“No kudos for the kudu” is a title he wisely skipped over, but if you are learning Daf Yomi, (and even if you are not) you will not want to skip Rabbi Natan Slifkin’s new essay that is keyed to the Daf for Sunday, Asara B’Teves.

Several parts of the Daf come alive, as you will find out the relative merits and demerits of making shofros out of some common and not so common animals. You will also find out why, to fulfill the mitzvah in the best possible manner, you may want to visit the local Yemenite shul on the way home from your own – at least if they haven’t decided to replace the ram’s horn with that of the kudu.

If you should ever happen to find yourself in an ornate, high-ceilinged room and a military-uniformed classical string ensemble is segueing from a flawless rendition of a Bach Concerto to an equally impressive (if considerably less inspiring) version of “I Have a Little Dreidel,” you can only be one place: the White House Chanukah Party.

The annual event hosted by President and Mrs. Bush for a few score representatives of the American Jewish community is a tangible expression of the good will the First Couple have demonstrated to a multitude of the nation’s religious groups, Jews among them. Whether one considers President Bush II’s domestic or foreign policies principled (as I, for the most part, do) or preposterous, the President must be given high points for his reaching out to Americans of faith.

Among the Jewish groups to whom the White House extended invitations to this year’s Chanukah celebration, which took place on December 18, the third day of the holiday, was Agudath Israel of America, and I was honored to attend as one of its representatives. It was a pleasure to meet and mingle with Jews from other parts of the American Jewish community, an opportunity that doesn’t present itself as often as I’d like. And it was a privilege to meet, if briefly, President and Mrs. Bush. I chose to use my moment in their company to offer them my sincere and solemn blessings, thereby disappointing my 13-year-old son, who had wanted me to request a Presidential decree that the school week be reduced to three days.

The event, true to its Jewish nature, was awash in food, all of it under strict Orthodox supervision, produced in a White House kitchen fully “koshered” for the event. As another observant participant observed to me when I greeted him, “This is an amazing symbol of the malchus shel chesed [government of kindness] that is this great country.” It was indeed hard to not be impressed.

I wonder if the editor would comment on this blog’s rules of acceptable discourse. Without prejudice either way on the claims being made, I wonder if the charges being made were leveled at charedi/mo movements or their leaders, whether they would have been allowed.

Joel raises an important point that more than deserves a response.

I’m one of the editors, and I can’t figure out the rules myself! (There is no one editor. Several people have editorial privileges, and usually whoever gets to the moderation desk first makes the decision, often asking the others when there are questions.)
We are long overdue on a formal protocol for comments. There are some rules we all agree upon:
1) There should be no obvious violations of hilchos lashon hora and rechilus (laws of impermissible speech). (Yes, we do ask shaylos; no we are not perfect.)
2) We avoid comments that attack generally accepted hashkafic principles within mainstream Orthodoxy. (Only Dennis gets to do that, and only when debating me )
3) We delete (or edit) comments that use demeaning and fighting language, racist references, or comments that will lead to chilul Hashem in the general population
4) We do allow criticism – even strong criticism – of charedi or centrist Orthodoxy. We would not allow criticism of a named leader of any mainstream Orthodox group. Criticism of Chabad was tolerated on this thread; we would not have allowed insults of the Rebbe z”l himself.
5) I have been pushing to change the rules further, and make the comment section hew closer to the line of ezines, in which it is not there to facilitate back and forth between readers, but where only comments that say something new and insightful would be published. I don’t know how popular that will be with other contributors.

We did stretch the rules for this thread, and allowed comments far more vituperative than we would normally tolerate. I have a long friendship with Rabbi Eliezrie; I believe him to be a vital and reasonable link to the Chabad world. He has shared many of his talents with the non-Chabad world in the past (such as instructing and guiding figures in major Orthodox groups in the fine art of dealing with media) , and is as much a meshichist as I am a Reconstructionist. I wanted him to hear the voices of the non-Chabad world with the dampers off; I wanted him to take off his gloves and mount a vigorous defense. I certainly don’t agree with all his points, but he (and some of the commenters of like mind) has done a good job staking out a different position.

