It is a strange and disorienting panorama that Rabbi E. E. Dessler, the celebrated Jewish thinker (1892-1953) asks us to ponder: a world where the dead routinely rise from their graves but no grain or vegetation has ever grown.

The thought experiment continues with the sudden appearance of a man who procures a seed, something never seen before in this bizarre universe, and plants it in the ground. The inhabitants regard the act as no different from burying a stone, and are flabbergasted when, several days later, a sprout pierces the soil where the seed had been consigned, and eventually develops into a full-fledged plant, bearing – most astonishing of all – seeds of its own!

Notes Rabbi Dessler, there is no inherent difference between nature and what we call the miraculous. We simply use the former word “nature” for the miracles to which we are accustomed, and the latter one for those we have not before experienced. All there is, in the end, is G-d’s will.

It is a thought poetically rendered by Emerson, who wrote: “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore…”

In no area of human behavior does Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity – “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” – come so frequently to mind as Middle East peacemaking. Periodically, usually near the end of a presidential term, a buzzer goes off in the heads of the departing administration signaling that the time is ripe for the all-out commitment of American prestige and resources to finding the solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that has eluded policymakers for over sixty years.

Thus Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice has announced that she intends to have a peace treaty between the Palestinian Authority and Israel all wrapped up before President George W. Bush leaves office. The quest to achieve that goal begins this week at Annapolis.

On the face of it, nothing has changed since the breakdown of Camp David more than seven years ago that would seem to increase the chances of concluding such an agreement. Just the opposite. In the wake of Camp David, Yassir Arafat and the Palestinians declared a war of terror on Israel in which thousands of Israeli Jews lost their lives. Only after Operation Defensive Shield, in the wake of the Seder Night Massacre in Netanya, in late March 2002, did the IDF retake control of security in all of Judea and Samaria and the terror abate.

In summer 2005, Israel withdrew from Gaza only to find itself under constant rocket attack from the territory it abandoned to Palestinian control. And the Palestinians in Gaza, now under Hamas leadership, have taken advantage of Israel’s ceding control over the Egyptian-Gaza border to smuggle in vast quantities of more lethal and long-range missiles. The experience of the Gaza withdrawal has hardly put Israelis in the mood for territorial concessions in Judea and Samaria that would make it easier for terrorists to direct their fire at Israel’s heartland.

Do Torah Jews have an obligation to use any power, political or economic, that they can muster to force the not-yet religious to live in greater conformity with the Torah’s commands? In determining whether to employ the power at our disposal, is it permissible to take into account such factors as the norms of a democratic society, the chances of stirring up a backlash against religious Jews, or the possibility that coerced conformity to halachic norms could be at the cost of a genuine religious commitment at some later date?

Let me give an example of the type of situation that I have in mind in posing these questions. Imagine a formerly secular neighborhood in Jerusalem into which chareidi Jews have begun to move. The neighborhood has a communal swimming pool. When the chareidi population reaches 30% of the neighborhood, the chareidim ask the community center to set aside hours for separate swimming for men and women, and the community center acquiesces.

Now what happens when the chareidi population reaches 70%? Let us say that the chareidim are in a position to end all mixed swimming and institute only separate hours. Would they be halachically obligated to do so? Would the failure to do so constitute a de facto approval of mixed swimming?

What might be some of the countervailing considerations to exercising our power? For one thing, the hypothetical case described above involves a degree of religious coercion. The chareidi population would not just be acting to ensure its own ability to live as Torah observant Jews, but imposing halachic norms on other Jews. There is no greater hot button issue for the secular population than religious coercion, or one that does more to provoke hostile responses to religious Jews.

We are encouraged that President Bush, best known for waging war in Iraq, has finally accepted the challenge of peacemaker. –NY Times editorial

A line like that makes your heart stop. The NY Times has not a kind word for the man in seven years, and suddenly they respect him, they are “encouraged,” he is a “peacemaker”? G-d forbid he should actually turn out to be what they wish and hope. If George Bush gets a favorable editorial in the NY Times, can the Nobel Peace Prize be far behind? G-d forbid. Pray for Israel.

Meanwhile the same issue of the NY Times features a dyspeptic word from the comfortably predictable Maureen Dowd, Bush Hater. She still hates him. Baruch Hashem. Sigh of relief.

