Kudos are due to the Harry & Jeanette Weinberg Foundation, which has pledged $10 million in support of K-12 Jewish education in Baltimore over the next five years. The Associated Jewish Charities will match with $5 million over the same period. The Jewish Times says the total will be $16 million — I’m not sure where they get the last million from, but it means an additional $3 million per year pumped into the local schools.

Many years ago, the Baltimore Board of Jewish education set up a formula for distribution of funds to local day schools on a per-student basis. That means that the money isn’t politicized by denominational or school preferences; rather, money is allocated to each school for every Baltimore child educated.

It sounds like a huge amount, and without question it will make a big difference. It comes down to roughly $500 per student according to a local school executive. But when day school tuitions approach or exceed $10,000 per year, you realize how much more must be accomplished to make a day school education affordable for every Jewish family.

That in no way diminishes the importance of this groundbreaking contribution. Funding for Jewish education is funding the Jewish future, and the Weinberg grant blazes a trail that we can hope many will follow.

Just how hard should Jews work to build relationships for a rainy day? A little-known work of the Ralbag may hold a clue to the answer.

Many of us have heard the stories about the ethical response of a Jewish leader to a non-Jew and the dividends it brought years later. We know about the Nodah Bi-Yehudah and the baker’s son, and how it saved Prague’s Jews from a plot to destroy them; we’ve read about R’ Yaakov Kamenetsky and his instructions to return the extra postage to the postmaster, and how he became mayor years later and saved Jews under Nazi rule. We have digested many similar stories. Part of their charm is that the response was spontaneous and uncalculated. The Torah figure acted as he did because he was suffused with integrity, not because he anticipated some future gain.

In more recent times, Jewish leaders have sometimes deliberately pursued warm relationships with non-Jews in high places specifically for the purpose of investing in the future. There is nothing ignoble or unethical about this, as the parties on the other side of the relationship are also looking out for their own future benefit. The expectation is symbiotic gain. Along the way, real friendships are created, because the people who involve themselves in this kind of lobbying are often those who genuinely like other people, no matter how diverse.

Is there precedent for this in Jewish history? We think of Esther parlaying her position into salvation for her people. Esther, though, had no real choice in the matter. Is bridge-building part of the Jewish political agenda? This author in particular would like to know, since he spends a good chunk of the week warming up to potential friends outside the Jewish community on behalf of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. An incident in the life of the Ralbag may shed some light on the matter.

Meretz MK Chaim Oron introduced a bill last week in the Knesset that would impose an automatic six month jail sentence on anyone attempting to influence, directly or indirectly, a minor to be chozer b’teshuva, under the auspicies of any organization that has as one of its purposes bringing Jews back to religious observance. For the time being, at least, the proposed legislation is going nowhere. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is still ardently courting United Torah Judaism in the hopes of bringing the chareidi party into his coalition, and he is not about to let such an incendiary piece of legislation make any headway in the Knesset.

Oron, it would seem, is interested primarily in generating a little publicity for himself by stirring up a religious tension. With Tommy Lapid and his Shinui party now just a bitter memory, Oron hopes to win over some of Lapid’s former supporters. The introduction of the law remains a painful reminder that religion-baiting still has a constituency in Israel today.

In his written materials in support of the legislation, Oron compares his bill to existing anti-missionary legislation. Yet his bill is, in fact, much further reaching than the anti-missionary legislation now on the books. The latter outlaws primarily financial inducements to change one’s religion from Judaism. And the government has never made any serious attempt to enforce laws against missionaries. In any confrontation between missionaries and anti-missionary groups such as Yad L’Achim and Lev L’Achim, the latter are far more likely to be arrested by the police than are the missionaries.

Unlike the anti-missionary statutes, Oron’s proposed bill contains no clause limiting its application to the use of financial inducements to convince minors to adopt religious observance. It is so broadly and unclearly worded that the teaching of Torah, mitzvot and Jewish holidays could easily be interpreted to fall within the ambit of the statute. In the terms of American first amendment jurisprudence, the proposed statute would exercise a “chilling effect” on all teaching of Torah to minors not from religious homes. It would return us to the days of the Romans.

