“Whatever happened to ahavas Yisrael?” an acquaintance recently demanded to know. While I sometimes doff my defender-of-the-faithful hat at the gym, I assumed he was talking about Emmanuel and dutifully trotted out all my proofs that no ethnic discrimination was involved. Though Emmanuel was — as I had guessed — the impetus for his question, the issue he raised was far larger than Emmanuel.

“When I grew up in Detroit,” Max told me, “there were barely enough kids from shomer Shabbos families to support one day school. We all went to school together. I remember Rabbi Avrohom Abba Freedman, a devoted disciple of Reb Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz, going from bed to bed in hospitals asking people if they were Jewish. If they were, he would beg them to send their children to Bais Yehudah. Many important talmidei chachamim from that era came from non-shomer Shabbos homes.”

As the frum community has grown, schools have become more and more selective. The emphasis today is on refining the criteria for exclusion, not bringing in as many Jewish children as possible. Rav Aharon Leib Steinman has quipped that Avrohom Avinu would not be accepted in our schools today because of his father, but Yishmael and Esav would be.

Much, of course, has changed from the 40s and ’50s. The average non-frum student of those days was more innocent than many students from Orthodox homes today. Schools can no longer simply employ an open-door policy. Internet and handheld devices are game-changers. One child with Internet access can corrupt an entire class.

(Nor is it always in the best interests of children of recent ba’alei teshuva or from weaker backgrounds to be integrated immediately with children from veteran religious families. In such circumstances, the recent ba’alei teshuva will often feel like second-class citizens, just because they are lacking so many basics their peers have absorbed at home.)

But our emphasis on tiny differences goes far beyond protecting our children against the ravages of internet. In both the United States and Israel, many schools look askance at any child whose father is not learning in kollel. Even children of English-speaking kolleleit are persona non grata is some Israeli schools. In a famous clip, a school principal boasts to Rav Steinman that the school employs someone with a special talent for ferreting out those who lack the proper signon (style).” Rav Steinman replies that what the principal calls signon is only ga’avah (conceit).

Community-wide schools for children from a variety of backgrounds have largely gone the way of the dodo bird – at least apart from smaller communities. Some of the reasons are valid; others less so: Like everything connected to chinuch, matters are complicated and the dividing lines thin. But we should at least have our eyes open about what has been lost. Continue reading The Price of Exclusion

There exists an eerie parallel between the treatment of Israel by the international media and the treatment of chareidim in the Israeli media. Within two days of the Gaza flotilla incident, videos showing the Israeli naval commandos who rappelled onto the Mavi Marmara deck being set upon with metal bars and knives were available to all news outlets, and the association of those killed with jihadist groups well-documented.

Nevertheless both the United Nations and the United Nations Human Rights Council pushed forward with demands for an international investigation, and much of the international press continued to write about the event as an act of wanton murder. Reuters took a particularly creative approach to uncomfortable facts: it simply photo-shopped them out of existence. The knife in the hands of one of the jihadists, which had been used to eviscerate the commander of the Israeli forces, disappeared from the Reuters photo.

Moreover, the international press turned the flotilla into a huge public relations success by continuing to write about the “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza as an established fact. Few of those reporting on that crisis seemed the slightest bit interested in actually visiting Gaza to witness the crisis firsthand. Had they done so they would have seen consumer goods in plentiful supply at prices far lower than in neighboring Egypt, and learned that the life expectancy in Gaza is higher and infant mortality far lower than in Turkey, from which the “humanitarian” flotilla was launched.

A similar obliviousness to facts permeates much of the reporting of the chareidi world in the Israeli secular press. The Emmanuel case provides a clear case in point. There is no dispute that over a quarter of the girls in the so-called chassidic track in Emmanuel and nearly one-third of the fathers jailed for contempt were Sephardi. And any reporter who took the time to read the Court’s opinion would have confronted early on a lengthy citation from the report of a non-religious inspector (a former high official in the State Comptroller’s office), appointed by the Education Ministry. He concludes that differing religious standards, not ethnic discrimination, lay behind the division of the Emmanuel Bais Yaakov. He also wrote that no girl of Sephardi origin who agreed to the more rigorous standards of the chassidic track was rejected.

Yet the media continues to report Emmanuel as an open-and-shut case of the most blatant ethnic discrimination. Daniel Gordis, for instance, a respected commentator, described the mass rally in support of the imprisoned parents as a rally to “insist on their right to racial discrimination in their schools.” Continue reading Middah K’Neged Middah

How the citizens of Israel speak about and to one another makes a great deal of difference. If anyone should understand that it is Daniel Gordis, Senior Vice-President of the Shalem Center.

More than anyone, Gordis has been responsible for breaking the painful news to supporters of Israel that there is little hope of peace in the near future. That was the thrust of his most recent work, Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War That May Never End, for which he received the National Jewish Book Award.

