A few days ago, I posted a piece about Grigory Perelman, the Jewish mathematician who solved the Poincaré conjecture. One of our readers, a Russian-Jewish mathematician of considerable attainment himself, sent me a private communication, essentially saying that Americans could not possibly understand what Soviet Jews had to go through. His reconstruction of the probable cause for Perelman’s decision turns the story from one about intellectual integrity to one about Jewish heartache and pride. As all of us engage the new reality of mounting world-wide anti-Semitism, his letter is a poignant reminder of how Jews lived while locked in a vise-grip of hatred. At the request of the author, I had to delete many details, since there could still be nasty consequences to friends and relatives living in Russia. The Iron Curtain may have fallen, but Russian hatred of Jews is alive and well.

I am afraid that Grisha’s words in the end of the article — why he gave up the medal — can be understood only by a well-informed mathematician who lived in Russia and knows something about the West as well.

Many people here know about anti-Semitism in Soviet mathematics but relatively few people know how discoveries — at all levels – of Jews, and then of other non-ethnic-Russian mathematicians too – were stolen by “big men.” For example, a famous problem was settled by a young Jewish undergraduate student who submitted his paper to a Soviet journal. His paper was kept there for two years — exactly the time his referee needed — with full knowledge of the editors — to publish these results under his own name. The real author was denied any access to mathematics — graduate schools didn’t take Jews at that time. Finally he found an obscure job — I think at a telephone station in a small Ukrainian town.

Yet too many people knew and talked about that. So, two years later, they published the paper of the young Jew who “also” obtained these results. The thief got all possible recognition, prestigious foreign prizes — and was allowed to travel abroad to collect them. Many people know his name because of “his” brilliant result. As far as I know, the young man was unable to obtain a graduate mathematical education. His famous paper remained his only publication. Only 16 years later, well after the USSR ceased to exist, he published three more papers, all of them in US journals. Yet in his best years he had to do something else, not mathematics.

Nah, no one saw this coming:

In what will be a watershed moment for the Conservative movement — akin to admitting women into the rabbinate a generation ago — the ordination of openly gay and lesbian rabbis and the sanctioning of same-sex unions are likely to be approved by the denomination’s legal scholars, according to movement leaders.

Upon the founding of JTS in 1898, Rabbi J.D. Eisenstein, an Orthodox scholar, objected as follows: “in my opinion, the objective of Conservatism and the law of the Radicals [Reform -YM] lead to the same path, the only difference between them is time.” Eyzehu Chacham? HaRo’eh Es HaNolad. Who is wise? He who foresees the results. Rav Eisenstein was a chacham.

In discussion of previous posts about Kehillat Orach Eliezer, the “Orthodox” synagogue that appointed a woman as spiritual leader, the affiliation of its past Rabbi was part of the discussion. David Weiss HaLivni was a scholar at the right wing of JTS, who left the Conservative movement in the aftermath of the JTS decision to ordain women in 1983. He was instrumental in the formation of the Union for Traditional Judaism.

Well, not literally — but when I read the following comment to an earlier post, I did think about it. The topic then was a Slate magazine article which covered Ismar Schorsch’s “parting shots” at the Conservative movement, delivered during his final graduation address as the Chancellor of JTS.

Here is Ahron’s comment:

I went to a heavily Conservative day school and can only amplify and reamplify the observation of “no passion”.

A short story: When I was in 7th grade I davened in the Conservative minyan at this school. When we came to “ahava raba” right before the morning shema, we sang the opening part of it in a popular tune but with some sort of variation so that we stopped the singing right before the word “ahava” (“love”) in “talmud toratecha b’ahava” (“the learning of your Torah with love”). I presumed (in 7th grade!) that the reason we stopped singing out loud right before “ahava” was because in the Conservative minyan they didn’t want to encourage us to study Torah with love or passion but rather with dispassionate academic distance and criticism. I am deadly serious.

