Just before Pesach, the front pages of all Israel’s major papers were filled for days with three cases of horrific child abuse. In two of the cases, some of the children involved will likely never recover from their physical injuries, and it is hard to imagine the emotional injuries ever healing in any of the cases. Each of the three cases involved chareidi mothers.

One chareidi commentator noted that the explosion of the cases in the headlines seemed perfectly timed to coincide with the release of national figures on child abuse. And huge headlines quoting investigators describing the abuse as the worse they had ever encountered will be true only until the next sickening case comes to light. But the secret long known to social workers in the chareidi community is out of the bag: Our children enjoy no immunity from horrible abuse at the hands of their parents.

Each of the cases involved its own sensationalistic details, and together they raise many questions. The mother in the case in Beit Shemesh was the charismatic leader of a group of women, almost all whom came from non-chareidi backgrounds, who have taken to covering themselves in 18 layers or so of clothing, and who had already managed to achieve a certain international celebrity. The mother in the case in Jerusalem had apparently fallen under the spell of newly religious “mekubal,” who directed her.

Among the issues raised by these cases is: How is it that so many newcomers to the chareidi world have imbibed so many strange ideas? Who is teaching them? What kind of connection do they have with rabbonim once they enter the world? Even if they come with longstanding socio-pathologies, why does no one notice this?

Boxing may be dead but those who still savor the sight of heavyweights throwing roundhouse punches at a fast and furious pace could do worse than the current donnybroook between Justice Minister Daniel Friedmann and former Supreme Court President Aharon Barak.

The verbal fisticuffs between the two – like those between Barak and Richard Posner, one of America’s leading jurists — have performed a valuable public service by bringing to the fore a long postponed debate about the nature of the Israeli legal system. No longer can it be claimed that criticism of the Supreme Court is confined to proto-fascist, right-wing thugs. Friedmann is both an Israel Prize laureate in law and a man of the Left.

Just how long this debate has been suppressed can be discerned from the hysteria that has greeted Friedmann’s proposals for reform of the judicial system. In a pre-Pesach interview with Ha’aretz’s Ari Shavit, Barak predicted Friedmann would turn Israel into a “Third World country.” At least he did not threaten to cut off Friedmann’s hand, as did his former colleague on the Court Mishael Cheshin.

In the Ha’aretz interview, Barak accused Friedmann of seeking to dominate the entire legal system. But that is precisely what Barak himself did as Court President. He enforced uniformity of ideology and judicial philosophy throughout the judicial system, and now he seeks to bequeath to his protégé Dorit Beinisch the same power.

My pre-Pesach column “Five-Star Pesach” generated, as expected, a larger than usual number of responses. The issue is a hot-button one for many.

One friend wrote that going away to a hotel allowed him to spend most of his week in the beis medrash, a luxury he would not have had at home, where he would have been the program director for his young children. A number of women described Pesach in a hotel as an opportunity to savor the Chag, rather than feel like slaves shackled to the stove preparing festive meals for their families and guests for eight days. .

Another husband told me how his wife used to present the classical symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder in the weeks leading up to Pesach, which typically left shalom bayis in short supply as they limped into the Chag. Now the family still cleans for Pesach and does bedikas chametz, before heading for a nearby hotel, but they do so without all the bitterness attached.

To all who wrote to explain why the hotel experience helped their ruchnios experience of the Chag, I can only say, “I was not talking about you.” As I already acknowledged, there are plenty of reasons why a family might decide not to stay home for the Chag.

This time Tzippi Livni got it exactly right. “Davka because I am not a religious person, I want to preserve something in Tel Aviv that symbolizes the Chag; something in the public square that does not coerce anyone to do anything or refrain from doing anything in the privacy of his home,” she said in a recent discussion of the Chametz Law.

The Chametz Law, which forbids the public display of chametz (leavened products) for the purpose of sale during Pesach, benefits the secular Jewish state, not religious citizens. As an instrument of enforcing compliance with halacha, the law is totally ineffective, and would be counterproductive if it were effective: Many Israeli Jews – 70% of whom do not eat chametz on Pesach, according to a recent Yediot Aharonot poll – would davka do so if the state prohibited it.

