By Avi Shafran, on August 31st, 2007 An odd Rosh Hashana custom, duly recorded in the Talmud and halachic codes, is the lavishing of puns on holiday foods.
Most Jews know that on the first night of the new Jewish year, it is customary to eat a piece of apple dipped in honey, to symbolize our hope for a sweet year. Less known is the Rosh Hashana night custom of eating foods whose names augur well for the future. Though the Talmud’s examples are, of course, in Hebrew or Aramaic, at least one halachic commentary directs us to find pun-foods in whatever language we may speak.
“Help us pare away our sins” before consuming a pear might thus be an appropriate example. Or an entreaty that G-d be our advocate, before eating a piece of avocado. “Lettuce have a wonderful year” might be pushing it a bit, but maybe not. One respected rabbi once smilingly suggested partaking of a raisin and stalk of celery after expressing the hope for a “raise in salary.”
Such exercises might seem a bit out of place on the Jewish holy “day of judgment.” But that is only because we regard the custom simplistically, as some quaint superstition. … Read More >>
By Jonathan Rosenblum, on August 30th, 2007 This post deals only with Rabbi Angel’s views, not with MO, in general, and was written and published last month before the piece on Noah Feldman. Steve Brizel, who was critical of the Feldman piece, urged me to post this one. In short, I have no wish to revisit the general issue of Modern Orthodoxy. Any criticisms with respect to this post itself are, of course, welcome.
Rabbi Marc Angel, former president of the Rabbinical Council of America, is retiring after 38 years as the spiritual leader of Manhattan’s Congregation Shearith Israel. But he is not going quietly into the night. In a recent interview with the Jewish Week, Rabbi Angel charged that Orthodoxy, including his own Modern Orthodox movement, is “to a certain extent slipping over the line to a cultic, superstitious kind of religion.” He bewailed the loss of creativity within modern Orthodoxy and the growing resort to “so-called authorities” by local rabbis.
The Angel interview was reminiscent of last year’s valedictory address of Ismar Schorsch as chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary (Conservative), in which Schorsch excoriated the movement he had headed for years. But whereas Schorsch complained that his movement increasingly has no standards, … Read More >>
By Jonathan Rosenblum, on August 30th, 2007 In his Kuntras HaBechirah, Rav Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler makes a truly frightening statement. No matter how elevated one’s actions, if those actions are only the result of one’s training, then they confer no merit upon the one performing them. Only those actions that result from the exercise of one’s free will are attributed to a person.
That which we do as a form of imitation of our role models or as a result of some form of coercion is not truly ours. One only can only lay claim to those mitzvos to which one brings something of oneself – some thought, some feeling while performing the mitzvah.
Rav Dessler taught that we define ourselves only through the exercise of our free will. And that only takes place when there is an aspect of internal struggle. That struggle is the opposite of rote behaviour – mitzvos anoshim m’limuda.
Our very relationship with Hashem depends on the exercise of our bechirah. Any true relationship must be based on the individuality of both parties – on what is intrinsic to them and not compelled by circumstances beyond their control. And that process of self-definition requires the exercise of our bechirah.
With this … Read More >>
By Harvey Belovski, on August 30th, 2007 I have been involved with formal and informal outreach for more than 15 years but have only recently started to ask myself a few pointed questions, which I share, anticipating that they will be of value to others.
How do we ensure that those we help to become involved in Jewish observance stay tolerant of others who have not taken the same bold steps as they? Surely we don’t want Ba’aley Teshuvah (the newly observant) to regard their family members as sinful failures. It is likely that their childhood homes were the incubators within which they learned a sense of social justice, the pursuit of truth and the dedication to family values and were therefore indispensable to their ultimate discovery of a Torah lifestyle. Do we, as the facilitators of religious seekers’ spiritual growth constantly emphasise this, or do we see their families as opponents to be defeated?
Perhaps worse, it seems that the newly-religious sometimes maintain their relationships with non-observant friends simply to try to make them religious. It seems improbable, but is it just possible that we encourage it? Picture, if you will, Bob and Jenny, old friends of John (now Yochanan) and Sheila (now … Read More >>
By Yaakov Menken, on August 29th, 2007 The JTA is reporting that Metropolitan Schechter in Teaneck, NJ will be closing. Metropolitan Schechter was formed just last year when Manhattan Schechter closed and merged with Teaneck’s Schechter Regional. As a result, this closure leaves the Conservative movement without a high school in the New York region. As I wrote here previously, administrative, managerial, and fundraising issues aside, this closure still reflects the failure of the Conservative movement to “walk the walk” on Jewish education.