An editorial in Friday’s Wall Street Journal regarding a new campaign of the Internal Revenue Service raises an alarming issue for religious communities. It reports that the IRS has newly expanded its Political Activity Compliance Initiative to “put some 15,000 nonprofits — mostly churches — on notice that preaching politics puts them at risk of audits, fines or, in some cases, the loss of tax-exempt status.”

More disturbingly, the IRS has announced that

It will no longer wait for complaints to come in, but will instead take action ‘to prevent violations.’ It will be reviewing the content of sermons, it says, as well as the financial books of religious organizations. The free exercise of religion could now come with a hefty bill.

This is an issue that impacts religious institutions at all points along the political spectrum. And, the IRS concedes, there is no bright-line test for determining what constitutes political activity. Indeed, the WSJ piece begins with an anecdote about a Pasadena minister whose church has been under investigation since 2004 because of a sermon he gave two days before that year’s presidential election opposing the Iraq War.

The following item from James Taranto’s Opinion Journal column on Tuesday cites more evidence that openly anti-Semitic comments are no longer beyond the pale for the left-wing of the Democratic Party.

The item also brings more evidence that Stephen Walt (Harvard) and John Mearsheimer (University of Chicago) are increasingly incapable of saying or writing a true word about Israel, and have fallen prey to the wildest of conspiracy theories. This week they told a CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) gathering that Israel used Hizbullah’s July 12 kidnapping of Israeli soldiers as a pretext to launch a long-planned invasion. One wonders how much they had to pay Nasrallah to provide the cover. One also wonders how come Israel had no war plan if they had long-intended to launch an attack. This claim is of a piece with the claim in the infamous Walt-Mearsheimer paper on the Israel Lobby that Israel withdrew from Gaza to bring Hamas to power and thereby doom the Roadmap. Clever people those Jews.

In the most recent issue of the University of Chicago Alumni Magazine, Mearsheimer further makes the ridiculous claims that Ehud Barak and Yasir Arafat both rejected the deal offered by President Clinton at Camp David, a claim that will be news to Mr. Clinton, who pointedly told Arafat, “No, I’m not a great man. I am a failure and you have made me one.” Mearsheimer then goes on to claim that negotiations ended when Israel walked away from Taba three months after Camp David, failing to note that Israel had considerably upped its offer to Arafat, while the latter’s positions remained unchanged.

‘Stomp Israel Like a Bug’

Many readers may have missed the following news item, which, to my knowledge, appeared in the JTA Daily News Briefing but almost nowhere else:

Close to 50 Reform youth leaders urged the movement to address the deaths of civilians on both sides of the Israel-Hezbollah war. “We applaud the Union for condemning . . . violent and terrifying attacks on Israeli civilians . . .,” said the letter delivered by 48 student leaders to leaders of the Union for Reform Judaism. But it adds:’We urge the Union to likewise condemn the IDF’s killing of unarmed Lebanese and Palestinian covilians, as well as its premeditated targeting of civilian infrastructure . . .’

A response, signed by 11 Reform student leaders, took a different stand on the conflict. “We are concerned about the equivalency made between the tactics of Hizbollah and the IDF”, the response said.

The Reform movement’s leader, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, also weighed in. “No side is completely blameless in a war, but I am confident that the government of Israel has taken alll reasonable precautions to avoid civilian casualties,” Yoffie wrote to the first student letter.

6 b Ellul
The Homosexual Open House in Jerusalem is trying to reschedule the Gay Parade for the week preceding Rosh Hashanah. [Meanwhile, the police nixed it, so as not to offend tourists]. In a revealing interview on Ynet, the Yediot Aharonot internet paper, Noa Sattah, head of the Jerusalem Open House, gave this explanation when asked why the organizers don’t schedule the parade through the Muslim and Christian quarters of Jerusalem.

The YNET journalist Andrew Friedman wrote that he posed the following question to Sattah:

If the homosexual agenda is truly one of “human rights,” what better chance to promote human rights in a (Arab) society in which active homosexuals are often brutally murdered? Why are drag queens on King George Street [in the Jewish area] legitimate but out of bounds for Salah al-Din Street [an Arab thoroughfare]?

