By Eytan Kobre, on February 28th, 2007 When last I wrote, it was to report on the politically (and anatomically?) correct move of the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute to add a smattering of women to its board, and to voice my wistful musing on the likelihood that strongly Orthodox Jews would ever be invited to join that august body.
Lo and behold, I read on to find that one of the three new female members of the People Policy Planning politburo is Professor Suzanne Last Stone, a highly regarded Orthodox academic. Thought I: by golly, I wonder if the Planners realize that they’ve actually chosen a strongly Orthodox woman to join the club.
Now, I’ve never made the acquaintance of Prof. Stone, nor am I at all familiar with her professional writings. All I’m going on here is my vivid recollection of her contribution to the August 1996 Commentary symposium entitled “What Do American Jews Believe?” I’ve gotten many hours of reading pleasure out of my by-now dog-eared copy of that symposium, which I heartily recommend to readers who are not allergic to even a whiff of Orthodox triumphalism.
To explain what I mean by that, I’ll quote from a review of the symposium in the February 1997 … Read More >>
By Yaakov Menken, on February 27th, 2007 Just in time for Purim comes this item, yours for $95 plus tax, plus another $35 for the Sefer Torah. Truly unsure what to make of this, I called in my local expert on all things dolls and accessories: my eldest daughter.
“Is that supposed to be a boy or a girl?” she asked.
“A girl,” I told her.
“Then why is she wearing all the things men wear?”
Note the Steinsaltz Gemara in her right hand. See what happens when you let a girl learn Gemara?
My wife first noticed that the builder apparently has a set of Ritv”a from the Mossad HaRav. Then when she reached the last picture (of “Barbie leading Daf-Yomi shiur”) she was almost ROTFL (rolling on the floor laughing) quite literally. Happy Purim, indeed!
By Yitzchok Adlerstein, on February 27th, 2007 Blogs were a bold step forward for many in the Orthodox world, an experiment in transparency that held great promise. For the first time, there was an open, collaborative forum (the principle behind Wikipedia) in which issues could be explored, and concerns shared in a serious, respectful manner – at least on a small number of blogs.
Looking at some of reader comments to recent postings, I wonder if the experiment worked. I very much hope that readers will still prove me wrong, but I detect an undervaluing of Torah in some of what has appeared on these pages.
When we started up Cross-Currents, we sought the advice of major figures within the Torah community regarding what to publish and what not to publish. Basically, we were told that publishing critical remarks was fine, as long as the substantive part of the criticism would be effectively answered within the blog. Usually, this has worked well. As long as comments did not use attack language or directly assault key principles of faith, we allowed them, and sat back and watched as other readers did a good job at least presenting another point … Read More >>
By Yaakov Menken, on February 26th, 2007 Word to the Wise: if you want us to write about an article you’ve seen, please send us a tip. All of my last four posts previous to this one came because of articles sent to me by others — and if you don’t tell me about it, I’ll probably miss it. Which explains why “Owning a Wall,” Neil Rubin’s editorial in the Feb. 16th issue of the Baltimore Jewish Times, escaped my attention until this Shabbos, and why you’ll have to go to the archives (set the date to Feb. 17) and look for the editorial in order to read it. When you do, you’ll find that Mr. Rubin begins by making the case that the Wall is not — or, philosophically, should not — be an Orthodox synagogue with separate seating.
I have this sketch at home by Rabbi Joseph Schwarz from his beautiful mid-19th century manuscript “A Descriptive Geography and Brief Historical Manuscript of Palestine.” It’s of pious Jewish men and women praying, side-by-side, at the Western Wall, or Kotel. That tells me that back then, members of both sexes could pray together at this most sacred of sites.
Were the great sages of the era … Read More >>
By Shira Schmidt, on February 26th, 2007 8 b Adar
Two years ago the publisher of Haaretz, Amos Schocken, published an op ed in his own paper extoling the virtues of intermarriage, as a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian and Jewish-Muslim conflict. The Hebrew is still available on the Haaretz website May 8,2005 Ha-im Israel rotzei shalom? It has 400 talkbacks.
The English version of Schocken’s op ed is can be read on the “kibush” website (I couldn’t access it on the Haaretz website).
“Does Israel Want Peace?” dated May 6,2005.
What greater peace can there be between the peoples than thousands of Egyptian, Jordanian and Palestinian students at universities in Israel, and thousands of Israeli students at universities in the Arab states and in Palestine? And what greater peace can there be between the peoples than what is likely to ensue from this: marriages between young Israelis, both Jewish and Arab, and young people from the neighboring countries and from Palestine?
Embedded in the aspiration for peace is a real interest that the Israeli Arabs become an integral and involved part of Israeli society (and not a `sector`), and that Palestinians, Egyptians and Jordanians live in Israel. This can be … Read More >>
By Avi Shafran, on February 25th, 2007 The thesis that is the Jewish Nation has an antithesis: Amalek. And just as the Jewish People is defined by its Torah, so is its polar opposite associated with a particular system of thought and attitude.