He wants to look like he’s taking the problem of an Israeli-Palestinian treaty seriously when his true motivation is more cynical: pacifying the Arab coalition and holding it together so that he can blunt Iran’s sway. –Maureen Dowd, NY Times

I hope to G-d she’s right, and that’s all it is.

Most issues raised by Rabbi Marc Angel’s recent essay on conversion standards are not going to change the quality of your life, unless you are a candidate for conversion. One issue does, and it deserves the attention of all committed Jews.

First, we turn to the background. It gives me no pleasure to have to take strong issue with the author of that piece. Rabbi Angel has a distinguished record of service to the rabbinate in general and as the spiritual leader of Cong. Shearith Israel, the Spanish and Portuguese in Manhattan that is so saturated with history, that it deserves a place in the hearts and minds of all traditional Jews, Askhenazic and Sephardic.

Many have already taken issue with a number of points he made. Rabbi Angel laments that there is increased pressure to restrict conversion to those who commit themselves to a fully halachic lifestyle. “[The] narrow view gained traction only as recently as 1876 when Rabbi Yitzchak Shmelkes ruled that conversion was to be equated with an absolute commitment to observe all mitzvot. Any candidate for conversion who was not committed to becoming fully Orthodox in observance was to be rejected.” He treats this as an aberration of halacha, because “great rabbinic voices opposed this radical change in approach. They favored maintaining the far more flexible and inclusive views of the Talmud, Maimonides and Shulchan Aruch.”

No person who has ever worked through any of the responsa of the Bais Yitzchok could believe for a moment that he would decide against “the Talmud, Maimonides and Shulchan Aruch.” Rabbi Angel means that while those texts all make it abundantly clear that a convert who rejects any part of the Torah he or she has learned, it is not clear from a simple reading of them that the court needs to project whether the candidate will comply with what he has not yet learned about. Silence about this leaves room, in Rabbi Angel’s opinion, for differing opinions.

“Dog bites man is not news,” so often the good stuff goes unreported or underreported. We offer here a few anecdotes about Kiddush Hashem, and how easy it can be.

Jerry Seinfeld came to the Kotel last leyl Shabbos. He danced with a minyan. It was going well. No one harassed him, no one charged him with participating in the corruption of American culture through the accursed visual media. Perhaps no one recognized him.

But then someone did. A guy in chassidishe levush i.e. wearing a bekeshe spotted him and sauntered over. Went straight up to him, and said, “Jerry, welcome home!”

Jerry will not be coming back to the States with hateful stories about haredim.

Jonathan Rosenblum’s paean to the accomplishments and contributions of Baalei Teshuva are a fitting accessory to the Agudah Convention, which always has provided huge chizuk for the attendees. His article will certainly inspire much commentary and reaction.

Those of us who could not make it might find solace in the recent availability online of a classic from a previous convention, in this case the West Coast Agudah Convention. Although sixteen years have passed, many of us vividly remember the debate between Prof. Aaron Twerski and Dr Aharon Hersh Fried on the topic of “Are Our Children Too Worldly?” Prof. Twerski was powerful and engaging, but it was Dr. Fried who dropped the bombshell in his opening lines: “The question is not whether our children are too worldly, but whether they are worldly enough!”

It got even better after that. (A small number of kanaim/ zealots were seen making a bee-line to the payphones to phone various East Coast personages in protest. The vast majority of the audience gobbled up the rest of his presentation respectfully.)

Rabbi Dr. Fried is a Munkaczer chasid, professor at Stern College, and authority on special education, with great traction in the haredi world. (A number of years ago, it was he who took on the rapidly spreading belief in “facilitated communication,” through which otherwise uncommunicative autistic children used computers to send messages from beyond, usually in broken Brooklyn yinglish. He is respected enought that Hamodia printed his scathing report, despite the fact that facilitated communication had gained a following in some yeshiva circles.) He committed the presentation to paper, with significant upgrades. It was published in volume 4 of Hakirah, whose policy is to make its contents available when an issue sells out. That time has arrived; the article is now available for free download.