The speaker was a bit reluctant, unaccustomed to standing before an audience. Yet there she stood in Los Angeles, her hometown, at a dinner hosted by a Southern California Jewish campus outreach organization, the Jewish Awareness Movement. She was addressing supporters of the group and parents, like herself and her husband, whose children, as a result of JAM and their consciences, had come to Jewish religious observance.

Marsha Greenberg recounted how her grandparents had come to American shores from Romania, met in Chicago and sired nine children, the oldest of which was the speaker’s mother. And she told of her own childhood, how her father had died when she was only four and how, ten years later, her older brother and only sibling perished in a freak, fierce blizzard while on a Boy Scout trip in the San Bernardino Mountains.

“My mom never recovered from the loss,” she told the crowd. “I grew up overnight.”

When she was sixteen, she went on, she met a “nice Jewish boy” two years her senior, “from a good home.” They married and eventually had three children.

There are currently 800 secular Jewish women in Israel looking for a chareidi woman with whom to learn Torah over the phone, and no study partner available. “Couldn’t be,” you’ll say. But, unfortunately, it is.

The Ayelet HaShachar organization has been in contact with 2,800 secular women who want to learn Torah half an hour a week over the phone. About 50% of the secular women come via Rabbi Zamir Cohen’s cable TV program Hedabrut; most of the rest are recommended by a friend already in the program. And these 2,800 women represent only the tip of the iceberg. Mrs. Tzili Schneider, who runs the telephone chavrutah program for Ayelet HaShachar, has a list of another 15,000 names of secular Jewish women with whom she has not yet made contact.

At present, however, only 2,000 chareidi women have responded to Ayelet HaShachar’s advertisements seeking chareidi women prepared to commit to a half-hour phone chavrutah once a week.

Mrs. Schneider is convinced that frum women have the power to bring about a revolution in Israel. Secular Israeli women, who have experienced firsthand the breakdown of their family life – the lack of trust between spouses, a lack of respect of children for parents – are thirsty for the wisdom upon which chareidi women build their homes.

The Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, the nation’s largest Orthodox Jewish Umbrella organization mourns the death of former President Gerald R. Ford. Mr. Ford, our country’s 38th president, took office amid tremendous internal divisions domestically and complex, dangerous challenges internationally.

With grace of personality, humility of character and nobility of spirit, Gerald Ford led our nation through those turbulent times, making difficult, and sometimes, intensely unpopular decisions that history would prove correct.

For the Jewish people, he remained a stalwart friend, demonstrated by his successful efforts to bring a cease fire between Egypt and Israel and committing the Soviet Union to the Helsinki human rights accords, a pact that helped Jewish prisoners of conscience. Gerald Ford’s leadership through the Middle East crises of the period remained guided by his principled support of Israel:

“America must and will pursue friendship with all nations. But, this will never be done at the expense of America’s commitment to Israel. A strong Israel is essential to a stable peace in the Middle East…My commitment to the security and future of Israel is based upon basic morality as well as enlightened self-interest. Our role in supporting Israel honors our own heritage.”

I debated Dennis Prager yesterday – and survived!

The OU was looking for a strong closing session for its West Coast Torah Convention, and there are very few proven draws as strong as Dennis, who lives and broadcasts here in Los Angeles. The two of us have been friends for many, many years, so I was seen as a natural sparring partner.

Of course it was foolish to go up against a consummate debater like Dennis. I agreed to swallow my pride and dignity to help out the OU, and my good friend Rabbi Alan Kalinsky, the OU’s West Coast director. I tried to make light of being outranked by describing the encounter as a win-win proposition for me. If I made a few good points, great. If I didn’t, Dennis would get the blame, since everything I know about public debate I learned from him.

Nonetheless, I was plenty apprehensive about the encounter. The brochures had assigned a topic so vague – The Future of American Jewry: Innovation or Preservation – that I could not prepare in any way. Dennis would have to lead, and I would respond. Dennis did not disappoint – neither in holding the audience spellbound, nor in providing an opportunity to respond.

I doubt that last week’s gathering of Holocaust deniers in Teheran, convened by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, registered high on the radar screen of many in our community –d at least until a small group of clowns in Chassidic garb showed up to hug and kiss Ahmadinejad and exchange their business cards with various Islamic clergy.

While denial of the greatest tragedy in modern Jewish history is profoundly offensive, we instinctively discount its impact. After all, we reason, surely the deniers will be dismissed as either insane or pathological liars by every sentient person. Some of us might even have thought that Ahmadinejad’s convening of such a conference was positive in that it would expose his lunacy and hate-driven agenda to all and sundry.

I will confess to having shared those views. In retrospect, however, it now seems to me irresponsible to cloak ourselves in a false sense of security with regards Holocaust denial. The world still treats Ahmadinejad as a head of state in good standing, despite dozens of statements calling for the destruction of Israel and past instances of Holocaust denial. European nations have a seemingly endless string of rationalizations and justifications for every Arab or Islamic departure from generally accepted norms of political behavior.

The fact that the theories are demonstrably wrong is no protection against their spread. After all, the tired myth that the Arab-Israeli conflict lies at the heart of all that ails the Middle East, recycled again last week by the distinguished members of the Iraq Study Group, demonstrates that no theory – no matter how weak or devoid of factual support — can be counted upon to refute itself.

by Rabbi Dovid Eliezrie

Menelaus would have been proud. He was the Hellenistic high priest installed by Antiochus who championed the battle against traditional Jews that brought about the holiday of Hanukka. Not much has changed - it would seem - in 2,000 years.

Instead of the Greeks and the secular Jews combining forces to stifle Jewish observance, today it’s Labor MK Ophir Paz-Pines. He has introduced a bill in the Knesset that would effectively punish an adult who brings a minor closer to mitzva observance or Torah study.

Invite a teenager to put on tefillin, and you could be prosecuted.
Paz-Pines says he is concerned about the potential strife in families that may come about if a teenager suddenly goes off the deep end and starts going to shul; or decides that maybe the Talmud is more interesting than Playstation 3.

I was sent the following by someone here in Baltimore, but the product is distributed from Brooklyn and could be available nationwide. Please be on the alert for this product:

I’m writing this letter to raise awareness about a fire hazard with commonly used menorah accessories. Tonight, the pre-filled glass cups in our menorah became so hot, they literally melted, causing fire to leak out from the menorah and on our table. The glass cups were so hot, they fused together. Luckily my wife noticed the fire almost immediately and I was able to put it out. But had we been in another room, there’s a good chance the fire could have been catastrophic.

The pre-filled oil glass set was purchased at AtoZ Savings, and it’s also available at Perns. It may be available at other retailers in
Baltimore and throughout the nation.

I am including a link to pictures of the menorah and glasses after the fire. Also in the photo album is pictures of the box of the pre-filled oil glass set.

Reviewers have not been kind to The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, professor of something called “the public understanding of science” at Oxford. Critics have found it to be the atheist’s mirror image of Ann Coulter’s Godless: The Church of Liberalism - long on in-your-face rhetoric and offensively dismissive of all those holding an opposing view.

Princeton University philosopher Thomas Nagel found Dawkins’s “attempts at philosophy, along with a later chapter on religion and ethics, particularly weak.” Prof. Terry Eagleton began his London Review of Books critique: “Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the British Book of Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.”

Dawkins’s “central argument” is that because every complex system must be created by an even more complex system, an intelligent designer would have had to be created by an even greater super-intellect.