Meanwhile, Broward County, Florida is about to become home of the first-ever “Hebrew Charter” school, delivering a secular education with a Hebrew-language emphasis, devoid of Jewish content. As Jonathan Tobin points out, the latter’s opening, no less than the former’s closing, “is a direct threat to the one institution proven to be our best investment in our future:” the Jewish Day School.
By Yitzchok Adlerstein, on August 29th, 2007 The law does not say that a Jewess cannot marry a Christian, nor a Jew a Christian woman; nor does it state that the Jews can only marry among themselves. The only marriages expressly forbidden by the law are those with the seven Canaanite nations, with Amon and Moab, and with the Egyptians…The prohibition in general applies only to nations in idolatry. The Talmud declares formally that modern nations are not to be considered as such, since they worship like us the G-d of heaven and earth. And accordingly there have been at several periods intermarriages between Jews and Christians in France, in Spain, and in Germany. These marriages were sometimes tolerated, and sometimes forbidden by the laws of those sovereigns who had received Jews into their dominions… We cannot deny that the opinion of the Rabbis is against these marriages. According to their doctrine, although the religion of Moses has not forbidden the Jews from intermarrying with nations not of their religion, yet, as marriage according to the Talmud requires religious ceremonies called Kiddushin, with the benediction used in such cases, no marriage can be religiously valid unless these ceremonies have been performed. … Read More >>
By Yaakov Menken, on August 28th, 2007 With an twist of phrase that would have done George Orwell proud, Israeli Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch rebuked those proposing Knesset legislation to restrain the Court, calling the proposed legislation “a direct blow to the democratic character of the State of Israel, a blow to the substantive democracy that has been built here and is the pride of the state.”
The Knesset, of course, is elected by the population of the State of Israel. The Supreme Court, by contrast (and it is practically alone among High Courts in the civilized world in this regard) exercises near-total control of the selection of its new members. Thus the Court does not represent a balance between diverse perspectives within the populace — it represents only itself. It is, by a vast margin, the least democratic of all branches of government in Israel. It also exercises greater power than the other branches; as the State proudly declares on its web site:
The Supreme Court also sits as the High Court of Justice. This function is unique to the Israeli system because as the High Court of Justice, the Supreme Court acts as a court of first and last instance. The High … Read More >>
By Jonathan Rosenblum, on August 28th, 2007 On the Road
I’m writing while traveling in America with my wife and two youngest sons. As always, I find travel to be a great stimulant. The lack of familiarity with one’s surroundings forces one to open one’s eyes and to observe the world around with a keener eye and in sharper detail.
At the Boeing Museum of Flight in Seattle, for instance, I had a chance to contemplate the fact that less than seventy years separated Wilbur Wright’s first flight, which lasted a few seconds and carried the him little more than one hundred feet, from Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon. I never would have thought about this particular aspect of the unquenchable human thirst to explore new vistas – itself one of the wonders of the Creation – had I not been at the Museum. (The Museum also forced me to reflect on how quickly the Wright brothers’ invention was employed to transform the nature of warfare and greatly multiply its destructive force.)
At the same time, the breaking out of familiar patterns entails its own risks. One of the gedolei hador once quipped that Ben Gurion Airport has more yiras Shomayim than any other place … Read More >>
By Yaakov Menken, on August 27th, 2007 From the Urban Dictionary: “Being confuddled is when your confused about being confused but u dont know wot your confused about so your completly confuddled.”
One of the more frequent complaints about Cross-Currents, at least from those to our philosophical left, is that it so frequently critiques that same left, particularly the heterodox clergy and the modern Jewish movements. Our usual answer, stated at its least diplomatic extreme, is that Cross-Currents is merely the first attempt at an antidote to a steady and poisonous flow from the secular & “mainstream” Jewish media. Given that conventional outlets let their ignorance and even animus towards observance show all too often, Cross-Currents serves a valuable function by providing an alternative.
I wonder how our critics would have us address the following, real-life situation. Several weeks ago, Rabbi Avi Shafran published a piece called “Conversion Confusion,” which eventually made its way into the august pages of the New York Jewish Week. In that article, Rabbi Shafran deflected criticism — from certain Orthodox Rabbis — of Israel’s Orthodox Rabbinate for “raising obstacles to prevent non-Jews from entering the Jewish fold.” Inter alia Rabbi Shafran made reference to an obvious point about conversion: “Sincere … Read More >>
By Jonathan Rosenblum, on August 26th, 2007 My post on Noah Feldman’s recent essay in the New York Times provoked an unusually large number of responses — most critical of my post and many unflattering on a personal level. I was travelling in the United States during most of this flurry of responses, and only had a chance to read them in dribs and drabs. A fuller reading, however, only confirmed my initial impression: I did not recognize myself or anything I wrote in most of the comments, which were mainly of a tone that has made this an increasingly unsatisfying forum in which to participate. That I may not have perceived all my many failings is itself not so surprising — no one recognizes his own blemishes — but, in truth, I did not recognize them even after having them pointed out to me in such detail.