Nor is the law for the protection of the sensitivities of religious Jews. There is no prohibition against seeing chametz in someone else’s possession. What does – or should – pain religious Jews is that other Jews feel no connection to the performance of mitzvot, not that they are witness to that fact.

Rather the law serves to remind Israeli Jews that they are members of a people with a very long history and distinctive practices that set it apart from all other peoples of the world. Strengthening national identity, as many secular Israelis have come to recognize, is the key to Israel’s long-term survival. And symbols that have their origin in traditional religious practice – e.g., bans on the sale of pork, Shabbat closure laws, the closing of restaurants on Tisha B’Av – play a role in instilling Jewish national identity.

What better time to contemplate the state of the Jewish people today than on the eve of our birth as a nation on Pesach? (I shall confine myself to the state of the Jewish people in Eretz Yisrael.)

The immediate external threats to the Jews of Eretz Yisrael — well-armed proxies of the jihadist Iranian state on both our northern and southern borders, the distinct possibility of a Hamas takeover of much of Judea and Samaria as well, and a soon to be nuclear Iran — absorb most of our attention. Yet precisely because of the magnitude of the external threats is the greatest danger facing the Jews of Israel today internal.

The Palestinians have long predicated their strategy on the belief that time is on their side, and that no matter how downtrodden they are today, they will ultimately prevail. Their goal is to wear down the Jews of Eretz Yisrael by making their lives so miserable that they can no longer bear living here.

Nothing better captures the Palestinian game plan than a story that I have told before, related by Palestinian legislator Selah Temari. While imprisoned in an Israeli jail for security offenses, Temari came to the conclusion that Israel was far too powerful to ever destroy. He decided that when he got out of jail he would devote himself to tending his own olive tree and abandon the struggle against Israel. He even began to study Jewish history to gain insight into the perseverance of the Jewish people in the face of so much adversity.

I will never forget an address by Rabbi Ephraim Wachsman at an Agudath Israel of America convention on the topic “Living a Life of Ruchnios amidst Gashmius.” I had never before heard Rabbi Wachsman, and I practically jumped out of my seat when he thundered: This topic represents a fundamental mistake. There is no ruchnius amidst gashmius. To the extent that a person is living in the world of gashmius he is removed from ruchnius!

I was reminded of those words recently on a recent trip to Los Angeles, where I had a rare opportunity to speak with a rav whose wisdom has always impressed me. In the course of our conversation, he asked to me, “What would you say is the greatest threat to Yiddishkeit today?” I leaned forward eagerly, confident that he would mention one of my favorite subjects. But I must admit that his answer would not have been on my top ten-list.

“Pesach in hotels,” turned out to be the winning answer. And my friend’s central criticism was similar to that of Rabbi Wachsman: the Pesach hotel industry takes what should be one of the ultimate spiritual experiences of every Jew’s life and encases it in a thick wrapper of materialism. Read the advertisements, he told me: “No gebrochts” right next to “24 hour tea bar;” “Daily daf hayomi” next to “Karate, go-carts, and jeeping for the kids.”

“Olympic-size pool,” “state-of-the-art-gym” (to work off all the extra pounds from the non-stop eating), “five-star accommodations” and famous singers are de rigueur for the full Pesach experience. And many throw in exotic locations – Hawaii, Cancun, the Bahamas, and an eighteen-hole golf course. What exercised my friend the most was the way that well-known rabbis, and even roshei yeshiva, are impressed into service in the advertisements, as if to put an imprimatur of ruchnius on the festivities.

Whenever I speak abroad about Israel’s security situation, I’m invariably asked: Why doesn’t the Israeli government ignore world opinion and do what it must to stop the terrorism? I always answer by pointing out that Israel does not manufacture F-16s or most of her other major weapons systems. Second, Israel’s economy is dependent on trade with other countries, chief among them the European Union.

Yet deference to world opinion has been taken way too far by our current government, to the point that Israel is unwittingly helping to fuel the international campaign of delegitimization against it. That campaign led by the unholy of trinity of NGOs, the United Nations, and major Western media outlets, the BBC chief among them, was the subject of a day-long symposium, featuring an impressive array of experts, sponsored by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs last week.

Not discussed, however, was the impact of Israeli government policy on the delegitimization of Israel. Since the first Oslo Accords, successive Israeli governments have adopted the position that Israel’s security is better served through diplomacy than by ensuring that Israel maintains defensible borders.

Yet those diplomatic efforts and the various attempts to subcontract our defense to outside parties — to Yasir Arafat under Oslo, to the U.N. in Lebanon, and to Egypt in the Philadephi Corridor — have only harmed our international standing, which is demonstrably lower today than at the start of the Oslo process. Any fleeting good will generated by such actions as the Gaza withdrawal is soon lost — and then some — when Israel is forced to respond to the consequences of its concessions.

The ArtScroll Gemara is known throughout the Torah world; far fewer know the name Torah Communications Network. The General Editors responsible for the creation the ArtScroll Gemara are household names; the name of the creator of the Torah Communications Network remains little known. In large part, the difference is a question of medium. Seforim are printed, and each sefer bears the name of those responsible for its production. Telephone shiurim, by contrast, bear no imprint nor is there any need to describe their provenance.

But Rabbi Eli Teitelbaum, the one-man force behind the creation of Torah Communications Network, surely appreciated his relative anonymity. Fame and money were two things that never held any attraction for him.

Only with his sudden passing last week is Rabbi Teitelbaum’s full impact on Torah Jewry worldwide over the past fifty years coming to light. From an early age, he was fascinated by technology. As a young boy, he used to take apart ham radios to understand how they worked. His younger brother Rabbi Shlomo Teitelbaum described in Reb Eli’s hesped fascination with every new gizmo. When asked him why he was wasting his time on such things, his response was always that this technology would someday be harnessed in the service of Torah.

His first major effort in that direction was via radio. He bought up radio time for a show called Mishnayos-on-the-Air, featuring Rabbi Nosson Scherman, his close friend from their days together as co-head counselors at Camp Torah Vodaath. Rabbi Scherman’s mellifluous voice and precise explanations made the program an instant success. Ever the master mechanech, Rabbi Teitelbaum added an interactive element in the form of quizzes and prizes that held the young listeners’ interest.

Last month, the English Yated Ne’eman bravely published a two-part article by R’ Avraham Birnbaum on some of the consequences of the ever accelerating dominance of Lakewood within the American learning community.

While the transformation of Lakewood is largely a tale of the remarkable growth of the American learning community, the changes have not come without costs.

It is now a standard rite of passage for American bochurim who are ready to marry to head for Lakewood. While they are in shidduchim, they will learn in overflowing batei medrash, with a thousand or more bochurim. After marriage, the default assumption is that the young couple will continue to live in Lakewood.

The presence of most of the eligible young learners in one place also has its effect on young women. Those from “out-of-town” communities must either leave their parents’ home and move to New York or endure costly and draining long-distance dating.

The Torah community of Eretz Yisrael achieved a brief moment of unity this past week. Unfortunately, it took the tragic slaughter of eight young yeshiva students at Yeshivat Mercaz Harav to bring it about.

Who could have even imagined before the attack the circumstances that could bring the Belzer Rebbe, Rabbi Shmuel Auerbach, Rabbis Rafael Shmulevitz and Yitzchak Ezrachi of Mirrer Yeshiva, Rabbi Moshe Mordechai Farbstein of Hebron Yeshiva, Rabbi Asher Weiss, and Rabbi Shmuel Bloom, executve vice-president of Agudath Israel of America to the campus of Mercaz Harav?

Or that would provoke the fiercely anti-Zionist Satmar Rebbe to proclaim of the students of Mercaz Harav, the flagship institution of religious Zionism, “When a disaster like this occurs, murderers penetrating into a yeshiva, it is as painful to HaKadosh Baruch Hu as the destruction of the Bais HaMikdash. This is a overwhelming tragedy for all of us. They were learning at that moment the same Torah we learn. The Gemara is the same Gemara.”

Speaking only a few minutes after the slaughter, Rabbi Reuven Leuchter, one of the closest talmidim of the late Mashgiach Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe, said that anyone who did not understand the shooting in Mercaz HaRav as a threat to every yeshiva, anyone who tried to make distinctions between this yeshiva and another, is a dangerous idiot.