Amalek the nation is unknown to us today; the Biblical command to destroy it to avert the mortal threat it poses to all that is good and holy is thus moot.
Amalek the notion, though, is very much present – in the broader world, the Jewish one and perhaps, to a degree, within each of us as well. And its undermining remains an obligation both urgent and clear.
A hint to the attitude defining Amalek lies in the Torah’s words immediately preceding that nation’s first appearance. In Exodus (17:7), just before the words “And Amalek came,” the Jews wonder “Is G-d in our midst or not?” The Hebrew word for “not” – “ayin” – literally means “nothing.” That Amalek’s attack comes on the heels of that word is fitting, because Amalekism stands for precisely that: nothing. Or, better: Nothing – the conviction that all, in the end, is without meaning or consequence.
In Hebrew, letters have numerical values. The number-value of the … Read More >>
By Yaakov Menken, on February 22nd, 2007 According to the New York Jewish Week, the Modern Orthodox community “may believe that it has made more progress in terms of gender equality than it actually has.” What’s the problem? “Even the most enlightened [emphasis added] of Israeli yeshivot for American young women,” “examples of ‘women’s progress’ in that they are devoted to rigorous Talmud study, as well as other Judaic subjects,” has a student body less than interested in Talmud, and even less interested in feminism — indeed, “any practices construed as feminist are considered dangerous.”
This impassioned critique emerges, like any number of other, similar essays and speeches decrying the rightward shift in Modern Orthodox youth, from someone on the left fringe of Modern Orthodoxy — in this case, Emily Shapiro Katz. “A graduate of Stern College, Shapiro Katz studied at Midreshet Lindenbaum’s Talmud program and later taught at Midreshet Moriah, Machon Gold and several other learning programs for visiting American young women.” After marriage, she “returned to the U.S. and is now on the faculty of an adult education program of a large Reform temple in San Francisco.”
Now, of course, any number of Orthodox educators participate in non-Orthodox educational programs in order to provide a … Read More >>
By Yaakov Menken, on February 22nd, 2007 The Yeshive World blog reports:
With a heavy heart, I report to you of the Petira of Horav Haposek Rav Avrohom Blumenkrantz ZATZAL. The Levaya details will be posted as they become available. Boruch Dayan Emmes…
Rabbi Blumenkrantz was especially well known for his trailblazing guides to Kosher for Passover products, including household items and medications. His passing leaves a void that will be especially difficult to fill.
By Emanuel Feldman, on February 21st, 2007 Mercedes recently ran a full page ad in The New York Times. It contained only six words. At the top were two words: “More Power.” Four inches below that were two more words: “More Comfort.”
And finally, four inches below that, the last two words: “More Envy.”
One can appreciate the advantages of driving a car with more power and with more comfort. But what does envy have to do with driving a car?
Furthermore, the ad seemed logically skewed. Power and comfort are qualities we can possess. Envy, on the other hand, is not something we possess; it is something others will feel toward us if we own this car.
But the ad is not skewed at all. In fact, the copywriters fully understand human nature. When they peddle the idea of becoming the envy of others, they are tapping into something very deep within human nature. They know that, for most of us, to be the target of envy is a marketable commodity, as desirable as the power of the car’s motor and the comfort of the car’s interior.
What does envy have to do with driving a luxury car? Everything.
ENVY IS built into us. Say the rabbis: “Except for his child and … Read More >>
By Yitzchok Adlerstein, on February 21st, 2007 Among the Jewish super-rich, philanthropy is alive and well. A decreasing share of it, according to a recent issue of Lifestyles magazine, stays within the community. The upshot of this is not so much about funding institutions as another sign that the Orthodox are going to have to take on a greater share of community responsibility. No one else will
Not so long ago, Orthodox institutions heavily depended upon non-Orthodox largesse to stay afloat. Some of that money had guilt written all over it; money was a form of atonement for not living an observant lifestyle. Some of it came with a bit of smugness attached: “You many have surprised us by lasting longer than we thought, but it ought to be perfectly clear that you couldn’t survive without the rest of us.” They counted on Orthodoxy to guarantee the Jewish future, but they saw themselves as the necessary financial guarantors of Orthodoxy.
As a new generation moved ever more distant from observance while Orthodoxy grew by leaps and bounds, the unpredicted happened. Orthodoxy developed its own funding sources – however imperfectly – and weaned itself away from financial dependence upon the non-Orthodox. The … Read More >>
By Shira Schmidt, on February 18th, 2007 Rosh Hodesh Adar.
Sometimes I go to great lengths for the sake of the Cross-currents blog…. Last week I rode the length and breadth of the Land of Israel on the mehadrin buses in order to provide readers with a state-of-the-art summary of the controversial Egged bus lines.
