By Avi Shafran, on November 30th, 2007 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…”
A thought, in fact, that subtly … Read More >>
By Jonathan Rosenblum, on November 29th, 2007 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 … Read More >>
By Jonathan Rosenblum, on November 29th, 2007 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 … Read More >>
By Toby Katz, on November 28th, 2007 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.
By Yitzchok Adlerstein, on November 28th, 2007 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 … Read More >>
By Yitzchok Adlerstein, on November 27th, 2007 “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.
A Muslim friend of mine almost didn’t fare as well. He is really a good guy, who has worked hard for Jewish interests. He came to the kotel during the week, and was set upon by meshulachim. He responded by taking out his wallet, and handing out money. One of the recipients apparently noticed that the name in his wallet wasn’t Kahan but Khan. He then noticed his darker complexion. He came back to him, … Read More >>
By Yitzchok Adlerstein, on November 25th, 2007 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 … Read More >>
By Jonathan Rosenblum, on November 25th, 2007 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 … Read More >>
By Yaakov Menken, on November 25th, 2007 This story, thankfully, has a happy ending. The runaway is home and safe.
By Avi Shafran, on November 22nd, 2007 “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 … Read More >>
By Jonathan Rosenblum, on November 22nd, 2007 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 … Read More >>
By Toby Katz, on November 21st, 2007 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 … Read More >>
By Jonathan Rosenblum, on November 20th, 2007 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 … Read More >>
By Jonathan Rosenblum, on November 20th, 2007 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 … Read More >>
By Jonathan Rosenblum, on November 19th, 2007 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 … Read More >>
By Avi Shafran, on November 16th, 2007 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.”
And, then, in each of the day’s two remaining prayer services, as in the morning one, the silent “Amidah” prayer includes a similar blessing.
It is hard to believe that any people, entity or government could arrogate to claim a closer connection than the Jewish one to the city nestled in the … Read More >>
By Harvey Belovski, on November 14th, 2007 ‘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 … Read More >>
By Yitzchok Adlerstein, on November 14th, 2007 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.
Briefly, here are the new guidelines:
• Comments must be civil and collegial, in both tone and choice of words. Shrill language, attack words, … Read More >>
By Shira Schmidt, on November 13th, 2007 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 … Read More >>
By Yitzchok Adlerstein, on November 7th, 2007 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 … Read More >>
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