Several days ago, an observant Jewish writer who identifies himself by the nom-de-plume “Jameel Rashid” wrote a post on his blog (which he calls “the Muqata“) concerning the above topic. He sent an email soliciting our participation in the discussion, which I neglected to forward to the others (it was a very busy week!).

That was regrettable, because he has both touched on an important issue, and generated a long discussion (some 45 comments, some of the best of which he collected into a second post).

I’m putting this out so that more are aware of the discussion, and to get your opinions.

Personally, I think the idea that secular parents want to send their kids to the religious schools should be a mark of pride. Frequently it has nothing to do with the religion per se, but merely the quality of education (the Shas schools, for example).

One of the joys of living in Israel for a Jew from Amerca is the way in which the rhythms of the Jewish calendar are felt in the public square. Almost all families sit down to a Seder. And even in non-religious neighborhoods, many families build sukkot and light the Chanukah menorah. On Yom Kippur, the streets fall largely silent, and a large majority of the population fast.

Shavuot is the glaring exception. It lacks any special customs in which all can join. Eating cheese will not bring a secular Jew any closer to the essence of the day. Many religious Jews stay up all Shavuot night learning, and walk to the Kotel for the long early morning prayers. But these activities offer few attractions for those for whom Torah learning and prayer are not already part of their lives.

Secular Israelis can attach universal messages to other holidays: Pesach as a celebration of freedom; Yom Kippur as a day of self-examination and repentance; Chanukah as triumph of resistance to tyranny. Not so Shavuot.

True, Shavuot has universal significance. Our Sages (Chazal) comment that if the Jews not accepted the Torah, the whole world would have returned to its original formlessness, for Creation was brought into existence only for the fulfillment of Torah. But for those Jews – the vast majority of world Jewry – for whom the study of Torah and the observance of its mitzvot have long ceased to be relevant, that message does not resonate. Shavuot offers nothing.

Don’t be surprised. The same court system that has, for years, obstructed the city of Rechovot in its attempt to provide a home for Lev L’Achim and its Torah classes, now insists that the city of Jerusalem must fund activities for gays.

This is quite typical for the court system under Supreme Court President Aharon Barak. As Evelyn Gordon explained a few days ago, we got a recent insight “into how Barak makes decisions: not by interpreting the law, but by creating new laws in the Knesset’s stead.” Her article is, as usual, required reading for anyone still operating under the misconception that Israel is a democracy. In a democracy, an oligarchy of Judicial tyranny cannot replace the laws of the democratic parliament with its own “enlightened” choices.

It’s a famous statement of the Torah: “G-d will wage war for you, and you shall remain silent.” [Exodus 14:14] We don’t always need to do the work ourselves; HaShem works for us. The Talmud in Brachos says that it is the anti-Semites who will uniquely praise G-d in the end of time, because they, more than we, know how many times G-d thwarted their aims without telling us.

Sometimes, though, we find out. In the anti-terrorist forces there is apparently a term, “the Abdullah factor,” used to describe the propensity of Arab terrorists to blow themselves up while preparing their latest munitions to wage war against Jewish civilians. More recently, we’ve seen a powerful politician and academic both find ways to demolish their own careers.

First there was Cynthia McKinney, Congresswoman from Georgia’s fourth congressional district. Now, Ward Churchill, Professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, has done himself enough damage to limit his influence as a threat.

“Better to go to a house of mourning than to a house of feasting,” (Ecclesiastes 7:2), said the wisest of men.

Until my father’s recent passing, I had only experienced a house of mourning from the viewpoint of one offering comfort, not that of a mourner. Even then, I was struck by the wisdom of the ancient forms. According to halacha, one waits for the mourner to initiate conversation. It is not the job of the one who has come to offer solace to fill up the silence, but rather to follow the lead of the mourner.

Comforters who feel the pressure to say something, whether profound or witty, are almost guaranteed to say something stupid. Halacha relieves them of that pressure.

The shiva houses I remember from my suburban upbringing were usually filled with food. The mourners acted as if they were responsible for entertaining their guests, and the guests seemed to think their role consisted chiefly of distracting the mourners from their pain by making light talk.

