One of the perks (such as it is) of working for a Jewish organization is receiving unsolicited books and manuscripts in the mail. Most – like “new age” Jewish ritual guides, Middle-East manifestoes and novels channeling their authors’ neuroses through Biblical narratives – don’t interest me. Occasionally, though, a freebie escapes the circular file. Like the copy (there were actually two, a few weeks apart, one hardcover, the other soft) I received of “Hope, Not Fear: A Path to Jewish Renaissance” by Edgar M. Bronfman and Beth Zasloff.

Mr. Bronfman is the former CEO of the Seagram Company, past president of the World Jewish Congress and a major contributor to Jewish causes.

His book, the accompanying folder contents informed me, is “a passionate plea to the Jewish community, urging members to celebrate the joy in their culture and religion… [and] to recognize their responsibility to help heal a broken world.”

Mr. Bronfman proposes that young Jews be brought to “meaningfully encounter Judaism: its texts, traditions and community”; that they be brought “into conversation with the faith’s traditions and with each other”; and that Jewish institutions find ways to reach out to Jewish youth. Sounded promising.

Guest column by Chava Willig Levy

Full disclosure: I believe that God guides history. The improbable, meteoric rise of Barack Obama offers a case in point.

The facts are common knowledge: In 2000, Obama was a virtual unknown. He had to scrape together the airfare to attend that year’s Democratic National Convention, to which he had not been invited. Three months later, he was trounced in his run for an Illinois congressional seat. But in 2004, not yet a United States senator, he was the Democratic National Convention’s keynote speaker, an honor usually reserved for political icons; he became an overnight sensation. Just two years after he became Illinois’s junior senator, he announced his candidacy for president of the United States.

But here are some less well-known facts:

For those inclined to see the workings of Divine Providence in human history, the special affinity of the American people for Israel provides a happy example. If Israel could have only one consistent ally in the world, it would surely have picked the world’s (still) most powerful nation. Without the United States, Israel would be hard pressed to obtain the weapons needed to defend itself.

American popular support for Israel has many sources. The first is historical. The Puritan founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony self-consciously modeled themselves on the ancient Hebrews, and styled themselves as the New Israel. The Hebrew Bible provided their guidance. All the early presidents of Yale College were Hebraists, and the College’s insignia was patterned on the Urim ve’Tumim worn by the Kohen Gadol.

To this day, Americans remain by far the most religious people in the Western world. Seventy million American evangelicals constitute Israel’s most ardent supporters. Americans have always tended to be jealous of their sovereignty and willing to defend against any threat to their liberty. The state motto of New Hampshire, “Live Free or Die,” captures that spirit. As such, they admire Israel’s doughty self-defense against far more numerous enemies.

In Western terms, America is a Center-Right country. A major aspect of the American exceptionalism discussed by historians is its failure to develop a class-based political movement. That too has strengthened the bonds to Israel. Among American liberals, who tend to see the world in terms of victims and oppressors, 59% view the Palestinians more or equally sympathetically (according to a 2002 Gallup poll). Among conservatives, whose focus is on particular values and the determination to defend them, 59% view Israel more favorably.

YES, POGO, THE JEWS ARE THE STUPIDEST PEOPLE

Arab-Americans overwhelmingly support Senator Barack Obama for president. So do Jewish-Americans. One of these two groups either does not care much about the Arab-Israeli conflict and/or is stupid. My money is on the Jews.

American Jews care less and less about Israel. Over 50% of non-Orthodox Jews under 35 say they would not view the destruction of the State of Israel as a personal tragedy. Israel is not a popular cause on college campuses. Many Jewish students struggle against being identified with Israel, lest it complicate their social lives. In the under 35 cohort, only 54% profess to be comfortable with the idea of a Jewish state.

Other Jews who still find it uncomfortable to disavow concern with Israel have convinced nevertheless themselves that it is in Israel’s best interests to be forced back to the 1949 armistice lines. A talkback to a recent Jerusalem Post piece of mine nicely captures the mindset.

His message isn’t pleasant to listen to, but the Gerer Rebbe shlit”a may have gotten the best line yet around the global economic meltdown.

Others are treating the crisis with a giant Post-It Note, with “Blame” angrily scrawled on it. They attach it to what they believe is the best (or most convenient) place to make it stick, until the next pundit moves it elsewhere.

The Rebbe, however, reached for a different pad, and offered the first prescription for the future. While no one yet can gauge whether we are being overly pessimistic or whether we do not have a clue on how bad things are going to turn out, the Rebbe’s advice will remain valid in all outcomes.

