Plastic does not degenerate and is difficult to recycle. Given worlds enough and time, the planet will eventually be overrun by plastic.

Is worrying about such matters an indication of a mind addled by having seen too many exhibits at the Monterey Aquarium last summer of different species endangered by rampant pollution? Or are these legitimate Torah concerns?

The convenience of using plastic dishes are obvious. Plastic offers freedom from sinks brimming with unwashed dishes and fights about whose turn it is to wash the dishes. Against the convenience is the infinitesimal impact any change in our individual behavior would have absent similar changes by millions of others.
Here we come to an old problem in moral philosophy known as the Tragedy of the Commons. Let us say there are a variety of shepherds sharing a common grazing area. It is in the interest of each shepherd to increase the size of his herd. But if each shepherd follows that strategy the common grazing area will eventually be depleted bringing disaster to all.

Another example. The most rational strategy for an individual parent would be not to vaccinate his child to protect against the slight chance of serious adverse reaction. But that is true only so long as all other parents vaccinate. But if other parents make the same calculation, smallpox and whooping cough will soon return and pose a far greater threat to every child.

On the eve of Senator Barack Obama’s visit last week to Israel, Yossi Klein Halevi penned a gem of an essay in The New Republic in the form of an open letter to the Democratic presidential candidate. Halevi began by assuring Obama that Israelis have paid little attention to such diversions as his middle name (Hussein), his early years spent in Indonesia being raised by a Moslem step-father, or any of the other topics so beloved by viral e-mailers. Nor does Barack’s color evoke any concern in a country that “rescued tens of thousands of African Jews and turned their arrival into a national celebration.”

Halevi did not even mention Obama’s former spiritual mentor pastor Jeremiah Wright. He was writing as a citizen of Israel, and the question of Obama’s views on America are of necessity of far less moment to Israelis than they are to American. The former are far more interested in knowing Senator Obama’s views on Israel.

Here too Halevi was quick to assure Obama that few in Israel doubt his friendship: “Your description of Israeli security as ’sacrosanct’ and your passionate endorsement of Israel’s cause at the annual AIPAC conference in Washington were greeted with banner headlines in the Israeli press.”

But precisely because Israelis do not suspect Obama of harboring any ill-will towards them were they hoping for something more from him than professions of friendship and sympathy for the people of Sderot. Above all, they want some indication that Obama understands their predicament.

The front-page headline in the New York Post was striking: “A-Rod brainwashed by Kabbala. Wife blames Madonna, sues for divorce.” I did a double take.

Who is A-Rod? He is Alex Rodriguez, the star third baseman of the New York Yankees, who commands a $300 million contract and is considered the best baseball player since Willie Mays.

Who is Madonna? She is the aging Hollywood pop star who has been dabbling in what she calls the secrets of the esoteric Kabbala and makes sure the world knows about her secrets.

What is Kabbala? The short answer is that it is the overall term for ancient Jewish mystical lore. The long answer is that it is the study of the cosmic ramifications of our behavior, of the hidden meanings behind the biblical text and of the almost inconceivable meticulousness with which human beings must align their actions with the demands of the Torah. That is to say, one cannot even begin the study of Kabbala unless one is thoroughly conversant with Torah, Talmud and the codes; is personally pious and dedicated to spirituality; and is deeply learned in the ways of God. Neither Madonna nor A-Rod seems quite to match these qualifications.

“It is frantic, disorganized, exceptionally neurotic, but somehow the necessary things get done - a metaphor for all of Israeli life.” So Martin Sieff describes Israel’s UN mission, in a Jerusalem Report review of Gregory Levey’s memoir of his stint as the mission’s chief speechwriter. Unfortunately, it is far from clear that the metaphor still works and “the necessary things get done.”

In recent weeks, at least two “crises” briefly gained media attention. The first concerns the country’s “worst water crisis” ever; the second the continued viability of our higher education, with Nobel Prize winner Aharon Ciechanower comparing the brain drain of Israeli academics to that of Jewish scientists and thinkers from Germany after the Nazis’ rise to power.

After garnering headlines, both “crises” just as quickly receded from the limelight. Only in this country could forecasts of an impending lack of water to drink not even merit front-page headlines. And that is part of the problem. Our media, like our politicians, suffer from severe attention deficit disorder.
Sure, there are plenty of distractions: the ongoing corruption investigations of the prime minister and a host of other senior government officials, past or present; the Iranian nuclear threat; the never-ending jockeying in the governing coalition.