Our condolences to the family of Mrs. Jackie Wein, a”h, who passed away this week. She was the wife of Rabbi Berel Wein, whose classes are featured on Torah.org, and also the sister of Rabbi Avraham Chaim Levin, shlit”a, Rosh Yeshiva of Telshe — Chicago.

Rabbi Wein will be sitting shiva at 15 Ben Maimon, Jerusalem through Tuesday night May 30, and then at 51 Briarcliff Drive, Monsey, NY on Wednesday, May 31 until Thursday morning. Rabbi Levin will be sitting shiva at 5104 N. Drake, Chicago, through Tuesday morning.

by Michael Freund

What a difference a few minutes can make.

That thought must surely be running through the minds of dozens of parents and teenagers at the HaNativ HaYeshivati high school in Sderot, after a Palestinian Kassam rocket slammed through the roof of a classroom there this past Sunday.

The day had started like any other, with students attending morning prayers in an adjacent synagogue and then staying behind to hear their teacher deliver a schmooze – a brief discourse on a Torah-related subject.

The following article was sent to Rabbi Adlerstein by a colleague or talmid (I’m not sure which), and, given that he’s out of the country, he sent it to me asking whether I wanted to post it. I think it’s an amazing article, so, as is now obvious, I said yes.

It first appeared, with the title “Who’s living an incomplete Jewish life?”, in the Jerusalem Post of May 17. It is by Larry Derfner, whose writing often demonstrates a very different viewpoint from that of the observant community — some might even term it biased coverage on many occasions. I would even go so far as to say that this article demonstrates bias, as I will comment within. That makes his agreement with Jonathan Rosenblum’s thesis of earlier today all the more striking.

He does not, to be certain, agree that “those whose identity is purely Israeli have been infected with a death wish,” as Rabbi Rosenblum concludes. But given the choice between a world with only observant Jews, or only a State of Israel, he concludes that there is a greater need for the former. Or, as he puts it, “the core is more important than the shell.”

Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua set off a firestorm at the gala 100th anniversary celebration of the American Jewish Committee when he contrasted the totality of Jewish life that one is capable of living in Israel to the “plug and play” Judaism of the Diaspora.

Yehoshua might as well have released a stink-bomb. His speech quickly became the sole topic of discussion, not all of it printable.

True to his classical Zionist negation of the Diaspora, Yehoshua assumed that the future of world Jewry outside of Israel is bleak and that of Israeli Jewry secure.

For the former proposition — at least as applied to the non-Orthodox segment of Diaspora Jewry — Yehoshua can cite an impressive array of demographic evidence. Unfortunately, his confidence about the secure future of Israeli Jewry is less founded.

As you may know, Project Genesis is looking for a logo (separate from that of Torah.org — see the bar at right for your chance to win an MP3 player by helping us find one). Perhaps it’s only natural that I’m more attuned to message and branding issues than usual. Although, for the record, naming a Jewish journal “Cross-Currents” was not my idea.

In any event, I’m subscribed to a mailing list for a magazine called “Baltimore SmartCEO,” supposedly intended to help local small business CEO’s do a better job. In the mail this morning, they tell me the following:

After commiting $500,000 to a San Francisco-based branding firm, this week (the Baltimore Sun reports that) BACVA [Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association] will officially announce its new marketing slogan for the city of Baltimore:

“Baltimore - Get In On It.“

by Rabbi Avi Shafran

Quite a stir ensued at a recent American Jewish Committee symposium in Washington when Israeli novelist A.B.Yehoshua called the hosting organization’s 100-year record “a great failure” and opined that Jews in the United States cannot live genuinely Jewish lives. Only in Israel, the celebrated writer asserted, can a truly Jewish life be expressed, and only the Jewish state can ensure the survival of the Jewish people.

Reaction was quick and spirited. Many of Yehoshua’s American listeners were scandalized – New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier accused him of “insist[ing] on narrowing [Jewish religion, culture and literature] down to Israeliness.” And Israeli commentators took Yehoshua to task as well for, what the Jerusalem Post’s Uri Dan characterized as, “the stupidity” of the novelist’s remarks.

Citing the work of Israel Democracy Institute’s Professor Aryeh Carmon, Forward editor J.J. Goldberg perceptively framed the brouhaha as the yield of a conceptual divide. With the destruction of Jewish Eastern Europe during the Holocaust, asserts Carmon, Israeli Jews “inherited” the Jewish identity expressed through daily life in an identifiably Jewish environment; and American Jews, the experience of Jewishness as a “way of looking at things.”

