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. In truth, though, it is precisely Rosh Hashana’s austere gravity that lies at the custom’s source.

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, Rabbi Angel complained that the standards of Orthodoxy are ever stricter.

For all the harshness of his critique, Rabbi Angel offered few concrete examples of what precisely is bothering him. He mentions the question of whether it is permitted for men to attend the opera, but it is hard to believe that issue is what is exercising him. Recently, he has vociferously dissented from the view that geirus (conversion) requires an acceptance of yoke of mitzvos — a view that was axiomatic to his mentor at Yeshiva University Rabbi Yosef Ber Soloveitchik — and he even called for the dissolution of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate, in part, because of its failure to convert more immigrants from the FSU.

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.

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 Sheindy). Bob and Jenny are unlikely to feel kindly disposed to their newly-religious friends (or indeed Judaism at all) if they discover that Yochanan and Sheindy have only remained in contact with them in the hope of making them frum.

While it is beneficial to develop a confident and firm attitude to one’s own Jewish life, will the products of outreach also remain open-minded towards those who have adopted a different style of Orthodoxy from their own? This can be very painful: I recently heard of a case where two scarcely-observant friends from a traditional community became religious and went off to Yeshivos in Israel: one to a modern-style establishment, the other to a Charedi institution. The acrimony between them over religious issues is now so ingrained that when they come home for vacation, the local rabbi struggles to contain their feuding.

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.

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. This could not be done towards persons who would not both of them consider these ceremonies sacred. (Response of the Assembly of Jewish Notables to Napoleon, August 1806, Third Question)

Written two hundred years ago, the author of these lines was spared the fury of today’s bloggers and commenters who would have been appalled by what they would have seen as a ziyuf Ha-Torah – a counterfeit presentation of Torah truth - for the sake of some PR points. What misrepresentation! What a collection of double entendres, staying (maybe!) just on the right side of truth, but appealing to what Napoleon wanted to hear! Thank G-d, all of us would have spoken more forthrightly, and let the chips fall where they may. Thank G-d, we have the Torah training to avoid smarmy sycophants who write drivel like this.

Except that the drivel in question may have saved a community from the full repression of religious practice by Napoleon, who asked for answers to twelve crucial questions that would shape his approach to all the Jews in his growing realm. The author was not a kal, but Rav Dovid Sinzheim, known to us denizens of the bais medrash for the Yad Dovid, and one of the gedolim of his generation. The Chasam Sofer not only authored a lavish hesped for him, but spoke specifically of the wisdom he used in dealing with hostile rulers.

Why did people not rise in righteous indignation at the sacrifice of Torah principle? Because they knew there was a time to be silent. When Torah and the Jewish people are under attack, and someone rises to defend them – that moment is not the time to publicly debate the rectitude of every phrase he used.

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 Court of Justice exercises judicial review over the other branches of government, and has powers “in matters in which it considers it necessary to grant relief in the interests of justice and which are not within the jurisdiction of any other court or tribunal.” As a High Court of Justice, the Supreme Court hears over a thousand petitions each year. [emphasis added]

The Court can self-select when it considers a matter relevant. It can override the legislature, State and local authorities and their officers, and the religious courts. It also continuously demonstrates a left-wing, secular bias in its decisions — no wonder that the Court and the leaders of the left are in an uproar at the prospect of someone forcing the Court to behave in a matter more consistent with its role in a Western democracy.

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 in the world – i.e., many Jews leave their yiras Shomayim at the departure gate. Being removed from one’s familiar surroundings while traveling makes, it is easy to feel as if all the old rules have been temporarily suspended.

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 acceptance of the responsibility to strive to observe all of the Torah’s laws — or ‘kabbalat hamitzvot’ — is the very sine qua non of Jewish conversion. A convert need not be conversant with all of the laws but must nevertheless embrace them in principle, as the Jewish People did at Sinai before receiving the Torah.”

Recently, Rabbi David Ellenson, president of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, and co-author of an upcoming book “on 19th- and 20th-century rabbinical responsa on conversion to Judaism,” replied with his own article, entitled “Conversion Complexity.” He wanders into a debate between Orthodox sources, yet I have heard no chorus clamoring that he has grabbed the opportunity to take pot shots at the Orthodox. Furthermore, his article obfuscates the obvious and clouds the clear, undermines understanding and corrupts knowledge (I was doing just fine until I tried to find an appropriate verb beginning with ‘k’). So I think it not entirely out of place for me to wonder what our critics would have us do. Should we ignore it and allow such ignorance to be the last word on the subject? Or, perhaps, would they merely prefer that I, or anyone with even a basic knowledge of Hilchos Geirus, the laws of conversion, squelch our honest amazement that the author of a book on responsa on conversion, who stands at the pinnacle of the Reform movement’s educational system, would demonstrate himself to be so uneducated on the contents of the very works about which he is supposed to be writing?