The theme of this year’s annual convention of Agudath Israel of America is the necessity to “Wake the Sleeping Giant” by involving all members of the Torah community in efforts to reach out to non-Orthodox and unaffiliated Jews. We are fast approaching the point where intermarriage and assimilation will have so reduced the general American Jewish population that there will be little left to rescue.

The relatively short window of opportunity remaining and the untapped potential of all Torah Jews – and not just kiruv professionals – will be the focus of most of the speakers. But I would like to address another aspect of the ba’al teshuva phenomenon that is too frequently overlooked: the positive impact that ba’alei teshuva have had on American Orthodoxy over the past 25 years.

As one who travels frequently to communities on the other side of the Hudson River, I am frequently struck by the extent to which many out-of-town communities are primarily made up of ba’alei teshuva and geirei tzedek. Nor is this phenomenon limited to out-of-town communities.

At a recent Shabbos meal, we entertained four or five English-speaking bochurim currently learning in Eretz Yisrael. True, they were not learning at Brisk (or one of its satellites). But their yeshiva is for boys who come to Eretz Yisrael already serious about their Torah learning. Each of these bochurim came from a family where one or both of the parents are ba’alei teshuva, and they told me that the same is true for well over half the boys in the yeshiva. In sum, the American Orthodox world is experiencing something of a population transfer.

This story, thankfully, has a happy ending. The runaway is home and safe.

“New study finds Orthodox women are sexually victimized as much as other American women” read the subheader of a New York Jewish Week article on October 26. The study found nothing of the sort.

Based on a self-selected sample — women who chose to fill out a survey offered on Jewish websites and in newspaper advertisements, synagogue bulletins, doctors’ offices and through other means — the study, in the American Journal of Psychiatry, could not and did not make any claim about the relative prevalence of abuse in the Orthodox and general American communities. Randomized studies, like those that have focused on abuse in the general American population, yield reasonable estimations of the behaviors of their foci. Self-selected surveys of the same populations, however, can easily yield data that diverge substantially from the reality in those groups.

Thus, the study’s authors themselves responsibly cautioned that “those who chose to participate may not be representative of the [Orthodox] population,” and noted that the unfeasibility of obtaining a representative sample constituted a “major limitation of this study.” The study also notes that “there was a high proportion of subjects [51% -- AS] receiving mental health treatment in this group [the sample recruited for the study],” further suggesting that the respondents were not representative of the larger Orthodox population (victims of abuse are, of course, more likely than others to seek counseling).

And so, by comparing the 25%-27% figure for American women claiming (in randomized surveys) to have suffered abuse at some point in their lives with the 26% figure yielded by the recent (self-selected) study of Orthodox women, and concluding that “Orthodox Jewish women suffer as much [abuse] as other American women,” the Jewish Week writer was comparing apples and tractors. If anything, the similar percentages arguably indicate a lower rate of abuse in the Orthodox community. After all, if 26% of a group likely to contain a disproportionate number of abuse victims report they were abused, one would expect a much lower percentage of a randomly selected group from the same population.

The name Rabbi David Fohrman flashed brightly on my radar screen for the first time in twenty years this past summer. I was in Lawrence, and a good friend told me that he had been challenged by his partner in Torah learning, a highly successful hedge fund manager, to prove that the Torah is the product of a single Author.

My friend had arranged for his learning partner to meet a number of people, and asked if I wanted to join them. The last stop on our highly stimulating tour was Rabbi Fohrman.

Though Reb David and I had learned in the same yeshiva about two decades ago, I was completely unprepared for the brilliance of his presentation. For two hours, he held us transfixed as he showed repeating ideational patterns in Bereishis. He demonstrated how many of the key events in the story of Creation are related as chiasms – or, as they are sometimes known, at-bash patterns. In this literary form, the first idea mirrors the last, the second idea mirrors the next to last, etc. Or, to put it another way – the key ideas follow a pattern of A-B-C-B-A, with C forming the fulcrum.

After showing how this was true for the story of Creation, he then demonstrated how the same ideas and literary patterns are repeated in the story of the Flood (re-creation), and of Avraham Avinu (the creation of the Jewish people).