Responses to an essay say much to a writer. Sometimes they reveal flaws in the essayist’s assumptions or reasoning, provide a different perspective or are otherwise enlightening. Other times they reveal something more about the responders.

Back in May, I wrote an article about atheism. It was inspired by an earlier op-ed by philosopher Slavoj Zizek in The New York Times, extolling “the dignity of atheism.” I titled my own essay “The Indignity of Atheism” and made one simple and obvious point: One who sees only random forces behind why we humans find ourselves here can have no reason to believe in objective categories of good and evil.

I took pains to stress that I was not contending that atheists are bad people, and certainly not that religious people are necessarily good. I was not judging anyone, rather stating a self-evident philosophical truism: If our perception that some deeds are good and others are not is but a quirk of natural selection, none of us need feel any commitment to morality or ethics.

The piece appeared in The Providence Journal and a number of Jewish weeklies. Soon enough, it was posted on a multitude of atheist weblogs, along with rebuttals – or screeds presented as such.

Adam and Eve in the Garden, and the misadventures of Rep Mark Foley and other public figures: what do they have in common?

What they have in common is man’s total uwillingness to take responsibility for his own actions, and his total willingness to blame someone else. Adam violates Gods edict about eating from the forbidden tree. God confronts him. What does Adam do? He blames his “problem” - Eve: “The woman you gave me talked me into it.”

God confronts Eve. What does she do? “The serpent persuaded me to do it.” She is not responsible. Her problem, called the serpent, made her do it.

Adam and Eve could be in today’s headlines. All that is missing from their story is today’s crocodile-tearful public apology and the retreat to a rehabilitation center, after which they would be re-admitted to their Paradise. But there was as yet no public, and God had somehow forgotten to create rehab centers in the first seven days. Unfortunately for them, the only public they could address — God Himself — is singularly unimpressed with their excuses . He gives them appropriate rehabilitation: they are permanently banished from the Garden.

How do some small-scale chesed organizations grow to become major organizations? The difference, after all, is not merely one of scale. Running a gemach with total assets of $500, for instance, has little to do with running one lending ten million dollars annually, involving more than a dozen bank accounts, and a full-time staff.

Similarly, nothing in the backgrounds of Rabbi Yaakov Weisel and his wife Hadassah, a maggid shiur and a housewife, respectively, suggested the ability to transform their collection campaigns for various neighbors into a multi-million dollar chesed organization.

Yet, in the first case, Rabbi Shmuel Avraham Myski, zt”l, seamlessly made the transition to chief executive of the world’s largest gemach, mastering such arcane subjects as federal bankruptcy law along the way. Every aspect of his gemach reflected his careful attention to detail. The rooms in which loan applicants were interviewed, for instance, were each sound-proofed and had music piped in so that there was no chance of what was said in one room being heard in another.

And Yad Eliezer, under the day-to-day direction of the Weisels’ son Dov, has proven itself a highly efficient organization. Each year Yad Eliezer collects approximately a million dollars of produce from farmers who would have otherwise burned it or left it in the field to rot. Had Yad Eliezer not been capable of collecting such a large quantity of produce and distributing it to the neediest sectors of the population, the Agriculture Ministry would never have offered its assistance.

Joseph Epstein’s ruminations on friendship, or more accurately the loss thereof, in the July-August Commentary (”Friendship among the Intellectuals”) touched a subject close to my heart.

I am someone who feels a strong need to retain a connection to the past. On trips back to Chicago, I inevitably take my children to visit the house in which I grew up, as well as old campus haunts, only to be surprised by how little interest they exhibit in these places. As a little boy, I spent a lot of time wondering whether my future wife was yet born and what she was doing at that moment; half a century later, I often find myself wondering what old friends are doing now.

If asked, Epstein observes, most people would deny that one should give up friends because of differences over politics or ideas. And yet that happens all the time, particularly among those who take ideas seriously. Norman Podhoretz managed to get an entire book, Ex-Friends, out of the friendships broken as he moved from the Left to the Right of the political spectrum.

