Fighting web comment spam continues to be a major issue with popular blogs. We installed the ‘akismet’ tool for WordPress on January 2, 2006, and by July 14 it had trapped over 10,000 spams. Today? Over 80,000 trapped spams, and barely a dozen false positives. If not for Akismet, comments would be almost impossible to maintain.

We use a site-recommender tool for our “Spread the Word” links, and on Friday we discovered (the hard way, of course) that it, too, could be misused by an innovative spammer. The spammer included links to other sites in the “message” segment. So I wrote a short code snippet that traps links to sites (href) and images (img) and included it in our code.

I then forwarded it to the creators of the SiteRecommender. Tonight’s email included a note back from them that they’ve incorporated my code and issued a version upgrade of the recommender.

Isn’t Open Source great? Of course it is — the Talmud was the first Open Source document. You knew there was a Jewish hook in here somewhere…

The half-ton squid caught in waters south of New Zealand in February – 33 feet long and weighing 1089 pounds – isn’t kosher, but it can still serve as food for Jewish thought.

Such sea-creatures – this one a representative of the species Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni – were long thought to be the products of overactive imaginations.

Until 1873, there were only claims, but no hard evidence, that monstrously-sized squids existed. That year, though, a fisherman off the coast of Newfoundland struck a large sea-creature with a hook and then hacked off one of its tentacles. The appendage was later measured to be nineteen feet long. Over subsequent decades, intact carcasses of such giant squids (a smaller species than the “colossal squid” of the recent catch) were discovered washed ashore on various beaches. Thus ended the centuries over which the animal was assumed to be fictional.

Only a few years earlier, though, Arthur Mangin, a celebrated French zoologist, dismissed sailors’ claims that they had seen the animal, urging that:

A sefer I had not turned to till this year yielded one of the most delectable thoughts on the Hagaddah I’ve seen this season. I happily share it with our readers.

The Baal HaHagaddah makes a point of underscoring the relationship between Moshe’s mateh (staff) – with which he would later bring the Ten Plagues – and the osos, the signs earlier performed for Paroh.

“As in the days when you left the land of Egypt I will show it wonders (Micha 7:15).” This verse establishes an identity between the events of the original Exodus and those of the final redemption. The rest is a translation of the words of the author:

We were privileged in our times to great salvation – to the Six Day War, and to the very establishment of the State, after we were beaten down to dust to be trampled by animals in the form of humans. These were just the osos preceding the mofsim [much greater] wonders that will follow, doubling and tripling their impact, just as the water turning to blood before Paroh served as …a sign that all the waters of Egypt would [later] turn to blood. Fortunate is the person who awaits and achieves [what he has awaited].

The battle between fans of hand shmurah and machine continues unabated, having changed very little since the opening rounds in the early nineteenth century. Some people point to the halachic difficulty in incorporating kavanah lishmah into a mechanized operation; others are equally passionate in pointing out the many opportunities for real kashrus problems to arise in the manual baking of matzos. No one is going to end this dispute in the near future.

Solutions to some of the kashrus problems have been proposed over the years, and were ignored because of the profit motive. Mishpacha recently reported an “innovation” that many consumers always assumed: that the workers be observant, motivated Jews who had an interest in insuring a product made to the highest standards, which is part of the reason that people are paying small fortunes for their matzah. In fact, many of the American bakeries until recently employed non-observant immigrant laborers who had to be browbeaten into compliance with strange regulations they had no interest – other than keeping their jobs – in complying with. Meanwhile, Lakewood residents were warned today that their might be a supply shortfall, and that the prudent would buy matzos early or from more distant locations.

In Los Angeles, we gloat over what has been a win-win-win arrangement that joins the quality of chaburah matzah, the participation of major supermarket chains, and offers parnasah to a growing number of workers in Israel.

Many of us remember from our yeshiva days the thrill of participating in a chaburah to bake hand matzos. We also remember our misgivings about how many things could go wrong that don’t go wrong with a well-designed machine baking. We saw our participation, in part, as an antidote to the errors that could otherwise occur. A successful entrepreneur in LA who remembered what his rabbeim sought in a chaburah baking was disappointed by some of the industry standards, and over the space of a number of years came up with a winning combination.