What a pity that Orthodox Jews have not been active in the Right to Life movement, and have left Christians to speak for us. Yes, we sympathize with them and vote for conservative candidates, and once in a while the Agudah may file an amicus brief. But we have been mainly silent, and as a result, very few people—very few Jews, even—know what the Jewish position actually IS.

In today’s NY Times we have been lumped together with Christians for the umpteenth time, as if there really were one monolithic “Judeo-Christian” view of when life begins. The NY Times thinks that Orthodox Jews share the Catholic view—that life begins at the moment an egg is fertilized by a sperm. The Times says, “In the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is wrong to destroy embryos in the course of research.” And how should they know that there is any difference between the Christian and Jewish views, if we are silent?

If we had been more active and more vocal, we might have had more influence within the pro-life movement, and our actual views might have been better known to the media. In Torah tradition, the soul enters the body forty days after conception. Almost all poskim permit IVF for the sake of treating infertility (not with donor sperm, though)—and when too many embryos are created to have a reasonable chance of safe birth, almost all permit destroying the “extras” in the Petri dish. By “embryos” we mean tiny eight-celled balls in a laboratory dish, aka blastocysts, smaller than the dot at the end of this sentence.

If an IVF cycle produced five or six such balls, the Catholic Church would require that ALL of them be implanted in the woman’s uterus, even though the chance of six babies surviving would be almost nil (and the mother’s health would also be severely compromised). The Catholics (and some Protestants) would say that if some of those minute balls were discarded in the lab, then the doctor was guilty of murder, just the same as if he had killed a 20-year-old man. Halacha, in contrast, permits the doctor to choose the two or three best embryos and discard the rest. Remember, “embryo” means a ball the size of this dot.

When last heard from, we were lamenting the alienation of younger, non-Orthodox American Jews from Israel, as detailed in a recent study by sociologists Stephen M. Cohen and Ari Kelman. Those findings parallel a great deal of social science evidence describing the rapidly waning sense of peoplehood among American Jews and declining willingness to affirm any special responsibility to one’s fellow Jews (see Cohen and Wertheimer, ‘Whatever Happened to the Jewish People,’ Commentary, June 2006).

Some have attempted to put a happy face on these findings by arguing that while Jewish ethnic identity is plummeting, Jewish religious observance is holding steady and perhaps even increasing. Unfortunately, there is little consolation to be found in that direction.

Whatever can be said of religious observance that downplays mutual responsibility of Jews for one another, it is not Judaism. Lawrence Hoffman, a professor of liturgy at Hebrew Union College, describes the new Reform Siddur as taking into account ”a growing emphasis on personalism as opposed to peoplehood, the individual’s search for the sacred. . .”

That emphasis on the subjective experience of the worshiper as providing the validation of religious ritual is borrowed from 18th-century German Protestantism. But it has far earlier antecedents. The essence of pagan ritual, Rabbi Yosef Ber Soloveitchik observed, is that it derives meaning only from the emotional impact upon the one performing the ritual.

Yitzchak entreated Hashem opposite his wife because she was barren. And Hashem answered him, and Rivka his wife conceived (25:21)

According to Rashi, both Yitzchak and Rivka were praying for a child, but Hashem answered only him and not her. Why? Answers Rashi: Because there is no comparison between the prayer of a tzaddik who is the child of an evildoer to the prayer of a righteous person who is the child of a righteous person.

I suspect that most of us have at some point found ourselves puzzled, even angered, by Rashi’s comment? Why should the merit of a tzaddik be greater by virtue of being the child of a tzaddik? If anything, is it not more meritorious to have completely separated oneself from a house of evil, as Rivka did, than to continue on in the path set by one’s parents.

The source of our confusion is that we do not properly understand what is meant by a tzaddik who is the child of a tzaddik. Had Yitzchak just emulated the example of his father Avraham he would not have been considered a tzaddik. Indeed, explains Rav Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler, anything we do solely because our parents taught us to do so does not confer any merit upon us.

I was asked recently to speak to a group of foreign journalists about the haredi community in Israel and take them on a tour of Mea She’arim. I refused the second request. A tour of Mea She’arim alone, I explained, would only reinforce one of the most common misconceptions of the haredi world - that Mea She’arim typifies haredi Jewry or, at the very least, represents the haredi community in its unsullied, uncompromised form.