He is calling for frum Jews to reevaluate their lifestyles and spending habits. He asks us to ponder whether we really need every electronic gadget we have become addicted to, and whether our tastes in clothing are what HKBH expects of a people dedicated in principle to kedushah. He decries our wastefulness, pointing to yeshivos that leave their lights on all Shabbos. He is concerned not only with the bottom line, but with the terrible example it imparts to our children about conserving what HKBH has given us. (Regarding to living within one’s means, see Rashi, Beitzah 16A s.v. kol mezonosav.)

Talk of reclaiming the Jewish bookshelf – the canonical texts that are the heritage of every Jew – is in the air. I cannot imagine a better guide on that path than Rabbi David Fohrman.

Rabbi Fohrman has been teaching mixed groups of secular and religious Jews for years. And he has now produced a rare work that will equally delight those who have been studying Chumash with the classical commentaries all their lives and those lacking even knowledge of Hebrew.

The Beast that Crouches at the Door is close reading of two of the best known Biblical stories: Adam and Chava’s eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and Kayin’s murder of his brother Hevel. The book is philosophically deep, psychologically acute, hypersensitive to the nuances of the Biblical text, and reads like a mystery. Each short chapter ends with the reader hanging on the edge of the cliff eager to proceed.

By focusing on stories whose basic outlines are familiar, Fohrman demonstrates how we are all prone – learned and unlearned alike – to the “Lullaby Effect” when confronting well-known texts. No one ever thought to ask why a baby would be comforted by a song about a cradle crashing down from a tree top. And similarly, we fail to note obvious questions in the Biblical texts.

Recently, Harvard University agreed to establish certain hours for sexually segregated use of the gym and swimming pool. Most of us upon hearing that news would be cheered at an apparently reasonable accommodation to those women who for religious or other reasons do not feel comfortable exercising or swimming in the presence of men.

I do not mean to suggest that that immediate response is not the correct one. But let me add just one wrinkle to the puzzle. Harvard’s decision came not in response to student petition or a request from Orthodox Jewish students on campus, but from the Harvard Islamic Society, whose request was subsequently joined by Harvard College’s Women’s Club.

Orthodox Jews likely outnumber devout Muslims at Harvard. Yet I doubt it ever occurred to Orthodox Jewish students to request separate hours for use of the swimming pool or gym.

And had they made such a request, I not at all sure Harvard would have been so quick to grant it. Recall Yale University’s unwillingness to accommodate the request of Orthodox Jewish students not to be forced to live in sexually mixed dorms (or at least to pay dearly for a room in such dorms) And even before the case of the Yale Five, Wendy Shalit described Williams College’s insistence that all bathrooms on campus be unisex. It is safe to assume that there are no Jewish billionaires with an interest in separate swimming hours likely to contribute $20,000,000 to Harvard, as one Arab sheikh recently did.

Last week, we detailed the extent to which Israel’s declining geopolitical situation and deterrent capacity has been largely self-inflicted – the result of unilateral withdrawals from Lebanon and the Gaza Strip and, most significantly, the failure to defeat Hizbullah in the Second Lebanon War. This week we will focus on another self-inflicted threat – perhaps the greatest of all: Israel’s declining human capital.

Evidence of that declining human capital is all around us. One indice is the rampant corruption at the top of the governmental pyramid. Ehud Olmert has finally resigned as prime minister amidst six separate criminal investigations, several of which are almost sure to result in indictments.

Israel’s last two presidents – a job that requires above all doing nothing to embarrass the state – both resigned in humiliation. One former justice minister is under indictment, and another has already been convicted of various improprieties on the day the Second Lebanon War broke out (though his conviction did not prevent him from returning as deputy prime minister). And finally, the previous Minister of Finance is already on trial for massive embezzlement from the workers organization he headed. Tellingly, the primary qualification that Tzippi Livni, the most likely replacement for Olmert, can cite is that she is honest, as if that were an extremely rare quality.

In the current issue of Azure, editor Assaf Sagiv makes the interesting point that lawlessness has always been part of the Zionist ethos, which he attributes, in part, to the fact that so many early Zionists were self-consciously in rebellion against the Law. The insouciant rule breaker once glorified by Israeli culture has now morphed into the venial politician busy padding his own pockets.

Florida Congressman Robert Wexler, one of Senator Barack Obama’s leading spokesmen to the Jewish community, argues that Democrats are better for Israel than Republicans. What’s his proof?: Compare Israel’s security situation today to what it was in 2000 at the end of President Clinton’s term in office.

