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The reason I call your attention to this article is not so that you can have a look at an anti-Semitic diatribe in the guise of a serious position about the current state of affairs. It is so that you can see the comments. Britain is not known to have nearly such a strong understanding of Israel’s need to defend itself. These comments are, in that context, surprisingly heartening. We’ve already gone several rounds on how Bush, McCain and Obama stack up when it comes to Israel. Now that Olmert has finally decided that Kassam rockets raining on Sderot deserve a bit more than improved bomb shelters in response, all our statements about Bush’s amazingly pro-Israel position, and our concerns about Obama, are all-too-rapidly being verified. First, let’s look at the current US Administration’s response to the violence on the Israel-Hamastan border: The U.S. on Saturday blamed the militant group Hamas for breaking a cease-fire and attacking Israel, which retaliated with strikes of its own during what became the single bloodiest day of fighting in years… It was “completely unacceptable” for Hamas, which controls Gaza, to launch attacks on Israel after a truce lasting several months, said Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council. “These people are nothing but thugs, so Israel is going to defend its people against terrorists like Hamas that indiscriminately kill their own people,” Johndroe said in Texas as President George W. Bush was spending the week before New Year’s at his ranch here. “They need to stop. We have … Read More >> Does all an organization that routinely attacks innocents have to do to achieve respectability is garner the support of a population and open health … Read More >> Well, not quite ten. So we’ll start closer to the top. What follows are some comments from around the Jewish world that struck me as particularly powerful and telling. They are presented with very little or no comment. They are all in the hameivin yavin category. Number 4 Quote What is abundantly clear is that Bernie Madoff is a mass-murderer. We will never know the names of the people who are going to die because of him, but he has killed numerous would-be recipients of medical care, welfare support and just plain money to pay the bills with, from the host of charities … Read More >> Last weekend, in which the parshah we read referenced an eshkol anavim, Klal Yisrael lost an ish ha-eshkolos. Rav Yehoshua Leiman z”l was niftar after a long struggle with illness. Separated as we were by thousands of miles (he lived in Flatbush), I did not know him well, but knew that he was remarkable the very first time I met him, at one of the first AJOP conventions. I don’t recall how we first began speaking, but it became apparent that he was a genius. (It is probably familial. Yibadel le-chayim tovim, his brother is Prof. Shnayer Leiman.) I deliberately chose the elliptical “became apparent,” because he didn’t flaunt it. He was downright easy-going, modest and accessible. Our conversations initially were about Maharal, and spread to other sifrei machshavah. He would always challenge me – to provide a source here, refine a thought there. His Torah interests were eclectic. Although clearly self-defining as a member of the haredi Yeshivah world, he was familiar with historical and academic figures and scholarship, Rav Kook, and the philosophical works of the rishonim (the ones not studied too often any more in yeshivos). He was extremely medakdek in halacha, carrying around a sack … Read More >> by Rabbi Pesach Lerner For me, the story began about 17 years ago. I sincerely hope and pray that it ends soon. I joined the National Council of Young Israel’s (NCYI) professional staff in October 1991. One of the first things I began doing was visiting the many Young Israel branches. During the first few years of my employment at NCYI, I visited almost all of the more than 150 Young Israel branches throughout the United States and Canada. During that time, I heard about an event which was scheduled to take place at the Young Israel of Manhattan in the Lower East Side of New York City, which was to focus on sharing information and raising awareness about Jonathan Pollard. I thought that attending the event would be a great way to meet the members of the shul and to learn something about Jonathan Pollard, a name that I recognized but did not really know much about. I attended the event, where not only did I meet members of the shul, but I also heard a startling story about Jonathan Pollard, who spied for Israel and received a life sentence. The Pollard story bothered me, as … Read More >> Recently, a commenter reacted with both surprise and disdain to the hopeful messages here following the election of Barack Obama as our next President. Referring correctly to the fact that many of our writers — including myself — had grave reservations about Obama (the word he used was “villified” [sic]) and strongly favored McCain, he wondered how Cross-Currents writers could be “scurrying to demonstrate their moderation and seek his favor.” The simple answer is that we did not “vilify” anyone, but referred critically to Obama’s public record — and now that the election is over, it’s time to work with our President-elect rather than against him. During the election, I said Obama’s