Mea She’arim is in many respects sui generis - linguistically, behaviorally and in terms of the historical memories that shape the community. Outside the hassidic world, Yiddish usage is in steep decline in the haredi community. Most present-day Israeli yeshiva students, for instance, do not speak or understand Yiddish. But it remains the lingua franca of Mea She’arim. The overwhelming majority of haredim eligible to vote do so, whereas most denizens of Mea She’arim do not.

Most importantly, the mindset of Mea She’arim has been shaped by a different history. Its residents represent the so-called “Old Yishuv” that has been locked in battle with the Zionist interlopers for well over a century. It is a community that views itself as being under siege from the outside world.

Though the rest of the haredi community was also ideologically hostile to Zionism, its historical memory has not been shaped to nearly the same degree by the Old Yishuv’s hundred-year war with Zionism. Rabbi Avraham Yeshayahu Karelitz (universally known as the Chazon Ish, the name of his multivolume halachic work) arrived in Palestine from Europe in the 1930s and quickly established himself as the ideological leader of the “New Yishuv.” He once referred to the self-proclaimed “zealots” as Jews from before matan Torah (the giving of the Torah). By that he meant they had been rendered incapable of balancing a multiplicity of factors as demanded by the Torah.

This morning I counted. There were at least ten times the Hebrew name of Jerusalem, or its synonym Zion, passed my lips. Before breakfast.

There was “Jerusalem, praise G-d,” “May You shine a new light on Zion,” “the Builder of Jerusalem,” and many more throughout the Jewish morning prayer service.

And then there were the other references to Jerusalem but without her name, like “May it be Your will… that the Holy Temple be rebuilt, speedily in our days” and “the city called by Your name.”

After a bowl of cereal, the blessing “Al Hamichya” would mention Jerusalem two more times. And for any meals including bread that might have followed, one of the main blessings that comprise the grace after meals would have the Holy City as its subject as well, beginning with a reference to “Jerusalem Your city” and ending “Who in His mercy builds Jerusalem.”

‘Yippee: a Journey to Jewish Joy’ premiered at a special showing in London last week.

At the end of the film, the middle-aged Jewish woman sitting a few seats away turned to me and asked, ‘What did you think of it, then?’ When I suggested that I needed a while to digest my experience (code for: I don’t want to tell you), she launched into her disapproval of the Breslovers (‘They’re nothing like any Hassidim I’ve ever come across’), the fact that there was filming on Rosh HaShanah (untrue: the cameras stopped at sunset and resumed after Yom Tov, although there did seem to be footage from the previous Shabbos), and, finally, of me, for failing to express an opinion of the film (I would have thought that someone like you – i.e. bearded – would know much more about it). Going to see Yippee: a Journey to Jewish Joy’, was, like the film itself, an extremely Jewish experience!

The film, a trailer for which can be viewed here, records the participation of Hollywood director Paul Mazursky in the Rosh HaShanah 2005 pilgrimage of Breslover Hassidim and ‘fellow-travellers’ to the grave-site of Rebbe Nahman (founder of the Breslov movement) in the Ukrainian town of Uman. Rebbe Nahman encouraged his followers to celebrate Rosh HaShanah at his burial place and in the post-Communist era, this has grown to attract tens of thousands of pilgrims. Mazursky, who describes himself as a secular Jew, was encouraged to make the trip by David Miretsky, his orthodox optometrist in LA, himself a regular visitor to Uman.

The film is light on detail about Breslov: one gleans little sense of the radical nature of Rebbe Nahman’s teachings or what distinguishes Breslov from other Hassidic groups. Yet it highlights one area (mentioned in the film’s subtitle – ‘a journey to Jewish joy’) for which Hassidey Breslov are famed: ecstatic joyfulness at all times. The teachings of Rebbe Nahman are replete with this theme; the lifestyle, aspirations and music of the Hassidim express it in practice. It is this constant happiness that intrigued Mazursky and motivated him to explore a world so distant from that of his comfort zone in Beverley Hills.

At least the comments.

Those lofty goals in the title need not conflict with each other. For many, many reasons, we are going to try all of the above, by announcing and implementing new guidelines for the submission of comments.