Every friendship is an investment, and most of us are reticent about acknowledging an investment gone sour. But there is another price to be paid for jettisoning one’s friends as one’s politics change: the danger of becoming a narrow partisan. Certainly one can never earn Conor Cruise O’Brien’s description of an intellectual “as someone who is prepared to admit when another has made a point in a debate” if one never exposes oneself to opposing ideas. Those of us who care about ideas should prefer to see our own tested in the crucible of debate.

Scrawled on a wall: “G-d is Dead.” – Nietzsche.

Underneath: “Nietzsche is Dead.” – G-d.

Many years ago, I found it necessary (or so I thought) as a young kiruv (outreach)worker to learn what the other side believed. I picked up Bertrand Russell’s small collection of essays on atheism, and ploughed through them. They wound up enhancing my emunah (belief). This was the best the atheists could cobble together, I thought?

Richard Dawkins, preeminent biologist and spokesperson for contemporary evolutionary thought, is on tour of the US, hawking The G-d Delusion, his new book exposing belief in a Deity as the underlying cause of most of what is wrong with civilization.

I have long had mixed feelings about parshas Bereishis.

On the one hand, it’s my Bar Mitzvah parshah – and let’s just say that . . . there’s a reason I have lained only once since that fateful weekend.

On the other hand, despite those somewhat negative memories, the overwhelming importance and profundity of the creation story (as well as the narrative of Adam and Chava) always makes this an exhilarating text for study and reflection.

In that vein, allow me to share two thoughts from this past week’s parshah.

The students at New Voices magazine were distressed to learn that their funding will be cut; they will receive only $10,000 from the UJA-Federation of New York this year. Last year they were given $30,000, could have received $40,000 this time around, and — adding insult to injury — this year’s reduced funding also requires that they run advertisements for two pro-Israel advocacy groups free of charge.

The Forward seems to bemoan the reduced funding, quoting the editor of New Voices and one of its advocates, and discussing the layoff caused by the cut. The New Voices editor clearly seems to take the position that the UJA should simply hand over the money, whether or not New Voices is to the UJA’s liking:

The magazine’s editor, Ilana Sichel, said she believed that displeasure with the coverage of Israel in New Voices was the reason for the reduction. “The translation, as far as we understand it is: We publish articles that present Israel as a real political entity with real problems,” Sichel wrote in an e-mail. “And that doesn’t serve the advocacy agenda.”

Unfortunately for Ms. Sichel, the Golden Rule of donations is that he who has the gold, makes the rules. There’s nothing wrong or insidious with the UJA having a pro-Israel agenda.

News Flash: Men are inherently less spiritual and religious than women, and require different and more structured programs to spark and maintain religious commitment. This difference, first recorded in Torah and Talmud and codified into Jewish observance ever since, has been rediscovered by liberal Jewish groups now struggling to explain why teenage boys are much more likely than their female counterparts to bolt Jewish involvement after Bar Mitzvah. Highlights from the Jewish Week include:

In startling numbers, boys are simply ceasing their involvement in Jewish activities around the time they become bar mitzvah, according to Moving Traditions. As a result, many Jewish programs for teens and young adults are disproportionately filled with girls.

“Boys consider bar mitzvah their graduation from Jewish life, more than girls do,” says Deborah Meyer, executive director of Moving Traditions, which recently started a three-year research project to identify what boys need.

Underlying issues aren’t unique to Jewish boys. A Newsweek cover story last January focused on the struggle of increasing numbers of boys in education. And American boys are more suspicious of religion than girls, according to a National Study of Youth and Religion (youthandreligion.org).

by Jeff Jacoby

Before writing his article, Jeff sent a letter to several Rabbis seeking their thoughts. His comments about why he wrote this piece have not been published previously, but add considerably to its Jewish context. It is our privilege to post a selection from his email, with his permission:

Twice before I have written about the Christian impulse to express love or forgiveness or charity in the face of depraved evil — once when Pope John Paul II prayed that God should forgive the 9/11 terrorists, and after Arafat died, and George W. Bush’s instinctive reaction was to say, “God bless his soul.” I feel the urge to do so again — I guess because every Jewish instinct in me rebels at the idea that one’s response to cruelty and murder should be compassion and kindness for anyone except the victims. A few years back, Meir Soloveichik wrote a wonderful essay in First Things called “The Virtue of Hate,” which explored this difference between Judaism and Christianity at (magazine) length…

The end of a generation.