Yet the failure over much of the past decade to attend sufficiently to either the water or the educational crisis will have as much impact on our future as those “distractions,” with the obvious exception of a possible nuclear attack by Iran. Even in the unlikely event that a sustainable peace was possible with a Palestinian entity or Syria, chronic water shortages would make peace negotiations dramatically more difficult and create an ongoing tinderbox if they were successfully concluded. Currently one-third of Israel’s water comes via the Golan, and aquifers under land likely to be part of any Palestinian state contribute significantly. A parched country could not dispense with those water sources.

In all the articles and comments about whether Ba’alei Teshuva are fully accepted in Frum from Birth communities, one major factor I haven’t seen mentioned is the character of the individual BT. This applies also to gerim (converts). I know a convert who is a sweet, outgoing, pleasant, talented, easy-going person, and she finds the charedi community to be delightful and wonderful. Everyone is good, warm, intelligent, altogether admirable. I know another convert who is sour, dour, prickly and altogether a difficult person, and she finds the Orthodox community to be cold, unwelcoming, uncaring and exclusionary. And both of these women formed their impressions while living in the same neighborhood! Fancy that.

Forget four-dollar-a-gallon gas, the sundry financial crises, and the various looming threats posed by Russia, China, et al. One issue alone – the prospect of a nuclear-armed, apocalyptic Iran – dwarfs all else at present as the singular issue of ultimate consequence for us as Americans and, more acutely, as Jews. The consensus across the Israeli political spectrum and among many thoughtful observers in this country is that an Israeli strike against Iranian facilities sometime this coming autumn is a fait accompli; speculation revolves primarily around how events will unfold in the aftermath of such attack.

Can any reader recall another moment in the Nuclear Age as pregnant with threat as this one? Not even the Cuban missile crisis, when we were arrayed against a coldly pragmatic, albeit evil, Politburo, compares. What quality of character, then, ought Americans insist their leader possess, above all others, at such a defining juncture, at this moment of historical moments? My answer: the ability to recognize evil, and the resolve to act to vanquish it.

We can forgive Barack Obama his supercilious, humorless persona. We can even suffer his self-aggrandizing quest for the brass ring at the expense of the American commonweal. We cannot, we dare not, however, vouchsafe our future – our present! – to a virtual babe in the woods who is, by all indications viscerally incapable of recognizing evil and summoning the fortitude to strike out at it.

In just the past several weeks, we been witness to the latest manifestations of unadulterated evil in the Middle East, and it is instructive to observe the reaction thereto of a prominent denizen of Obama’s thought-world, and a favored mouthpiece of his, the New York Times, the better to learn how the Annointed One himself approaches such matters. First there was the horror of a Palestinian run amok with a massive Caterpillar front-end loader, killing three, including a young mother crushed to death in her car as her infant sat unscathed in the back seat.

Like so much in our world that seems genuine at first, the photograph that graced the front pages of some of the nation’s most respected newspapers earlier this month was in fact a fake.

The digital manipulation of the image, which depicted Iranian missiles being test-fired, is readily apparent in the launch pad cloud of exhaust and the mid-air smoke trails of two of the four missiles depicted. The clouds and trails are, incredibly, identical. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, which released the photograph along with some belligerent rant, was clearly doing some Photoshopping.

The alteration, first pointed out by political blogger Charles Johnson, seemed intended to conceal the fact that one of the missiles, which the Iranians claim could reach Israel, either did not fire or exploded on the ground.

This latest Iranian Photogate scandal (last year the same blogger exposed a similar clumsy attempt at graphics monkey-business by Iran’s Fars News Agency) might be regarded as nothing more than an example of sloppy damage-control.

Last week found me speaking for the Jewish Boys School of Zurich on “Educating Children in Turbulent Times.” But as far as Zurich goes, these are not particularly turbulent times – at least not yet. Those with whom I spoke could not remember more than one or two young people from the chareidi community leaving the fold.

The natives took a modest view of their achievement. A number quoted the late Rabbi Moshe Soloveitchik’s, zt”l, observation that every trend in the Jewish world arrives in Zurich twenty years later. The communal rabbonim and leaders are clearly eager to do what they can to avoid the problems that have been experienced by larger communities in Israel and abroad. Recently an expert from Baltimore was brought in to lecture on the perils of the Internet.

Many of the reasons for the Zurich community’s success with its youth may be explained by factors that are unique to Zurich. And it would be a foolish on my part to claim any expertise about a community that I was visiting for the first time. Yet certain observations perhaps have wider application and could be adapted to different communities.

The chareidi community of Zurich is large enough to support a host of communal institutions: two boys schools – one primarily chassidic – until around age 15, a number of shuls, a kollel, and even the production of cholov Yisroel products. Until a few years ago, most boys and girls went abroad to continue their studies after age 15, but in recent years, Yeshiva L’Tzeirim, and Machon Chen for girls have offered the possibility of remaining at home for another two or three years.

Several decades ago, a senior official at the Conservative movement’s University of Judaism alerted the wider Los Angeles community by direct mailing to a new threat looming on the Jewish horizon. A growing number of Jews were introducing strange and foreign ideas and practices into the Jewish mainstream. He urged his readers to reject their view of Judaism, and to not take pride in their rediscovery of their Jewish roots.

The threat, he claimed, came from people known as Ba’alei Teshuva.

Ironically, albeit for different reasons, some FFB’s may also see BT’s as threatening. An article in the Sivan issue of the Jewish Voice and Opinion, pgs. 28-33 is one of the most disturbing I have read in months. It claims that FFB’s often keep BT’s in a state of dhimmitude - out of their schools and away from their children, both in Israel and in the US. FFB’s often look down upon BT’s, regarding their non-standard behavior as “harryish.” (Since much of the more extreme content of the article was gleaned from blogs, readers should be skeptical of how typical are the vignettes. Clearly, it is not universal. The two most haredi schools in Los Angeles, including the chassidishe cheder, are absolutely open and inviting to ba’alei teshuvah.)

One of the most telling testimonies came from the more than respectable haredi weekly Mishpacha:

Sometimes a word or set of words is just so jarring, so inappropriate or so cruel that it causes actual pain. Jewish religious law forbids such language to Jews as ono’at d’varim pain-causing words. Newspapers don’t likely consider themselves similarly constricted by Jewish law, and a recent report in The New York Times offered a good example of that fact.

Pain was already well in place this past week, when the terrorist militia known as Hezbollah and reviled by civilized people the world over fulfilled its part of a deal with the Israeli government to return two Israeli soldiers it had held since 2006. Cynically refusing to say whether or not the soldiers were alive, the terrorist group seemed to take a perverse pride in “revealing” with a flourish the coffins containing the bodies of the two young men.

In return for that demonstration of grace, Israel handed over the remains of nearly two hundred Palestinian fighters and five all-too-alive terrorists it had captured. One of them, of course, was Samir Kuntar, who in 1979 landed a rubber dinghy on the seashore of the coastal Israeli town of Nahariya on a mission to kidnap Israelis.

According to eyewitnesses, Mr. Kuntar invaded the apartment of an Israeli family, shot the father, Daniel Haran, in front of his four-year-old daughter Einat and then took the little girl outside where he smashed her skull against a rock with the butt of his rifle. A doctor testified that Mr. Haran’s daughter had died from “a blow from a blunt instrument, like a club or rifle butt.”

There is good kiruv and there is bad kiruv. After reading ‘You’ve been Aish’d…’ in the Jerusalem Post, even the bad kiruv starts to look better. It is a piece that alternates between silliness and shallowness. The author makes it clear that she believes that the claims of Orthodoxy have some facial appeal, but nothing rigorous to back them up, and then proceeds to pen many declarative sentences – with nothing to back them up. Perhaps she was more influenced by her kiruv experience than she realizes.

“Everything moves fast and intensely, yet rarely lasts,” she writes about the trips to Israel. Duh…if the effects were such a rarity, would she really be writing an expose of kiruv organizations like Aish and NCSY? Where are the stats on the religious effects of kiruv organizaions? As I recall, a scientific study by the Lilly Foundation a few years ago demonstrated quite impressively the long-term efficacy of NCSY programs.

Those female advisors, overbrimming with cherubic innocence, may make a good go of it, but “unfortunately, they are unable to relate to the secular world.” So why do so many neophytes come back to them and their classes and their homes, and find in those same naifs mentors for life? Again, just how many people has she interviewed?

“Teachings are superficial …addressing issues from an archaic, non-scientific, pseudo-psychological perspective.” Just what makes them archaic, other than the fact that they originated a few millennia ago? Is everything old (e.g. love, honor, loyalty, honesty, freedom) archaic by dint of not having first seen the light of day in a YouTube presentation? Non-scientific – let’s consider that one. So how many approaches to the questions that really concern people, like how to be happy, and what meaning can I extract from life, have been treated scientifically? If they were amenable to scientific treatment, I think we ought to be prosecuting some of those scientists for war crimes, or something horrible like that, for withholding from the rest of us the scientifically established protocols for finding happiness, peace, and cheap gasoline. (We’ll excuse the Israeli prof who gives the single most popular class at Harvard, on learning to be happy, despite the fact that he quotes liberally from archaic Jewish tradition.)