record on Israel worried me — and for good reason. For example, in an essay on the Middle East, paragraphs referring to Hizbollah and Hamas categorized the former, but not the latter, as a terrorist organization. Could anyone concerned for Israel’s safety not find that troubling? John McCain’s decades-long relationship with Israel is unquestioned, his attitude towards Arab terrorism consistent, and his belief in Israel’s right and need of aggressive self-defense, refreshingly frank. But John McCain isn’t going to be our next president, and instead of … Read More >> Recently I was privileged to participate in a student-group organized panel presentation at Yeshiva University entitled “The Kosher Quandary: Ethics and Kashrut.” The panel included representatives of the Orthodox Union, the Rabbinical Council of America and a social justice advocacy group, Uri L’tzedek. The panelists were given a list of questions to address in their remarks, and I think, and hope, that it was an educational experience for all who attended. Since some people seem to have imagined that I said things I didn’t, or chose to ignore things I did say, I offer my remarks below, which followed my expression of gratitude to the organizers. I would like to make clear at the onset that, while I intend to speak clearly and bluntly tonight, nothing I say should be construed as impugning the intentions or good will of anyone. I might feel that certain actions or decisions are misguided, but I mean to judge things, not, G-d forbid, people. Searching for the right metaphor for the relationship between ethics and kashrut, what I came up with is the relationship between… personal hygiene and poetry. Get it? Well, a great poet might … Read More >> No, he’s not Orthodox. More on that later. Within a handful of hours after the story broke, the Nazi sites spun it as predicted. Cretins that they are (and therefore understanding nothing about where the money went), they questioned where someone could hide $50 billion. The answer is self-evident: the Zionist Jew had it all shipped to banks in Israel! The fallout would have likely been far worse if Madoff would have embezzled little old ladies in Middle America. Instead, so many of the victims were Jews. The racist and Arab sites were too busy gloating over all those Jews losing fortunes to try to spin this as the latest epilogue to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and their plan for global domination. Less predictable was the baseless charge that Madoff was Orthodox. Rabbi Elliot Dorff, rector of American Jewish University (formerly University of Judaism, the West Coast equivalent to the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary) wondered how a person who davened three times a day could get it so wrong. It all goes to show, he argued, that ritual observance is not enough, and Jews must learn to incorporate ethics and morals … Read More >> (By Noam Neusner, who was a speechwriter and Jewish liaison for President Bush from 2002-2005.) President Bush and First Lady Laura Bush will watch Monday night as the grandsons of Harry Truman and David Ben-Gurion light a menorah on the State Floor of the White House. It will be the eighth year the president has devoted an evening to celebrate Chanukah, and more than 600 Jewish friends and guests will celebrate with him. The White House will serve kosher food and the Marine Band will play Chanukah favorites. Cynics will say it’s easy for presidents to do these kinds of events — that’s what all presidents do, after all. They hold nice parties and make people feel good and important. But with this president, the Jews are different — they really do matter to him. I know because I saw it firsthand on his staff and as his liaison to the Jewish community. I saw his eyes well up while watching the Holocaust-themed movie “Paper Clips” in the family theater. I know how moved he was by meeting with Soviet Jewish refuseniks, Holocaust survivors and the parents of slain journalist Daniel Pearl. There was one meeting in particular — with Jews from around the … Read More >> The NY Jewish Week noted a thread of criticism of media coverage of the terrorist attack on the Chabad of Mumbai, one both different and more subtle than the media’s obfuscation of the terrorists’ identity as Islamic radicals and their Jewish victims as deliberate targets (though, to be certain, it took note of that as well). What exercised the Jewish Week is that the news reports called the Chabad shluchim “ultra-Orthodox.” But lest you think that the NY Jewish Week took this as an opportunity for soul-searching, to perhaps finally discard its consistent use of a disparaging term to describe our community, prepare to be disappointed — for that impression would be sadly mistaken. Mark Steyn, writing in the National Review and Washington Times (Dec. 6), noted that “ultra” was used “in almost all the western media … less a term of theological precision than a generalized code for ‘strange, weird people, nothing against them personally, but.” And Steyn adds, were these ultras “stranger or weirder than their killers?” Mark Steyn, in this passage quoted in the NYJW, gets it exactly right. Frequent readers will note that many of us at Cross-Currents have protested … Read More >> Each of us knows at least one. I mean someone who inevitably makes you feel happier, more inclined