I can hardly recall how often I heard that claim made at the levayos (funerals) of various Torah personalities. No one in my generation saw the great yeshivos and communities of pre-war Europe. Our rabbeim were from the she’eiris hapletah, the small number of those who survived. Each one who passed away was the end of a generation, the last who personally experienced some aspect of what had taken eight hundred years to build in Europe. This one was the last who studied with the Chofetz Chaim, or who had seen R’ Chaim Brisker, or remembered R’ Chaim Ozer on the Vilna beis din.

The end of a generation.

So time-worn is the phrase, that I could not believe that I heard myself using it, even in the privacy of my own thoughts. It was, though, the first thought that entered my mind when I heard of the petirah on Hoshanah Rabbah of Reb Hershel Berger, z”l.

Anyone familiar with contemporary talk-radio knows that the word “liberal” has become for some a slur, implying that holders of ideals like tolerance for other cultures or concern for the poor and disadvantaged are somehow inherently polluted by nonchalance toward national security, too little concern about crime and too much about the rights of terrorists.

But another word, “fundamentalist,” has likewise been made into an insult of its own, something recently noted by David Klinghoffer, the erstwhile literary editor of National Review and current senior fellow at a public policy think-tank, the Discovery Institute. (Full disclosure: Mr. Klinghoffer was a Sabbath guest at the Shafran home several times seven or eight years ago, and I consider him a friend.)

Writing in the national Jewish weekly Forward, Klinghoffer points out that the “fundamentalist” label is regularly used to cast people who hew to foundational religious beliefs as “stupid,” “obnoxious” or “backward.”

Klinghoffer’s context is the assertion by former New Republic editor and current Time Magazine blogger Andrew Sullivan that “fundamentalists” – i.e. people with deep religious beliefs – are inherently arrogant, because they believe they know what is right and what is wrong, and apply their convictions to political and social issues. Instead, Sullivan advocates “spiritual humility and sincere religious doubt” and champions “a faith that… picks and chooses between doctrines under the guidance of individual conscience.”

Never underestimate the power of enthusiasm and positive thinking! This was the lesson driven home by our unexpected guests on the evening of Shemini Atzeres, the “gathering of the eighth day” at the end of Sukkos.

Friday evenings often find me at the synagogue founded by my wife’s grandfather, Rav Tzvi Elimelech Hertzberg zt”l. A distant relative of my wife was inspired to bring his two teenage sons to the same service, also because of the family connection. They aren’t observant, but were interested to see how we celebrate the holiday.

Of course, this led to an invitation to Friday night dinner, and three unexpected guests in our Sukkah. Given that they hadn’t dressed for an evening in chilly weather, I loaned the two boys a winter jacket and a parka dating back to my college days, and a warm raincoat to the father.

Only at the end of the meal did the father admit to me that his sons were cold! Without going into all the details, Shemini Atzeres is a night when many dine in the Sukkah, but only if they are comfortable. We certainly could have made Kiddush and eaten challah in the Sukkah, and then gone inside for the rest of the meal.

Back in the old days, America’s religious checkerboard came in only two colors – Jewish and Christian. This was never true, of course, but we liked to think it was. The perception left room for an effective throw-away line that made inter-group cooperation possible: “We all worship the same G-d, after all.” I’m not sure if this was ever true, but by now it is not even a useful fiction. Ironically, the presidential aspirations of Mitt Romney are creating doubts about whether there is room for all of us to stand under the same theological umbrella. As far as I am concerned, the first ones to get pushed out into the rain are the Islamofascists.

