By Avi Shafran, on May 30th, 2008 Once upon a time, Jews who found Judaism cumbersome simply declared the Torah obsolete and went about their lives as they pleased. They weren’t inclined to intellectual contortions.
Some “progressive” Jews today, though, choose instead to twist and torture the Jewish canon, in an attempt to force it to “yield” what they wish it actually did. In a way, their reluctance to just jettison the Torah and Talmud is admirable. Other words, though, come to mind for their merciless manipulation of the Jewish religious tradition.
A recent example of such intellectual anarchism is Hillel. The campus organization, that is, not the Talmudic sage who, while he was an exemplar of equanimity and tolerance, had harsh words for Jews who arrogate to “exploit the crown” – i.e. misuse the Torah for personal purposes (Avot, 1:13).
“Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life” maintains a presence at more than 500 campuses throughout the United States and Canada and aims to “inspire every Jewish student to make an enduring commitment to Jewish life.”
If that final phrase read “contemporary mores,” a recent Hillel publication entitled “LGBTQ Resource Guide” might make sense. It is intended, after all, in its own … Read More >>
By Yitzchok Adlerstein, on May 29th, 2008 [The following article first appeared in the May 29th edition of Jewish World Review , a site that does enormous good in putting Jews and traditional Jewish values in a positive light in front of hundreds of thousands of users, Jewish and non-Jewish. I’ve written elsewhere
about my enthusiasm for Binyamin Jolkovsky’s work. In deference to the way his site works, I’m reproducing the first part of the piece below, but to continue on, you will have to follow the link at the end.]
John Hagee doesn’t have an anti-Semitic bone in his body, despite what he said about the Holocaust. It is a shame that John McCain saw fit to distance himself from him. Neither of them, nor anyone else we know, caused the earthquake in China. A common thread ties all these people and events together.
The caller to my office was not typical of those who call for assistance. He was not Jewish, and calling from an area well outside the Los Angeles vicinity.
The Kotel webcam was down, and he had the implications figured out. There are websites that allow you to place a virtual kvitel (a prayer written on a … Read More >>
By Yitzchok Adlerstein, on May 29th, 2008 The death of any IDF soldier is a terrible tragedy, and yet some deaths still strike us as for added dimensions of poignancy.
Liran Banai, hy”d, was exempt from military service because both of his parents are deaf, and often depended upon him for assistance. He succeeded in overcoming their objections, and joined the Givati Brigade. In March, his jeep was detonated by remote control while patrolling the Gaza border. Doctors struggled for three days to save his life, but he succumbed. It is painful to even think of what his loss means to his parents.
Our Way, an Orthodox Union program for the Jewish deaf and hard of hearing, has organized a nechamah campaign. They are collecting letters in both Hebrew and English, bundling them, and sending them to Liran’s parents in late June.
Given what Liran did for his people, and what his parents sacrificed for their nation, it seems like a chesed that takes little effort and could mean much.
Letters can be emailed to ourway@ou.org
By Yitzchok Adlerstein, on May 28th, 2008 Conversion-controversy junkies will have an opportunity to participate in a live, interactive webcast on the topic this coming Tuesday evening, through some really cool technology. Those whose comments have been edited can get their revenge
The Conversion Crisis:
Tuesday June 3, 9:30pm Eastern
In light of the recent ruling regarding thousands of converts Torah in Motion will be hosting an online discussion on the crisis with
Rabbi Yitzchak Adlerstein, member of the beit din l’giyur of the Rabbinical Council of California
Rabbi Seth Farber, Founder and Director, ITIM:The Jewish life information Center.
Rabbi Barry Freundel, Head of the Gerut Commission of the Rabbinic Council of America
Rabbi Benny Lau, Director Beit Morasha
This program will be broadcast via the e-TiM network which provides the unique experience of seeing, hearing, and participating in real time,
All you need to participate is a computer with a high speed internet connection and you will Experience Torah like Never Before
Register at www.torahinmotion.org
By Avi Shafran, on May 23rd, 2008 An amusing pair of letters to the editor appeared in the New York Times Book Review on April 13, responding to a review of a book about the science of human reproduction.
Both letters were withering critiques of the illustration that accompanied the review, a graphic of a large, oddly shaped, complex organic molecule, featuring atoms of various elements and bonds of many sorts. One of the letter-writers, a professor of chemistry, sniffed that the graphic contained a “dozen brazen errors” and deemed it “a lesson in aberration.” The second, a graduate student in chemistry, denounced the drawing as “nothing short of atrocious” and upped the error count to more than two dozen.