As the title indicates, this will be (or, given my track record, might be) the first of several posts focusing on recent developments in the Conservative movement. I therefore want to preface these posts by pointing out something interesting.

When, in the past, this site has featured posts on the goings-on in the heterodox denominational world, some commenters have criticized the posters for excessive negativity, fighting irrelevant, old battles, triumphalism, etc.

How interesting, then: In the several months since Conservatism’s Committee on Law and Standards issued its long-awaited ruling on homosexual ordination and ceremonies, which was the biggest news in that movement in a long time and which frummies like us would have been expected to use as a cudgel with which to bash that movement, and the sundry other Judaisms for good measure, the number of C-C posts on the topic has been precisely . . . zero.

A recent stint as a scholar-in-residence in Baltimore drove home a point that I first learned the hard way decades ago. Shteibelization is not a panacea for unhappy shul-goers.

I had not been out of Kollel long enough to have lost my exuberant brashness, so the opportunity many years ago to debate Rabbi Maurice Lamm, then the rabbi of Beverly Hills’ Beth Jacob Congregation seemed inviting enough. The topic was shteibelization – the trend to bolt the larger shuls and join much smaller places of worship where everyone knew everyone else, and each individual had a much better chance of being needed and appreciated. This was where the “frum” community was headed, leaving the cathedral synagogues to the impious modernists. Clearly, G-d was on my side, and I would blow away my far more experienced opponent.

G-d chose otherwise. While I did not do so poorly, I walked out definitely bloodied. Rabbi Lamm deftly maneuvered me into a corner, and had me concede both the drawbacks of shteibelization and the abiding advantages of membership in a very large congregation such as Beth Jacob. The drawbacks (which I would have realized had I not been so intoxicated with the absolute righteousness of the “frummer” folks in the ghetto I hang out it) included giving people the ability to avoid both membership in and responsibility to any shul whatsoever. Folks could daven shacharis in one small shul, mincha at another, and find a hashkama minyan (early service) on Shabbos morning at yet another location. They could escape paying dues and establishing a relationship with any one rav by playing one place against the others. On the other hand, the advantages of the large congregation included organizing important communal responses that required a critical mass of congregants. Various charitable enterprises, political machinations, and outreach activity were unthinkable without a large membership base in their support. (To his credit, Rabbi Lamm never held my chutzpah against me, and we became friends. I was honored when he called me years later and asked me to review for Jewish Action a new book he had penned.)

It took decades until I learned the next lesson, but time caught up with me at Shomrei Emunah in Baltimore last Shabbos. It is definitely a large shul, not a shteibel. Its specialness struck me almost immediately, from the first davening Friday night. There were too many different kinds of Jews there, and they all seem to get along. I wasn’t used to that.

Daniel Gordis is perhaps the most eloquent writer from a traditional Zionist perspective in English today. Yet even he admits in a recent essay, “A Place Called Hope” , that Zionism has demonstrably failed to deliver on either of its two great promises: the first that a Jewish state would provide increased security for Jews; the second that it would result in the normalization of the Jewish people.

With respect to security, only a UN Security Council cease-fire resolution brought a cessation of 34 days of Hizbullah shelling of Israel’s North last summer, after the IDF failed to do so.

Soon over half the world’s Jewish children may well find themselves in “the crosshairs of a nuclear Iran.” Bottom line: “It is now more dangerous to be a Jew in Israel than any other place in the world.” Still worse, Israel’s existence today makes life more dangerous for Jews around the world.

Nor is Gordis more sanguine with respect to normalization. As a journalist covering the Dreyfus trial, Theodor Herzl concluded that Jews could never be assimilated as individuals in European society. But he thought that a Jewish state could assimilate among the nations of the world.

by Rabbi Harvey Belovski

Much has been written about the predicament of mature singles in our communities, their frustration, sense of helplessness and feeling of exclusion from mainstream Jewish life. However, the religious fallout of long-term single-hood is less frequently addressed: singles commonly suffer from a lack of inspiration and religious burn-out. I would like to address one aspect of this troublesome phenomenon.

