By Yitzchok Adlerstein, on August 31st, 2006 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 … Read More >>
By Yaakov Menken, on August 31st, 2006 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.
The Conservative Movement’s Committee on Law and Standards did not … Read More >>
By Yaakov Menken, on August 31st, 2006 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.
Now, I have no idea why the minyan sang the tune in … Read More >>
By Eytan Kobre, on August 31st, 2006 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.
As the WSJ editorialist observes:
Churches have always tried to influence voters … Read More >>
By Jonathan Rosenblum, on August 31st, 2006 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 … Read More >>
By Eytan Kobre, on August 30th, 2006 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.
For a while after seeing this report, I tried to make sense of how it is … Read More >>
By Shira Schmidt, on August 30th, 2006 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
In a moment of uncharacteristic candor, Sattath provided the answer. “We don’t want to offend them [the Arabs],” she told me a couple of weeks ago.
“But many Jews are also offended by the march,” I responded. “Seems to me that means you are careful not to offend Arab … Read More >>
By Jonathan Rosenblum, on August 30th, 2006 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 … Read More >>
By Yitzchok Adlerstein, on August 30th, 2006 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.
By Yaakov Menken, on August 29th, 2006 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 … Read More >>
By Yaakov Menken, on August 29th, 2006 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.
We sent a warm thank-you letter to the electric company along with the attached pictures.
Indeed, only in Israel! How can you beat an amazing story like this? Truly Mi K’Amcha Yisrael — “who is like your nation, Israel” — with all the stories we hear about Israel’s bureaucracies, this is truly heartwarming.
Oh, and Mazal Tov to the Chosson and Kallah!
By Yaakov Menken, on August 29th, 2006 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 … Read More >>
By Jonathan Rosenblum, on August 29th, 2006 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 … Read More >>
By Jonathan Rosenblum, on August 29th, 2006 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, … Read More >>
By Yitzchok Adlerstein, on August 29th, 2006 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 … Read More >>
By Eytan Kobre, on August 28th, 2006 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 … Read More >>
By Yaakov Menken, on August 28th, 2006 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 … Read More >>
By Yitzchok Adlerstein, on August 28th, 2006 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 … Read More >>
By Yaakov Menken, on August 27th, 2006 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?
By Mark Bane, on August 27th, 2006 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 … Read More >>
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