I spent a few hours updating myself on the gender-separate seating. If you have been reading the media reports, you would have suggested I go in full battle gear, perchance I would be accosted by the 300-pound haredi who resembled a Sumo wrestler and commanded Naomi Ragen to move to the back, as she recounts in her interview on National Public Radio. Go to the NPR website and seach for “Jerusalem’s Rosa Parks Fights Modesty Patrols.” You can listen to and/or read the report. Listening is great because you can hear the derision in the speakers’ voices. I am so used to the haredi sector getting short shrift and unequal time that I don’t even mind that the anti-mehadrin side got most of the report, while my pro-mehadrin viewpoint was drastically abridged.
In contrast, the JTA (Jewish Telegraph Agency) … Read More >>
By Yitzchok Adlerstein, on February 16th, 2007 Some further clarification of the issues I raised in an earlier piece.
Judging people favorably is sometimes a halachic requirement, and sometimes just an admirable trait, even when not absolutely required. Never, however, does it require throwing discretion to the winds. When the need is great enough, we become suspicious. (See Rambam, Commentary to Mishna, Yoma 1:5, end, regarding measures taken to insure that the High Priest did not follow Sadducee practice in the Holy of Holies.) Specifically in reference to charitable giving, halacha is pretty clear. While you may give a small amount without investigation, a larger contribution calls for a checking of credentials (Yoreh Deah 250:3; see Shach loc.cit. #4. The value of a larger gift is not immediately clear to me. The Taz #1 writes that an amount greater than the cost of a single meal is definitely a larger gift.)
If you are interested in learning more about how tzedakos rate when measured against each other, and how most IRS-recognized charities opt to keep their exemption from opening their books to the public, I would recommend two sources – one general (www.charitynavigator.org) and one Jewish (www.just-tzedakah.org ). Between … Read More >>
By Guest Contributor, on February 14th, 2007 by Rabbi Harvey Belovski
I am enjoying the privilege of showing my eleven-year-old daughter around Israel and yesterday we spent the day grave-hopping in the Galil. We had a wonderful time, which both of us found highly educational, yet something disturbed me – the proliferation of ugly mechitzos (barriers dividing men and women) at gravesites. I found it particularly unpleasant at the grave-site of the Rambam.
I last visited the grave of the Rambam in Tiberius some years ago and remember it well. One leaves the road and walks up a gentle incline between fourteen pillars each engraved with the name of one section of the Rambam’s magnum opus, ‘Mishneh Torah’. Passing the resting places of the Shelah (Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz, the great 17th-century mystic) as well as those of Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai and other sages of the era of the Mishnah, one arrives at the grave of the Rambam at the top of the incline. The tombstone is quite distinctive and the inscription reads, ‘from Moshe (the original Moses) to Moshe (the Rambam), no-one arose as great as Moshe’.
This preamble is intended to indicate the beauty of the site and how the area has been … Read More >>
By Jonathan Rosenblum, on February 14th, 2007 The dedicated askanim who devote themselves day and night to solving some of our most pressing communal problems are one of the crowning glories of the Israeli chareidi community. Recently two groups of askanim – one in Jerusalem and one in Bnei Brak — addressed themselves to the plague of tragedies involving the loss of parents of young children, often after long and agonizing illnesses.
Many of the stricken families are left without even the money for basic necessities, not to mention resources to cover all the extra help required in the wake of such tragedies. About money to help the orphans marry, we need not even speak.
In virtually every case, the deceased parent had no life or health insurance. So the family is left without any recourse other than to turn to the already overburdened community, and to ask strangers to open their hearts and purses.
The askanim in question refused to accept the current system of ad hoc appeals as the best possible solution. And they came up with the idea of creating large groups of ten thousand or more families, whose members would in effect self-insure one another. The initial plan promised approximately $50,000 to every … Read More >>
By Yitzchok Adlerstein, on February 14th, 2007 No, this is not a defense of THE Jonathan Rosenblum article, the one that decried the cavalier attitude that some in the haredi community display towards the way their less laudable actions will be perceived by the rest of the world. So that there should be no confusion, I will say that I salute him for the content of his remarks, and his courage in writing them. As is the case so often, I wish I had done it first.
Rather, I rise to defend him regarding his piece about deception and tzedaka, in which he described how some people mulcted him out of some cash by fabricating need, and how he accosted them and demanded the return of the money.
A reader of Hamodia chided him for this, and opined that once money has been contributed, it is not our task to be judgmental and ever ask for its return.