Winning that war requires maintaining a modicum of civility when voicing our complaints about one another. Without a measure of unity, we will not prevail in that long war. Thus I was shocked by my friend’s recent vitriolic diatribe against the charedi community (“The Five-State Solution,” Jerusalem Post, June 25).

He fires a series of one-sentence accusations at the charedi community, not lingering over any of them long enough to interject even a trace of analysis, or nuance, or solutions. If charedim have ever contributed anything of value to Israel, or might ever do so, it has escaped his notice. Lifting a page from the old campaign posters of Meretz and Shinui, he labels the entire charedi community an “existential threat” and a “cancer.” Continue reading Answering Daniel Gordis

Recently, I attended a speech by the person to whom I invariably turn whenever I need advice. His subject was the human relations aspects of creating a successful organizational team.

My friend drew liberally on his own experience founding and running a number of highly successful institutions, as well as some failed ones – the latter providing an equally rich lode of valuable experience. Many of the points were sealed with the wisdom of two figures: Rabbi Elyahu Lopian, zt”l, my friend’s Mashgiach as a young man, and his father. My friend has himself passed the halfway mark to 120, and his father has been gone for many years. Yet one could hear in the way he pronounced the words “my father, alav haShalom” a reverence undiminished by the passage of time.

Though he himself is someone whose counsel is sought by a wide-range of people wherever he travels, with a vast wealth of his own life experience, it was clear that he continues to treasure each word heard from his father as a pearl, and that his father’s image remains ever before him, like that of Yaakov’s before Yosef in the house of Potiphar.

Listening to the way my friend spoke about his father – which is pretty much how I think of my own father, alav haShalom ­– it struck me that we would all do well to constantly ask ourselves, “What will my children remember most of me? What will they take away for their own lives?” Continue reading How will we be remembered?

In the fiction of my favorite frum novelist, Dov Haller, there are no real villains: No one is judged without the omniscient author explaining everything that brought him to his present situation(l’m'komo). Nevertheless, if one had to pick out the least sympathetic character in Haller’s recent novella, Whispers in the Wind, it would surely be Nochum Levine, the father of a prized bochur in Lakewood. The mere hint from Yosef Hoffer, the father of the girl whose shidduch with Nochum’s son has gotten off to a promising start, that the family business is not as rock solid as everyone thinks is sufficient for Nochum to immediately put a stop to the shidduch.

In the end, Nochum too has his day in court, as Haller valiantly tries to humanize him: Twenty-five years earlier Nochum too had been widely viewed as a future rosh yeshiva. But those were the days before people spoke of “money and support,” and after marriage, he found himself struggling to make ends meet, and barely able to keep his head upright when he has a few hours to learn Gemara at night. All he wants is to protect his son from the same fate.

I suspect that many of us with children in shidduchim found ourselves squirming uncomfortably when reading about Nochum Levine, and wondering whether there is not a little of him in us. Continue reading Avoiding Corruption in Shidduchim

What could the Israeli Supreme Court have been hoping to achieve by ordering 43 parents from Emmanuel jailed for contempt of court for sending their children to a chassidic school in Bnei Brak, after the Court banned a separate chassidic track within the Bais Yaakov in Emmanuel?

All the Court succeeded in doing was unifying the diverse charedi community by striking directly at the very heard of charedi life – the right of parents to transmit the Torah to the children, according to their convictions. Even a neighbor who regularly stops me to air his criticisms of the charedi community and leadership was gung-ho for last week’s Jerusalem protest rally.

The prayer gathering drew a crowd estimated at 100,000 or more, and was the antithesis of a series of demonstrations involving a few hundred demonstrators, primarily drawn from Meah Shearim, over the past year. The broader charedi community looked on the latter with horror when they turned violent. Last week’s gathering, called by a broad cross-section of rabbinical authorities, was, by contrast, completely peaceful.

Continue reading The Court comes up empty-handed

When Chanina was born, his parents told friends and family, “We get a double mazel tov. We have a new son, and he is a special child.”

To their own children, they added, “Hashem has never made a mistake.” When Chanina passed away seven years later, last 26 Sivan, they again told their children, “Hashem has never made a mistake.”

Towards the end of Chanina’s final days in Sha’arei Tzedek hospital’s Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU), two of his married sisters came to visit. In the unit at the time, was a very sick one-year-old Downs Syndrome child. The child’s mother turned to the two sisters and asked, “Can I ask you a question? Do you really love him like other children?” They answered in unison, “Oh no, we love him much more.”

Downs Syndrome children are incapable of artifice, of calculation as to whether a kind word to another will be reciprocated. What mother could resist a child who regularly hugged her and said, “Ima, I love you”? Fittingly, Chanina’s last words were, “Akiva, thank you so much,” after his brother pretended to pull something out of his ear, when Chanina complained of a buzzing noise.

The normal … