A Winnipeg case currently winding its way to its grim conclusion pits the children of Samuel Golubchuk against doctors at the Salvation Army Grace General Hospital. According to the pleadings, Golubchuk’s doctors informed his children that their 84-year-old father is “in the process of dying” and that they intended to hasten the process by removing his ventilation, and if that proved insufficient to kill him quickly, to also remove his feeding tube. In the event that the patient showed discomfort during these procedures, the chief of the hospital’s ICU unit stated in his affidavit that he would administer morphine.

Golubchuk is an Orthodox Jew, as are his children. The latter have adamantly opposed his removal from the ventilator and feeding tube, on the grounds that Jewish law expressly forbids any action designed to shorten life, and that if their father could express his wishes, he would oppose the doctors acting to deliberately terminate his life.

In response, the director of the ICU informed Golubchuk’s children that neither their father’s wishes nor their own are relevant, and he would do whatever he decided was appropriate. Bill Olson, counsel for the ICU director, told the Canadian Broadcasting Company that physicians have the sole right to make decisions about treatment - even if it goes against a patient’s religious beliefs - and that “there is no right to a continuation of treatment.”

That position was supported by Dr. Jeff Blackner, executive director of the office of ethics of the Canadian Medical Association. He told Reuters: “[W]e want to make sure that clinical decisions are left to physicians and not judges.” Doctors’ decisions are made only with the “best interest of the individual patient at heart,” he said, though he did not explain how that could be squared with the undisputed claim that this patient would oppose the doctors’ decision. Meanwhile, an Angus Reid poll of Canadians showed that 68% supported leaving the final decision with the family.

There was a time, not terribly long ago, when disturbed individuals bent on broadcasting angry fantasies had only soapboxes in public parks from which to rant. And respectable people knew, if only from the ranters’ appearance, to keep well out of spittle’s range.

Today, though, the very means of mass communication that enables so much worthy information to reach such large numbers of people at the speed of light – the Internet – has also been harnessed to spread madness, hatred, lies and (not a word to be used lightly but here entirely appropriate) evil. And so, close on the heels of the swindlers and pornographers who have colonized so much of cyberspace, have come the gaggle of electronic soapboxes known as weblogs, or blogs.

The writer of a recent article in the Agudath Israel monthly The Jewish Observer expressed chagrin at discovering the nature of many Jewish blogs. Often anonymous as well as obnoxious, some of those personal opinion-diaries, he found, display utter disregard for essential Jewish ideals like the requirements to shun lashon hora (or forbidden negative speech) and hotzo’at shem ra (or slander), to show honor for Torah and respect for Torah scholars. I would have added basic fairness to the list. And truth.

There are, of course, responsible bloggers, in the Jewish realm as in others, writers who seek to share community news or ideas and observations with readers, and to post readers’ comments. Some explore concepts in Jewish thought and law, others focus on Jewish history and society.

Jonathan Rosenblum previously speculated in these pages that there are advantages to people living in religiously mixed neighborhoods. Another CC contributor, Rabbi Emmanuel Feldman, made the same point earlier this week in the Jerusalem Post.

Here are two variations on that theme, situations and vignettes in which a bit of Jewish intramural multiculturalism seems to be working well.

The Jerusalem Post (Dec. 25) reports on a follow-up survey of Nahal Haredi (NH) graduates. Over 90% have entered the work force, holding down jobs. For the most part, the only members of the haredi community who are urged to join are those for whom learning is just not working out. The finding should be seen positively, therefore, even by those who are opponents of NH. Were it not for their ability to fulfill their military service obligation through NH, these men wouldn’t be working but they wouldn’t be learning either.

The article further reports that NH has mushroomed. What began as a single company is now at battalion strength, including an elite counterterrorism unit. So things look good, at least to the Jerusalem Post.

The ADVA Institute has just issued it latest report on Israel’s deepening income gap. According to the report, nearly one in five wage earners are living below the poverty line.

Typically, the release of new poverty figures generates large headlines in the chareidi press, and the figures are seized upon as proof of the government’s failure in this area and of the need to return child subsidies to former levels.