Many men and women use Shabbosos as opportunities to attend singles’ events geared to helping them find their life partner. These occasions are often professionally run and claim a good number of successes. While in principle they are a ‘good thing’, singles who attend them regularly are in danger of turning Shabbos into a means, rather than an end.

The purpose of Shabbos is no more than Shabbos itself: affirming one’s belief that God created the universe and building a joyful relationship with Him through the observance of the Shabbos laws. This tremendous experience is an end in itself, yet for many on the singles circuit, Shabbos has become a means to finding a mate, no longer an opportunity for spiritual enrichment. Shabbos is the cornerstone of Jewish observance and of the Jew’s rapport with the Divine: its proper observance and the integration of its message form the basis of a healthy religious identity. Robbing Shabbos of its power by using it as a means to achieve something else will have devastating religious consequences. A Jewish life lived over an extended period without a ‘real’ Shabbos will feel dull and uninspired; the person concerned may never realise why.

Over the course of his distinguished military career, it is unlikely that General Peter Pace ever encountered a barrage as unrelenting as the one lately lobbed by the media and punditsphere after he expressed his personal feelings about the practice of homosexuality. The offensive (in both the word’s senses) weapons aimed at him were only words, but they were duly destructive all the same.

What General Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, dared to voice was his conviction that homosexual acts – not inclination, not orientation – are immoral. Needless to say, anyone can choose to disagree; the general was opining, not seeking to impose his views on others. But some who disagree with him seem to feel that his point of view simply has no place in civilized discourse. That should trouble us all.

The volleys lobbed at General Pace included widespread characterizations of his remarks as evidence of odious prejudice. The New York Times called the general’s beliefs “bigoted” and averred that he was “wrong in every way, and out of step.” The New York Daily News headline about the matter read, simply: “General Bigot”.

Similarly, several years ago, The American Civil Liberties Union ran an advertisement comparing people who object to homosexual practices on moral grounds as akin to vicious racists of yesteryear. Those espousing a traditional view of acceptable sexual behavior, the ACLU asserted, seek “to hide behind morality.” But, the ad continues, “we all know a bigot when we see one.”

Several readers of my recent post on interfaith conversations raised the issue of reciprocity. If we find that people are ready to listen to us when we share our Torah values and perspectives, is it not inevitable that they will want to do the same, and invite us in to their religious lives? For many if not most people, such religious voyeurism would run afoul of accepted halachic norms. There would be no good choices. Accepting the invitation for reciprocity would be unacceptable; declining it would appear rude, small-minded, and arrogant.

There is a third way. We politely explain that we have halachic barriers that forbid us any amount of involvement with other religious belief systems. My experience – at least with people who take their own religions seriously – is that it works.

Isn’t this infuriatingly self-centered for a religion? What do we think we have – a monopoly on the truth?

Actually, we are in good company. They all make the same claim. Every revealed religion claims to be, in some form or another, the only real act in town. Which is why other people are not so taken aback as we think they are. Those who sincerely believe their own claims about specialness are simply not fazed by the equivalent claims of competitors.

Regular readers of this column know that there are fewer bigger believers than I in the power of warmth and positive reinforcement to help our children realize their full potential. That does not mean, however, that constant praise is the way to do so. Last week, we discussed why all praise is not equal – i.e., praising children for effort yields very different results from praising them for their native intelligence. This week we will discuss the dangers of too much praise. (Again we are drawing on the research summarized in a February 19 New York Magazine article entitled “How Not to Talk to Your Kids.”)

The publication of Nathaniel Braden’s The Psychology of Self-Esteem in 1969 ushered in the self-esteem movement in the United States. Self-esteem was proclaimed the key to every aspect of life. The precepts of the movement dovetailed nicely with the needs of parents with increasingly little time to spend with their children. Parents convinced themselves that they could compensate for their absence with heavy doses of generalized praise of the “you’re the greatest” variety.

Recent studies, however – some by early enthusiasts of the self-esteem movement – have found that high self-esteem bears little relation to concrete achievement. In one comparative international study of math achievement, for instance, children in the United States ranked near the very bottom. Yet when asked to assess their own mathematical abilities, American children gave themselves the highest marks of any nation. (And this was at a time when only one in a thousand American students would have ranked in the top ten percent of Japanese students their age.)