Friedman then goes on to observe that

A group of young American Reform Jews recently sent a letter to Reform leader Eric Yoffie, requesting that the movement “condemn the IDF’s killing of unarmed Lebanese and Palestinian civilians, as well as its premeditated targeting of civilian infrastructure, which has put additional lives at risk and hampered relief efforts.”

The high-school and college students who wrote this letter are among the most identified of American Jewish youth. Over 50% of American Jews are unaffiliated with any of the so-called streams. These authors at least know Yoffie’s name – indeed they are designated by the Reform movement as “youth leaders.”

The thought that these letter writers represent the future of non-Orthodox American Jewry should send shivers down the spine of anyone concerned about the future of Israel-Diaspora relations. On its face, the letter condemns all killing of civilians by the IDF. That is not a morally serious position, unless the authors explain how Israel can defend itself against Kassams from Gaza or Katyushas from Lebanon, without ever running the risk of killing civilians, given the fact that that those missiles are inevitably located and fired from civilian areas.

Do they think that supporting “the principle of peace negotiations” is an answer to that dilemma?

One of our avid readers brought the following quote to my attention. It doesn’t say anything we don’t already know, but it should humble us mere mortals who would never put things so elegantly and economically.

The author is James Lileks, who usually writes for the Minneapolis StarTribune. The topic is the leadership of the Presbyterian Church USA, the first mainline group of Protestants to push for divestment from Israel two years ago, until thwarted by a palace revolt by members possessed of fairness, sanity, and a higher regard for Israel. ‘Nuf said.

But they’re [PCUSA's leadership] not anti-Semites. Heavens, nay. Don’t you dare question their philosemitism! No, they looked at the entire world, including countries that lop off your skull if you convert to Presbyterianism, and what did they choose as the object of their ire? A country the size of a potato chip hanging on the edge of a region noted for despotism and barbarity. By some peculiar coincidence, it happens to be full of Jews.

In an article on Jewish World Review this morning, Caroline Glick discusses the latest possible media hoax — Israel’s “attack” on a Reuters camera crew. You can read the details there, but in brief, Reuters claimed that Israel had fired upon one of its vehicles. This was in the middle of a battle zone, at night, when all of the “clear markings” that it was a press vehicle likely could not be seen. But even more, critics insist that the evidence of a missile hit just isn’t there. A Powerline reader writes:

I spent twenty years in both military and civilian bomb disposal. The damage to the ambulance pictured in the article was NOT caused by any missile. Any missile that the Israelis have would completely destroy a vehicle like that ambulance. That hole in the roof looks like a couple of well placed hits with an axe.

Ms. Glick uses this story to drive home the importance of blogs as the method via which we keep the media honest.

It is not a coincidence that I saw the pictures of the Reuters’ vehicle on Powerline and not in the media coverage of the purported attack. Both the global media and the international NGO community abjectly refuse to investigate themselves. As democratic governments and their militaries have proven incapable of dealing with the phenomenon (in part because they seek to curry favor with the media and the international NGO community), the blogosphere has taken upon itself the role of media watchdog.

Only in Israel gives us the story of Bride vs. Power Co.

The next day he called and in a happy voice conveyed his best wishes for the upcoming wedding. He asked me to tell the bride Mazel Tov [congratulations] and that she would have electricity because he personally went to look at the location and he found a solution.

So we get up bright and early on Sunday, and lo and behold, there is a generator parked right outside of our building. That’s right – our building was hooked up to electricity all day from our own private generator while the rest of the neighborhood had a blackout!

It was truly amazing. There are people here with big hearts who made it clear that our happiness was important to them as well.

The above is the more polite title (the one found in the title bar) of an article that appeared yesterday on Slate.com. The title as found on the page is “One Mad Rabbi: Conservative Judaism gets a kick in the pants.”