That is not going to happen, I would guess, no matter how grim the poverty figures. Periodically, particular coalition constellations – such as the current government’s need to retain Shas in the coalition – may lead to a temporary increase in child subsidies. But there are important factors militating against a dramatic long-term rise in child subsidies.

By far the largest beneficiaries of child subsidies are the Arab sector: There are over twice as many Arabs as chareidim in Israel. Since the cut in child subsidies, there has been a substantial drop in the Arab birthrate (which, Baruch Hashem, has not been accompanied by a parallel drop in the chareidi birthrate). The decline in Arab birthrates is crucial to Israel’s demographic survival.

Let’s say a person lives in Williamsburg, sports a shtreimel and long, curled peyos, and his father was the gabbai for many years in Rav Yoelish’s beis medrash. All his forebears in recent memory hail from Satu Mare, Hungary. On the other hand, he drapes an Israeli flag outside his apartment (and lives to tell about it), and swears allegiance to the Lubavitcher Rebbe. Is he a Satmar chusid?

My intention is not to be facetious, but to begin answering some of the concerns of readers over the last days. Dr. Shapiro pointed out what he thought was a blatant contradiction in two lines of Rabbi Leff’s review. Rabbi Leff calls certain positions “outside the pale,” but then goes on to say that rabbinic authorities are not conclusive as to whether these views are heretical or not. So which is it? Are these views kosher or treif?

I offered a resolution, of sorts. I argued that the contradiction vanishes if one assumes a difference between what is “heretical” and what is “unacceptable.” Rabbi Leff was saying, I believe, that some beliefs may not be heretical, but the voices that have rejected them have been close to unanimous. In those cases, maintaining such beliefs is “outside the pale” of Jewish experience. The community has the right to regard them as foreign, rather than merely different.

Back to our confused chosid. His neighbors will never succeed in persuading a court to order him to cease and desist from calling himself Satmar. On the other had, he could know shas and memorize Al HaGeulah V’Al-HaTemurah, but he won’t land a job teaching at Torah V’Yirah. He has the right to call himself whatever he wants; others have the right to ignore his declaration. Debating who should, and who should not, use the name Satmar will be of little consequence. His neighbors will simply see him as outside the pale. Rabbi Leff, it seems to me, makes the parallel argument regarding beliefs that push the envelope. Except for principles of faith, we don’t legislate beliefs. People can follow minority opinions in midrashim and in medieval philosophy. The price that one pays for such beliefs is that his thought-system is at variance with the near-unanimous collective experience of generations of Jews. Others may regard him – like our maverick Satmar – as foreign to their experience of Judaism – and with good reason.

Ever since the Sabbath after Sukkot, when the communal synagogue reading of the Torah began anew, I haven’t been able to attend a Jewish wedding without thinking about the Netziv’s unsettling, if simple, observation.

The Netziv – an acronym meaning “pillar” by which Rabbi Naftali Tzvi Yehudah Berlin (1817-1893), the famed dean of the Volozhin Yeshiva, is known – noted that the first marriage in history differed in a most essential way from all the matrimonial unions that would come to follow. Because, according to a widely cited Jewish tradition, Adam and Eve were created a single entity, a man-woman coupled back to back, with the “forming” of woman described by the Torah more accurately envisioned as a separation. The word often translated “rib” is in fact used elsewhere in the Torah to mean “side,” and so would be understood in the light of that tradition as referring to the woman-side who was part of Adam-Eve before Divine surgery provided her independent personhood.

So, says the Netziv, Adam’s subsequent union with his wife was in fact a “re-union” – of two entities that had originally been one. That idea, says Rabbi Berlin, lies in Adam’s declaration when Eve is presented to him: “This time it is a bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh” [Genesis 2:23]. Comments Rabbi Berlin: “Only ‘this time’ is it so, since she is a ‘bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh’; [here, Adam’s love for Eve] is like a person who loves his own hand.”

Not so, though, every marriage to follow, where the two people creating a relationship will have been conceived, born and raised as independent individuals before becoming a marital unit.

For those who enjoy studying their fellow human beings, there are few better laboratories than a long flight. Indeed the opportunities for such study are one of the few pleasures of air travel, especially if one is crammed into an economy class seat. Plane flights often thrust us into the immediate company of someone from a completely different background, with whom we would have little likelihood of social interaction in everyday life.