In inviting that comparison, Wexler is presumably counting on the collective amnesia of Jewish voters. Just in case anyone forgot, the end of the Clinton presidency was not exactly a happy time for Israel. After the failure of the Camp David negotiations, Yasir Arafat launched the Al Aksa intifada, and Israel found itself at war on Rosh Hashanah 5761. That war continued through March 2002, in which month alone nearly 140 Israelis lost their lives in terror attacks. Only after Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield, following the Seder night massacre in Netanya, did terror attacks on its citizens begin to abate.

Clinton, it must be admitted, does not bear sole, or even primary, responsibility for the failure of Camp David and its aftermath. He was, in part, pulled to Camp David by Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who was desperate to save his failing government by achieving some dramatic breakthrough. That pattern was repeated in the last two years of Ehud Olmert’s term as prime minister. Despite multiple criminal investigations and a personal popularity rating that frequently did not reach double digits, Olmert nevertheless embarked upon a dazzling array of diplomatic initiatives with the Palestinians and Syrians in a futile attempt to save his doomed government. (I write hours after Olmert handed his letter of resignation to President Shimon Peres.)

Though President Clinton does not bear primary responsibility for Camp David, what made Camp David possible at all, were certain assumptions shared by Barak and Clinton. One was the extreme tolerance for Yasir Arafat’s failure to deliver on any of his endlessly recycled promises during the first decade of Oslo. Arafat’s failures to move seriously to stop terrorism or incitement in the official Palestinian media under his control were inevitably attributed to Arafat’s weakness – i.e., the lack of support in the Palestinian street for ending terrorism or incitement.

Along with the new Jewish year we welcomed a new cycle of Torah-readings. For Californians, the first post-Sukkot Sabbath reading was particularly timely, coming as it did a mere ten days before the 2008 elections. It should have given pause to Jewish opponents of Proposition 8, the measure aimed at amending California’s constitution to enshrine the traditional definition of marriage in state law.

An assortment of arguments can be made in support of Proposition 8 – from the deep and abiding connection of marriage with procreation, to the healthful effects for children of having both a mother and a father, to the endangerment of religious freedom lurking in societal sanction of same-sex unions (which will all too easily be used to tar conscientious objectors as unlawful discriminators).

Such arguments aside, though, Jews with respect for their religious tradition will perceive in the first chapters of Genesis the clear template for marriage: the first man and the first woman. As the text declares: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother and cling to his wife [literally ‘his woman’] …” (Genesis 2:24).

And, in fact, the Torah, both in its written dimension (what we call the Jewish Bible) and its oral one (the “rabbinic” material that determines Jewish law), goes on to forbid the sexual union of two men. (The issue of female same-sex unions, while in a different category, is prohibited as well.)

Ever change your mind after reading something? In the course of translating an essay I was stimulated to rethink a principle I once held dearly: suspicion and avoidance of large crowds. I believed that babies and small children had no place in crowds since they don’t understand what is going on and may disturb. And we know how mass gatherings can be used for nefarious as well as efficacious purposes.
But while translating an essay on Hakhel by Rabbi Haim Sabato from Hebrew to English, I reevaluated my opposition to crowds. (BTW two ceremonies in remembrance of the Hakhel took place during Hol Hamoed Sukkot). I changed my mind on the issue of crowds due to an insight of the Malbim that R. Sabato cites in his essay on Hakhel…

All the Jewish holidays are times of rejoicing, but only Sukkos is specifically known as “the time of our rejoicing.” The special joy of Sukkos is connected to the extra measure of closeness to God we feel as we leave our fixed, permanent dwellings to spend a week in an impermanent structure, with no fixed roof over our heads.

That miniature exile, explains Rabbi Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler, leads to a negation of the material world (bitul hayesh) and paves the way for a greater closeness to God. The sukkah is a reminder of the Clouds of Glory that protected our ancestors in a howling wilderness, and helps us feel God’s enveloping love.

THE ENTIRE WORLD is currently experiencing its own form of negation of the material, though few have been heard expressing much rejoicing . World stock exchanges are crashing, and the retirement nests that millions had squirreled away in “safe” pension plans are disappearing. The only question according to many economists is whether we are on the cusp of a worldwide recession or depression.

Already the meltdown in financial markets has had major consequences. Two of the world’s leading investment banks have bit the dust, and the rest are being reorganized on a completely new footing. The American presidential election, which was a dead heat three weeks ago, increasingly looks like it will end in a Obama rout, though he has given no indication of any economic understanding and even though one of the causes of the crisis was the pressure placed on banks by Democratic legislators to offer mortgages to non-creditworthy home purchasers. (By speaking more frequently and impulsively, McCain has removed any doubts about his own grasp of economics.)