By Eytan Kobre, on August 24th, 2007 A well-worn anecdote has it that a teacher assigned the writing of an essay with the requirement that it relate to elephants in some way. Looking through the submitted papers, the teacher came upon the one authored by the only Italian in the class entitled “Eating Habits of the Elephant.” Next was a piece by the lone Frenchman headlined “Romantic Interests of the Elephant.” Reaching the last essay in the pile, he found the essay of the token Jew. His topic? “The Elephant and the Jewish Problem.”
One elephant that hasn’t left the room, so to speak, a full month after the publication of that article, is the one relating to the non-Jewish question — that is, the issue of what conclusions are to be drawn from the halacha that requires suspension of melacha proscriptions on Shabbos to save the life of a Jew but not that of a non-Jew, except where failure to save the latter’s life would foster enmity towards Jews, with potential violent repercussions.
I’m fully mindful that, with the onset of Feldman Fatigue Syndrome, this post might go by entirely unnoticed. But I’ve decided to launch it into the blogosphere anyway if only as a way of … Read More >>
By Yitzchok Adlerstein, on August 24th, 2007 Justice came quickly for NBA veteran referee Tim Donaghy, who pled guilty recently to betting on games at which he officiated and sharing his predictions on the point spread with professional gamblers. Donaghy, who admits to a serious gambling problem, is now looking at a half-million dollar fine and a thirty-thousand dollar restitution judgment against him. The trial he faces could land him in prison for twenty-five years.
Donaghy’s behavior sullied the reputation of professional basketball, not just the games he called. Americans take their sports seriously. His behavior was a serious breach of public trust, and the swift retribution is understandable.
Less understandable is why others mired in conflict of interest walk away unscathed. Consider the prominent judge who sat on a panel asked to consider the charge that Vice President Cheney had pandered to outside interests in formulating Federal energy policy. Some thought this judge ought to have recused himself after being flown on Air Force One to a hunting weekend, along with two family members. He didn’t, and there were no consequences. Perhaps, given Cheney’s hunting record, Justice Antonin Scalia thought there was punishment enough in being close enough to the … Read More >>
By Yitzchok Adlerstein, on August 23rd, 2007 Rabbi Moshe Kolodny, Archivist for Agudath Israel, alerted me to a dumb error in my piece on Mendelssohn’s Biur. I expressed surprise that R. Akiva Eiger, while voicing other objections to the Biur’s rendition of the Shema, did not criticize the translation of Hashem’s Name into “the Eternal.” Rabbi Kolodny came to the defense of Artscroll, which has steadfastly refused to translate the Tetragrammaton. He pointed out that at the bottom of the very column in Chidushei RAE on Megillah that I cited, RAE does object to translating the Shem Hashem for a number of reasons, including the fact that proper nouns shouldn’t be translated. (The paragraph does not deal directly with the Biur, but with the difficulty of generally translating berachos and tefilos/ blessings and prayers into the vernacular.)
If I had to be upstaged, at least it came at the hands of someone who makes a professional career of knowing his material.
By Yaakov Menken, on August 20th, 2007 Today’s Jewish World Review carries an article about Saraa Barhoum, “the young star of Hamas television’s best-known children’s show.” The show is “best known for bringing the world a militant Mickey Mouse look-alike and then having him killed off by an Israeli interrogator.”
As I commented three months ago, when news of faux Mickey reached us, “We all know that terrorists are the fault of the occupiers, who create an environment of hopelessness and despair in which young men and women see nothing better in their future. We’re sure it has nothing to do with using a Mickey Mouse clone to train young children to ‘annihilate the Jews’ and, well… see for yourself.”
By Eytan Kobre, on August 17th, 2007 The Forward recently reported on another in a series of what it calls “cushy confabs” that bring together the really important Jews to deliberate and pontificate (although the pontiff himself was not invited — perhaps that big yarmulke did him in) and decide the future course of Jewry and Judaism for all us small folk.
In this sense, this gathering of pretentious eggheads, enjoying an all-expenses-paid jaunt on the dime of a filthy-rich sponsor whose own pretensions are slaked by soaking in the intellectual aroma of the former — read: those who can pontificate; those who can’t, bankroll others who pontificate — is so entirely irrelevant that even the slight energy expended by tapping on a keypad grants it more than its due.
This latest shindig, last month’s grand summit of Jewish People Policy Planner People, some other such regular inanity called — so very understatedly — “The Conversation” — they’re all so fungible and so deeply meaningless.