New York Times reviewer Jim Holt described this argument as the equivalent of the child’s question, “Mommy, who created God?”

From time to time, I get together with a few law school profs from a different school to help them with their research on intellectual property. They are all Jewish, but have different comfort levels with untranslated rabbinic texts. Having a bit more experience with responsa literature, I am able to nudge them past some of the obstacles in the text.

Working our way through an important teshuva of the Bais Yitzchok (taking issue with the Shoel U-Meishiv’s contention that there is a self-evident proprietary right to intellectual property), I was pleasantly surprised by the absolute delight expressed by one of the participants to a reference to what I had seen as a peripheral point. The Bais Yitzchok mentions Bal Tomar in passing – a reference to Yoma 4B, which seems to establish a rule of assumed confidentiality of all conversation between individuals – unless indicated otherwise. In other words, no one needs to caution you not to repeat a conversation to anyone else. Unless he/she tells you otherwise, all conversation is presumed to be private and confidential, and it is forbidden to relate it to others. The Gemara is cited by Magen Avrohom, Orach Chayim 156:2 (at about the midpoint; he sees an exception if the matter is related not to an individual but to a group of three or more); the Smag considers it a violation of Torah (in contradistinction to rabbinic) law.

My colleague was so delighted because it moved back privacy law earlier than he had previously considered.

In any event, the ethic of this Gemara differs sharply with what we colloquially call “the right to know.” Such a right, if validated at all by halacha, is much more limited by halacha than the way we know it in the US. An anecdote related by a friend impressed me as showing the wisdom of a genuine talmid chacham, in balancing the privacy demanded by halacha with a genuine need to know.

Many years ago, I met a mechanech (Torah educator) who had been a Pirchei Agudah leader in his younger years back in Germany. One of his young charges had submitted an original essay to him, which he remembered for its clarity and force. A central thesis of the essay was that a Jewish homeland was unthinkable unless it was predicated upon Torah.

The young man’s last name was Kissinger. As in Henry.

I was reminded of this by a submission by one of our readers, who wishes to remain anonymous. It is poignant for much the same reason as the Kissinger story. In the final analysis, both stories are reminders of the terrible toll galus (exile) has taken on us, luring away some of our brightest and most creative. The following essay was submitted by a student at the famous Boston Latin in 1935

My father is a very complicated human being. A man of irregular temperament and unusual convictions, he is a rare combination of the shrewd businessman and the ardent religionist. It is rare that one finds such a combination. In my father’s case, I attribute whatever degree of material success he has attained to this very suboccupation, religious activity.

From time to time, particularly in the comments section, this site comes to seem like a wall for krexing (sic?) about all the real and imagined failings of the chareidi community and/or some of its members. I number myself among the krexers.

That is why I like to get out from time to time to be inspired by the amazing people produced by this community, and who to a very large extent attracted me to the chareidi world in the first place. Yesterday, I spent four hours with a remarkable woman who runs a project for Ayelet HaShachar in which chareidi women are connected with secular Israeli women who have expressed an interest in learning Torah texts or hashkafa. (About this particular program I’ll be writing in the future.)

At the beginning of our talk, by way of explaining the source of her confidence that chareidi women have the power to make a revolution in Israeli society, which is desperately casting about to find its moorings (another subject to which we will be returning in the future), she told me a story about her mother, a”h.

When she was about 60 years old, her mother went to a doctor to consult about a growth she had detected on her neck. The doctor ascertained immediately that the situation was far worse than she imagined. In fact, he told her that cancer had spread through her entire body, and she did not have long to live. She smiled.