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.

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 registering my non-acquiesence in the two significant treatments of this topic that I’ve seen presented in response to the Feldman piece.

I take strong exception, based on my understanding of the Torah view, to elements of both essays. I’ve set forth below the passages I find unacceptable, with brief accompanying comment. In my intended Part II of this post, I hope to share a differing perspective on the subject.

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 VP that he could have been mistaken for a duck.

A different judge, sitting on the 1st Circuit Court, did not recuse himself from a case that came before him regarding the limits of Superfund liability. The decision that he signed on to became a benchmark in restricting the EPA’s access to Superfund assets. The jurist did not see any conflict in the fact that he was a “Name” for Lloyd’s of London, which means that a good deal of his personal fortune was potentially at stake if plaintiffs were allowed to raid a Superfund’s cookie jar. Professor Monroe Freedman, a Harvard-trained authority on legal ethics, testified against this judge at his Senate confirmation hearing, arguing that the failure to recuse was a serious moral breach. Stephen Breyer, however, won confirmation to the country’s highest court without ill effect.

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.

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.”

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:

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.

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 strong connection with a grandparent who is not so observant how do they explain the fact that Bubbe is not keeping Shabbos, or the Uncle does not eat kosher. Some also fear that if the community finds out who their relatives are it might lower their status and inhibit good Shidduchim. It seems that some of these baali tehsuva are being encouraged to follow this policy of insularity by their Rabbonim.

Are we so afraid of what we teach our kids that they can’t know that their grandparents are not Frum. In my mind it is an act of insecurity that some try to limit the relationships between family members, except in a case that there is intent for malicious harm. Is our Yiddiskiet so weak that we need fear interaction with families members will harm our children’s Yiddiskiet.

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.

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 America of poor and often religious Jews from Eastern Europe.

In this reading, the Times’ publication of Feldman’s piece is a reflection of Orthodoxy’s surprising rebirth in America. (Monday’s Jerusalem Post noted that three-quarters of Jewish births in the UK are haredi, and pointed to similar trends around the world.)

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 to the traditional service — but they do. In the words of a 16 year old girl, social action VP of her temple youth group, “when the prayers were very nontraditional, they felt botched; the music was so distracting. It seemed so disrespectful.” This girl is from California, no less.

When Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, advises that “we should be prepared to explore everything, even things that would have been unthinkable to parents and grandparents,” and when HUC Rabbinical Student David Singer says “we’re looking for things outside the box in which our generation feels comfortable experimenting and expressing our Judaism in ways that haven’t always fit into the established norms” — they’re not talking about Tikkun Olam in Darfur, dance circles, or the embrace of “alternative lifestyles.” They are referring to kashrus, tzitzis, and Shemiras Shabbos!

The last two weeks have provided many venues – in print and online – for valuable discussion and thoughtful responses to Professor Noah Feldman’s article in the New York Times Magazine. I was especially gratified to read, for example, the insightful arguments and incisive prose of my teachers and mentors, R. Norman Lamm and R. Shalom Carmy.

Additionally, the recent revelations about the infamous newsletter photo should certainly remind us all of the danger in rushing to judgment – or to pontificate – at the same time it underscores the wisdom of the Sages’s adage (Avot de-Rabbi Nathan, ch. 26) “seyag l’chochmah shetikah” – sometimes silence is not only prudent but wise.

There are many important issues raised directly and indirectly by Feldman’s essay and most of them have already been dealt with by others. There is one issue, however, that I am not sure has been sufficiently discussed.

II.

U’re’eh B’tuv Yerushalayim — Seeing the Good

by Rabbi Elchonon Oberstein

I recently returned from a wonderfully positive visit to Israel and want to share two observations which gave me much cause for optimism. One son lives in Modiin,a community with many American olim who could be living very well in Teaneck but who have chosen to raise their families in Modiin .This is a tolerant Israel. The bris of my new grandson brought together a segment of society composed of native Israelis as well as older and younger olim who have careers and are part of the culture and commerce of Israel, none are living in isolation. These people are not rioting, they are too busy running their companies, serving in their professions, and becoming part of Israel. Idealists, all.

During the week, I stayed in Yerushalayim with my Mir Kollel son, who has been given a golden opportunity by Aish Hatorah to give the daily shiur to a group of American yeshiva high school boys in a summer program called “Bnai Aish.” I accompanied them on an inspiring trip to the new Yad Vashem.

by Rabbi Dovid Landesman

I write this piece with a sense of b’dchilu u’rchimu - let’s translate this as trepidation. When I was younger I was less hesitant about being a semi-m’gadef - ascribing all types of vile characterizations to gedolei yisroel who seemed to somehow not get what was perfectly clear to my post-adolescent mind. With my vast storehouse of Torah erudition and my unbelievably astute analysis of the world around me, I was somehow qualified to make Torah pronouncements on issues that did not fit strictly into the area of halachah. I was willing to admit the supremacy of gedolim in some areas, but to expand this admission to the grey area that is called “da’as Torah” - no way, Jose!

