There is a tendency in the Israeli Torah community to view the world as a zero-sum game, in which that which benefits the secular population is at our expense and vice versa. An intelligent friend of mine once argued with a straight face that the chareidi community is overtaxed because the funding we receive for education constitutes a lesser percentage of national budget than our share of the population. When I explained to him that we also use the roads, are protected by the IDF, and drink the water, he reacted as if he had never thought of that.

Of course, everyone appreciates that we are in a common boat with respect to security. An Iranian nuclear attack would not distinguish between religious and non-religious. When a decree of destruction. comes to the world, it sweeps before it the tzaddik and ordinary person alike. But common interests are by no means limited to matters of security. The perennial problem of Israel’s lack of drinking water is another example of a crisis affecting one and all.

A few weeks ago, I wrote in these pages a piece summarizing some major lessons from the life of Rabbi Moshe Sherer, zt”l. I now realize that I left out a very important lesson: Rabbi Sherer was extraordinarily careful never to let anyone close to him whom he feared might ever reflect badly on Torah Jewry. Many times, he rejected out of hand suggestions that Agudath Israel of America honor particular people out of a concern that the award might come back to haunt the organization one day.

Though I described this trait in Rabbi Sherer, I don’t think I fully appreciated it. I did not realize how great the temptation is nor how rare is the ability to resist. We are not talking about turning down money to do something that is clearly wrong or where the potential downside is evident to all, but about something much more subtle: Refusing an immediate and obvious benefit because of a slight suspicion that it may one day generate a negative fall-out.

The Tiger Woods saga hardly rises to the level of Greek tragedy. A taste for cheap women is not exactly the type of tragic flaw to warrant the attention of the great tragedians. It is too ubiquitous.

In Greek tragedy the hero’s tragic flaw is always intertwined with his greatness. An outsized sexual appetite is not self-evidently related to the quality that – even more than his physical prowess – made Tiger Woods arguably the greatest golfer ever: his phenomenal cool under pressure.

Yet watching the wreck of Woods’ career, one experiences something of the horror that Athenian audiences felt. His descent was every bit as precipitous and sudden as that of Oedipus upon learning that Jocasta was his mother. A month ago, he was the most admired man in the world. One could not walk around the corner in any major metropolitan airport in the world without confronting Tiger’s smiling visage or his hand raised in triumph on some 18th green.

Today, he is the non-stop butt of every comedian on the planet, and could not show his face in public without the sure knowledge that everyone is pointing at him and sniggering. The advertisers who made him the first sports figure … Read More >>

[Editor’s note: Rabbi Rosenblum originally submitted this as a comment, responding to one reader’s feedback to an earlier piece. This piece is too valuable to allow it to go unnoticed to the many of our readers who do not look at the Comments section. At my suggestion, therefore, we are publishing it as a stand-alone submission.]

More than anything I’m saddened by the comment of KollelGuyinEY. Probably because I can visualize him writing with a feeling of self-righteous virtue that he has defended the honor of the gedolei Torah. He has not.

KollelGuy seems to think that because he has not seen a front-page announcement in Yated Ne’eman that it is now permitted to work that the exalted figures he mention believe that every yungeman must stay in kollel indefinitely. I would start the other way: Have you ever heard of a yungeman who went to one of the figures mentioned and told him — We have no food on the table; my wife is breaking down; our shalom bayis is a wreck because of fighting over money; or just that he feels that he is stagnating after many years in kollel, with no prospect of any … Read More >>

Yaakov Avinu represents the highest level of perfection among the Avos. Avraham Avinu produced a Yishmael; Yitzchak Avinu produced an Esav. But Yaakov’s progeny became the Twelve Tribes; each one of them entered into Klal Yisrael.

Avraham’s defining middah (characteristic) was chesed (loving-kindness); Yitzchak’s was the opposite, gevurah (strict judgment). Yaakov’s characteristic of emes (truth) can be viewed as a synthesis of the two.

The above schema is well-known. But it raises an interesting question. Why did HaKadosh Baruch Hu have to proceed through Avraham and Yitzchak to reach Yaakov? Why could He not have just started with the embodiment of emes in Yaakov? Apparently, emes could only arise out of a creative tension between chesed and din. That tension was a necessary condition for reaching the ultimate perfection.