It is a rare flight that I don’t find myself learning something interesting about others – usually positive. Returning from London recently, I found myself next to a secular Israeli woman. Her attire did not leave me enthusiastic about my luck of the draw on this particular flight, and I kept my gaze firmly on my Gemara.

Thus I was shocked when she asked me before the plane had even taken off whether I would prefer that she switch seats with a young chassid sitting in the row behind us. Since we were placed in an exit row seat, with unlimited leg room in front of us and only two in the row, her offer was amazingly thoughtful and generous.

To my surprise, the chassid declined her offer to switch places. Both the seats next to him were still empty, and visions of being able to stretch out across the entire row were too enticing for him to worry about rescuing me from being seated next to an immodestly dressed woman.

We have been fighting off an unusually heavy barrage of spam to our comments section that has been going on for about a week. In the process, it is likely that a few comments waiting in the queue were not only inadvertently deleted, but tagged as spam.

If you did not see your comment posted AND believe that it conforms to the new, stricter policy on comments, please resubmit - preferably from a different IP address/computer.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

This week’s Torah reading sees Yaakov at the end of his life dispensing blessings to each of his sons. There is a comparable passage right at the end of the Torah, in which Moshe blesses the tribes soon before he dies. While these two poetic sections are quite similar, I want to focus on a difference:

A lion’s whelp is Yehudah… (BeReishis 49:9)

…Dan is a lion’s whelp… (Devorim 33:22)

Here the lion, as in other forms of literature, refers to the leader. While we would expect Yehudah, the ancestor of the kings of Israel, to be portrayed as a lion, why is Dan described in the same way?

10th of Tevet

“Those who say that suffering such as this has never befallen the Jewish people are mistaken. There was torture comparable to ours at the destruction of the Temple and at Beitar….”

As we approached the fast of the Tenth of Tevet, I reread some of the writings of Rabbi Kalonymos Kalmish Shapira, the Piaseczner Rebbe (pronounced Pia-sech-ner) who made the above observation in 1942 in Warsaw.

How many of us are able to rethink and reevaluate our positions? The Piaseczer did. The historian Esther Farbstein devotes a full chapter to the Rebbe in her comprehensive book Hidden in Thunder: Perspectives on Faith, Halachah, and Leadership During the Holocaust.

Two recent letters to the New York Jewish Week criticized opposition by Orthodox groups in America to the possible partitioning of Jerusalem. One called the Orthodox Union’s stance on the issue “a cynical effort to score public relations points” and questioned the “morality” of American groups challenging the policies of an Israeli government; the other sarcastically characterized Agudath Israel as having “become great nationalists” because of its recent resolution on Jerusalem.

The writers’ umbrage appears to have obscured three germane facts:

1) Eretz Yisrael is the land not of any particular temporal government but of the Jewish People. That is not only a metaphysical fact but an entirely tangible one, especially in the Orthodox community. Whether or not we live in Israel, we visit there whenever we can, and inject millions of dollars into the Israel economy through charity, tourism and investment. Many of our children and grandchildren spend a year or several studying there. Some of them, along with many other of our relatives and friends, choose to live there. What is more, many of us hold tight to dreams of one day living there ourselves. The security of Israel’s cities, and the accessibility and protection of the Holy Land’s holy places, directly affect our lives.

2) Jews who are fortunate to live on the Jewish Land’s holy soil are the brothers and sisters of Jews everywhere else. To suggest that any Jew or Jewish group does not have a right – or anything less than a responsibility – to speak up when an Israeli government seems poised to do something objectionable or dangerous is to deny the bond of Jews to both their ancestral homeland and to other Jews.

I am jealous of the scholarship of Dr Marc Shapiro – even when I often disagree with his conclusions. He never lets the reader down in amassing a huge amount of relevant material regarding the many topics he has written about. I do believe that he made a simple and perhaps understandable error in his response to Rabbi Zev Leff in the current issue of Jewish Action. He ignored a construct that is enormously important for the future of the community, but that he may find unattractive.