My brief stopover in Toronto last week happened to coincide with a solidarity rally for Sderot called by the Toronto Jewish Federation. As an Israeli citizen and a resident of Israel for almost three decades, it struck me that if Jews in Toronto were gathering to show solidarity with their fellow Jews in Sderot, it was no less incumbent upon me to do so.

The growing apathy of North American Jewry towards Israel was one of the topics I had been discussing in a series of speeches on the security situation in Israel, and I felt it also behooved me to observe counterexamples as well.

Finally, the headline speaker was Professor Alan Dershowitz, probably Israel’s most forceful advocate in the mainstream American media. In recent years, he has argued that Israel should announce in advance that the price for rocket attacks on Israel will be the destruction of a certain number of houses in neighborhoods from which those rockets emanate – a rather brave position for a member of the Harvard faculty and someone still identified as an international human rights advocate. I was curious to hear whether he would expand on that proposal and whether he believes that Israel could withstand the international outrage if it followed his advice.

Dershowitz spoke with the expected eloquence, skillfully pressed the crowd’s emotional buttons, and succinctly pointed out how international public opinion is the key to Hamas’s strategy: If they kill Jews with their rockets, they win; if Israel kills Palestinian civilians in an attempt to stop terrorists who operate out of civilian areas, they also win. The Palestinian’s trump card, as their spokesmen constantly proclaim, is that they love death while Jews and the West choose life. They can thus sacrifice their own citizens without compunction.

Reb Chaim Brisker and the Chofetz Chaim were once discussing the wisdom of having a Torah newspaper. Reb Chaim Brisker asked the Chofetz Chaim who would write for the newspaper. “You won’t write because you don’t have time. I won’t write because I don’t have time. So who will write?” he asked. Then he answered his own question, “Those who have time.”

The strong implication was that only those who have too much time on their hands would end up writing, and in that case the public might well be better off without the benefit of their wisdom.

Of course there have been gedolei olam who wrote frequently for the broader public. German Jews of the mid-19th C. spent hours every Shabbos with the weekly essays of Rav Shamshon Raphael Hirsch. Rav Elchonon Wasserman’s, Hy”d, great work Ikvesa D’Mashicha was not originally written in book form, but as a series of essay on current events for popular journals.

Obviously we do not have access today to the thoughts of gedolim of comparable stature on current events. Once again the field has been left to those who have time. And if that is the case, the question begs to be asked: Why should the public want to hear their thoughts?

I suspect that some Mishpacha readers are beginning wonder whether the magazine has developed an obsession with at-risk youth ever since the well-publicized tour of chareidi MKs of the teen hangouts around Jerusalem’s Ben-Yehudah street. Mishpacha recently carried an interview with the highly respected Bnei Brak dayan Rabbi Yehudah Silman dealing, inter alia, with chinuch issues and featured the Novominsker Rebbe’s words to a group of mechanchim under the aegis of Binat Halev.

In addition, Rabbi Grylak, Rabbi Yaakov Horowitz, and myself have all addressed aspects of the topic more than once. (For the record, we do not discuss among ourselves or with the editors of Mishpacha what we are going to write about.) Even the English serial Black and White touched on it.

The objections of some readers on this score would be well taken if we were talking only about the obvious drop-outs from mainstream educational frameworks. If they were an isolated phenomenon, one could argue that they constitute the exception that proves the rule of our overwhelming success in raising children whose connection with the Ribbono shel Olam is vibrant and positive.

But the truth is that drop-outs constitute only the most glaring example of a larger probelm of alienation. That is why one famous lecturer on parenting bases almost all his examples on drop-outs: They serve to highlight more general problems in chinuch.