Terry Mattingly is one of America’s most influential religion writers. He recently wrote about Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s Mormonism coming up as an issue in his possible bid for the Republican presidential nod in 2008. Commenting on Mormon beliefs about gay marriage, Romney had a memorable response. “Mormons believe that marriage is between a man and a woman and a woman and a woman.”

But the real issue, says Mattingly is not polygamy, but polytheism. He links to a longer analysis of Mormon belief seen from an evangelical perspective. According to this view, Mormons believe in many gods, each presiding over a different world. Moreover, gods were once human, and became gods through a process called exaltation. What emerges is that many Protestants see the Mormon conception of G-d as so different from their own, that they do not regard them as monotheistic at all. (Having met quite a few Mormons who are among the loveliest people around, I caution readers against accepting all of this at face value without hearing their response.)

I find this fascinating, for a number of reasons. First of all, it makes my relationship with Christians much easier. It has never been easy or pleasant to explain to Christian friends why Jews regard the Christian triune understanding of G-d as running clearly afoul of G-d’s Oneness, at least according to the standard expected of Jews. (Medieval authorities disputed whether non-Jews were expected to maintain as pure an understanding of monotheism according to the Noachide Code.) I now have an analogy that hopefully will work. Just as many Christians see Mormon belief in gods who were once human as a hopeless distortion of divinity, Jews see the very possibility of G-d becoming flesh (and therefore less than infinite and limitless) with the same objection. This should help them at least understand our position, which in my experience, few have ever heard.

In 1971, a Chassidishe yungerman with $500 in extra money from his wedding decided to start a gemach. By the late ‘80s, that gemach was lending over ten million dollars a year.

How did a second-grade rebbe, with no substantial personal resources of his own, come to run a gemach of that magnitude? That was the question that I faced when I came to write about Rabbi Shmuel Avraham Myski, zt”l, for the Jewish Observer, shortly after his too early passing.

Ultimately, the only answer I could offer was: When a person has an overwhelming desire to give to others, HaKadosh Baruch provides him the means to do so – and on a scale beyond anything that could have been contemplated initially. Rabbi Myski certainly possessed that overwhelming desire to give. He was accused, not without with some justice, of trying to grab all the chesed in Monsey for himself. . He did not wait to be asked for loans, but sought out those in need. He noticed, for instance, that a local shoe store was not properly stocked for the peak Pesach season, and deduced that the owner had exhausted all his credit. A loan was forthcoming without ever having been sought.

The lessons learned from Rabbi Myski’s remarkable life came back to me recently during a series of visits to Yad Eliezer’s Jerusalem headquarters. About the dedication of the organization’s founders Rabbi Yaakov Weisel and his wife Hadassah there can be no question. Fourteen years ago, robbers broke into the Weisels’ apartment in Jerusalem’s Ezras Torah neighborhood.

Recent years have witnessed repeated pleas for liberalization of the standards of conversion to Judaism. Most often those demands center on the State of Israel where the Chief Rabbinate still maintains authority over conversions performed in Israel. (Liberalized standards are less of an issue in the rest of the world, where it is always possible to find some “rabbi” to perform the conversion for the right price.)

Proponents of liberalized standards range all the way from those who ostensibly want nothing more than a more welcoming attitude towards converts and fewer bureaucratic hassles to those, like Yossi Beilin and Shimon Peres, architects of the Oslo process, who have urged the oxymoronic “secular conversion.”

In support of liberalized standards, proponents rely on two principle arguments. The first is the necessity of integrating a half a million non-Jewish immigrants from the FSU into the fabric of Israeli life. The second argument centers on the dwindling number of Jews worldwide, and the necessity of encouraging conversion as a means of preventing the disappearance of the Jewish people.

In general, those calling for liberalized standards are not overly concerned with the halachic issues involved. At most, they content themselves with a rhetorical argument: It is unfair to require converts to undertake full halachic observance as a condition of entrance into the Jewish people when the vast majority of halachic Jews themselves do not adhere to halacha.