The guidelines come after a few years of growth for Cross-Currents, and trying to please the multiple constituencies that have found room under our umbrella. The upshot of these new rules is that fewer comments will be accepted. The section will therefore appear leaner. On the other hand, the tone of all comments will change to something more civil than is generally accepted in the blogosphere, and result in a product that is also kinder.

Kinder, but not less critical. The one policy that will not change is that comments entirely critical of positions taken by our contributors and of the Orthodox center to right-of-center ideologies we represent will still be published. We believe in a way of life that can survive scrutiny and critique. It will be our job to respond.

Would you like to be a fly on the wall while a battery of secular and modern Orthodox academic experts are discussing the dynamics of change in the haredi world?
If so, then today Tuesday 3 bKislev you can view and listen to the conference (live in Hebrew) taking place at this link for the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem at their website

Here are some highlights for Tuesday, Israel-time. 9-11 am Changes in the public sphere; Consumerism as a political strategy;Limits to consumerism:the case of wigs; The eruv in a multi-cultural society;Chareidim from the ghetto to the Israeli suburbs
11:30am to 1:30pm Volunterrism and medical help (Zaka, genetic testing, philanthropy)
2:30 to 4 pm Education and communication; “An orphaned generation seeks a mother: The mesoret of Sarah Schenirer as a means of post-Holocaust rehabilitation”;
Children’s heroes; Forbidden and permitted media among haredi women/
Final session 4:30 to 6:30pm Halacha, Theology and Education; lectures on Rav Eliashiv shlita, R Shlomo Volbe ztzl; haredi girls’ educaiton between opennessa nd conservation;
theological discussion in popular literature.
Even if you don’t get to view the conference, just reading the list of topics (there is another list for Monday’s sessions) gives you an idea of just how dynamic and varied are the chareidi sectors (plural, there is no one sector) .

A heartfelt “I’m sorry” is one of the most important and effective tools of interpersonal relationships. Some forms of apology, however, border on the inane. Some – especially in regard to Israel’s conduct - are downright dangerous.

Phi Beta Kappa’s American Scholar offers a tour de force of the trend towards national mea culpas for the sins of our fathers. Or grandfathers. Or remote DNA donors.

The author takes pains to demonstrate the situations in which collective apologies do serve some positive purpose, such as bringing some measure of justice or compensation to victims still alive, or making groups own up to troublesome attitudes and issues that still must be dealt with. There is ample room for the Japanese to do more than mumble a half-hearted acknowledgment for the treatment of the “comfort women” of World War II. Many of the victims remain among us. The extremity of Turkish unwillingness to own up to their role in the Armenian genocide suggests that it would be healthy for a new generation of Turks to confront the xenophobia that led to the orgy of killing that could easily occur again.

A certain sort of pathotheology or theopathology leads some — the president of Iran, the father of Mel Gibson, an engineering professor at Northwestern University — to join neofascist historians in denying that the Holocaust ever happened. In a 1956 Grace Kelly movie, The Swan, a minor German royal, dispossessed by the Napoleonic Wars, breathlessly announces: “I’ve just read the most wonderful book. It proves conclusively that Napoleon never existed.” Many such books find readers.

I’ve been thinking of posting a piece or two on Jewish media bias and I still hope to do so. In the interim (which, in my case can last months . . .), however, I can’t resist posting the below item from today’s JTA News Bulletin, without comment.

No comment because even a thousand-word post couldn’t possibly make as clear as this item does just how profoundly out-of-touch JTA and other secular Jewish media outlets (who also get much of their material from JTA) are about the realities of Orthodox Jewish life. Unless, perhaps, using its telepathic powers or other forms of divination, it knows things about us that we don’t.

I only wish there was some way to convey to these media folks how embarrassing their publicly displayed ignorance of things Orthodox and, oftentimes of Jewish tradition, history and texts, is (assuming, that is, that they care.)

Rabbinic emissary to pray for rain

Last week’s New York Times coverage of haredi economic muscle ended on a rather sour note. Both the print story and the accompanying video clip offered the story of a young man who capitalized on his experience in one of the pizza capitals of the West (Deal, NJ) and opened up a pizza restaurant in Ramat Beit Shemesh – bet. After enough people expressed their displeasure with the fact that his store sat both men and women, reportedly through visiting upon him various projectiles in the from of tomatoes, hot oil, and gasoline – along with a death threat – he relocated to the safer precincts of RBS-alef. (”You can get a lot further with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word.” – Al Capone.) There, he found the haredi clientele much more to his liking.