Had I written a headline like that, it would undoubtedly have been termed “mean-spirited, bigoted,” and “hateful,” words used by a recent correspondent to describe his opinion of Cross-Currents overall. I assert that the reader was projecting his own feelings in the case of Cross-Currents, but wonder what people will say about the referenced article — given that it was written neither by myself nor any Orthodox Jew, but by Samantha Shapiro, who writes that “I grew up in the Conservative movement, and my religious ideals line up with it in many ways.”

Earlier this summer, Ismar Schorsch, the outgoing chancellor of New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary, kicked off his retirement with a graduation speech that was the religious scholar’s equivalent of Zinedine Zidane’s World Cup head-butt. Schorsch’s speech was a farewell not just to the most recent class of rabbis but to the school he ran for the last 20 years, which is the central institution of Conservative Judaism. Amazingly, given the context—an auditorium full of major donors and a freshly minted class of graduates and their families—Schorsch sounded few notes of inspiration and hope for the future. Instead, he offered his honest appraisal of Judaism’s Conservative movement, which he helped build: Basically, it stinks!

Since 1886, the Jewish Theological Seminary has sought to negotiate a middle ground between Orthodox Judaism… and Reform… Conservative Judaism, which began as a congregational movement in 1913, attempts to bridge the gap—to affirm the divinity of ancient Jewish law but also to allow changes to accommodate modern circumstances. “Tradition and change” is a movement motto.

With the beginning of the Hebrew month of Elul, the Shofar blasts sound at the conclusion of the morning prayers. As described by Maimonides, these blasts arouse us from the slumber and force us to think about matters too often forgotten in the quotidian struggle to get through the day.

The Shofar bids us to ask ourselves searching questions starting with “What went wrong?” How did the past year, which began with so many high expectations, so many hopes for growth and change, end up as just another year.

This year these questions are not confined just to shul-goers. Israel is going through a period of national soul-searching not seen since the Yom Kippur War. The question “Where did we go wrong?” is on all lips. Demands for a national commission of inquiry to probe the failures of our political and military leaders are heard everywhere.

But the question does not stop there. It is directed at the entire society. Did we become besotted with the fantasy of Israel as a “fun place to live?” Did we delude ourselves into thinking that we could escape the fate of Jews in all times and all places, and become a normal nation like all others.

Usually I post my thoughts, and then sit back and watch readers pick them apart — or, as is more often the case, pick one another apart over matters having only a tangential relationship with my original post.

Now, however, I’d like to solicit your thoughts on a moral dilemma currently confronting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. In particular, I’d be interested on any Torah sources that can be brought to the discussion.

As you know, indirect negotiations are now under way with Hizbullah over the two Israeli hostages captured by Hizbullah on July 12, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser. Nasrallah will almost certainly demand the return of Samir Kuntar, a particularly odious figure, who led a group of four PLF terrorists who managed to penetrate Israel by sea from Lebanon in 1979. Kuntar smashed the head of an eight-year-old girl in front of her father, and then shot the father to death. The mother of the family, who was hiding in their house, inadvertently smothered her two-year-old infant in an effort to keep her from crying and revealing their hiding place. In the last prisoner exchange with Hizbullah, Israel refused to return Kuntar.

Kuntar should have been tried, with full due process, and executed, but it’s too late for that now. Clearly his return would constitute a major political boost for Nasrallah. And by all logic, the upcoming exchange should be captured Hizbullah fighters for the two Israeli soldiers - a typical post-war exchange of prisoners.

A few days ago, Rabbi Menken offered his reasons for blogging, and essentially his raison d’etre for Cross-Currents. I respectfully dissent.

I will beg the forgiveness of readers who turn to these pages looking for some Torah insight into today’s headlines. It is going to take a few posts to formulate and articulate some ideas that have been brewing for quite a while. I hope this will not seem self-indulgent, or the improper use of a digital bully-pulpit. Getting feedback from the readership on which of our visions – if any – is more needed (or how to blend the two) will be valuable to the future of this blog.