Two days ago, the NY Times had an article about a man freed by DNA testing, after being convicted and serving ten years in jail for murder.

This, despite the fact that prosecutors insisted they had a valid confession from him.

The relevance to a current situation in Israel is rather obvious, is it not?

Several readers, who are not Jewish Observer subscribers, wanted to read the article on Metzitzah B’Peh by R’ Chaim Dovid Zweibel to which Jonathan Rosenblum referred earlier today. It is enclosed herein, and explains why the Agudah was so silent on the controversy last year.

A funny thing happened on the way to the millennium. Nomenclature that was once limited to the Orthodox and dismissed as being parochial has gradually become de rigueur among non-Orthodox groups. One now finds non-Orthodox kollelim, day schools, Beit Midrash programs, havruta study, hevra kadisha groups, a new stress on “rituals” and mitzvot, even renewed interest in the long-derided concept of mikve.

And major American federations, which once opposed day schools and yeshivot as being separatist and antiquated, have become supportive. The unfashionable Orthodox have become quite modish.

This should come as no surprise. It is another bit of evidence that the demographics, fertility and Jewish education of Orthodox Jews are propelling them toward an influential position within the Jewish community - evidence that is now clearly buttressed by the American Jewish Committee’s newly-issued study of American Jewry.

If Rip Van Winkle were a Jew, he would awaken today in amazement, for the face of American Orthodoxy, particularly in Jewish communities outside the major metropolitan areas, has changed radically in less than two generations.

What is the most effective form of advocacy for the Torah community to adopt vis-à-vis governmental authorities? Is it behind the scenes advocacy or public confrontation? The answer, as Rabbi Elazar Menachem Schach once said, in a different context, is: There is no rule. It all depends on the situation.

As a historical matter, the Torah community in galus more frequently adopted behind-the-scenes shtadlanus for the simple reason that it usually lacked the power for direct confrontation.

The question posed at the outset constitutes the theme of an extraordinary article in the April Jewish Observer by Chaim Dovid Zwiebel, Executive Vice-President of Agudath Israel of America for Government and Public Affairs. “Between Public Health and Mesoras Avos” is remarkable both for the sophistication of its analysis and in its willingness to openly address a split over tactics in the Torah community and come down respectfully, but firmly, on one side.

Zwiebel makes a powerful case for the traditional shtadlanus model, in the context of discussing various communal responses to an injunctive order obtained by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. That order barred one of the world’s most respected mohelim from performing metzitzah b’peh by direct oral suction of the circumcision wound. It followed a Health Department investigation of three cases of infants (one of whom died) who developed herpes simplex virus-type 1 after their brissen.

I’m currently translating Rabbi Shlomo Lorincz’s memoirs. He relates that in the early ’50s there was a group called Bris Kena’im, which would note the numbers of cars travelling through religious neighborhoods on Shabbos, and then set the cars on fire during the week. The Chazon Ish, zt”l, ordered Moshe Schonfeld to write a piece called “Violence is a Foreign Offshoot in Our Vineyard,” decrying all resort to violence as antithetical to Torah values.

I assume the zealots of the Chazon Ish’s day paid no more heed to his words than would their successors today. But the position of the Chazon Ish still deserves to be known.

Remember the fabulous finned phenomenon of a few years past? A fish which began conversing with a worker in a store in a Jewish enclave near Monsey, and which, upon further interrogation, was found to be exhorting the rest of us – in Yiddish - to repent? Said fish wound up in a prominent place in the New York Times, where it either impressed countless people with the holiness of the frum community for having merited such prophets, or impressed them in a very different manner. It all depends who you ask.

While the proprietor of the fish store claims that the fish, to spare it any further indignity, was ground up and turned into something suitable for a Shabbos table, recent evidence has surfaced (grin) that the fish survived, and came to a rather ignominious end. It appears that the fish, rather than become gefilte, became geshmad. Apparently, it converted to Islam.

A tuna fish caught in the Indian Ocean this week has excited Kenyan Muslims who are flocking here by the hundreds to see a Koranic verse apparently embedded in its scales.