Rebbetzin Esther Farbstein is a great woman in many ways. She is not only one of the chareidi world’s leading public intellectuals, but also a model of refined middos. Michlala Seminary of Jerusalem sponsored an evening on campus two weeks ago in honor of the publication of her classic Hebrew work B’Seser Ra’am in English as Hidden in Thunder. to which almost 500 people showed up. (A closed circuit TV had to be set up for the overflow crowd.) The speakers included Rabbi Berel Wein, Mrs. Rose Stark, an Auschwitz survivor, who spoke on her experiences with Mengele, ym”sh, me, and Rebbetzin Farbstein. She acknowledged that her work is a major contribution, but added with characteristic modesty, “But it is not me. I do not feel that I wrote it.” She meant it. And it is true.

The Spiritual Response to the Holocaust

Every society or nation writes history with an eye to inculcating a particular national ethos. Thus the historiography of the Holocaust in the nascent Jewish state tended to focus on acts of physical resistance – most notably the Warsaw Ghetto uprising – that were consonant with the image of the proud “new” Jew” of outstanding bravery and belligerence.

Spiritual responses to the Holocaust – mitzvah observance in the ghettos and the death camps, attempts to preserve one’s humanity amidst unceasing degradation, the heart-wrenching halachic queries that were asked and answered – were either downplayed or ignored. Those who had gone to their deaths, in the words of partisan leader Abba Kovner, “like sheep to the slaughter” seemed an embarrassment. (Towards the end of his life, Kovner would wonder whether his brother who refused to abandon their elderly mother in the Vilna ghetto was perhaps the greater hero.)

I recently had an opportunity to speak at length with someone who has a broad familiarity with most of the institutions created in Israel to deal with chareidi kids who are outside of any regular educational format. In the course of the conversation, I mentioned a recent column, in which I noted that the dropout phenomenon is even more severe in all chareidi communities than in mixed communities.

The explanation of everyone to whom I spoke, including two major talmidei chachamim, was that such communities generate a degree of social pressure that proves unbearable for many youth, especially those who have their own “issues.”

My conversation partner, however, offered a very different explanation. In his opinion, it is the higher percentage of ba’alei teshuva drawn to the all chareidi cities that explains the differential. He claimed that at least 70% of the drop-outs in one such community are children of ba’alei teshuva.

If that is true (and that remains a big “if”), then we as a community should be asking some hard questions about the conduct of all our kiruv efforts. One immediate question would be: Is it better for ba’alei teshuva to move to all chareidi enclaves or would it be better for them to either join existing communities or form their own in the places they are already living?

Of all the stereotypes of charedim, probably none leaves us so shaking our heads as that of mindless, interchangeable automatons, marching lockstep to the commands of our rabbinic leadership. Because we view our friends and neighbors, not to mention ourselves, as individuals, with unique strengths and weaknesses, we assume the stereotype must be the product of malevolent hatred.

Yet some recent experiences suggest that judgment is off base. As I was waiting for my luggage in Heathrow Airport recently, some chassidim proposed making a minyan for afternoon prayers. I pointed out another four or five from their group who could complete the minyan, but the latter preferred to wait for their bags.

I found myself perplexed that six of the group wanted to do one thing and four something else. Subconsciously, I had assumed that all those wearing the same “uniform” must think alike. What I had done was no different than what secular Israelis do when they see a yeshiva student in a black suit and fedora, and assume that his entire life is guided by remote control.

The error of this type of thinking is apparently one that we must relearn all the time. When I mentioned my own stereotyping at the Shabbat table recently, one of my sons pointed out that I had written a column on the subject a few years back, after attending the final session of a Dale Carnegie course made up almost entirely of young chassidim.

Tu B’Shvat provides an annual opportunity to examine our Sages’ understanding of the general purpose of life.

Fruits are man’s soul food. In the original plan of Creation, fruit was to be the exclusive food for mankind. Every time a person eats of the fruit tree, says the Vilna Gaon, he absorbs a power that lies in the potential within the fruit and is capable of being realized by man.

The Torah specifically tells us that there is a connection between man and a fruit tree, and it is this connection that makes fruits uniquely suited to sustain man.

When laying siege to a city, we are forbidden to destroy the fruit trees surrounding the city: “Is the tree of the field a man that it should fall before you during a siege?” the Torah asks rhetorically (Devarim 20:19). But the words were read by our Sages as a statement of fact as well: man is like the fruit tree.