It must have been difficult for the editors to quash the urge to respond mockingly, but somehow they managed understatement. “Our correspondents’ knowledge of chemistry,” they wrote, “may have kept them from noticing that the molecular entity [depicted]… spells out a familiar three-letter word.”
The letters and response are entertaining evidence for how limited scientists can be in negotiating the world outside their labs. It is a truism brought to mind too by the recent sale at auction of a 1954 letter written by … Read More >>
By Guest Contributor, on May 22nd, 2008 by Dr. William Kolbrener
What I’m getting from the first ripples I’m making in the blogosphere is that there really is no such thing as ‘openminded’ Torah. Yaakov (who is a colleague of mine) wonders whether being charedi (I’m glad he didn’t say ultra-orthodox) may preclude being open-minded; Daniel suggests, from a totally different perspective, that the Torah requires a form of self-nullification–without which one ends up being a heretic.
If openminded is the perspective of the non-committed relativist, then I’d have to assent to Yaakov’s doubts and Daniel’s assertion. Perhaps something more on what I understand by “open-minded” will help.
In the same portion of the Torah which enjoins the Jewish people to love one’s neighbor, there is the command to love the “stranger.” Rashi writes that one might come to hate the stranger because he manifests a מום or a ‘defect,’ and the presence of such a defect arouses a desire to afflict him, or distance him from our midst. Such a person was once immersed in עבודה זרה, idolatry, and now he dares to want to imbibe the Torah of Hashem, to sit and learn in the same yeshivot and seminaries with us! What an extraordinary chutzpah!
Yet, the … Read More >>
By Jonathan Rosenblum, on May 22nd, 2008 When a radio transmitter transmits sound waves, there is no way of knowing who will receive the signals. To pick up the radio signals, the recipient must have a radio and the radio must be tuned to a particular frequency.
We are all in the same situation as that radio transmitter. We are constantly sending messages – some verbal and some through our behavior. With respect to the messages conveyed by our behavior, we often have no idea as to who will pick up the messages. That depends on who is watching, and more importantly who has an eye to see. The whole world heard of Hashem’s miracles in Egypt and of the Splitting of the Sea, but only Yisroel really heard and took the message to heart.
Of those messages that we are transmitting perhaps the most important are those that convey what it means to be a Jew whose life is shaped by Torah. Every moment, we have the potential to make a Kiddush Hashem or the opposite. Heightening the awareness that we are always broadcasting deepens everything we do as a Jew.
A grade school teacher once asked a class of eight-year-olds what is a tzaddik. One … Read More >>
By Jonathan Rosenblum, on May 22nd, 2008 Last week’s events in Lebanon fill us with grim foreboding for the future and force us to confront past failures with greater clarity. Hizbullah has established itself as the dominant power in Lebanon. That which U.N. Secretary Gernaral Ban Ki-Moon predicted in February has come to pass. He warned that Hizbullah’s rearmament would threaten the “sovereignty, stability, and independence of Lebanon.”
The cost of Israel’s failure to deal Hizbullah a decisive blow in the summer of 2006 is now clearer than ever. Far from having lessened Hizbullah’s capacities, as Prime Minister Olmert was wont to claim at war’s end, the organization is now more powerful than ever. Its control extends not only over southern Lebanon but over the streets of Beirut as well.
The second lesson of Hizbullah’s putsch is the uselessness of the United Nations and its inability to act in the face of any recalcitrance. Over less than two years, Hizbullah has succeeded in doubling the number of missiles it possessed at the outset of the Second Lebanon War. Each of the more than 14,000 missiles it has added to its arsenal has been smuggled into Lebanon under the ever unwatchful eye of U.N. peacekeepers, even though the … Read More >>
By Yitzchok Adlerstein, on May 16th, 2008 I am at a loss to explain how much of the much-touted recent psak was lost on so many who have taken vocal positions about it. Let no one construe this piece as taking a stand one way or another. Reading the psak and gaining some additional context from others, suffice it to say that I was rather disturbed by aspects on both sides. The evidence regarding shoddy (to put it mildly) standards by the “special conversion courts” is persuasive; on the other hand, some of the arguments used by Rabbi Shirman seemed to me to require greater support than was offered in the psak, given the gravity of the consequences. Certain elements of the case, however, are much clearer than the general public seems to think:
1) It is a real stretch to see this as part of a haredi war against the dati-leumi camp. The whistleblower did not hail from Bnei Brak. He is Rabbi Yisrael Rozen, former head of the special conversion court, editor of Techumin, a leader of Tzohar, and very identified with the dati-leumi world. He was the one who in 2000 discovered that gerus documents were signed by … Read More >>
By Avi Shafran, on May 16th, 2008 My computer cautions me against fooling with certain manufacturer-determined system settings. Doing so, it warns, could create serious problems.
Riskier still is messing around with Judaism’s system-settings, determined by the ultimate Manufacturer.
That lesson might be the one being learned the hard way by contemporary Jewish religious movements which, unconstrained by the Jewish religious tradition, chose years ago to remove the slash that Jewish tradition places diagonally through the equal sign flanked by “men” and “women.”
Both genders, of course, are equally important to G-d. Women should be paid equal amounts for equal work on a par with men, and they should be respected no less than males. But pretending that men and women are identical and interchangeable in their life-roles – the much-cherished “egalitarian” approach – not only offends Jewish tradition, it may bode demographic disaster.
A soon-to-be-released report entitled “The Growing Gender Imbalance in American Jewish Life,” by Brandeis University sociologist Sylvia Barack Fishman, will present statistical evidence to confirm what has been widely suspected in recent years: males in non-Orthodox communities are opting out of religious activities. Professor Fishman fears that as non-Orthodox Jewish men become increasingly estranged from religious and communal life they are more … Read More >>
By Eytan Kobre, on May 9th, 2008 Below I share with you (with very minor changes) the e-mail letter I sent today to Dina Kraft, a JTA reporter, responding to her article on the JTA website regarding the controversy over the ruling of an Israeli beis din revoking a conversion performed many years ago. I hope to share with you any further correspondence between us in this matter as well.
Please note that I am entirely unfamiliar with the facts and opposing positions in this case. But, then, my letter isn’t really about this case, but about how journalists striving for objectivity, balance and moderation ought to go about their tasks.
Dear Ms. Kraft,
I read with interest your 5/6/08 article on the JTA website regarding the controversy over a rabbinic court ruling revoking a convert’s 15 year old conversion, and I have several questions and comments to which I would appreciate your response:
1) You write that the ruling is “prompting thousands of converts in the country to worry if their conversions to Judaism are at risk of being revoked.” How do you know this?
And, since the ruling at issue was based, as you write, on the convert’s acknowledgement “that she is not religiously … Read More >>
By Avi Shafran, on May 9th, 2008 Stephen Schwarzman is a very wealthy man. And a very generous one.
The CEO and co-founder of The Blackstone Group, a New York investment bank, recently made the largest unrestricted gift to any New York cultural institution: $100 million, to the New York Public Library.
Mr. Schwarzman may well have made gifts to Jewish causes too. Although his current wife is not Jewish and their marriage ceremony was presided over by both a rabbi and a priest, many intermarried Jews maintain relationships to the larger Jewish community and its institutions. The $100 million, though, is going to the public library.
Untold millions of Jewish philanthropic dollars, sums to spin the head of those of us who think in $20 bill denominations, have similarly been donated to causes that, worthy though they might be, do not address needs exclusive to the Jewish community.
Those needs include the Jewish poor, who not only actually exist but comprise a sizable subset of some communities. In New York, fully 145,000 Jews are classified by the government as poor, and another 375,000 as “near poor.” There are considerable numbers of impoverished Jews in other American cities as well, and in Israel and … Read More >>
By Jonathan Rosenblum, on May 8th, 2008 Just before Pesach, the front pages of all Israel’s major papers were filled for days with three cases of horrific child abuse. In two of the cases, some of the children involved will likely never recover from their physical injuries, and it is hard to imagine the emotional injuries ever healing in any of the cases. Each of the three cases involved chareidi mothers.
One chareidi commentator noted that the explosion of the cases in the headlines seemed perfectly timed to coincide with the release of national figures on child abuse. And huge headlines quoting investigators describing the abuse as the worse they had ever encountered will be true only until the next sickening case comes to light. But the secret long known to social workers in the chareidi community is out of the bag: Our children enjoy no immunity from horrible abuse at the hands of their parents.
Each of the cases involved its own sensationalistic details, and together they raise many questions. The mother in the case in Beit Shemesh was the charismatic leader of a group of women, almost all whom came from non-chareidi backgrounds, who have taken to covering themselves in 18 layers or so of … Read More >>
By Yitzchok Adlerstein, on May 7th, 2008 In the space of a single hour this evening, I heard:
The former President of the most populous Muslim country on the globe declare that he will not rest until his country recognizes Israel. He then dedicated the honor he received to an unnamed rabbi (in Indonesia!), deceased for a few years, who enriched his life by introducing him to Talmud and Kabbalah.