I have never seen any point in writing a column with which every single reader will agree. (The matter, of course, is different with respect to writing about middos, whose desirability is universally acknowledged, but the attainment of which remains distant, as the Ramchal notes in his introduction to Mesilas Yesharim.) Thus it is with a great deal of resentment that I find it necessary to devote a column to the antics of a handful of impostors dressed in the garb of Torah Jews who traveled to Teheran last week to participate in a conference of Holocaust denial convened by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Yet we as a community have no choice but to make clear to the broader public that the entire spectrum of chareidi Jewry spits out this tiny sect, numbering little more than 25 tortured souls. We must do so because those Jews who express their solidarity with the greatest butchers and would-be butchers of Jews in modern times claim Torah sanction for their actions.

The secular press in Israel and around the world has been only too happy to carry large photographs of a handful of clowns kissing Arafat and now Ahmadinejad, praying for the Ayatollah Khomeini, and declaring their allegiance to Hamas. These publicity hounds play nicely into the media’s constant efforts to discredit religion, in general, and Torah Judaism, in particular.

At least one member of this group of ten or fifteen sad sacks, who hop around the globe looking for any anti-Israel gathering at which they can count on media attention, spoke into a microphone on Shabbos at Hamas rally in Washington D.C. in April 2002. When asked by a non-Jewish reporter how he could justify such a blatant Shabbos violation, he replied that the mitzvah of destroying Israel pushes off the prohibitions of Shabbos.

The morning’s Email brings word that a friend’s book Dating Secrets is about to hit better bookstores everywhere. Knowing my friend, the pseudonymous Leah Jacobs, I have not the slightest doubt that her advice will smooth the shidduchim process for many singles, and help them close on those shidduchim that should go through and weed out those that should not.

But one thing this book will not do as advertised is provide an answer to the “Singles Crisis.” The roots of that crisis lie not in the realm of individual psychology – for which a book of advice can help – but in hard, cold statistics about the demography of the Orthodox community.

To put the Singles Crisis as baldly as possible: There are too many girls for too few boys. That is true for two reasons: (1) the Orthodox community is growing rapidly; (2) there tends to be a large age gap between most religious couples, with the husbands several years older than their wives. (The exception to the latter rule is the Chassidic world in which it is not uncommon for husbands to be the same age or even younger than their wives, and in which one does not hear of a Singles Crisis.)

To understand why these two facts guarantee a “Singles Crisis” let us consider the following hypothetical. Assume that 1,000 boys and 1,000 girls are born in 1985. If the community grows by 4% per annum, the comparable cohort for those born four years later will be 1160 boys and 1160 girls. If boys marry, on average, girls four years younger than themselves (the actual figure for the yeshiva community is 3.5 years and for the overall non-Chassidic Orthodox community 3 years) we are left with a situation in which every cohort of 1,000 boys finds itself paired with a cohort of 1,160 girls. That is a recipe for disaster.

Thanks to our alert reader Joel Rich, we can report that the trees have returned to Seattle-Tacoma Airport:

Seattle-Tacoma Airport maintenance workers returned 14 artificial Christimas tree to the terminal after a flap over a rabbi’s threat to file suit over the lack of menorahs – lamps that commemorate the Jewish celebration of Hanukah – at the airport.

Rabbi Elazar Bogomilsky of the Seattle Chabad Lubavitch had requested that an 8-foot-tall menorah be added to the display but had never asked for the removal of the trees, according to a December 11 statement released by Patricia Davis of the Port of Seattle commission.

Rabbi Bogomilsky “never asked us to remove the trees, it was the port’s decision based on what we knew at the time” according to the airport’s statement. “There’s been such an outcry from the public - from people of all faiths - who believe that the trees should be reinstalled,” Davis said, “I’m very thankful that we can return the trees and get back to running our airport during this very busy holiday season.”

The Slonimer Rebbe (Chanuka, pg. 38) observes that the symbolism of the approaching holiday of Chanuka includes the notion that illumination breaks through specifically from darkness. Both the community and every individual Jew must learn from Chanuka that when things appear hopelessly lost and irredeemable, a kernel of life-force remains that can emerge, grow and triumph.

