unlikely ever to happen. His analogy misses the point entirely, since what the gentiles are imitating is not the religious symbols — the baptism, the wine, and the wafer — but the party that follows.

Even free speech absolutists will not deny that unfettered speech can be lethal. Using no tool other than words, it is possible to poison the minds of impressionable young (usually) men, and turn them into killing machines.

The four suicide bombers who blew themselves up in London on July 7 are a case in point. While we will never know all the words to which they were exposed in the last months of their lives, it is clear that they underwent very dramatic transformations over a relatively short period of time. Typical cricket-playing, soccer-following British lads of Pakistani descent became Islamist fanatics bent on killing as many of the kufars (deniers) as possible.

Such cases have been almost entirely the province of Islamists in recent years, but not completely. Eden Natan-Zada, the 19-year-old AWOL Israeli soldier who killed four Israeli Arabs earlier this month also underwent a similarly rapid transformation after drawing close to a cell associated with the banned Kach movement in the West Bank settlement of Tapuach.

The question now facing all Western countries is: Can the poisoning of the minds be prevented without placing intolerable restrictions on freedom of speech? Let us sharpen the question.

I always knew that Israeli drivers were deranged, second only in madness to the Italians, so what happened did not shock me. What did shock me was the aftermath.

I was driving along a Jerusalem road when a car appeared on a small side street. The driver saw me, and I fully expected him to wait until I passed. But he was impatient. He darted out in full throttle, made a screeching turn directly in front of me, and sped down the road. Had I not swerved and slammed on my brakes he would have struck my car.

I was furious. I drove behind him, honking my horn repeatedly just to let him know that he was a fool. These demented Israeli drivers, I muttered to myself, always in a hurry, filled with chutzpah, oblivious to the dangers they pose to everyone around them. This country is filled with driving schools and no one knows how to drive.

It did not help alleviate my road rage when I noticed that his car was flying a blue ribbon - supporting the withdrawal - while I am a staunch man of orange. I also noticed that he was not wearing a kippah. Aha! This madman was a reckless secular supporter of the Gaza withdrawal. Wait until he stops at the next light, I’ll give him a good tongue lashing.

Someone forwarded a letter to me — unfortunately without the signature — by some pundit “explaining” that Katrina hit New Orleans because Louisiana is the home state of Condoleeza Rice. This catastrophic hurricane with all its attendant loss of life and property is punishment for Condoleeza Rice’s “forcing” Israel to abandon Gaza.

Probably it isn’t even necessary to comment on such convoluted reasoning, but I will anyway. First of all, Condi Rice is a lifelong, very warm and very vocal friend of Israel. And needless to say, Sharon’s four-year, single-minded program of imposing a unilateral “solution” to the Arab question long predates her accession to the State Department. Second of all, if she was really the cause of the hurricane, then Divine wrath should have struck Washington and not New Orleans. In fact, there should have been a fire in her own personal kitchen. Why are all these other people suffering for her?!

Aside from all of that, the larger question of understanding G-d’s ways cannot be addressed by facile and ad hoc “reasoning” like that of my unknown correspondent. The entire Book of Koheles addresses the question of the suffering of the righteous, and concludes that human beings can never fully fathom G-d’s ways.

There is no question that a blow like Katrina will hit the whole country and not just New Orleans, Biloxi and Gulfport. One can easily point to a long list of sins committed by America and say this one or that one must be “the reason.” The left might say it’s because we unlawfully removed Saddam from his rightful position as beloved leader of his innocent country. The right (with rather more sense) might say it’s because of the pornography and immorality that pollute the land. It’s always a good idea, when tragedy strikes, to examine one’s deeds and repent. But no one really knows “the” reason.