Minimally, perhaps some of us will figure out whether we are devoting too much time to yet another distraction taking us away from more important parts of our avodas Hashem (service of G-d). We are in the month of Elul, and now is the time for some serious internal housekeeping. One of the lessons that sinks in each year at this time is that time is not a renewable resource. Every moment is precious, and we will ultimately have to give an accounting for every delicious morsel of it. (The Vilna Gaon explained the oft-repeated phrase din ve-cheshbon (judgment and accounting). The former means answering for our misdeeds; the latter is to account for all that we were supposed to accomplish had we not squandered the opportunity. This second level of scrutiny, said the Gaon, is a more serious cause for concern than the first!) Perhaps we can learn how to blog more efficiently, or even not at all. For all its importance – as I will try to show – we need to prove that blogging justifies time off from learning. (Rabbi Yosef Dov Soloveitchik zt”l once hosted a group of heavy-hitter philosopher types in his office, keeping them enthralled with his knowledge and depth of their academic field. Not wanting to spend too much time on this meeting, he “arranged” to be politely interrupted so that the meeting could come to an end. When his guest had left, he reportedly remarked (it loses in the translation from the Yiddish), “None of it comes to learning another Tosafos!”) My own excuse is that I rarely write except late at night, when I just cannot effectively concentrate on a sefer without falling asleep. I pray that HKBH either gives me the strength that I should be able to change this, or that He accepts my excuse.

Truth be told, Rabbi Menken’s formulation is closer to the original conception of Cross-Currents, which oddly enough predates the existence of the blogosphere. A good number of years ago, CC’s own Rabbi Jonathan Rosenblum and myself paid a call on the Novominsker Rebbe shlit”a while he visited Har Nof. We went intent on executing a full-court press to convince the Rebbe that more should be done to fight the negative stereotypes associated with the Torah world in the popular press. The Rebbe did not need much convincing, and a number of important changes occurred after that meeting. One of the Rebbe’s ideas proved too difficult to implement. He wanted to see a journal, perhaps a quarterly, of well-written Torah thought that would be read by the non-Orthodox. The idea was still-born at the time, but was resurrected when blogging became an instant and inexpensive way to reach instantly beyond all borders. A few of us conceived of Cross-Currents – pushed largely by Rabbi Menken – to make a contribution in that arena. [Note: We did not ask the Rebbe whether to launch an internet site. It is quite likely that he would not have given his blessing to any internet presence.] Cross-Currents was thus born of the need to defend against a steady stream of wrong-minded drivel about traditional Judaism in general, and right-of-center and haredi Judaism in particular.

It was the Alter of Novarodok who said: “The accepted wisdom is that worldly people have this world, while the people of Torah have the World-to-Come. He who learns Musar knows that the worldly do not have this world and that the Torah scholars should worry about whether they really do have the World-to-Come.”

That saying is more than just a most incisive observation about what is real and what is illusion in our world. It also provides an approach toward, and thus raises hope for the possibility of, rapprochement between Jews who have been religiously estranged from each other.

I had occasion to reflect on this recently after having had the precious opportunity to spend an entire day in the company of a group of about 15 fellow Jews who, taken together, represent an extremely wide spectrum of religious belief and practice (with yours truly firmly ensconced on the right edge thereof). Our purpose: to discuss ways to make many more Jews aware of the teachings and practices of the Musar tradition. This is the second year that this meeting has taken place, although we speak by phone several times a year as well, and we have all become friends. The precise setting and details of the get-together I describe are not overly important.

What is important is that the good vibes in the room were palpable to me and, I safely assume, to everyone else there. This was not a case of people having to get up and make contrived pledges of allegiance to the values of “mutual understanding” and “tolerance.” My fundamental respect for those sitting on either side of me, which I clearly sensed reflected back, was a felt reality; it didn’t require trumpeting. Although the Jewishly-related topics we discussed over the numerous hours we spent together were not controversial ones, I would like to think that the spirit of sheer goodwill that pervaded the room would have made possible the calm discussion of subjects that would indeed otherwise be considered a good deal touchier.