We could use some good news on the political front. I would be willing to forgo all gifts at the end of the month in return for Santa Claus flying James Baker to the North Pole and leaving him there. In the meantime, we can at least appreciate one small item of good news. A recent major American poll shows that popular support for Israel actually grew since March, a time period we would have predicted to show a sharp decline.

Almost everything that could have gone wrong for Israel’s image did – and then some. Americans, brought up with the myth of Israel’s might and invincibility (and banking on its availability to America, should it ever be called upon to deliver), watched a weak military effort in Lebanon botched by even weaker political leadership. The US government began high-profile actions against alleged illegalities by AIPAC. Mearsheimer and Walt complained that the pressure of the Israeli lobby has a stranglehold on US Middle East policy. The inept president who actually damaged America’s position in relationship to two powerful enemies – Iran and North Korea – decided to viciously turn Israel into an apartheid state. Nonetheless, the recent Quinnipiac Survey showed that Israel gained in popularity with every subgroup polled. Support by evangelical Christians was only slightly ahead of that by mainline Protestants. Support among Republicans is higher than among Democrats. Israel is the 3rd most popular country with Americans, achieving an overall positive rating by 68%, and coming in behind only England and Canada. Positive ratings of the Palestinians declined in almost all subgroups, achieving a total 28.3% rating.

Go figure.

By now I presume it is clear to all and sundry that I know no more about the likely outcome of the El Al boycott than anyone else. I only know what I read in the papers.

Well, now I’m done wiping the egg off my face for passing on a report in HaModia last week that the two sides were close to signing a binding agreeement. That report turned out to be, at the very least, premature. Today’s Jerusalem Post suggested that the owners of El Al may even have wished to provoke the boycott, or at the very least to test the chareidi response, as a first step to instituting regular Shabbat service.

I tend to doubt that. The privatized El Al did not have to wait for last week’s general strike to find a pretext for Shabbat flights if that’s what it wanted to do. My guess is that airlines, especially in the current doldrums for airlines, do not sacrifice 20% of their clientele in the hopes of attracting more business travellers or because they expect a tourist boom among non-religious Jews (fat chance) and non-Jews in the indefinite future, which will offset their current loss of chareidi customers. Nevertheless, El Al is not being so quick to capitulate.

Having drawn the line in the sand, the chareidi community has no choice but to see this one through. Failure to maintain discipline vis-a-vis would undercut chareidi efforts to exercise influence through economic power in numerous other areas, in which policing threatened boycotts would be more difficult than that versus El Al. In this regard, the suggestion made yesterday by Rabbi Goldknopf of the Committee for the Preservation of the Sanctity of Shabbos that the chareidi community might set up its own airline was counterproductive because it was so unserious and could be immediately be perceived as such by those on the other side of the bargaining table. In negotiating, as in parenting, it is best to not to make threats that are not perceived as credible.

When I wrote my previous pieces about the violence surrounding the Gay Pride Parade, I was unaware of a recent incident that took place while I was out of the country. A clothes store in Geulah was burned down by unknown parties who presumably felt that some of the apparel being sold did not conform to their standards of tznius. This particular clothes store is owned by the wife of a rosh yeshiva in one of the better known yeshivos for American boys.

In response to this incident and the aforementioned violence, I’m told that there are now wall posters up in Meah Shearim, in the name of the BaDaTz, basically telling the local hooligans that they do not have carte blanche to do whatever they want to enforce proper standards of tznius, or anything else, and must consult with rabbonim. Among other things this demonstrates how difficult it is to put certain genies back into the vessel once they have been unleashed.

Last week someone sent me a first-person account of an alleged incident, in which a woman riding the number 2 bus from the Kotel after davening at the Haneitz Minyan describes how she was roughed up by four men after she declined their request to move to the back of the bus. The account mentioned that she was from Har Nof (my neighborhood), and when I did not find her name in the Har Nof directory, I briefly entertained hopes that the whole thing was a fabrication. No such luck. Last night, she called me and we spoke for nearly an hour.