The Obama campaign is encouraging Jewish kids to fly to Florida to visit their grandparents over Columbus Day weekend. The website for the intitiative, www.thebigschlep.com, features comedienne Sarah Silverman instructing Jewish youth in Lysistrata-style tactics: Threaten to withhold future visits unless Granny agrees to vote for Obama. Here’s another suggestion: Tell them that if they don’t vote for Obama, “the goodest person we’ve ever had as a presidential choice,” it can only be because they are racists.

My guess is that Bubbe and Zaidy will not be too impressed by such bullying; nor should they be. The grandchildren will seek to prove that Obama will is good for Israel, but their identification with Israel bears no relationship to that of their grandparents. For them the Holocaust is the stuff of history books, not a living memory. Ditto the U.N. vote on Israel’s creation. They did not huddle anxiously around TV sets listening to the U.N. debates leading up to the 1967 war, when a second Holocaust seemed all too possible and 10,000 graves were dug in Tel Aviv in anticipation of war casualties. Many have never heard of Entebbe.

A 2007 study by sociologists Steven Cohen and Ari Kelman found that more than half of non-Orthodox Jews under 35 would not view the destruction of the State of Israel as a personal tragedy. The death and/or expulsions of millions of fellow Jews is something they can live with. By those standards, they probably would not see the Holocaust as a personal tragedy either.

Indifference to Israel, Cohen and Kelman found, “is giving way to downright alienation” among the under 35 cohort. Israel complicates the social lives and muddles the political identity of young Jews. Only 54% profess to be comfortable with the idea of a Jewish state at all. These are not the people to be telling their grandparents who will be good for Israel.

Hashem prepared us for Rosh Hashanah this year with a vengeance.

The Midrash (Bereishis Rabbah 8:5) on the words, “Na’aseh adam – ” Let us make Man,” describes a debate that took place in the Heavenly Court prior to Man’s creation. Truth argued against Man’s creation on the grounds that he would be a constant liar. Tzedek, however, argued that Man should be created, for he would also perform righteous deeds. While the debate was raging, Hashem created man. The Midrash relates that Hashem told those with whom He had been ostensibly consulting, “While you were deliberating, na’asah adam, Man was created.”

The deeper meaning of the Midrash is that Man’s very creation was contingent. No decision was ever reached that he was worthy of creation. It is left to Man to demonstrate that he is worthy of creation through the exercise of his free will, to literally justify his existence. And every Rosh Hashanah, the anniversary of Man’s creation, we find ourselves in exactly the same situation — our very claim to existence is hanging in the balance.

The financial meltdown on Wall Street — a meltdown almost sure to spread to all the world’s financial capitals — in the days leading up to Rosh Hashanah emphasized how uncertain is every aspect of the reality that we take for granted. The description of America as the “world’s only superpower” suddenly rings hollow. Talk of a worldwide depression is in the air.

What does it take to get two very opinionated writers to drop their differences and collaborate on a hot topic?

A shared feeling that the topic is too important to go without comment. That is what led to a
recent op-ed in The Forward on Hekhsher Tzedek, the plan to introduce a second tier of hashgacha on food products that would assure compliance with ethical standards.

Rabbi Michael Broyde and I have written together before, more often than not on relatively innocuous issues of interest in the legal community. Our awareness that we come from somewhat different hashkafic universes and often hang out with some very different people has not diminished our friendship in the slightest. Neither has our frequent disagreeing on important matters. When we find that we do agree on more controversial topics, we sense that it might be important to broadcast far and wide that people from different points on the continuum of Orthodoxy nonetheless see some real danger ahead.

Anyone who took notice of our collaboration last week probably figured that out for him or herself. It was probably even easier to figure out after observing that we went head-to-head with Reform leader Rabbi Eric Yoffie, and that Agudah (completely independently) issued a press release on the same issue, making virtually identical points.

The defining element of the sukkah – the temporary dwelling in which Jews are commanded to spend a week each autumn, beginning five days after Yom Kippur – is the once-growing but now detached material that must comprise the structure’s roof.

Some use untreated bamboo canes; others, mats woven for the purpose from slivers of the same material; others still, branches or leaves or thin, unfinished wooden slats. Whatever its particular identity, the stuff is called s’chach, from a Hebrew word meaning to “cover” or “hover”; the word sukkah itself refers to the same.

But there is another Hebrew word that Jewish tradition associates with the word sukkah – “socheh” – and its meaning is “to see” or “to perceive.” That association would seem to imply that a sukkah somehow provides some perspective. Which, in fact, it does.