My friend Rabbi Aharon Lopiansky first articulated this insight while counseling a young ba’al teshuva who was torn between his desire to deepen his own Gemara learning and his sense of obligation to share what he had already learned with the great majority of Jews who have never tasted Torah in their lives. The most important thing, Rabbi Lopiansky told him, was to continue to live with the tension rather than try to deny … Read More >>

Frum voters in New Jersey faced what was in many ways a wrenching decision in last week’s gubernatorial election. On the one hand, the incumbent Democratic governor John Corzine had proven to be highly responsive to the concerns of the Torah community in his first term in office, a fact attested to by Agudath Israel of America’s New Jersey representative and the endorsement of the Lakewood Vaad and senior figures in Bais Medrash Govoha in their private capacities.

Given Corzine’s record on matters of immediate concern to the Torah community, including school funding, there was a strong argument to be made that he deserved the community’s support as an expression of the basic Torah middah of hakaras hatov. Even leaving aside any ruchnios considerations, the Torah community has an important practical interest in being seen as a community that remembers its friends. And that consideration applied even though the Republican candidate Chris Christie led throughout the campaign. Those who are seen as fair weather friends will end up not being trusted by either party.

Once the Lakewood Vaad endorsed Corzine, there was yet another practical consideration in favor of supporting the incumbent. The more that community leaders are perceived as being able … Read More >>

Ever wonder where the report featured that Israeli soldiers kidnap and kill Palestinians in order to harvest their vital organs for transplants originated. Palestinian Media Watch provides the answer. It was lifted in toto from the December 24, 2001 edition of Al Hayat Al Jadida, the official Palestinian Authority newspaper.

Daniel Bostrum the intrepid reporter for Sweden’s largest circulation paper Aftonblandet who plagiarized this fabrication has said of his handiwork, “Whether it’s true or not, I have no idea. I have no clue.” Given his indifference to truth of his journalistic offerings, what further “scoops” can we anticipate from Bostrum? Again, Palestinian Media Watch provides the answer.

Here are just some of the charges one can read in the official Palestinian press or hear from leading Palestinian Authority officials. Israel will pay 4,500 shekels to any Palestinian who can prove he is a drug addict. Israel produced and distributed to Palestinians two hundred tons of drug-laced bubble-gum designed to destroy the genetic systems of Palestinian youth? It also distributes carcinogenic food and fruits for Palestinian consumption and children’s games that beam radioactive x-rays. Beautiful Israeli prostitutes are sent to infect Palestinians with HIV-virus. And don’t forget Suha Arafat’s accusation to … Read More >>

Readers of Chananya Weissman’s piece “Shidduch crisis? What shidduch crisis?” (Jerusalem Post, October 21) will quickly discern that he does not think too highly of sixty American roshei yeshiva who recently published a public letter addressing the “shidduch crisis” in the Orthodox world. They are variously compared to Balaam’s donkey, accused of being “disconnected from logic and reality,” and described as attaching their names to “foolish words” comparable to declaring a chicken to be an ostrich.

As someone who runs an organization devoted to helping older Orthodox singles find a spouse, one might at least expect Weissman to express appreciation that the sixty roshei yeshiva publicly called attention to the fact that hundreds of girls from non-Chassidic haredi homes are failing to find a spouse. But no, they are castigated for having denied any such crisis until now, or for having said the phenomenon only existed in the Modern Orthodox world, or having claimed that it results exclusively from exposure to Internet or movies or television.

Rabbi Chaim Shmuelevitz, zt”l, in his classic Sichos Mussar, makes a striking statement: The true measure of a man is the degree to which he accepts responsibility for his actions. That quality of taking responsibility (achrayus) has several aspects. The first involves not blaming others for the consequences of one’s decisions.

The tendency to blame goes back to the beginning of time. Adam attributed his eating of the forbidden fruit to Chava: “The woman whom You gave to be with me – she gave me of the tree, and I ate” (Bereishis 3:12). And Kayin blamed Hashem for his murder of Hevel, with all manner of excuses: You created the yetzer hara; You could have protected Hevel from me; If You had accepted my offering with the same favor that You accepted his, I would not have become jealous and killed him (Tanchuma Bereishis 9).

Yehudah merited kingship because he took responsibility for his deeds and words. He acknowledged the signet ring, wrap, and staff sent to him by Tamar as his own. Later he argued with his brothers as to whether his promise to Yaakov Avinu to ensure Binyamin’s safe return required him to substitute himself for Binyamin as a prisoner, … Read More >>

No day of the year is so filled with promise as Yom Kippur. In Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner’s unforgettable words, Yom Kippur contains the potential not just to be a better person (bessere mentsch) but a completely different person (andere mentsch).