Another gem from Jameel:

The winter session of the Knesset is now in session. MK Chaim Oron (Meretz) ascended the podium of Israel’s parliament and proposed a new law:

Any person who attempts to influence a minor, to become more religiously observant of Judaism, (להחזיר בתשובה) will be subject to arrest and imprisonment for 6 months.

Back in 1989 or 1990, the Jerusalem Report ran a feature on a new program sponsored by the “Movement for Secular Humanistic Judaism,” called the “Irgun L’Chozrim L’she’ila,” or “the organization for returnees to questioning.” Then as now, the Jerusalem Report wasn’t known to be especially pro-religion, and the article practically fawned over this wonderful new group.

The horrific murder of five Amish schoolgirls and the response to those murders by the Amish community has attracted extensive news coverage and inspired much meaningful commentary. Perhaps the most thought provoking interchange centered on the limits — or, if there should be limits — of forgiveness.

The position of the Amish community has been simple — if extreme. Forgiveness — complete and without any strings attached — characterizes their attitude towards the murderer, Charles Carl Roberts IV. This approach has, in turn, inspired emotional and eloquent reactions in the media. Some columnists, such as Rod Dreher, have expressed admiration of the Amish, even going so far as to the lament their own inability to act similarly. Others, like John Podhoretz, have voiced discomfort with such quick and complete forgiveness.

I believe that the balance of Jewish tradition — as reflected by both law and philosophy — would indicate that declarations of forgiveness are premature and uncalled for. One can admire the emotional strength of the Amish while disagreeing with their philosophy and it is important to distinguish between noble intent and moral clarity.

Central to any discussion such as this must be the question of who is empowered to grant forgiveness. On this point Jewish law is clear. Much as only the creditor can forgive a debt, similarly, only the victim of an offense is in a position to forgive the perpetrator. In fact, we are taught that even God will not forgive a person who has sinned against another human being before the aggrieved party has granted forgiveness. It appears clear, therefore, that although the Amish community leaders — and even the relatives of the deceased — have been affected by this tragedy, they are simply incapable of granting meaningful forgiveness.

Today, Hoshana Raba — the seventh day of Sukkos — is the anniversary of the day all the sukkos in North Miami Beach blew away, exactly one year ago.

Three days earlier, the weather reports started talking about a tropical depression called “Wilma” — so far down in the alphabet, so rare to have so many hurricanes in one season. Would this become a hurricane?

The next day, the warnings became a bit more serious. The day after that, one day before she hit, the radio and TV went to all-Wilma, all the time.

Having lived through a number of hurricanes in my neck of the woods — in fact, the eye of Katrina had passed directly over my house, a few weeks earlier! — I knew what to expect. Or thought I did. A lot of wind and rain, some branches on the road, a day or two without electricity. Katrina was only a Category One when it hit us, en route to New Orleans: it meant one day with no lights and no air conditioning.

Before the gates and books are closed on Hoshana Rabba, I would like to make the following amends.
1) Apologies to Rahel Jaskow . Yaakov Menken and others were unfairly harsh with Rahel Jaskow in the discussion below on Beinisch: the bane of the Supreme Court? . My primary focus in my posting was on the Supreme Court and Justice Beinisch. I think the Court used Women of the Wall to promote the Court’s activist agenda. The WOW were a pawn in a struggle between the judicial and legislative branches. That stuggle was my primary interest – I too didn’t care that much per se about WOW but rather felt that the Court should not be interfering with religious matters. Rahel Jaskow is one of the most sincerely spiritual people I know. She has a beautiful voice (I bought her CD Day of Rest) and Rahel wants to use her voice to worship Hashem. Although I think the Wall is not the venue for this, I realize that she and many of the women in WOW got caught in the aforementioned power struggle. It is the Court I wanted to criticize, not specifically WOW.