Last week, Rabbi Avi Shafran discussed media manipulation, comparing “a Reuters photographer’s creative Photoshopping of images” to various other forms of story-twisting — for example, the recent story asserting that an unaffiliated shul whose namesake is Conservative and past Rabbi was a founder of the UTJ (a breakoff from the Conservative movement) is, in fact, Orthodox.

This morning, Michelle Malkin refers us to an excellent case study in the various forms of media manipulation: a report by the Media Research Center called “Election In The Streets: How The Broadcast Networks Promote Illegal Immigration.”

Here are the main conclusions evidencing bias, as found in the report summary:

• While they celebrated “massive” immigration protests with “huge” crowds, the broadcast networks largely avoided scientific polling data that showed the protesters were in an overwhelming minority.
• Advocates of opening a wider path to citizenship were almost twice as likely to speak in news stories as advocates of stricter immigration control.
• While conservative labels were common, liberal labels were rarely or never used.
• While protests centered on underlining the vital role illegal aliens play in the American economy, the burdens of illegal immigration in added government costs or crime were barely covered.

Without extensive research, one can easily think of ways we have seen a similar set of biases closer to home.

Mathematicians don’t easily get excited. When my Shabbos-after-mincha chavrusa (Torah study partner) Dr Barry Simon told me with some urgency that I must read a fascinating article in the current issue of the New Yorker about a reclusive Jewish mathematician in St. Petersburg, I took him at his word. The article was a fascinating journey into a world few of us ever see – the Olympian reaches of world-class mathematics.

Grigory Perelman solved the Poincaré conjecture, a mathematical puzzle around one hundred years old, with significant potential application. Mathematicians of stellar performance have devoted their careers to it. This huge accomplishment clearly called for the mathematician’s form of the Nobel – the Fields Medal, awarded every four years. Perelman turned it down. No one had ever done that before. Perelman explained. “It was completely irrelevant for me,” he said. “Everybody understood that if the proof is correct then no other recognition is needed.”

Perelman is forty years old, served in academic positions in the United States, but returned to St. Petersburg, likely to work on the Poincaré conjecture. He gets all the solitude he wants there, where he lives with his mother. (His father made aliyah some years ago.) It is not only recognition that he manages without. Returning to his old job at the Steklov Institute, he is paid less than a hundred dollars a month. (He told a friend that he had saved enough money in the United States to live on for the rest of his life.) He dresses simply, lives simply, without the accoutrements of success or comfort. He can go for days without checking his email. None of the toys that intrigue the rest of us matter to him as much as pursuing mathematical knowledge.

Perelman’s story is woven into those of other mathematicians, including those with very contrasting styles. Their jockeying for recognition appalled Perelman – to the point that he felt the need to withdraw from the company of peers consumed by ego. The offer of the Fields was his Rubicon. “As long as I was not conspicuous, I had a choice,” Perelman explained. “Either to make some ugly thing” a fuss about the math community’s lack of integrity “or, if I didn’t do this kind of thing, to be treated as a pet. Now, when I become a very conspicuous person, I cannot stay a pet and say nothing. That is why I had to quit.”

Haaretz says: “As the ultra-Orthodox once were, Tel Avivians are vilified for shirking duty to the nation.”

Do Tel Avivians believe, heart and soul, that what they are doing in lieu of military service protects the entire Jewish nation from harm?

Whether or not Israel actually lost the war, the recent Israel/Lebanon war surely resulted in a less than preferred outcome for the Jewish people. Young Jewish souls were lost. Soldiers remain kidnapped. Property was devastated, and families were severely disrupted with communities forced into bomb shelters or compelled to evacuate their towns. Deep residual emotional scars abound.

The less informed have commenced the predictable banter of demands for resignations and admissions of culpability. Those identified as responsible include a parade of politicians and military leaders. The results of war allegedly reflect the failed efforts and judgments of these individuals. But other observers, particularly the more spiritually advanced, understand otherwise.