About one thing Aharon Barak is right: Constitutionalism - the imposition by judges of their moral intuitions on an unsuspecting public - is on the rise everywhere. The opinion of Justice Anthony Kennedy of the US Supreme Court in Kennedy vs. Louisiana could have been written by an Israeli Supreme Court justice, so lacking was it in anything bordering on coherent analysis.

A 5-4 majority of the court ruled that imposition by Louisiana of the death penalty on Patrick Kennedy for brutally raping his 12-year-old stepdaughter and inflicting internal injuries far too gruesome to describe would constitute cruel and unusual punishment. According to Justice Kennedy, the Constitution contemplates that in the end “our [i.e., the justices] own judgment” will be determinative. Yet the only argument he offered for why murder, alone of crimes against individuals, may be punished by death is that murder victims are dead.

Such profundity is Kennedy’s trademark.

In ruling that the death penalty may not be imposed in even the most serious cases of child rape, Justice Kennedy purported to be giving voice to the “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” It may well be questioned, however, whether in our respect for the value of human life that evolution has been upward.

It’s easy to snickeringly dismiss the recent disclosure that the late hotelier Leona Helmsley not only left $12 million to her dog but nearly all of the rest of her estate – an estimated $5-8 billion (yes, billion) – to dogdom. No correlation, after all, has ever been evident between wealth and sanity.

More significant by far was another recent bit of animal news, the Spanish parliament’s June 25 vote in support of extending the right to life and freedom to apes.

That would be great apes – orangutans, gorillas, and chimpanzees. (Pity the poor lesser apes and common monkeys, not to mention all the non-simians, whose rights for now remain unaddressed by Spanish lawmakers.)

The vote was the culmination of a push by an entity called the Great Ape Project, which for years has advocated on behalf of having apes accepted as closer to human than animal. The DNA of apes and humans, the group points out, is very similar. Indeed it is, although there are some 40 million differences among the two species’ respective nucleotides. The group further contends that “Human blood and Chimpanzee [sic] blood… can be exchanged through transfusion.” Don’t try that at home – or anywhere else for that matter; each species’ antigens would likely prove fatal to the other.

A reader submitted the following brief piece, which may or may not be relevant to the ongoing controversy about the derech of R. Shamshon Raphael Hirsch. It is offered here without comment or elaboration, and taken from Halachos of Other People’s Money Chapter 1 Section A note 69

I saw an awesome thing in the Sefer Divrei Yonah (Parshas Toldos s.v. V’yesh L’orer): “I heard from the Gaon and Tzaddik Rabbi Michoel Ber Weissmandl zt”l that he said, explaining that which we saw in the latest Hurban, Lo Aleinu, that even though the source of the tribulation, in our great sins, was in Germany and from there spread to the other countries, despite this in reality our brethren in Germany merited to be saved at a far greater ratio than our brethren in the other countries, and they also merited saving their money and property to a great extent, whereas in the other countries all of their money and possessions came into the hands of their gentile neighbors, Lo Aleinu. And he said that the reason for this was that our brethren in Germany had more honesty in their business dealings with the non-Jews during all the years, without cunning, and therefore the money that they had was more their own and there was no mixture of the share of the gentiles, as opposed to the other countries where the poverty and destitution was horrible, Lo Aleinu, and therefore they allowed themselves to sometimes engage in swindling activities in monetary matters in their business dealings with the gentiles and therefore on the day of retribution Lo Aleinu the property ended up in the hands of the gentiles, in order to return the property to the gentile neighbors, and in Heaven the matter was orchestrated that the money should reach the heirs and the like.”

[Thanks to DB]

Chaim Shmuel Golubchuk, a”h, has gone to his eternal reward. But the issues that pitted his children Percy Golubchuk and Miriam Geller against Grace General Hospital in Winnipeg over the last seven months will long be with us.

After being informed by their father’s doctors that they intended to end his life by removing his ventilation and feeding tube, the Golubchuk children sought an injunction against the hospital. They argued that their father would adamantly oppose any attempt to shorten his life, which is forbidden by Jewish law.

After the entry of a temporary injunction, the hospital pursued an aggressive legal and public relations campaign. At one recent hearing, the hospital was represented by a team of no less than seven high-priced attorneys (despite its claims that providing care for Mr. Golubchuk was draining the hospital’s resources.) Three doctors resigned from thospital’s intensive care unit claiming they were being forced to violate their ethical beliefs by continuing to treat Mr. Golubchuk rather than simply hastening his death. One of them graphically described in a public letter how the doctors in the ward would be left “to surgically hack away at his infected flesh at the bedside in order to keep the infection [from bedsores[ at bay.”