As I matured, a still ongoing process, I realized how little I really know and more so, how much they do know. I am no less perplexed by some of their pronouncements, no less bothered by their seeming lack of awareness of the real world, and no less astounded oftimes by public pronouncemnts of policy. Nevertheless, I am reluctant to simply discredit them or ignore their words. Instead of condemning, instead of being cycnical, I do my best to understand. I also realize that a challenge even to contemporary roshei yeshiva is foolish. No matter how many steroids I take, I’m not going to challenge Barry Bonds to a homerun derby!

A case in point: at the last Torah Umesorah Convention, Rav Aron Leib Steinman was asked for a halachic opinion regarding the suitability of a rebbi playing sports with his talmidim. To Reb Aron Leib, coming from Bnei Brak and living in an environment where such behavior would be an enormous pritztat hagedorim, the answer was obvious - lo with an aleph! Did Rav Shmuel Kaminetzky or Rav Aharon Shechter or any of the American roshei yeshivot who were present qualify this statement as being unacceptable in most parts of America? No! Does that mean that they disagreed with the p’sak? No! Do they enforce it or even mention it? No! Does that make them hypocrites? No! Confused? Yes!

A recent attack on Israel’s Chief Rabbinate invoked the late and revered American Orthodox decisor of Jewish law, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein.

The attacker was Professor Benjamin Ish-Shalom, the director of Israel’s Institute for Jewish Studies, an agency charged with offering a course of Jewish study to non-Jewish immigrants interested in conversion. What provoked him was the set of standards employed by the Rabbinate for conversions.

In a flattering Jerusalem Post interview — the reporter took pains not only to cite the professor’s scholarship, soft-spoken nature and religious piety but to describe for readers the “centuries-old Talmuds and well-worn works on Jewish philosophy and history” that line his office — Professor Ish-Shalom blasted what he calls the “humiliating” conversion process in Israel, dismissed religious court judges as insufficiently humble and declared that the Rabbinate is rendering Jewish religious law “irrelevant to the modern Jewish people and to the modern state of Israel.”

Professor Ish-Shalom further described a judge who invalidated a years-old conversion as embodying (in the Post’s paraphrase) “blindness and even halachic ignorance”; accused Israel’s religious court judges of fostering desecration of G-d’s name; and dismissed Israel’s Chief Rabbis of just being “loyal to their haredi masters.”

Other than history buffs, few people would associate R. Akiva Eiger (RAE) with Moses Mendelssohn. The former occupies a position of awe and reverence for those who have ever worked through the mind-boggling depth and breadth of his Talmudic commentaries or responsa; the latter is seen as the Founding Father of the heterodox movements that presided over the dismantling of loyalty to and identification with Torah Judaism in the Jewish “Enlightenment.” A classic never-the-twain-shall-meet situation if there ever was one. The greatness and depth of RAE is in fact probably understated; the role of Mendelssohn in the trajectory of those who walked out of observance may very well be overstated (although that is not the subject of this essay); and the two very much did meet. It takes nothing more than opening a RAE to Megilla 16A to prove it.

We will return to the story of how their paths crossed after illustrating a contemporary repetition of the event. (I present the story as I heard it, and welcome those who know more than I do to correct details, or falsify the incident. The point it raises is valid nonetheless.) When R. Yaakov Kamenetsky zt”l was Rosh Yeshiva of Torah Vodass, students used to help him prepare his house before Pesach. One group checked for chometz the seforim that might have been brought to the table. The work proceeded without event, until one bochur let out a shriek, having discovered a copy of Mendelsohn’s famous (infamous?) and ground-breaking German translation of Chumash, known today simply as “The Biur.” While there are likely fewer students in Torah Vodaas today who would know about the Biur and its author, that particular bochur did, and his horror was visceral. Rav Yaakov immediately understood, and reportedly smiled (he seemed always to smile) and said, “They are surprised that I would own such a work. If only they knew how many difficulties it helped me solve.”

In the eighteenth century, when translations of Chumash into any vernacular were not common, the announcement by Mendelssohn that he was preparing a scholarly translation into German was met with excitement. New works were often funded by paid advance subscriptions – think Amazon selling Harry Potter before Rowling ever typed a single paragraph.

The subscription list to Mendelssohn’s Biur included the names of many important gedolim, including RAE. While his views and background were likely no complete secret, those who disagreed with him did not shun him or his work entirely. Contemporaries continued to cite him respectfully even when disagreeing, and drawing support from his words when in agreement.