The woman in question is a fifty-year old grandmother who was visiting Israel from Canada, and studying privately with one of Eretz Yisrael’s most esteemed women teachers of Torah. While in Israel, she davened at the Kosel every morning. At least the broad outlines of her story were confirmed by a friend of my wife’s who also davens regularly at the Haneitz Minyan.

Talk about Daas Torah, be prepared for acrimony. There are few topics more divisive among Orthodox Jews. Many are given to dealing with the issue only with the volume up, making it difficult for people with more sensitive hearing to listen to reciprocal charges of fanaticism and heresy.

There is a second casualty generated by any Daas Torah discussion, besides the animosity and recriminations. Lots of people are turned off by extreme positions – either for good reason, or for lack of understanding. Watching the rounds whizzing past them from both end points, many people tune out to the entire discussion. At these extremes, some people would claim Daas Torah as the exclusive province of a single figure with whom they identify, while others see it as a modern invention meant to buttress flagging rabbinic authority. A definite middle ground is often obscured, wherein can be found core arguments that might very well be affirmed by a large majority of Orthodox Jews. I hope to open discussion here exploring that middle ground, hoping to find ideas that might bring more of us closer together.

It is not my wish to begin another endless and fruitless conversation about some of the particularistic claims at either extreme. I am also not going to fully articulate my own view on the subject. It cannot be as important as discovering areas that more of us can agree upon. Rather, I invite readers to explore whether there may be key foundational ideas in the Daas Torah universe, to articulate what they are, and to see if more people – especially people who feel excluded from the extreme position - agree about them than is ordinarily assumed.

In my mind, there are two quintessential components to what many call Daas Torah: 1) the leadership role of talmidei chachamim (Torah scholars), and 2) the ancillary gifts that come with Torah excellence. What follows is not meant to taunt or convince, but to briefly articulate one brief understanding of them. In my mind, these ideas are the most important in the Daas Torah orbit. Borrowing from Hillel’s response to the potential convert, everything else is commentary.

by Yehudah Avner

The possible renewal of Saturday flights in the wake of El Al’s privatization calls to mind a Knesset oration of yesteryear.

For days, tension permeated the Knesset. Stocky, gesticulating men combed its corridors, committees and canteens, their numbers rising daily like tugboats heaving in fresh infusions of lobbying power. They were El Al union men, accompanied by their whispering lawyers, intent on scotching prime minister Menachem Begin’s resolve to halt the national airline’s flights on the Sabbath, from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. Without let-up, they pressured, pestered and petitioned the parliamentarians. Even the ever-ebullient, highly erudite, and strictly observant interior minister, Dr. Yosef Burg, was collared.

He was waylaid by a union man who placed an amicable arm around his shoulder, jabbed a forefinger into his chest and barked into his face so grimacingly that his head was jerked backwards as if to have the arguments shoved physically down his throat.

That’s ABC News’ title for the following story, for which ABC also managed to provide the most inflammatory first paragraph that I’ve seen:

There is a damper on Christmas cheer at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport: A rabbi’s complaint led to the removal over the weekend of synthetic Christmas trees that have decorated the entrances every holiday season for the last 25 years.

What the Rabbi did was not ask for the removal of the trees — like Chabad shelichim everywhere, he asked for the addition of a Menorah. But not content to ask for a Menorah, he demanded it, and threatened to sue if they said no. The airport then realized that this “would have required adding symbols for other religions and cultures in the Northwest,” and they logically decided that the best move was to pull the trees.

The Rabbi’s lawyer is quoted as saying, “There is a concern here that the Jewish community will be portrayed as the Grinch.” No, you’re kidding. Really? It requires a truly penetrating legal mind to realize this might make the Jews look bad, given the national news coverage of this story. As a friend and Kiruv professional in Milwaukee put it, “I don’t think they call this ‘Kiddush Hashem.’”