Charges that “hopeless” efforts to prolong Mr. Golubchuk’s life were diverting valuable medical resources from other patients aired continuously in the Canadian media. One editorial in the journal of the Canadian Medical Association went so far as to accuse the Golubchuk children of using their religious beliefs to gain special treatment for their father. And numerous letters appeared in the Canadian press decrying or ridiculing the Golubchuk’s religious fanaticism.

When I wrote two weeks ago that I was “back,” and hoped to resume posting more frequently, I also wrote that I planned a post on “Michael Bloomberg, Barack Obama, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and telecommunications.” That post never materialized, simply because I waited to gather information. A good friend of mine is a strong left-winger, and I knew that once he had a moment he could fill me in on “the other side of the issue.” The result of that conversation is that the post I had contemplated won’t be written. My initial understanding of the subject was wrong; once corrected, I can’t see a particularly Jewish spin to one side of the issue over the other.

Not only information, but misinformation, can spread quickly once published. Yes, the writer can look foolish once shown to be wrong, but it’s also all too easy to “stick to your guns” and not publish the correction with nearly the prominence needed.

Just think for a moment about the damage done by the myth of the “shooting” of Mohammed Al-Dura, which I put in quotes because of the very serious possibility that he was never shot at all. It was published worldwide, and even Jewish “leaders” rushed to take Israel to task. [Even had a child been shot by Israeli troops, it would only have been an accident caused by the willingness of terrorists to use children (intentionally) as human shields.] But, in fact, if he was killed at all, the gunfire didn’t come from the correct angle to be Israeli. And the tapes now shown (we still have not seen it all) make it clear that this was a staged event, one of a series of staged events filmed that day.

It should be obvious that Cross-Currents won’t try to create a myth, especially on such an incendiary issue. But nonetheless, even inadvertent errors of fact can color opinions (personally, I don’t believe the myth that Senator Obama is Muslim has any “traction” and warranted Mayor Bloomberg’s comment, but here again, I could be wrong). It’s always worth it to wait a few days, and get the facts straight before wasting pixels on misinformation. On that, there is most definitely a Jewish side to the issue — one that speaks for patient, careful judgment.

Many years ago, while a rabbi in Atlanta, I answered a knock on my door one Shabbat afternoon. Standing in front of me was a fine-looking couple - obviously non-Jewish.

“Shabbat Shalom, rabbi,” they said, and asked to have a word with me.

I sensed that they were missionaries and asked them what the subject was. They replied that they wanted to talk to me about the “Son of God.”

I suggested that while I respected their personal beliefs, in Judaism there is no such thing as a son or mother of God, that ours is a very strict monotheistic faith, and that our God is one, not two, and not three. I added that before attempting to convert Jews, they should consider converting Christians to Christian teachings, because throughout history, Jews had seen very little of Christian love and of turning the other cheek.

Yes, Varda, there is a Jewish way to vote – or at least a genuine Jewish perspective to bring to political races like the current one for the American presidency.

Some Jews would assert that “voting Jewish” consists only of analyzing the respective candidates’ positions or pronouncements on the Israel-Palestinian conflict, or any of a number of domestic social issues, or on Iran, Darfur or the environment.

Such analyses are certainly proper. But there is a larger context in which to place them here, an overarching Jewish principle.

A June 6 New York Sun editorial rejected attempts to link Senator Obama with odious people he has known. The editorialist noted that even American presidents who had espoused repugnant views before their elections, came afterward to act very differently from what their erstwhile views would have led anyone to expect.

Of all the many bizarre elements of hostage exchange approved this week by the Israeli cabinet by a vote of 22-3, the most bizarre was that Israel negotiated as if did not matter whether Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev are dead or alive. Hizbullah never provided any information concerning the condition of its two captives and did not permit any international body access to them. Thus Israel allowed itself to be placed in the position of negotiating without even knowing what it was negotiating about.

The negative implications of this approach for the future are obvious. By entering into negotiations in such circumstances, Israel lowered the standard for treatment of its POWs. Israel should instead have attempted to raise an international outcry against Hizbullah’s violation of all accepted international standards for the treatment of prisoners. In the likely event that Hizbullah showed itself immune to international pressure – something at which its excels – then Israel’s next move should have been to show that two can play this game with prisoners, and cut off all communications between Palestinian prisoners and their families.

When the Confederacy started to kill captured blacks fighting for the Union Army, President Abraham Lincoln threatened to reciprocate against Confederate prisoners. And that was the end of the matter.

The principal justification offered for the release of Samir Kuntar, an unrepentant murderer of four Israeli citizens, who has vowed to return to the battle against Israel as soon as he is released, is that IDF morale depends on soldiers knowing that everything will be done to bring them back if captured.