to do something nice for the next person you meet, just by spending a few moments in their presence. Someone who radiates simchas hachaim. Simchas hachaim bears no resemblance to the hale-fellow-well-met jocularity of a successful politician – an external garb. It is a quality that wells up from within and is incapable of being contained within one body, but must burst forth and be shared with others. It is expressed in a warm smile, a natural inclination to judge others favorably, optimism, and a strong desire to help others. Take my former optician Mr. Rosenberg, for instance. I never saw him without a gentle, knowing smile on his lips. And he never showed any sign of pressure, even when someone who had not purchased glasses from him came in looking for a tiny screw to hold the earpiece. He would just take out his plastic box containing hundreds of such screws and patiently try one after another until he found the right one. Then he would inevitably waive payment, even though fiddling with a series of tiny screws would be … Read More >> No subject so divides the Jews of Israel and America as that which once bound them most closely: Israel itself. To appreciate the gap try telling an American Jew that George W. Bush was the president who best understood Israel’s predicament and watch his jaw drop. American Jewry is lining up behind a return to the hyperactive American peacemaking of the Clinton years. The Jewish Alliance for Peace and Justice, according to an article in New York’s Jewish Week, recently obtained the signatures of 800 rabbis on a petition to president-elect Obama urging him to make the Israeli-Palestinian peace process an early priority, beginning with the appointment of a high-level envoy to the region. And the new left-wing group J Street contacted the Obama transition team to argue that American Jews want a more active peace process and that large Democratic majorities in Congress provide the incoming administration with the power to push an aggressive peacemaking agenda. J Street’s is likely right. For many American Jews Israel has become a drag. If they were to wake up tomorrow and find that Israel had bloodlessly disappeared and its Jews had found safe haven elsewhere, they would be relieved. That includes the … Read More >> The students of a prominent Eastern-European rabbi were about to join him to light the Chanukah lamp. The rabbi noticed a broom near the window next to his Menorah and asked for it to be removed; apparently, he was concerned that in their zeal to emulate him, his followers would place a broom by the window before lighting their Menorahs too. There is a humorous (and definitely fictitious) end to the story: having visited the rabbi, each of his students went home, placed a broom by the window and then removed it before lighting his candles! A common perception of a significant part of the Orthodox world is that sometimes it seems monolithic and may stifle individual expression. Detractors often point to the restrictive nature of Jewish law, conformity in dress-style (this criticism is levelled especially at those visible communities with distinctive garb) and the seemingly limited range of educational and other life-choices available to its adherents. There is a sense that the ‘men in black’ all think the same way and live cloned, indistinguishable lives. There is some truth to this, something for which we make no apologies: traditional Judaism is predicated on a belief in the … Read More >> The President-elect once bought a home whose deed prohibited its resale or rental to Jews. He had associations with a number of dubious characters, some of whom did not much care for Hebrews. In fact, he himself seems to have harbored some pretty anti-Jewish sentiment. No, no, not Senator Obama. That was Richard Nixon, whose delivery of arms to the Jewish State during the Yom Kippur War helped prevent an Arab victory. And who, in the terminal crisis of his presidency, confided in two identifiable Jews – Henry Kissinger and Boruch Korff (known as “Nixon’s rabbi”). Then there was President Harry Truman, who wrote that he found “the Jews… very selfish” and expressed anger at the fact that “a thousand Jews [had been brought] to New York on a supposedly temporary basis and they stayed.” The same Harry Truman who acted to help Jews in postwar Europe and supported Israel’s creation – against his own State Department. Such examples point to a truth paid lip service but not always internalized: History is determined not by any sovereign’s personal biases but by the ultimate Sovereign’s insuperable will. As King Solomon wrote (Proverbs 21:1) “Like streams of water … Read More >> As the dust settles on this year’s election season, it’s worth reflecting on one aspect of the campaign that holds particular relevance for the Jewish community: the way in which the principle of separation of church and state, a longtime sacred cow of Jewish communal life, was unceremoniously put out to pasture. For many decades now, the secular Jewish establishment and non-Orthodox religious movements have invoked the Constitution’s Establishment Clause to fight tooth-and-nail against government aid to yeshivos. Yet, along came a candidate named Barack Obama and the tantalizing possibility of a liberal Democratic rise to power, and, suddenly, this hallowed concept disappeared from the collective