That is surely true on a mystical plane, but there is prosaic vision to be gained no less. It doesn’t take inordinate sensitivity to see things a bit differently while spending a week in a small rudimentary hut, within sight of, yet apart from, one’s more comfortable, more spacious home.

Being completely unschooled in the dismal science, I have nothing to say about the economic mess major parts of the very intertwined world finds itself in at the moment. In lieu of analysis, I offer a single anecdote, without comment. Readers can take from it what they wish.

A short few years ago, a young kollel-trained man had gotten some experience finding mortgages for prospective house buyers. Looking to improve his bottom line, he sent out feelers to various mortgage brokers. Each interview seemed to cover the same ground. A company representative explained the extremely liberal terms and the loose requirements for obtaining the loans they were offering. Moreover, each company threw in a similar pitch to the prospect, about how they could obtain a house with payments so affordable that he or she would still have money left for vacations, etc.

The young man was skeptical. How could the lender possibly afford such terms, and with such poor risks? Again, the answer was the same at each asking. The companies did not hold on to the mortgages, but quickly sold them to larger institutions that were free to change the interest rates. The trick was to convince people who thought (pretty much correctly) that they could not afford a house that the opposite was true. Once they took the bait, they would be locked in to escalating terms.

There was no deception involved. Borrowers were told that the rates could change. They were nonetheless enticed by the opening offer to get into something that would prove to be over their heads.

Rabbeinu Yonah discusses various barriers to teshuva in Sha’arei Teshuva. But perhaps the greatest barrier most of us experience is a lack of belief in our capacity to change. In this month of teshuva, as we contemplate all that requires improvement, we are struck that we have been here before. Last year we klapped al cheit on the same aveiros. Last year, we undertook certain kabbolos that seemed a distant memory by Tzom Gedaliah.

We cannot bring ourselves to promise Hashem once again that we will not fail in certain ways, after having done so last year and the year before that. Our promises, we fear, are beginning to resemble the undertakings the Palestinians were allowed to recycle endlessly throughout the Oslo process and as of about as much value.

Perhaps one corrective to these feelings of despair is to spend some time considering all those whom we have seen make changes, even dramatic ones. I think of a chavrusah from nearly thirty years ago. When we learned together, he was not really a very nice person; short-tempered and lacking in any social skills. Today when we meet, I cannot believe it is the same person and how little resemblance he bears to the young bochur I once knew. In many respects, his younger self may have been closer to his “natural” personna, but, if so, he overcame nature.

Not long ago, a young man got married in Jerusalem. The wedding hall was filled with a special electricity, as most of the guests knew where this young man had been but a few years ago. Those who stayed the longest at the chasunah were various mentors who had worked closely with him over the years.

A new volume of Tradition (available for paid download only) arrived in the mail a few days ago. A memorial volume offered in tribute to Rabbi Dr Walter Wurzburger z”l, it is especially rich and diverse in its contributors and contributions. I will comment, in the space of two or three posts, on three articles that grabbed my attention.

Seizing upon a jailhouse petition from one of the notorious Leopold and Loeb murderers, Rabbi J. David Bleich (“The Problem of Identity in Rashi, the Rambam, and the Tosafists”) launches into a discussion of what many would consider a hopelessly theoretical philosophical issue. By the time he finishes, he convincingly shows that a machlokes Rashi and Tosfos in multiple places in Shas follows and is illuminated by two different explanation of identity, espoused by Aristotle in antiquity, and A. J. Ayer in recent times. (He calls them, respectively, arguments from causality – seeing a nexus between the cause of a phenomenon, and the effect that is already resident in it – and from spatio-temporal contiguity.) Along the way, he turns several other gemaros – as well as chidushim of R Elchonon Wasserman and several representatives of the House of Brisk (none of whom presumably would appreciate being linked to either of the gentleman mentioned in the last sentence) – into one superbly organized sugya. Zeh v’veh gorem , among other things, will never look the same again.

With the exception of brain cells, it is argued that all other body cells die and are regenerated within seven years. On that basis, the famed privileged-genius pair who sought to commit the perfect crime petitioned the court for release after more than seven years had elapsed since the deed was committed. The prisoners, they argued, were not the murderers, having morphed into new beings.

A judge dismissed the argument, citing a common sense understanding of personal identity. While this may be sufficient in a Western court, it won’t make the grade in halacha. Rabbi Bleich lays bare the philosophical underpinnings of the issue, and then takes the reader on a quick tour of Shas and poskim, stopping at all the relevant sites, effortlessly displaying his signature combination of both breadth and deep lomdus.