Rabbi Leff, one of the most important English language baalei machshavah in Israel, reviewed Dr Shapiro’s The Limits of Orthodox Theology, which tries to demonstrate that there was significant disagreement regarding the positions that became Rambam’s Thirteen Principles of Faith. Rabbi Leff argues that finding isolated voices who disagreed is irrelevant in the face of overwhelming acceptance of those principles over hundreds of years.

One who denies any of [the Thirteen Principles] is outside the pale of the faith community of Torah Judaism. For example, the conviction that G-d is a corporeal being is a belief that is outside the realm of Judaism, despite the fact that the Sages do not agree whether to deem one a heretic for harboring this belief.

Dr. Shapiro responds,

A Test of Wills

An ancient Midrash recounts a conversation between Ishmael and Isaac. Ishmael asserts his superiority over Isaac on the grounds that his circumcision took place at 13, when he was fully conscious of the ordeal, while Isaac was only eight days old at his circumcision. Isaac replies that if God were to request him to give up his life he would gladly do so.

That conversation, according to the Midrash, constituted the immediate prelude for the Binding of Isaac. Ishmael and Isaac were disputing which one of them is the true inheritor of the Divine promise of the Land to their father Abraham. And both understood that the answer to that question turns on the measure of mesirut nefesh - self-sacrifice - each demonstrates for the right to inherit the Land.

Ishmael’s descendants remain faithful to that understanding. It is we Jews who give every indication of having lost our will, in large part because we have lost our belief in the Divine promise to Abraham.

My host for Shabbos lunch on a recent trip to Baltimore told me a story that I have already repeated many times.

After high school, Shlomo learned for two years in Yeshivat Kerem B’Yavneh in Eretz Yisrael. The normal trajectory from Kerem B’Yavneh was to Yeshiva University for college, and indeed that is where everyone, including his parents, expected Shlomo to go. But an older bochur he met in Kerem B’Yavneh convinced Shlomo to join him at Yeshivas Ner Yisrael in Baltimore.

Shlomo stuck out a bit in the Ner Yisrael beis medrash upon his arrival: He was one of the few bochurim who wore a kippah seruga , not to mention blue jeans. Sometime in his first zman in the yeshiva, his friend managed to get him into one of the weekly vaadim given by the Rosh Yeshiva, Rabbi Yaakov Weinberg, zt”l. Shlomo was enthralled by Rabbi Weinberg and made up his mind to ask the Rosh Yeshiva for a private chavrusah once a week.

During afternoon seder, Rabbi Weinberg learned at the front of the beis medrash, and one afternoon Shlomo approached his shtender to present his request for a chavrusah. As he drew nearer, he felt the beis medrash grow quiet and 300 pairs of eyes turn towards him. The silence grew thicker the closer he came to the Rosh Yeshiva, and he felt as if the stares were piercing through his back.

[Editor's note: Steve Brizel is a frequent commenter to Cross-Currents, besides being a regular presence on Beyond Teshuva and Hirhurim. (As a long-time NCSY stalwart, and a regular mispallel at the shul of an old chavrusa of mine, he also scores extra points.) We are pleased to offer his review of a hot new title. --RYA]

One of the most talked about issues within the Modern Orthodox world, whether in its publications such as Tradition 1, the Yeshiva University student media 2, a fairly popular , if stereotypic novel 3 and many a Shabbos table, is the effect of a year of study in an Israeli yeshiva for post high school students. Much of this discussion inevitably segues to how the Orthodox world has shifted to the proverbial right 4 . Too much has been written from the view of the external, as opposed to the internal thought processes of these young men. At long last, a welcome corrective has arrived that actually explores the effect of the year on Modern Orthodox post high school young men. Yashar Press deserves much praise for publishing “Flipping Out”.

“Flipping Out” is prefaced by an introduction by Richard Joel, the President of Yeshiva University, who extols the benefits of the year in Israel programs, but who urges greater parental involvement and who argues against rushing through one’s college years. This introduction was written before Yeshiva University announced recently that it was engaging in an evaluation of the yeshivos and seminaries on its Year In Israel Program, which form one of the key elements for the near record enrollments in YU , RIETS and Stern College for Women 5. It remains to be seen whether the evaluation is primarily financial , academic, or ideological, especially since some of the institutions that recently left or were dropped from the program may have supplied too few students and engaged in decidedly anti YU sloganeering, etc .