2) Apologies to Dorit Beinisch . My original post was critical of Justice Beinisch and her using WOW to promote her own position which seems to be adversarial vis-a-vis Orthodox authority, and supportive of feminist positions. I was happily surprised to read that having assumed her responsibilities as Supreme Court President, she is modifying her outlook. Specifically, I read the following description of Yom Kippur services at the Jerusalem [Orthodox] Great Synagogue in a Jerusalem Post column by Greer Fay Cashman:

But the surprise dignitary was Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch, who as far as any of the powers-that-be could tell, had not previously attended High Holy Day Services at the Great Synagogue. Asher Schapiro, the chairman of the congregation, was seated alongside Yehezkel Beinisch, the husband of the president of the Supreme Court, who is well-known for his love of music. Schapiro asked Beinisch if they were there to hear Cantor Naftali Hershtik and the choir. The reply was in the negative. The reason for their presence was that Dorit Beinisch considered it her duty as president of the Supreme Court to make an appearance on the Day of Judgment in the Great Synagogue of the capital of Israel. [emphasis mine, SLS]

We each have our own memory highlights of the recently concluded Days of Awe: the Shofar of Rosh Hashana; the magnificent symphony of that day’s Musaf Amida; penetrating prayers like “Who shall live and who shall die, and “Cast us not off at old age”; the emotional Neila service that climaxes Yom Kippur. One does not have to be particularly religious to be moved by one or another aspect of these truly holy days.

In the Shul I attend here in Jerusalem, something occurred at the end of Yom Kippur day that was memorable. Paradoxically, this was not because of the words we uttered, but the words we did not utter.

Somehow, the Neila service had ended a bit earlier than scheduled. We recited the climactic Confession of Faith that marks the end of the day: the Shema Yisrael, followed by “Baruch shem kevod/May His glorious Name be blessed for eternity,” followed by the seven-fold affirmation that “God, He is the Lord.”

Normally, the Shofar is sounded at this point, which, according to tradition, marks the return of the Divine Presence to its celestial abode. But it was too early. It was only 5:38, and the Shofar could not be sounded until it was fully dark at 5:48. Ten minutes to go.

Was Biblical Ezra the Scribe ultra-Orthodox? What lies behind this seemingly silly question is a set of serious questions: When did Torah-observant Jewry divide into Orthodox, modern Orthodox, ultra-Orthodox, etc.? Were Moshe Rabbenu, Ezra & Nehemia, Maimonides, Rashi, and Yehuda Halevi haredim?

This came to mind when someone asked me whether Ezra, the fictitious hero of Dawning of the Day, Rav Haim Sabato’s newest novel, was haredi.

For those who will be in Jerusalem on Monday after Simhat Torah (24 bTishrey) Oct. 16, there will be an evening devoted to the Dawning of the Day at 8 pm at Mishkenot Shaananim (Yemin Moshe, near Montefiore’s windmill down the block from the King David).Rav Sabato will speak (in Hebrew) and answer questions, and several literary critics will speak (in English).

The Friday English Haaretz published my review (co-authored with Jessica Setbon) of The Dawning of the Day, the exquisite translation into English translation (by Yacob Dweck a young scholar of Syrian descent) of R. Sabato’s K’Afapey Shahar. We know a lot about the book’s hero, Ezra Siman Tov, an Aleppo (Syrian) Jew living in Jerusalem’s Mahaneh Yehuda. We even know that

Ezra Siman Tov has a secret - a dark, sinful secret. He hides from it, but it intrudes like a specter on his peaceful life in the Jerusalem community of immigrants from Aleppo (Halab). “For several years he wept and pleaded for his sin to be pardoned, and he scrubbed and scoured the stain with all his might.”

This answer was just posted to JewishAnswers yesterday. I don’t know who wrote it, but it could have been most anyone in the JewishAnswers group.

I would be interested to know what you think of this video involving Neturei Karta?

The video you referenced disturbed me greatly. If you will allow me a moment, I am going to get on my soap box here:

I don’t have an issue with someone being pro or con the establishment of the State of Israel. As Americans we are taught to respect those who differ with us, as students of Torah we are taught the same thing. However, the issue I do have with these people is consorting with those who delight in killing Jews. For that I see no excuse, nor do I have anything but the greatest of contempt for such people. Feeling that there are religious reasons that there shouldn’t be a state before the coming of the Messiah, is not an excuse to encourage those who are sworn to kill Jews!