Yom Kippur is a day of rebirth. Just as the convert to Judaism is like a newborn infant by virtue of his acceptance of the Torah, so too can we become a new person on Yom Kippur. Conversion requires immersion in a mikveh, which symbolizes rebirth. And HaKadosh purifies us, as if in a mikveh, on Yom Kippur: “Rabbi Akiva said, ‘Happy are you, Yisrael. Before Whom do you become purified and Who purifies you? Your father in Heaven. . . and it says, [G-d is] the mikveh of Yisrael’” (Yoma 85b).

The forty days between the beginning of the month of Elul and Yom Kippur correspond to the forty days that Moshe Rabbeinu spent on Har Sinai preparing to receive the second Tablets of the Law. They form – at least ideally – one continuous process of teshuva (repentance). The most essential ingredient in that process is deep introspection on our part. Only if we know who we really are, and understand the myriad ways in which the yetzer hara has managed to insinuate itself into our lives and taken control, can we hope to change in the coming year.

Unfortunately, thinking deeply about ourselves, or anything else for that matter, is something at which we are ever less adept. The prospect of being alone with our thoughts, without any outside stimulus, terrifies us. If we find ourselves in any of those places or situations where thinking was once possible, we immediately start casting about for people to call on our cell-phones.

The Swedish government refused to condemn a totally unsupported article in the country’s largest circulation newspaper alleging that Israel routinely kidnaps and murders Palestinians to harvest their organs. To comment, said Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, would be a violation of the country’s principles of free speech.

Those who called for donors to withhold giving to Ben Gurion University after BGU Professor Neve Gordon penned an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, in which he advocated an international boycott of Israel, were accused of threatening academic freedom.

Both responses reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of the meaning of freedom of speech and academic freedom. Just because the content of speech is legal does not make it proper or immunize it from criticism. I have the right to express my thoughts. But I do not have a right to have The Jerusalem Post publish them, or to demand that it not publish letters ridiculing its “haredi apologist.”

Freedom of the press and speech protect Aftonbladet from sanctions by the Swedish government. But the Swedish government has its own interests – or so one would have hoped – in disassociating Sweden ancient anti-Semitic stereotypes, as the Swedish ambassador to Israel rightly recognized. Had a major Swedish … Read More >>

No Torah Jew finds it difficult to justify Israeli government expenditures on Torah education. For us, it is clear that without the citadels of Torah that all the efforts of the IDF to protect us from the dangers all around will be for naught.

But obviously few secular Israelis share that view. From their perspective, the most notable aspect of Torah education – at least that of males – is that it leaves many of its recipients lacking basic numeracy and unable to enter the workforce at anything above menial jobs, which will, in any event, prove insufficient to feed their large families. At most, some will acknowledge that the intellectual acuity attained in Talmud study makes it possible for many chareidi men to acquire later some of the missing skills and knowledge.

In Yoder vs. Wisconsin, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the Free Exercise Clause of the United States constitution prevented Wisconsin from enforcing its mandatory school attendance laws against religious groups who opposed education for those over 14. In reaching that conclusion, the Court noted that the religious groups in question are, in general, law-abiding citizens almost never found on the welfare roles. Few secular Israelis look at … Read More >>

Haredim think that the media shows a persistent and blatant bias in its coverage of the community. They are right.

For proof one need look no further than the coverage of the grisly July 23 attack on a counseling center for teenage homosexuals in Tel Aviv, which left two dead and more than a dozen others injured, three critically.

Before the blood had even been wiped from the floor, the media was rife with the presumption of haredi culpability. Some were quick to assume that the perpetrator was himself haredi. A moment’s reflection should have made clear how unlikely that was.

For one thing, murder is not a haredi thing, as Anshel Pfeffer noted in Ha’aretz. Second, despite Israel’s large Orthodox population, there is no history of religious Jews seeking out homosexuals and attacking them. Finally, the venue of the counseling center was not public knowledge, and would have been unlikely to be known to any haredi.

Western media, in general, and the Israeli media, in particular, avoid pegging ethnic labels on the perpetrators of crimes, unless, of course, they are haredim or settlers. After 9/11, for instance, then Secretary of State Colin Powell was quick to admonish against identifying the hijackers as Muslims, … Read More >>