Since the inception of the modern Israeli state, a significant segement of Orthodox Jewry has understood the Torah learning of Torah scholars as dictating fate on the battlefield. After each Israeli military victory, the learned have rejected the military bravado of the secular Israeli. It is not the bravery or strategic prowess of the Israeli soldier or commander that facilitated victory - it is rather pious Torah study and behavior, taking place behind the scenes, that guides our fate. The prayers and religious behavior of the righteous have facilitated the victories. This view influences attitudes, but also dictates significant life choices.

One can only imagine the emotional anguish currently being experienced by Torah community leadership for the massive suffering of recent weeks. Alas, to those leaders who are actually responsible for how G-d treats his people, the option of resignation is unavailable, and sidestepping responsibility unimaginable.

Good religion, bad religion. Differentiating between them jumped into prominence in the aftermath of 9/11. Americans who ordinarily gave religion a wide berth suddenly had to contemplate religious warfare on their native soil. Europeans were used to this; to Americans it was quite new. A litmus test of acceptability quickly sprang into existence. Religion was good if it promoted tolerance, cooperation and respect for other groups. If it wanted to convert people (especially people close to your shopping mall) by the sword, it was bad.

People who value religion in their lives require much more of religion to make it good. A while back, I came across some Jewish demographers who argued for a paradigm shift in Jewish outreach. A generation or two ago, young Jews could be connected to the Jewish community through the Holocaust, or through Israel. This was no longer the case. The Holocaust card had been played too often, and was associated with persecution and oppression – notions that young Jews didn’t want to think about. Israel’s image on campus was so poor, that increasing numbers of students found identifying with it a liability.

Fortunately, they argued, a new strategy suggested itself in reaching under-affiliated, Jews, albeit in a different age cohort. Jews just a few years older and starting families sensed a moral aimlessness around them. As they thought about the values that they would want to teach their children, they realized that they were coming up short on answers to questions of right and wrong, or moral and ethical questions in an ever-changing world. If Jewish teachers could point the way through Jewish wisdom and tradition, they had a great chance to connect the younger generation with their legacy and their coreligionists.

People who take religion seriously have every expectation that a Deity Who cares about Man will have something to say about the issues that consume people, both major and minor. Religion, they reason, ought to work. If it cannot address the eternal questions of life, it won’t satisfy the quest for significance. Religion should address the ultimate issues, such as the meaning and purpose of life, and the existence of justice in an apparently unjust world. It also ought to provide insight into the everyday dilemmas that people must agonize over. It should help them in their relationships with spouses, children, parents and friends. It should guide them in relating to their jobs, their free time, their issues of money, satisfaction, and security. It should help make some sense out of the headlines of the morning paper. Tertullian, Pascal and Kierkegaard may not have obsessed over these issues, but then again there may not have been any need to in their days, when many people thought they had a better handle on these things. The western tendency to question everything and take nothing for granted leaves many people searching for moral footholds while feeling like they are falling down the side of the mountain.

If you followed media coverage of the recent hostilities in Lebanon, then you are probably familiar with the “fauxtography” of (ex-)Reuters photographer Adnan Hajj, and the blogosphere’s discovery and revelation of the doctored images. JPost columnist David Shamah wrote a recent article crediting the blogs for “Keeping the Big Boys Honest.”

It was the knowledge that blogs served as a means of correcting the media that drew me towards this medium in the first place. And it is no coincidence that “Little Green Footballs” took a leading role in revealing both the forged documents about George Bush’s National Guard service, and the forged photos from Reuters — because LGF invites readers to contact them with tips and information, and publishes in response to those tips. PowerLine does this as well, and also played a leading role in both of these stories.

Most members of the Charedi community who read the “regular” media would agree that its imagery with regards to Charedim is often quite close to Hajj’s photography: if not fabricated entirely, then so grotesquely exaggerated as to provide a false picture.

That is why I have, for example, been following the tragic story of Yisrael Valis so closely — not because I knew he was innocent (I suspect it now, but don’t know, and was still less certain in the beginning), but because I did know immediately that there was plenty of falsehood mixed in with whatever the truth might be. And like the readers of LGF who sent tips about the altered photos, it was tips from readers that led directly to both of my most recent posts on Valis.