After the failed Camp David summit of 2000, George Will pronounced then prime minister Ehud Barak “perhaps the most calamitous leader any democracy has ever had” for the way he had succeeded in “delegitimizing all previous [Israeli] positions….”

By that standard, our current Ehud is worse.

Prime Minister Olmert too is dead to the importance of national will and belief in the justice of one’s cause in the life of nations. In his “new year” interview with The Jerusalem Post, Olmert uttered nary a word about Israel’s “red lines,” paid passing lip service to Jewish “rights,” and mentioned only illegal Jewish outposts - no Palestinian failures to keep their promises (such as the murder of three Jews by PA security personnel in the last six weeks). Nor did he stress the limits of what he can do without bringing about a civil war more ruinous than any Arab terrorism.

In his most demoralizing comment, Olmert portrayed Israel as desperate for peace: He spoke of the end of Israel’s existence as a Jewish state unless it can realize the vision of two states for two peoples. He thus confirmed Yasser Arafat’s old boast that the “Arab womb” will prevail, and, with his demographic determinism, strengthened the Palestinians in their view that time is on their side.

This week Jerusalem Post health reporter Judy Siegel reported that Samuel Golubchuk, the 84-year-old frum Jew from Winnepeg, whose doctors seek to remove him from his ventilator and feeding tube, had awakened. Mr. Golubchuk is now described as “awake, alert, has returned back to his baseline, sitting up in a chair at times, more interactive, and shaking hands purposively.”

Nevertheless his doctors still seek to kill him, and are contesting the matter in court, including moving to exclude the affidavits of experts on the grounds that they arrived too late. Apparently winning to them is more important than Mr. Golubchuk’s life. Indeed in a similar case recently in Calgary, involving an elderly Chinese man, whose family contested the doctors’ decision to cut off life support, and won, the patient eventually improved so much that he was able to walk out of the hospital and return home. Nevertheless the doctors continued to pursue an appeal. Presumably they wanted to bring him back to the hospital and kill him.

There is a hearing this afternoon that might well determine Mr. Golubchuk’s fate. His name is Chaim Shmuel ben Pinya. His son Percy can be reached at sgolubchuk@shaw.ca

No one in their right mind would knowingly ingest poison. Unless, of course, he or she was diagnosed with the dreaded disease and the doctors prescribed chemotherapy.

But even after the decision has been made that chemotherapy offers best hope of destroying the malignancy, doctors continue to monitor the effect of the toxins on the patient. There is no point to administering a “cure” that is worse than the disease.

And if the chemotherapy proves successful, the patient’s physicians do not simply ignore the adverse side affects. Everything possible is done to alleviate those side effects.

To what does this moshol refer?

A Winnipeg case currently winding its way to its grim conclusion pits the children of Samuel Golubchuk against doctors at the Salvation Army Grace General Hospital. According to the pleadings, Golubchuk’s doctors informed his children that their 84-year-old father is “in the process of dying” and that they intended to hasten the process by removing his ventilation, and if that proved insufficient to kill him quickly, to also remove his feeding tube. In the event that the patient showed discomfort during these procedures, the chief of the hospital’s ICU unit stated in his affidavit that he would administer morphine.

Golubchuk is an Orthodox Jew, as are his children. The latter have adamantly opposed his removal from the ventilator and feeding tube, on the grounds that Jewish law expressly forbids any action designed to shorten life, and that if their father could express his wishes, he would oppose the doctors acting to deliberately terminate his life.

In response, the director of the ICU informed Golubchuk’s children that neither their father’s wishes nor their own are relevant, and he would do whatever he decided was appropriate. Bill Olson, counsel for the ICU director, told the Canadian Broadcasting Company that physicians have the sole right to make decisions about treatment - even if it goes against a patient’s religious beliefs - and that “there is no right to a continuation of treatment.”

That position was supported by Dr. Jeff Blackner, executive director of the office of ethics of the Canadian Medical Association. He told Reuters: “[W]e want to make sure that clinical decisions are left to physicians and not judges.” Doctors’ decisions are made only with the “best interest of the individual patient at heart,” he said, though he did not explain how that could be squared with the undisputed claim that this patient would oppose the doctors’ decision. Meanwhile, an Angus Reid poll of Canadians showed that 68% supported leaving the final decision with the family.