Not only is there little reason to believe that constant efforts to build children’s self-esteem boosts either their short-term achievements or their chances for long-term success in life, there is evidence that endlessly telling them “You’re special,” can be damaging. Since 1982, a team of psychologists has been evaluating American college students according to something called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. And they have charted a steady and dramatic increase in narcissism among those tested. That trend, they worry, could lead, among other things, to even greater marital instability, since narcissists have difficulty creating and maintaining close personal relationships.

3 bNissan

I heard this question this week at all-day conference at Bar Ilan University on “Tefillat Nashim” – issues realted to women’s prayer. There were over a dozen lectures and workshops, many of them discussing the history and halakha of the relationship of women to prayer and how this changed over the centuries. For example, several lecturers cited material that seems to show that centuries ago European Jewish women were the sondaks or godmothers at the brit mila circumcision ceremonies held in synagogues,but that the Maharam of Rotenberg ruled to discontinue this practice this because of the problems arising in mixing men and women. Others discussed how synagogue architecture and design reflect how women have sometimes been less welcomed and other times more welcomed in public prayer as there were fluctuations in the halakha and planning of women’s sections, Ezrat nashim. During the question period, one woman stood up and asked, “Why do the men hate us so much?” I was taken aback. It seems to me that the main reason for separating men and women in prayer is that the men like women so much!
I thought of this as I read the talkbacks (62 so far) on my current Jerusalem Post op ed (March 21, 2bNissan), “Black hats in the front of the bus.”

This is the article that appeared last month on the JTA website. I discussed it here in cross-currents on Feb. 18 in “The Kidnapping of Rosa Parks.” At one point I wrote about women sitting in a separate section at the back of some buses in Israel:

Why women in the back? It isn’t strictly required, but in the Shema prayer we are warned not to follow our roving eyes [“lo tasuru”] and some haredi men take an extra stringency upon themselves to minimize such opportunities. This gift from God - that women nicely distract men - belongs in the privacy of the home…. It’s the men who are disadvantaged because Jewish law imposes more limits on their visual freedom…While self-control is an admirable quality, you shouldn’t put stumbling blocks before the blind… or the sighted.[“lifne iver lo sasim michshol”]

In my previous Cross-Currents post I made reference to the frightening and tragic “culture of death” that has engulfed large parts of the Palestinian population. In the comments section, a number of contributors went back and forth about the accuracy and fairness of this description (starting with #4).

As I read some of these comments I must admit that I found it hard to believe that anyone, regardless of background or affiliation, could deny this reality. One would have to be either willfully blind or dishonest not to acknowledge what is patently obvious.

As I noted in the original piece, the examples of this phenomenon – especially when surveying the broader world of radical Islam – are in fact too numerous to catalogue. But I am particularly struck by the depraved attitude that many Palestinian and Arab parents have taken towards the welfare of their children. This was what I was alluding to in my reference to the story of Mariam Farhat.

Particularly relevant – albeit unsurprising – is the recent transcript from MEMRI of the interview on Al-Aqsa TV (the Hamas channel) of two small children of a suicide bomber. If this is what they preach and what they encourage their children to do, it only follows that when mommy actually kills herself to kill Jews, her children would only be too happy.

The folks at Synagogue 3000 are at it again. Last year, Pastor Rick Warren was invited to LA’s Sinai Temple following a “ground-breaking meeting with Synagogue 3000.” This year, the headline says it all…

JEWISH WORSHIP LEADER CRAIG TAUBMAN BRINGS MEGA-CHURCH STYLE PRAYER EXPERIENCES TO ATLANTA IN BID TO INVIGORATE SYNAGOGUE LIFE: Synagogue 3000’s Atlanta Initiative presents composer/recording artist Taubman and local clergy leading services in aim to pack the pews March 23rd and 24th 2007

In order to “invigorate” synagogue life, Synagogue 3000 tells us, we should turn to churches. What a revolutionary idea! Except, of course, that it isn’t new at all. Nearly 200 years ago, a new synagogue was built in Seesen Germany. The founders decided that prayer in most synagogues was “unseemly” by comparison with that in churches, and therefore they revised the service “in the direction of beautifying it and rendering it more orderly.” The new synagogue featured German-language songs and prayers, ecclesiastical robes, a mixed choir, and an organ — all of which were common to German Protestant churches and all of which were previously foreign to Jewish congregations. And thus the Reform movement was born.