21 bKislev

What is the ideology behind a conference titled:Halakhah and Ideology?
It looks like it will tilt in the direction of suggesting that most halakhic decisions are ideologically motivated. But I will withhold judgment until I hear some of the sessions that will take place in Jerusalem on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday 21-23 bKislev (Dec. 12-14) at the Van Leer Institute.[the list of lectures is in Hebrew and English].

It is an academic conference, not many rabbis or halakhists will be speaking. I wonder if they attempted to invite any active poskim. From the titles of some of the sessions, it seems there will be a number of lectures questioning whether what is considered halakhah is not an ideologically driven position. Typical is an opening lecture by David Landes in English with the intriguing title, “The Vision of a ‘Non-Ideological Halakhah’ in the Grip of Ideology” and Shalom Rosenberg, “Implicit Ideology in the Disputes of the Sages.” On Tuesday David Sorotzkin will speak on “The Satmar Rebbe: Reconstruction and Deconstruction of the Halakhah as an Ideological Tool” .
The Orthodox feminist Dr Gili Zivan will speak on “What Remains of Halakhic Discourse when it is Recruited for Ideological Goals?” I am puzzled because Gili pushed through a women’s aliyot mehitza minyan at her religious kibbutz over the objections of the kibbutz rabbi. I wonder if that isn’t halakhic discourse recruited for ideological goals?
The issue of such “shira hadasha” women’s aliyot in Orthodox minyanim will be given a whole evening. The organizers are to be commended for balancing the panel, with Prof. Eliav Shochetman who has written a kuntres against this innovation, and R Mendel Shapiro who wrote an Edah article promoting women’s “qeri’at ha-Torah” [sic]

R. Dr. Dov Frimer, a traditionalist known for his 100-page article with his brother on Women’s Prayer Services in Tradition (Winter 1998) will also be on that panel.
There will probably be few, if any , haredim at the conference, although I would happy to be wrong. I wonder whether the minimal visibility of haredim at such venues is due to the organizers not making an effort to invite people to the “right” of themselves, or to the reluctance of haredim to participate. I have compiled a list of a few dozen haredim in academia and in public discourse who could be presenters, moderators, respondents, or panelists in such conferences (available from me on request).

In a forthcoming book, “Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality,” Dr. Pauline W. Chen writes about the many operations she performed on brain-dead patients for the purpose of procuring, or “harvesting,” their organs for transplantation. “They all,” she writes, “seemed remarkably alive.”

This past fall, the prestigious journal Science published a report on a young woman who, after a devastating car accident, was declared vegetative. For five months, she showed no signs of awareness whatsoever. Scientists, though, decided to put her in a Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging scanner, a machine that tracks blood flow to different parts of the brain and that was only developed a few years ago. When they asked her to imagine things like playing tennis and walking through her home, the scan lit up with telltale patterns of language, movement and navigation indistinguishable from those produced by the brains of healthy, conscious people. The report’s authors, while stressing that the patient may still be classified as “unconscious,” conclude nonetheless that she has a “rich mental life.”

Ten years earlier, a patient like the young woman would have been assumed, for all practical intents, to be – effectively, if perhaps not legally – lifeless. Only the development of a new diagnostic technology has now rendered her more obviously alive. It’s hard not to wonder what technologies might one day yet be developed – or what aspects of consciousness might forever elude scientific instrumentation.

The acronym DCD might be mistaken for some new medium of music reproduction but in fact refers to “donation after cardiac death” – the procurement of organs from people whose hearts have stopped, even if their brains may still be functioning. Such procedures have taken place in many countries, despite the fact that the cessation of heartbeat is not necessarily irreversible. Even some patients whose hearts did not respond to cardiac resuscitation, it is well documented, have “come back to life” – in one case after the lapse of a full seven minutes, certainly sufficient time to harvest a vital organ or two.