American Pizza’s sign shows the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Asked why, Mr. Shmueli said he consulted his rabbi. “The rabbi told me that the Statue of Liberty is a problem, spiritually speaking,” he said. Liberty is “chofesh,” which implies pure freedom. “Haredis don’t have chofesh,” he said. “We are servants of God.”

Rabbi Chaim Malinowitz, the always fearless General Editor of the Artscroll Gemara (Bavli and Yerushalmi) and Rav of an RBS shul, was moved to respond with a letter to the New York Times:

As the rabbi of a fast-growing synagogue in Ramat Beit Shemesh, I find the cited rabbi’s remark concerning the Statue of Liberty at the end of your article embarrassing and absurd (although I am not sorry that Lady Liberty fails to adorn a pizza store). As thousands upon thousands of Jewish immigrants to the U.S. can testify (including my father, of blessed memory, who entered the U.S. in 1948 after Hitler’s horrors), the Statue Of Liberty was, and remains, a symbol of selfless protection and freedom from tyranny, persecution, and vicious anti-Semitism. Immigrants would become teary-eyed when visiting it. If the good rabbi would bother to learn about its inscription (”Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore…”) he would know that the freedom which it represents is not the freedom of hedonism and self-indulgence, but the freedom of choice, a primary and fundamental value in Judaism, and one for which the United States of America deserves the world’s, and particularly Judaism’s, boundless gratitude.

On their surface, the e-mails had nothing to do with the uncontrolled wildfires then devastating southern California. Yet the confluence of the messages and the maelstrom held a truth worth contemplating.

The topic of the e-mails is of no matter. The writers were urging Agudath Israel of America to take a certain stance on a political issue. It was their tone that stood out. The correspondents had taken for granted that their own judgment on the matter was right, and were writing to insist that the organization come on board, or “get with it,” as one put it. Or, as another wrote: “Your Moetzet Gedolei HaTorah [Council of Torah Sages – Agudath Israel’s highest rabbinical body] needs to take a strong stand here…”

Agudath Israel is unique among Jewish groups. Its administration does not set policy; that role resides among the venerable rabbinic elders at our helm. The organization’s officers and executive staff are sometimes asked to provide the Council members with information, even to lay out various approaches to an issue. But we do not tell our religious leaders what we think they should think. One might say that we report, they decide.

It is an approach that rankles some, especially those who might not appreciate the humor in a sign I have that reads: “People who think they know everything are particularly aggravating to those of us who do.”

OK, I’ll admit it: I’ve been jealous for some time of co-contributors Yonason Rosenblum and Rabbi Avi Shafran for their ability to post pieces they’ve written and published in other venues. So I figured I’ll try my hand at this bit of literary economy as well by posting the piece below, although it’s not standard Cross-Currents fare. It appears, with small changes, in two parts in the October and November editions of Yashar, the monthly newsletter of the Mussar Institute.

Aficionados of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone may recall the episode in which an inveterate gambler named Bob comes up to the pearly gates and is shown to his place of eternal repose. Opening the doors to a large hall, he beholds a scene that is clearly his idea of heaven. It’s a casino packed with patrons enjoying every manner of games of chance, and Bob, too, quickly joins in the fun.

Lo and behold, he wins at one game after another. Whether it’s roulette, blackjack or the slots, Bob simply never loses. This goes on for some time, until Bob begins to tire of his constant winning ways. Sitting down at the bar, he orders a beer – it’s on the house – and remarks to the bartender: “I wonder what the ‘other place’ looks like,” to which the bartender responds: “Buddy, you don’t understand; this is the ‘other place.’” Serling’s eerie theme music comes on, as the camera pans Bob’s dumbstruck face and the scene fades.

Whether Serling knew it or not, this scene encapsulates one of Judaism’s deepest teachings about the nature and function of that which defines a person’s very humanity: his free will. To explain, let’s go for a whirlwind tour of Jewish Philosophy 101, and, in particular, what Judaism teaches about man’s purpose in this world.