Arabic scholars examined the fish and determined the writing was a Koranic verse meaning “God is the greatest of all providers,” said Hassan Mohamed Hassan, an education officer with the National Museums of Kenya in Mombasa.

The JPost reports that Atef Adwan, Hamas’ refugee minister, met with Rabbi Moishe Arye Friedman of Vienna today in Sweden. The Israelis, and most of the civilized world, criticized Sweden for letting terrorist representatives into the country. I mean the Hamas minister, not the Rabbi… but after reading this article, I’m not so sure.

Friedman said his congregation would “do everything in practical terms to help the Palestinian people,” including sending money and food to the West Bank.

“We will support them in ways that others have failed to do,” Friedman said, but declined to give details.

Now when it comes to sending food, I understand (though I question his priorities). Israel is not trying to starve the Palestinians (despite various charges to the contrary from the terrorists and those who support them). But all funds are funge-able, as the saying goes. To stand with Hamas, have a friendly discussion, and talk about sending money, implies that the money will be sent to Hamas to distribute. One can only hope this is not true, that he only means to send money directly to humanitarian aid groups not tied to terror. Give Hamas money for “humanitarian purposes,” and Hamas will suddenly have more funds available to murder more Jews.

I just had a chance to catch up on the strings discussing the pre-Pesach protests/demonstrations/riots in Boro Park and Meah Shearim. The latter were triggered by the arrest of a nineteen-year father belonging to Neturei Karta on charges of inflicting fatal injuries on his infant son.

Clearly the provocation was much greater in the Boro Park case. There can be little justification for throwing a 75-year-old, hard-of-hearing man face down in a paddy wagon, even if he failed to hear or ignored police instructions not to get out of his car after being stopped for talking on his cellphone. Nor can the anti-Semitic epithets of one of the arresting officers and the local police commander (who subsequently apologized) be excused.

By contrast in the Meah Shearim case, no one knows what actually happened. Whatever the police did or did not do in extracting a confession from the father, they certainly did not kill the baby.

Despite the greater provocation in the Boro Park case, leading rabbinic figures, including the Novominsker Rebbe, Rosh Agudas Yisrael of America, were outspoken in their criticism of the riots. The Rebbe labelled the actions of those who set fires and attacked police cars a chilul Hashem that required condemnation in no uncertain terms. And Rav Yosef Rosenblum, a senior rosh yeshiva, reminded the chareidi public that we too are beneficiaries of law enforcement officials, without whom men would swallow one another alive.

10 bIyyar

I often wonder whether my participating in blogs, debates, and discussions, can lead to my putting a stumbling block before the blind- violating the prohibition we read here last week from Parashat Kedoshim warning “lifnei iver lo titein mikhshol” (Lev.19:14). Perhaps blogging is at the expense of study.

There were many insightful (and inciteful) comments on my posting about the Holocaust and Martyrs’ Rememebrance Day, and I learned much from them. I would like to restate my position. There are two avenues that lead most directly to the preservation of the Jewish people and constitute the true memorial for the Churban Europa. In my posting, and in my J Post article, I emphasized the first avenue:building large families. I did not emphasize the second avenue – Zil Gmor. Study. Rather than write, talk, and read ABOUT the Churban, it is more productive to engage in serious study. By study I mean traditional texts –Tanakh, Talmud, Jewish thought, and texts written during the Churban. Here are a few:
(a)Naomi Israel (in comment #14 to my post) mentioned Rabbi Kalonymus Shapira, the Admor of Piaseczno who wrote Esh Kodesh during the war. If you can’t read the Hebrew, then there is Nehemia Polen’s The Holy Fire:The Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymus Shapira, the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1994).
(b)Several works by Esther Farbstein are superb. Her tour-de-force is Be-Seter Ra’am (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook) a Hebrew compedium. It will iy”h be published in English next year. She has a chapter on Rabbi Shapira. Rabbanit Farbstein’s chapter citing “Halakhic Historical Observations on Marriage During the Holocaust” appears in English in The Impact of the Holocaust on Jewish Theology edited by Steven Katz (NYU Press) $30 via amazon. I have a copy in WORD of her essay in English which I can email anyone interested. Esther Farbstein published a book containing sermons in Hebrew given during the Churban by Rav Moshe Kahlenberg, titled Yedei Moshe. See the website of the Michlalah Jerusalem which hosts the website for Zachor - a valuable source for Churban material.