With the Arizona Diamondbacks’ shlugger Shawn Green set to join the league-leading New York Mets a few short weeks before the playoffs begin in October, I thought it timely to reprint a piece I wrote for the Forward back in 2001 when Green, then a Los Angeles Dodgers star, made headlines by sitting out a crucial game on the Yom HaKadosh (Holy Day).

This year, however, it falls on October 2, just after the season concludes, making it unlikely, I suppose, that a playoff game will be scheduled for that day, and thus sparing the yingel the nisayon (spiritual test). Expecting Green to forego a Shmini Atzeres game is probably a bit too ambitious, yet who knows what effect his coming to that metropolis of Torah U’Mitzvos, New York, might have?

Move over, Sandy Koufax, make room for the next boychik of summer.

Mr. Koufax, besides having been one of the most overpowering pitchers of the 20th century, forever will be remembered by Jewish baseball fans for his decision to sit out the first game of the 1965 World Series because it coincided with Yom Kippur. Now comes word from Shawn Green, the slugging right fielder for Mr. Koufax’s Los Angeles Dodgers, that he, too, will not play in what could be an important game, the Dodgers’ final home game on September 26, this year’s Yom Kippur Eve.

Much furor accompanied the exposing of a Reuters photographer’s creative Photoshopping of images from the recent Israeli invasion of Lebanon – and rightly so. Aish HaTorah produced a short film report on the deception, by turns amusing and infuriating. Among other examples of the journalistic deceit it documents is a gentleman posing first as a rescuer and then as a corpse. And the apparent placement, for maximum emotional impact, of a pristine wedding dress and an assortment of equally dust-free stuffed animals into the midst of Beirut bombing rubble.

Media manipulate, though, in myriad ways. Sometimes even with good, if misguided, intentions, sometimes even unintentionally, and sometimes even in our own backyard.

Take a recent front-page story in the New York Jewish Week. The article heralded what it claimed may be the “charting [of] new territory in the terrain of religious practice” in the Jewish world. The Sabbath’s move to Tuesday? The introduction of a new holiday? A set of laws governing e-mail? A time limit for sermons? No, no, something more radical: a woman was appointed to lead a congregation.

Now there have been women rabbis in the Reform and Conservative movements for decades. Although their salaries inexplicably lag behind those of their male counterparts, Conservative and Reform female rabbis have become commonplace over the years. So why the Jewish Week’s breathlessness over “a decision that could be seen as fracturing the stained-glass ceiling” of a synagogue?

Is there a connection between the corruption and venality of the current government and its disastrous conduct of the war in Lebanon?

Before jumping to answer affirmatively, we would do well to remember that history is replete with examples of outstanding leaders whose private lives were far from exemplary, and the opposite. Even virtues do not automatically translate from one realm to another. Israel’s most decorated soldier – a man of outstanding bravery and clear thinking under fire – proved a cowardly and confused prime minister.

Still the ethical lapses of the present Kadima-led government inevitably raise the question of the connection between private and public conduct. At the top of the pyramid of those under investigation or indictment is the prime minister. According to Ha’aretz’s Ari Shavit, Ehud Olmert and his wife will soon be summoned by the State Comptroller to explain why a developer sold him a new apartment for $1,500 less per square meter than it cost him to develop, and for little more than half the per meter price of other apartments in the building. The State Comptroller will want to know whether the half million dollar windfall is related to the highly unusual zoning variances granted the developer by the former mayor’s cronies in the Jerusalem municipality.

Justice Minister Chaim Ramon has already resigned after being indicted. MK Tzahi Hanegbi, head of the powerful Knesset Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defense and one of the first to jump from Likud to Kadima, will soon be indicted for using the Environment Ministry in a manner that would have done Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall proud. And the State Comptroller is investigating illegal campaign contributions from American billionaire Daniel Abraham to vice-premier Shimon Peres. (The ubiquitous Abraham purchased the Olmert’s former apartment for almost twice the price per square meter as their new apartment, even though the latter is in a more expensive neighborhood – the kind of favor not soon forgotten.)