But one incident at this latest outing, held in Park City, Utah, and put on by the Bronfmans, needs comment. The Forward’s reporter describes the scene when old man Bronfman arose to address the assemblage:
Looking out at the crowd, Edgar … Read More >>
By Avi Shafran, on August 17th, 2007 Like most religions, Scientism has its articles of faith.
Science, the study of nature, has a premise — the scientific method — but no required beliefs about the unseen.
Scientism, by contrast — the conviction that there is and can be nothing beyond the reach of our physical senses and instruments — possesses a dogma as sacrosanct as any religion’s.
Among its unchallengeable doctrines is an abiding faith in the absence of a Creator, in the all-pervading rule of chance in the universe. Unfolding from that axiom is the conviction that life materialized naturally from inanimate matter; and that the diversity of life on earth emerged from the trinity of a common single-celled ancestor, random mutation and natural selection.
Which leads in turn to another of Scientism’s creeds: that life must exist beyond our planet.
For if chance is the loom on which the universe’s fabric lies stretched, there is no reason that only a single, unremarkable planet in a single, unremarkable solar system in a single, unremarkable galaxy — a solitary orb in a universe of billions of stars and their satellites — would alone have spawned life and, eventually, intelligent life.
During the same eons that allowed natural processes on Earth to progress … Read More >>
By Guest Contributor, on August 12th, 2007 By Rabbi Dovid Eliezrie
The women was crying. Her daughter became a Baalas Teshuva some years ago, and lives in Bnai Brak. The daughter has done everything possible to inhibit the parents from having an active relationship with the grandkids. Only on the daughters turf, and only with many conditions. The crying mother is involved in teaching at a Conservative temple in the US and had come to the National Jewish Retreat , a Chabad five day learning program in Colorado last week. She had attended a session that I coordinated, “Oy Vey, they became religious”. It was about the tensions in families where one member becomes Frum.
What struck me was the story that I have sadly heard more than once. Baalie Teshuva who fear too much interaction between their children and their grandparents. They are afraid that a grandparent who is not so Frum may have a negative influence over the kids. We are not talking about cases where the non Frum relative is intentionally out to harm. Most grandparents just want a real relationship with their grandchildren. Some baali Teshuva are afraid that the kids will have a … Read More >>
By Yaakov Menken, on August 11th, 2007 UPDATE: The owner has been located and the item(s) returned.
If anyone knows this person, please leave a comment (it won’t be published) or email. He left something in Baltimore. The spelling above is transliterated, so the last name could be spelled differently.
By Jonathan Rosenblum, on August 10th, 2007 Harvard Professor Noah Feldman’s lengthy whine in the July 22 New York Times Magazine about the failure of Boston’s modern Orthodox Maimonides School to acknowledge his marriage to a Korean-American fellow professor and the subsequent birth of two children in its alumni Mazel Tov bulletins triggered a panic attack in certain Orthodox quarters. It shouldn’t have — or at least not for the reasons it did.
Why did the Times choose to publish an essay about an event that took place nearly a decade ago, and which has no evident “news hook,” especially when both Feldman and the Times knew two weeks before publication that the essay’s opening vignette and emotional core had never occurred? The picture of Feldman and his then girlfriend had not been deliberately excised from a tenth high school reunion picture. They had simply been cut off, along with 16 others, by the photographer’s lack of a sufficiently wide-angle lens.
The answer, I suspect, is that the Times’ owners, with their Jewish last names, but whose religious affiliation tends towards the Episcopalian today, have been spooked by the growing ascendancy of Orthodoxy in Jewish communal life, just as their German Jewish forbears were spooked by the arrival in … Read More >>
By Yaakov Menken, on August 9th, 2007 The story is told of a classical Reform temple somewhere in America where they blew a French Horn on Rosh Hashanah. Younger members of the congregation were dissatisfied with this, and proposed using a Shofar. Some older members took umbrage at the suggestion — one exclaimed, “these youngsters have no respect for our traditions!”
Whether or not this story is apocryphal (and the Rabbi who told the story gave no indication that it was), the underlying tension that it describes is all too real and becoming ever more pronounced. As described in the latest NY Jewish Week, active young members of the Reform movement are adopting traditional practices and rejecting “innovations” in ever greater numbers. This came to a head when the staff at Kutz Camp, the Reform movement’s teen leadership camp, brought in a jazz musician with a keyboard for a “creative approach” to Ma’ariv, the evening prayers. Forty campers — one-fourth of those in attendance — found the service so disconcerting that they spontaneously walked out.
This was a weekday Ma’ariv, on the evening of US Independence Day, July 4. These are not kids whom we would imagine say a weekday Ma’ariv frequently enough to grow attached … Read More >>
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