(c)Rabbi Yissachar Shlomo Teichtal, (died 1945/5705). His book has been translated twice into English: Rabbi Moshe Lichtman’s translation is called Eim Habanim Semeichah: On Eretz Yisrael, Redemption, and Unity (Kol Mevaser, 2000)
I came across the entire 500- page book translated by R.Lichtman in English on the internet .

The first Yahrtzeit of my nephew, Aaron Elimelech ben Ben-Tzion Eliezer a”h, Aaron Rosenfeld, is quickly approaching. His parents, Elie and Debbie, have created a Memorial Fund with Chai Lifeline.

The fund’s inauguration will be this coming Sunday, immediately after the Yahrtzeit.

It’s an old cliche, but words are indeed inadequate in this case… you can read Elie’s, because he said it as no one else could.

May we share many simchos.

6 bIyyar 5766
Last year on May 6,2005, Toby Katz posted a thoughtful essay in Cross-currents titled Yom HaShoah explaining why the Israeli Holocaust Remembrance day is deeply problematic.
I reread her essay and ALL 54 commnents (!!) on Holocaust Remembrance day a fortnight ago. I agree with the reservations she articulated about the timing and emphasis of the Israeli observance.
Another controversy has arisen in Israel over the memorial day for fallen soldiers, which falls a week after the Holocaust memorial. As I wrote in my Jerusalem Post article which appears today, Thursday May 4 “Rebuilding is remembrance”

there are arguments for including the victims of terror officially in the name and ceremonies of the day, and there are arguments for leaving the day specifically as a memorial for those who have died in Israel’s wars.

One could make a case for both sides of the controversy. In any case, I was struck by the fact that this year’s remembrance day (for soldiers and terror victims), May 2, fell on the anniversary of the terrorrist attack that killed the pregnant Tali Hatuel and her four daughters in 2004 in Gush Katif.

David Hatuel, Tali’s husband, has created his own memorial and it is connected to the Holocaust memorial in which I live – Kiryat Sanz. Kiryat Sanz in Netanya was founded by the Klalusenberger Rebbe (may his memory be a blessing) who lost his wife and 11 children in the Churban Europa, but remarried, had seven children (one son is now the Admor of Sanz), built Laniado Hospital and Sanz Medical Center, and encouraged others to reconstitute their destroyed families.

No matter how you treat – or do not treat - Yom Hazikaron and Yom Haatzmaut, there is something in the story that follows that should tug at our heart strings.

We should remember the contempt and sneers that oppressors had for us for two thousand years.

We should reflect that we cannot fathom the debt we owe to those who sacrificed their lives so that we could enjoy our holy land.

We should ponder the pain of parents who lost children.

Since no one else posted, I will offer a few thoughts in the waning hours of a weekend spent mostly struggling to write a fair final for my law school students.

Our reaction to, and involvement in, the ongoing tragedy in Darfur is complex, and might just allow for multiple defensible positions. (I have mine, but suspect that reasonable people will differ. Needless to say, I am proud that my immediate superior at my day job journeyed to the Sudan two years ago, at the invitation of the heads of the government, who were looking for a way out of their impasse, and some Western acceptance if they succeeded. He negotiated with them with his yarmulke atop his head. It almost worked, but then the Arab Muslims decided to start slaughtering black Muslims in a different region, rather than black Christians as they had been doing. The deal collapsed.)

I have no argument with those who lived near Washington and decided not to attend the rally on Sunday, arguing that no human being can make every just and pressing cause his or her own, and that they had other causes that needed attending to. I have no argument if – and only if – the next time they tell their children about the Holocaust, and tell them how the entire world abandoned the Jews and did not raise a hue and a cry to save them, that they consider their own reaction to the deaths of literally millions of human beings.

I have no argument with those who traveled to Washington and participated, and made a point of flaunting their Jewishness so that others would take heed of their care and concern. I have no argument if – and only if – they can offer some set of guidelines to determine when the parochial needs of our own community, and of our own avodah of Torah and mitzvos, must be put before the needs of others. (I completely reject the activity of some rabbis last Tzom Gedalyah to turn that fast day into a day of remembrance for Darfur in order to make it more “relevant” to their congregants.)