The previous Archbishop of Canterbury closed his remarks with a beautiful piece of derush based on a beraisa in the first perek of Berachos. Lord Carey has campaigned against anti-Semitism for over twenty years, and stood up to his own church when it moved to divest its funds from Israel
A French-Catholic priest with tears in his eyes tell an audience why he has trekked for a decade through the Ukraine to uncover the previously unknown mass graves that hold the remains of a million and a half Jews murdered by Nazi mobile killing units. So far, he has found over five hundred of such graves. Invoking the words of the previous Pope in his visit to a Rome synagogue, he called Jews his “elder brothers;” he considered it intolerable that so many should be killed … Read More >>
By Yitzchok Adlerstein, on May 6th, 2008 Does the deeply-seated need for revenge mean that we are trapped between two approaches, each of which is unsatisfactory? On the one hand, acting upon our instinctive need plunges us into unending cycles of retaliation. On the other, the rule of law seems to demand the suppression of an undeniable part of our nature. Are we destined to give revenge either too much or too little? Jared Diamond, the fascinating cell membrane physiologist, turned evolutionary biologist of birds, turned ecological geographer, examines this question in a recent article in The New Yorker.
I have read Diamond since my teens, and always been overwhelmed by his versatility. As a writer, he is engaging and clear. He won a Pulitzer for Guns, Germs, and Steel; it is one of the most important secular books I read in the last ten years. [Warning: this is not a pitch or endorsement. Those who believe in a six thousand year-old earth will only be offended by the book, and find nothing of value therein. Those who admit to other possibilities will find remarkable insights into how the Ribbono Shel Olam, by cleverly arranging geographical … Read More >>
By Jonathan Rosenblum, on May 4th, 2008 Boxing may be dead but those who still savor the sight of heavyweights throwing roundhouse punches at a fast and furious pace could do worse than the current donnybroook between Justice Minister Daniel Friedmann and former Supreme Court President Aharon Barak.
The verbal fisticuffs between the two – like those between Barak and Richard Posner, one of America’s leading jurists — have performed a valuable public service by bringing to the fore a long postponed debate about the nature of the Israeli legal system. No longer can it be claimed that criticism of the Supreme Court is confined to proto-fascist, right-wing thugs. Friedmann is both an Israel Prize laureate in law and a man of the Left.
Just how long this debate has been suppressed can be discerned from the hysteria that has greeted Friedmann’s proposals for reform of the judicial system. In a pre-Pesach interview with Ha’aretz’s Ari Shavit, Barak predicted Friedmann would turn Israel into a “Third World country.” At least he did not threaten to cut off Friedmann’s hand, as did his former colleague on the Court Mishael Cheshin.
In the Ha’aretz interview, Barak accused Friedmann of seeking to dominate the entire legal system. But that is … Read More >>
By Jonathan Rosenblum, on May 2nd, 2008 My pre-Pesach column “Five-Star Pesach” generated, as expected, a larger than usual number of responses. The issue is a hot-button one for many.
One friend wrote that going away to a hotel allowed him to spend most of his week in the beis medrash, a luxury he would not have had at home, where he would have been the program director for his young children. A number of women described Pesach in a hotel as an opportunity to savor the Chag, rather than feel like slaves shackled to the stove preparing festive meals for their families and guests for eight days. .
Another husband told me how his wife used to present the classical symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder in the weeks leading up to Pesach, which typically left shalom bayis in short supply as they limped into the Chag. Now the family still cleans for Pesach and does bedikas chametz, before heading for a nearby hotel, but they do so without all the bitterness attached.
To all who wrote to explain why the hotel experience helped their ruchnios experience of the Chag, I can only say, “I was not talking about you.” As I already acknowledged, there are plenty of reasons why a … Read More >>
By Avi Shafran, on May 2nd, 2008 Even before Senator Barack Obama unequivocally denounced Reverend Jeremiah Wright as the loon he is, I was willing to take the senator’s word for the fact that his erstwhile pastor’s rantings about America, the Middle-East, the September 11 attacks, Louis Farrakhan, AIDS and white people do not reflect Mr. Obama’s own feelings.
What pained me then, though, and still does, is the tragic subtext of Pastorgate – that the sort of rank idiocy that was spewed from the pulpit at Chicago’s Trinity Church may not be unusual in churches that cater to African-Americans. Senator Obama’s statement, back when he still sought to preserve some of his pastor’s dignity, was telling. “I can no more disown [Wright],” he said, “than I can disown the black community.” Did he mean to in some way equate the two?
Well, Wright certainly did. On his talk-show vanity tour, he boasted that “This is not an attack on Jeremiah Wright. It is an attack on the black church.” The same sentiment was expressed by Wright’s successor at the church, Reverend Otis Moss 3rd, who said: “You cannot caricature Rev. Wright. This is an attack on the collective black church.” … Read More >>
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