American Jewish consciousness. This year’s Democratic convention was so suffused with religious content that it could have been mistaken for a camp revival meeting, except that this one featured even more rabbis than pastors. Then again, it was that convention’s nominee, Barack Obama, who told a Greenville, South Carolina church last year that he is “confident that we can create a kingdom right here on earth,’ and asked the congregation to “pray that I can be an instrument of G-d.” Hillary Clinton, for her part, told a campaign forum that “you can sense … Read More >> A Letter to the Editor in the Baltimore Jewish Times, December 5, restates a common theme in modern Jewish thought: whereas assimilation and low birth rates are lowering the Jewish population, we should be as welcoming as possible to prospective converts. Now, they argue, is the time to lower the barriers to entry for anyone wishing to identify with the Jewish people. Jews make up less than two percent of the American population and less than one quarter of one percent of the world’s people. Each year, assimilation and low birth rates lower the Jewish population, both in relative and absolute terms. We are becoming fewer and fewer and yet there are some among us who would reject the handful of brave souls who wish to identify as Jews. One can only wonder how the above writer would disparage the attitude towards conversion of Rabbi Tzion Levi, zt”l, who led the Jewish community of Panama for fifty-seven years. A short news item in Mishpacha, December 3, remarked on his petirah (passing), and included the following: Rabbi Levi laid down the law on conversions. He decreed that no conversions were to be performed in Panama; whoever wanted to convert would have to … Read More >> You may have read it here first, but the NY Times’ nonsensical, even demented speculation that the Mumbai Chabad house might have been “an accidental hostage scene” has cascaded through the hands of many media critics. Mark Steyn, in particular, so precisely echoed my own sentiments on the matter that I could almost wonder if he’s now reading Cross-Currents: Hmm. Greater Bombay forms one of the world’s five biggest cities. It has a population of nearly 20 million. But only one Jewish center, located in a building that gives no external clue as to the bounty waiting therein. An “accidental hostage scene” that one of the “practitioners” just happened to stumble upon? “I must be the luckiest jihadist in town. What are the odds?” Those critics found many additional examples scattered throughout the international media of what Andrew McCarthy calls Willful Blindness, “the refusal among academics and political leaders to confront fundamentalist Islamic tenets, the 800-pound gorilla that is somehow always in the middle of the room when terror strikes.” Caroline Glick goes a step further, calling it “The jihadist-multicultural alliance.” [Thanks to Scott Johnson of Power Line for these sources.] Again and … Read More >> [Rabbi Ilan Feldman is the rav of Cong. Beth Jacob in Atlanta, and a member of the Board of AJOP] The challenges of battle come at combatants fast and furiously, and can never be fully anticipated beforehand. What makes the greatest difference in a soldier’s ability to meet them? Training. Training creates automatic responses, so that, when the crunch comes, the soldier need not pause to think through the various steps of say, firing his weapon. The act comes naturally. It is thorough training that carries a soldier through the thick of battle. The fighter who uses his first battle as his training ground runs a high risk of becoming a casualty in his first training exercise. As a society, we are about to enter what is euphemistically called an “economic downturn.” We are only at the beginning an extremely challenging period of time whose duration is unclear. We are actually about to enter battle. The obvious “enemy combatants” in the war zone are formidable enough foes: little available credit, job losses and the fear of job loss, foreclosures, disappearing retirement savings as the market plummets, entire industries on the verge of bankruptcy, huge and ineffective government rescue packages. But theses … Read More >> A New York tabloid recently mocked the Bush White House. No news there; ‘tis the season, so to speak. The fodder for this ridicule, though, wasn’t political. It consisted, rather, of the artwork on the Bushes’ invitations to this year’s White House Chanukah party. A beautiful snowy White House scene dominates the card; all the way off to the side, a horse is drawing a wagon bearing a holiday tree. As in the past, some Agudath Israel representatives, myself included, received invitations to the Chanukah event. I smiled at the card when it arrived, but didn’t find it offensive in any way. According to the New York Post, though, someone – although unwilling to share his or her name – did. If we needed more evidence, beyond the countless blogs out there, that some people have all too much time on their hands and all too little sense in their heads, it’s here. Those who received the invitations are presumably Jewish. Does the person who thought it clever to call a reporter realize how remarkable it is that there even is a Chanukah party hosted by the President and First … Read More >> |
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