The ADVA Institute has just issued it latest report on Israel’s deepening income gap. According to the report, nearly one in five wage earners are living below the poverty line.

Typically, the release of new poverty figures generates large headlines in the chareidi press, and the figures are seized upon as proof of the government’s failure in this area and of the need to return child subsidies to former levels.

That is not going to happen, I would guess, no matter how grim the poverty figures. Periodically, particular coalition constellations – such as the current government’s need to retain Shas in the coalition – may lead to a temporary increase in child subsidies. But there are important factors militating against a dramatic long-term rise in child subsidies.

By far the largest beneficiaries of child subsidies are the Arab sector: There are over twice as many Arabs as chareidim in Israel. Since the cut in child subsidies, there has been a substantial drop in the Arab birthrate (which, Baruch Hashem, has not been accompanied by a parallel drop in the chareidi birthrate). The decline in Arab birthrates is crucial to Israel’s demographic survival.

For those who enjoy studying their fellow human beings, there are few better laboratories than a long flight. Indeed the opportunities for such study are one of the few pleasures of air travel, especially if one is crammed into an economy class seat. Plane flights often thrust us into the immediate company of someone from a completely different background, with whom we would have little likelihood of social interaction in everyday life.

It is a rare flight that I don’t find myself learning something interesting about others – usually positive. Returning from London recently, I found myself next to a secular Israeli woman. Her attire did not leave me enthusiastic about my luck of the draw on this particular flight, and I kept my gaze firmly on my Gemara.

Thus I was shocked when she asked me before the plane had even taken off whether I would prefer that she switch seats with a young chassid sitting in the row behind us. Since we were placed in an exit row seat, with unlimited leg room in front of us and only two in the row, her offer was amazingly thoughtful and generous.

To my surprise, the chassid declined her offer to switch places. Both the seats next to him were still empty, and visions of being able to stretch out across the entire row were too enticing for him to worry about rescuing me from being seated next to an immodestly dressed woman.

A Test of Wills

An ancient Midrash recounts a conversation between Ishmael and Isaac. Ishmael asserts his superiority over Isaac on the grounds that his circumcision took place at 13, when he was fully conscious of the ordeal, while Isaac was only eight days old at his circumcision. Isaac replies that if God were to request him to give up his life he would gladly do so.

That conversation, according to the Midrash, constituted the immediate prelude for the Binding of Isaac. Ishmael and Isaac were disputing which one of them is the true inheritor of the Divine promise of the Land to their father Abraham. And both understood that the answer to that question turns on the measure of mesirut nefesh - self-sacrifice - each demonstrates for the right to inherit the Land.

Ishmael’s descendants remain faithful to that understanding. It is we Jews who give every indication of having lost our will, in large part because we have lost our belief in the Divine promise to Abraham.

My host for Shabbos lunch on a recent trip to Baltimore told me a story that I have already repeated many times.

After high school, Shlomo learned for two years in Yeshivat Kerem B’Yavneh in Eretz Yisrael. The normal trajectory from Kerem B’Yavneh was to Yeshiva University for college, and indeed that is where everyone, including his parents, expected Shlomo to go. But an older bochur he met in Kerem B’Yavneh convinced Shlomo to join him at Yeshivas Ner Yisrael in Baltimore.

Shlomo stuck out a bit in the Ner Yisrael beis medrash upon his arrival: He was one of the few bochurim who wore a kippah seruga , not to mention blue jeans. Sometime in his first zman in the yeshiva, his friend managed to get him into one of the weekly vaadim given by the Rosh Yeshiva, Rabbi Yaakov Weinberg, zt”l. Shlomo was enthralled by Rabbi Weinberg and made up his mind to ask the Rosh Yeshiva for a private chavrusah once a week.

During afternoon seder, Rabbi Weinberg learned at the front of the beis medrash, and one afternoon Shlomo approached his shtender to present his request for a chavrusah. As he drew nearer, he felt the beis medrash grow quiet and 300 pairs of eyes turn towards him. The silence grew thicker the closer he came to the Rosh Yeshiva, and he felt as if the stares were piercing through his back.