When Synagogue 3000 was trading clergy between Sinai Temple and Saddleback Church last year, I asked, “since we’re all one big happy family, what’s wrong with Taubman’s son marrying Warren’s daughter?” Given the intermarriage rate in the United States, I think we already know the answer — nothing, really. Nothing at all. When your source of inspiration is a Mega-Church rather than Mesillas Yesharim (”The Path of the Just,” an ethical work), it’s only natural that the Pastor’s daughter seems more attractive than that of a Rabbi.

A week ago, Agudath Israel proudly announced that Scholastic Library Publishing was recalling and reprinting an educational book for middle-grade children. “Enchantment of the World” is a series on “a country’s history, people and languages, economy, government, culture, natural resources, climate, religions, and much more.” Its volume on Israel, however, contained this passage: “But some ultra-Orthodox Jews want to limit the definition of who actually qualifies [for automatic citizenship as a Jew, under the country’s 'Law of Return']. They believe that Reform and Conservative Jews are not really Jews at all because they are not strict in their observance of all the religious laws.” As the Agudah press release put it:

In a straightforward letter to Scholastic, Agudath Israel director of public affairs [and Cross-Currents writer] Rabbi Avi Shafran characterized the contention that Orthodox Jews reject other Jews’ Jewishness because of their less-strict level, or even complete lack, of observance as “utterly untrue.”

“This, I am sure you realize, is no minor matter,” Rabbi Shafran wrote. “Texts like ‘Enchantment of the World’ are not only expected to be accurate but help mold attitudes in young minds. The assertion that Orthodox Jews somehow question the Jewishness of other Jews is both false and prejudicial. And so I hope you will take immediate steps to rectify the situation.”

Scholastic, to its credit, did so. After determining that the passage was indeed in error, they “offered an amended paragraph for Agudath Israel’s approval,” and obligated themselves to republish the book. And not stopping there, they will be destroying their current inventory, and are even going to replace copies now in the hands of customers once the new version is printed. A credit to Scholastic indeed — and quite a coup for the Agudah! But it also forces us to ask: really, now, how wrong were they? Isn’t it true that the Orthodox have been fighting against an increased Reform and Conservative presence in Israel? All of us Kiruv-niks (Jewish outreach workers) aside, is there really no traction within the Orthodox community to the idea that we would be better off without the non-Orthodox?

While writing last week’s column on “progressive” Jewish intellectuals who call openly for the destruction of the Israel, a thought crossed my mind (hopefully not for the first time): Why am I writing in Yated Ne’eman as if being anti-Israel were the greatest possible betrayal of one’s Jewishness? After all, wasn’t Agudath Israel once labeled an “anti-Zionist” party? And did not most gedolei Yisrael oppose the creation of a non-Torah state in Eretz Yisrael?

In his Ba’ayot Hazeman, which remains the classic exposition of the halachic parameters of participation in the Israeli government, Rav Reuven Grozovsky, zt”l, begins by describing the baseline position that “participation in the government is forbidden.” And even if various practical considerations necessitate participation, he writes, participation remains “in the nature of a transgression for the sake of Heaven,” [and] must be done without giving more respect to [anti-Torah leaders] than necessary.”

Many of the Jewish “progressives” quoted in Alvin Rosenfeld’s “‘Progressive’ Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism” claim that Israel represents a betrayal of Jewish values. And the chareidi world also frequently criticizes the state for its many deviations from Torah values. So why did I shower contempt on the “progressives,” as if it quoting their views were tantamount to refuting them?

IN TRUTH, the criticisms of the state advanced by “progressives” and chareidim bear no resemblance to one another. I found the most clearly articulated expression of why not at a website devoted to Rosenfeld’s article. One of the discussants offered a simple question to distinguish the two groups of Jews. Ask them: Why is the continued existence of the Jewish people necessary in the 20th century?

Long ago the prophet foretold, “Your ruiners and destroyers will go out from you” (Yeshaya 49:14). In recent years, that prophecy has been most frequently fulfilled by Jewish intellectuals and professors.