I believe that this attitude is terribly in error, and damages the institution of charity rather than elevates it. Many people effectively “write off” their charitable funds, arguing that they have no real bond to them, because the money is “lost” to them anyway. … Read More >>
By Yaakov Menken, on February 13th, 2007 The following question and answer just appeared on our Jewish Answers web site, under the heading “Jewish Civil Rights:”
Please tell me why Jewish people as a whole seem not to defend their civil rights in America? I have noticed this in my experience with fellow Jews at our town meetings. I won’t go into the details, but I have tried to involve the organizations that claim to protect civil rights, but there is only so much they can do as non-profits.
I understand that Israel is important but for me the United States is important as well.I feel I am a fighter, a Maccabee, and I will continue but I truly desire to understand why I seem to be alone in this endeavor.
You have raised a very important question. I applaud your passion for protecting the rights of the Jewish people. Indeed, we are privileged to live in a land, which provides Jews equal protection under the law, and we should certainly strive to safeguard the civil liberties granted us. I cannot comment on the specific issue that you note, as I am not completely familiar with all the details. I will only comment on the hesitancy … Read More >>
By Yaakov Menken, on February 12th, 2007 An alert reader tipped me off last week to this piece from the JTA: “Latest salvo in intermarriage debate suggests a split in Jewish community.”
Steven M. Cohen, a prominent Jewish sociologist, has fired the latest salvo in what is becoming an increasingly vituperative debate about outreach to the intermarried.
In his newest paper, “A Tale of Two Jewries: The `Inconvenient Truth’ for American Jews,” Cohen uses his own research and data from the 2001 National Jewish Population Survey to argue that inmarried and intermarried Jews form two distinct halves of the Jewish community.
And the Jewish future, he argues, rests with the inmarried, who are more Jewishly engaged and much more likely to raise their children as Jews.
The Orthodox have always argued that the intermarried will be, in the great majority, lost to the Jewish future. But Steven Cohen is no Orthodox ideologue — he is professor of Jewish social policy at the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York. And in his circles, where the term “Jewish outreach” means not outreach to unaffiliated Jews, but to non-Jews, his words are far more controversial.
Where one stands on this paper depends largely on where one stands … Read More >>
By Yitzchok Adlerstein, on February 12th, 2007 I am back from Calgary, having enjoyed myself more than I thought, and burdened with far more guilt than I bargained for.
Scholar in residence gigs can go either way. Calgary being somewhat off the beaten path for an Angelino, I had no idea what to expect, other than wishing that they had invited me in August when I would have driven to the Canadian Rockies, rather than on the weekend that the city tried to disprove the notion of global warming. Temperatures got up to a balmy one degree, and there was fresh snow on the ground. As a former New Yorker, I can appreciate snow, as long as I don’t have to shovel it.
Truth be told, Calgary is a lovely community, and the universal warmth of its people completely compensated for the vertically challenged mercury column. I would have been loath to call it a frontier town, but some of the residents did. Calgary is on the cusp of becoming a second capital of Canada, the capital of the Canadian West. The province of Alberta is oil country, and it is enjoying a frontier-style boom. Three thousand new residents arrive each month, … Read More >>
By Jonathan Rosenblum, on February 11th, 2007 Last week, I was privileged to attend a lecture by Bernard Lewis at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The audience greeted the nonagenarian scholar with a degree of reverence and adulation that probably no other academic in the world commands. Many stood at the end of his presentation, and I fully expected to hear cries of “Bravo! Bravo!” Younger members of the audience will one day tell their children how they heard Lewis, still in full command of his subject, in much the way that aging baby-boomers regale their offspring with memories of Grateful Dead concerts.
Lewis was part of a double feature that began with the screening of Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West, a powerful documentary that has been widely shown on American TV, but for some inexplicable reason has yet to appear on Israel TV. One of the film’s great merits is the prominence given to the testimony of Arabs and Muslims. Nonie Darwish, daughter of the Egyptian military commander of Gaza in the ’50s, killed in battle with Israeli forces; Walid Shoehat (an alias), a former PLO member and Israeli security prisoner, Brigitte Gabriel, a black Lebanese Christian, raised to hate Jews, and The Jerusalem … Read More >>
By Toby Katz, on February 11th, 2007 When I first read about the lady on the #2 bus, I was inclined to cheer her on. From the sound of it, the behavior of the men was appalling, and she got some good licks in. Certainly the idea of separate seating on buses is most unappealing to me, but in her place, I would have meekly moved back anyway. Secretly I’m glad there are other, sterner women who aren’t so meek. Well, to be honest, it’s not the separate seating but the sitting in back that bothers me. If the men sat in back and the ladies up front, I really would not mind. My charedi brother in fact says that if looking at women is the real problem, the men should sit at the rear of the bus–facing backwards! :- )
My charedi relatives mostly are opposed to the whole idea of mehadrin buses, although one female relative tells me that many women prefer the separate seating because they are not crushed by pushy men who elbow their way through crowded buses. And they can nurse their babies discreetly under loose blankets without being noticed. But … Read More >>
|
|