“Flipping Out” consists of three different studies. Dr. Shalom Z. Berger profiles the rise in the “year in Israel” programs. Dr. Berger, an educator, graduate and musmach of YU , RIETS, and the Azrieli Graduate School of Jewish Education and Administration, depicts the rise of Modern Orthodoxy and the growth of the “year in Israel” programs. Dr. Berger’s study profiles the various yeshivos that these young men attend , why students spend a year in Israel, their spiritual growth and how they maintain their growth upon their return to their families and college environments. Dr. Berger also notes that many Modern Orthodox schools have “Israel nights” with visits from educators from many yeshivos and also run a religious guidance track to enable their students to make a proper choice.

The Old Gray Lady isn’t cute when she’s angry. Quite the opposite, in fact.

The New York Times editorial page’s longstanding antagonism to the Bush Administration is well documented. Still, the only dignified editorial response to last month’s news that two independent teams of scientists had reported having turned human skin cells into the equivalent of embryonic stem cells was “Hallelujah” – or, for the staidly secular Times, some less parochial but equally enthusiastic expression of joy.

After all, if the reported results are duplicated by other labs and various technical obstacles overcome, there will now be an inexhaustible supply of human stem cells available for research – and the controversy over the destruction of embryos to procure stem cells for research will have been effectively rendered moot.

Instead of rejoicing, though, The Times just seethed. On December 3, an editorial in the paper petulantly conceded that the new discovery “could help free scientists from shackles that have long hobbled their efforts.” But, it hastened to add, “any claim that Mr. Bush’s moral stance drove scientists to this discovery must be greeted with particular skepticism.” The editorial ended with the hope that “the next president will quickly jettison all restrictions on stem cell research.”

All of us in the Cross-Currents community should be appreciative of Rabbi Angel’s courteous and professional manner in continuing this discussion. For readers familiar with forums that are little more than soapboxes for the shrill and cathartically-challenged, this thread represents one of the better uses of the internet.

Rabbi Angel’s assurance that he does not embrace a Chinese menu approach to halacha immediately moves the discussion to a different plane. No issue is as important as this. Any approach to halacha that simply selects available options written by people with some background in Jewish texts, seeing them all as potentially valid, is simply beyond the pale of all halachic inquiry in recorded history. Determining practical halacha is both an art and a science, but its bottom line is comparing, contrasting, and assessing the likelihood of finding the truth, as best as a human being can comprehend it. Since we both apparently fully agree on that premise, what remains to be settled is how to find the halachic approach that represents the best way to make the conclusion flow from the textual evidence.

Regarding this question, I am afraid, that at the end of the day our respective positions have not moved at all. I don’t see anything in Rabbi Angel’s response that is very different from his original article, and nothing that would get me to change my mind.

Rabbi Angel does raise some extremely important questions in the middle of his piece. I will address my remarks to the numbered points that he makes in the middle of his article, and hope that this will provide the greatest service to our readers

[Editor's note: An earlier post took issue with some of the ideas expressed in an article in the Forward by Rabbi Angel. He requested an opportunity to respond, which of course was gladly granted.]

Thank you for allowing me to respond to the recent article of Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein, in which he took issue with an article of mine on conversion that appeared in the Forward. (Readers can find my article on my website www.jewishideas.org)

When I was a rabbinical student, our teacher in “practical halakha” was R.Melech Schachter, who taught that conversions could only be performed for candidates who accepted to observe all the mitzvoth; otherwise, the conversion had no validity. This is what Rabbi Adlerstein, no doubt, also learned. Indeed this has been a widespread teaching within the Orthodox world for the past several generations.

In 1970, I began studying the responsa of Rabbi Benzion Uziel (1880-1953), late Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel. I was astounded to find that Rabbi Uziel had an entirely different view about conversion. Rabbi Uziel argued that for the sake of maintaining whole Jewish families and raising children within Jewish families, rabbis were obligated to do conversions of non-Jewish spouses or potential spouses, even if there is no clear commitment to observe all the mitzvoth. I thought this opinion was so novel and unique that I wrote an article about it, which appeared in Tradition magazine in 1972.