The 1961 Commentary symposium,”Jewishness and the Younger Intellectuals,” is a good starting point for a consideration of this trend. In those days, the still young state of Israel had captured the imagination not only of the vast majority of America’s Jews, but of much of the Western world. The story of the creation of a Jewish national state, against all odds, so soon after the Holocaust was the stuff of Hollywood.

Yet even at that early date, the overwhelming majority of the prominent younger intellectuals who contributed to the Commentary symposium professed little interest in Israel. If they confessed to rooting for Israel in its wars, they did so with more than a measure of embarrassment. More commonly, however, they fretted about the fledgling state’s bellicosity, its mistreatment of Arabs.

But even their criticisms were muted. Their lack of interest in Israel paralleled a similar lack of interest in their own Judaism. One articulate contributor compared lapsed Catholics to her fellow Jews who observe nothing of Jewish religion. The former, she noted, will hesitate to call themselves Catholics after having lost their faith, while the latter had no trouble calling themselves Jews, even though nothing about their lives identified them as such. The lapsed Catholics could still understand the power of faith, whereas the Jews “find it quite incredible that anyone should believe in a body of religious dogma. That our children should convert to another religion no more strikes us as a real possibility than that they should convert to Judaism itself.”

R’ Meir Soloveichik, always a source of food for thought, offers some gourmet nibbles in the current issue of Commentary (subscription only; not online). In what is ostensibly a book review, Soloveitchik offers some plain and compelling talk about interreligious dialogue, an expose of the non-orthodox thought of some nominally Orthodox figures, and yet another glimpse into the wisdom of his grandfather’s brother. zt”l.

The book is the work of Maria Johnson, an Oxford-trained Catholic theologian at University of Scranton, who becomes close with some of the fervently Orthodox families in her neighborhood. Strangers and Neighbors: What I Have Learned About Christianity by Living Among Orthodox Jews represents to Soloveichik a better alternative to two older views on the encounter of Judaism with other faiths.

One of these demands that Christians elide parts of their belief and Scripture that grate on the sensitivities of others. In response to the 2003 Pontifical Biblical Commission (headed by Cardinal Ratziger, since elevated to the papacy), Rabbi James Rudin of the American Jewish Committee suggested that Christians should declare that “the messiah’s identity remains unknown, and Jesus, whom Christians believe to be the messiah, is not waiting at the end of days for Jews to recognize the ‘error of their ways.’” The weakness of this approach is fairly obvious. Christians would have every right to ask for reciprocity, and ask Jews to give up tenets of their faith that create conflict with Christian belief. Orthodox Jews who understand that faith is not something to be bargained away or negotiated will be quick to draw back from such an approach.

A second approach is to minimize conflict by declaring that all differences in essential beliefs are chimerical. Each religion only possesses part of the truth, but never exclusivity. Thus, David Hartman of Jerusalem’s famous line: “G-d speaks Arabic on Fridays, Hebrew on Saturdays, and Latin on Sundays.” Irving Greenberg, probably the person most associated with the conflation of all belief into one mega-faith, has asked, Why is it necessary for Jews (or other religions) to insist that the truth of their historical experience with God . . . negates Christianity’s claims?” Much earlier, Abraham Joshua Heschel paved the way for this approach with these words:

Today’s mail included a cylindrical package from the Forward. In addition to a commemorative poster, said package contained the following “Dear Friends” invitation to advertise in their upcoming commemorative issue:

As you are undoubtedly aware, the Forward is a legendary name in journalism and a revered institution in American Jewish life. [Frankly, I wasn't aware that the Forward was revered, but that's not what prompted this post. Project Genesis should learn to write PR materials from these people. --YM] Launched as a Yiddish-language daily on April 22, 1897, the Forward helped safeguard the “American Dream” of Jewish immigrants for generations. The paper has been a force in world Jewry ever since.

We are proud of our legacy and we invite you to help us celebrate this significant occasion. Please consider placing an ad — either commercial or congratulatory — in a commemorative issue to be published on April 6, 2007. We are offering a substantially discounted rate for participating in this special issue.