I can’t say that I didn’t find the YES commercial insanely funny. That is not to my credit. There is so much mockery of Torah, of traditional values in the clip that by right, a sense of revulsion should have eclipsed the humor. In short order, yet another reaction set in – a sense of sadness that to some extent we bring this kind of reaction upon ourselves.

The commercial shows a musically-accompanied machaah/ protest riot by a large number of Chassidim, up in arms over the availability of 42” high definition television in Israel, which of course is exactly what it is attempting to sell to the secular public. The protesters are superbly choreographed dancers (who seem to be doing their thing in lower Manhattan rather than Kikar Shabbat), upset that the new apparatus will allow even more detail to be seen of abominations like “shiksehs.”. Depending on the version you watch (there are several circulating), you might see the video preceded by a chasid applying wall poster decrying the insult to ארץ הקוידש (sic).

Nothing all that unusual so far. What saddened me – beyond the seemingly unbridgeable rift in Israeli society between religious and secular – were some of the other touches. The commercial did not spare its Israeli viewers a liberal sprinkling of Yiddish and even more of English. It capitalized on touch Israeli nerves by using the word toeavah over and over, as well as the phrase תזדזע ארץ הקודש. But it also assumed that Israelis would be quite familiar with “It’s against the Toirah,” and “You’ll all burn in hell,” both in English. Why should these phrases be so familiar to Israelis?

Meshech Chochmah in Parshas Bo (on Mishchu u-kechu lachem) explicates a rather strange Gemara in Pesachim that collects the sounds made by the drivers of different animals to get them to move. Why would the Gemara concern itself with such triviality? R Meir Simcha explains that in our pursuit of self-improvement, we need to differentiate between issues that grow out of our animal nature, and those that stem from faulty intellectual grasp. The latter need to be addressed by insight and sophistication; not so the former. The animal instincts within us should be dealt with the similar to the way a donkey driver calls to his charge: with a simple sound, repeated again and again. In controlling the beast within us, the repetition of a simple pithy phrase will be most effective. To tame our anger, for example, we might repeat Chazal’s epigram to ourselves: “Whoever is led to anger is as if he worshipped avodah zarah.

Many of us will have come across presentations of Hanukah that portray it as the anniversary of the ultimate victory of Jewish history – that of Judaism over the secular culture of the time. In this depiction, a pure, unadulterated Judaism, untainted by any non-Jewish influence, prevailed over an engagement with the surrounding society, its aspirations and intellectual activity.

This portrayal may be at odds with a number of ancient Jewish sources. In an allegorical reading of the laws governing the parah adumah (red cow, the ashes of which were used for spiritual purification), the holy Zohar learns:

‘Unblemished’ – this refers to the Greek kingdom, for they are close to the path of truth. (Zohar HaKodosh 2:237a)

In the same vein (although in reality, this has no modern application), one may write certain holy texts in Greek as the sole alternative to Hebrew. The Sages find a source for this ruling in the post-diluvian blessings given by Noah to his sons: Shem, the progenitor of the Jewish people and Yefes, the ancestor of Greece. The usual translation of the verse is:

At the height of the ongoing controversy over shmita observance, an editorial appeared in this paper (”Shmita pragmatism,” Sept. 18) celebrating the heter mechira as the essential manifestation “of the religious Zionist ethos.” The editorial described the heter mechira as a “circumvention” of “the ancient shmita limitations” using “pro forma bills of sale [whereby] farmers ostensibly turn over their land to non-Jews for the duration of the sabbatical [year].”

To call the heter mechira the essential manifestation of the national-religious ethos constitutes a huge slander against that community. It attributes to religious Zionism an attitude toward Halacha more generally associated with the Conservative movement: Halacha must be brought up to date, and is infinitely malleable in light of new “realities” and the emerging zeitgeist.

Shmita is no more difficult to observe today than in biblical times, when the entire society was agrarian and there was no possibility of importing food. Then too observance of the sabbatical year was a tremendous test of faith, as the Torah explicitly recognizes: “If you will say, ‘What will we eat in the seventh year’ - behold we will not sow and not gather in our crops?” (Leviticus 25:20).

A proper modern approach to shmita observance would seek new agricultural techniques that do not run afoul of the Torah’s requirement that the land lie fallow. And some leading figures in the national-religious world have indeed devoted themselves to that quest.