I suspect that by this point, the writers of the above letter lost about 90% of their advertisers. If you’re commemorating a launch on April 22, then why are you doing it on April 6? True, it’s now a weekly, but why not April 20? But you’ve probably figured it out: although they don’t mention or explain this anywhere in the letter, the commemoration is indeed only two days before the anniversary — if one is going by the Jewish calendar.

“Nothing can stand before the ratzon (will),” is a saying our children (or at least our sons) are likely to hear many times in the course of their education. That piece of wisdom is neither rabbinic in origin nor is it literally true. Yet a number of recent studies in educational psychology demonstrate that it contains a crucial educational message.

A February 14 piece in New York Magazine, “How Not to Talk to Your Kids” by Po Bronson, describes the work of Stanford professor Carol Dweck, who has spent the last ten years investigating the impact of different educational messages on children. Dweck and her colleague Lisa Blackwell tried various educational interventions with 700 low-achieving minority students. Each group was given an eight-session course on study habits. But one group also received a 50 minute unit built around the theme that intelligence is not innate, and the brain is a muscle – the more one uses it the stronger it becomes.

Teachers in the school were not told which students were in which group, but they had no trouble picking out those who had been taught that intelligence can be developed. Their grades and study habits showed significant improvement. Within a semester, Dweck and Blackwell had reversed a long-time downward trend in math scores.

Much of Dweck’s work deals with the impact of different types of praise. Contrary to popular belief and practice, she discovered that praising children for being smart can often have a deleterious impact on educational achievement. Praising them for effort, by contrast, has a positive effect.

by Rabbi Harvey Belovski

Growing up in middle-class not-so-frum Jewish London, I noticed that families with more than three children were very rare. In my childhood I knew only two families with four children – they were treated with awe – and none at all with more. Although this is just my own observation, this situation has changed little among the mainstream of British Jewry: indeed a number of parents of four children have told me their peers regard them as odd.

I was interested in a recent study published by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics indicating that Jewish women in Israel give birth, on average, to 2.8 children. This compares favourably with the average of 1.5 children per women in Europe and points to steady Jewish growth into the next generation. But these figures must be heavily skewed by the high birth rate among the burgeoning religious section of the populace, in which families of 10 or more children are common. Studies suggest that the birth rate among the less religious is low: while the overall trend may be upwards, the constituency of the population is gradually becoming more religious.

These statistics brought to mind a discussion I had a year ago with a leader of a non-Orthodox Jewish organisation in the UK. He told me that an expert in population statistics from the USA had visited his synagogue and explained to the congregants the inevitable consequences of low birth rate for their community in: their eventual disappearance. While, apparently, no one could refute his argument, they rejected his suggestion that survival was contingent on having more children!

Listening to the Megila this Purim, I could not help thinking about a latter-day Haman from Persia, who also boasts of his desire to wipe out, annihilate, destroy and kill every Jew in Israel.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has had a way of late of insinuating himself into the happiest of moments. As I sat at the Purim meal, surrounded by my sons, each pleasantly high enough to cast aside any restraints on saying divrei Torah and singing at the top of his lungs, I wondered if I could possibly feel happier than at that particular moment. No sooner did this thought pop into my head than another followed: There must also have been Jews in Poland who felt the same way at their Purim feast in the spring of 1939.

Historian Benny Morris’s January 18 piece, “This Holocaust will be different” presented the worst case scenario vis- -vis Iran as an absolute certainty - no ifs, buts or maybes intruded into his analysis. According to Morris, Iran will certainly obtain nuclear weapons. And once in possession of those weapons, Iran will employ them against Israel within five years.

One can quibble with his analysis at various points, but my only question upon finishing Morris’s piece was whether he had already secured an academic appointment abroad and booked passage for himself and his family. And to tell the truth, I have been wondering myself whether it isn’t time to renew my membership in the Illinois State Bar Association and make sure all our U.S. passports are up-to-date.

An alert reader caught it on Friday, but in case you didn’t get to see it, it was featured on the JPost all weekend: a celebration of the “former haredim who broke out of their dogmatic, strict confines, on pain of excommunication, poverty and loneliness, to live in a world in which they can choose how to live.” This is the story of the “Hillel” organization, and its efforts to support those leaving observance.

Although not documented in this article, I remember the organization’s roots as the Irgun L’Chozrim l’Sheylah [organization for returnees to questioning], a play on chozrim beTeshuvah [returnees to observance]. When it was founded it was featured in the Jerusalem Report, along with its sponsors — the Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism. A bochur then studying in the Mirrer Yeshiva Jerusalem noticed that without exception, all of the young prospective members were a little too young: they were minors, and the Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism was “aiding” runaway teens by keeping them away from their parents rather than helping effect a reconciliation. Given the unanimous opinion of psychologists that reconciliation is best in anything but an abusive relationship, it must be that the Humanists consider observance inherently abusive. Either that, or, the bochur penned in a letter to the editor, “that which is secular isn’t necessarily humanist.”

Although the organization has apparently matured, along with those that it aids, my opinion is unchanged. This latest from the Post is a classic “puff piece,” and given the topic, it is difficult to see the lack of balance as anything but offensive. In five pages one will search in vain for so much as a challenging question, much less the opinion of a detractor — and in this case, that means page after page of unrefuted slanders of Torah observance and observant life.

Assorted “facts” are conjured from thin air, such as “most haredi defectors are immediately ejected from their homes once they appear at the family doorstep without peyot (sidelocks) or, in the case of women, without a modest skirt.” Yaron Yadan, who, we are told, “fears that haredi influence and growth is undermining the state’s democratic character,” has created an organization to “try to teach the haredi public that they live by an unethical, mistaken and inequitable system.” Just in case you imagined he’s a mentally stable individual with a good grip on reality, he throws in this gem: “we try to explain to [the charedim] that the secular world is more beautiful — it is filled with creativity, ethics and spirituality.” Creativity, maybe. But modern, secular Israel is known for many things, and ethics and spirituality don’t even make the list.

That a recent book’s reported claim of Jewish ritual murder in the Middle Ages stirred considerably more commotion in the Jewish media than in the Muslim world may be a hopeful sign. Or it might just testify to the depth and breadth of the longstanding belief in Arab and Asian countries that, why, yes, of course Jews murder non-Jews to use their blood in Passover matzos and wine (although the extension of that belief to Purim’s hamantaschen is of more recent vintage).

The Western media’s unanimous condemnation and ridicule of the blood libel assertion in the Italian book “Bloody Passover” is certainly heartening. As many reports noted, the book’s author, Professor Ariel Toaff, based his speculation on confessions extracted from victims of torture. Surely, many whose bodies were pierced, stretched or torn by the horrific devices employed by European authorities in the 1400s – or who were even merely confronted with the prospect of such technology – would have just as readily admitted to being demons or Martians too.

There is, of course, no basis of any sort to the contention that the Jewish faith includes, or ever included, the consumption, on Passover or anytime, of human or animal blood. Consuming either is in fact forbidden by Jewish religious law.

The concept of blood, though, is indeed central to Passover, which begins this year with the first Seder on the night of April 2.

There has been considerable hullabaloo in the Jewish media of late over Jewish demographics, much of it bewildering (and ultimately saddening), some of it strangely invisible.

First there was the study claiming that 60% of children in Boston’s intermarried homes are being raised as Jews, which advocates of aggressive outreach to the intermarried seized upon to bolster their cause. Prominent demographers like Steven Cohen raised incisive questions, however, about the study’s methodology and about what conclusions could reasonably be drawn from the data.

More recently, there’s been the dust-up over newly released studies that found another million Jews that the NJPS of 2000 had apparently misplaced. A huge sigh of relief could be sensed in the coverage of that story — no more need to agonize over the Jewish future, we’ve found an extra million Jews to join the millions already disappearing into American society, so all’s well on the Jewish front.

What has gone almost totally ignored, however, so far as I can tell, is a report released at the beginning of November by Synagogue 3000 and authored by the above-mentioned Mr. Cohen, which found, according to an article in the Forward (the only one I found on the report), that “the Orthodox movement has the most children affiliated with its synagogues, setting the stage for a future shift in the balance of American Jewish power.” Or, as Cohen himself put it: “Non-Orthodox Jews ought to think about their relation to the Orthodox. . . . The growing number of Orthodox Jews means they will play a much more central role in defining American Jewry in the years to come.”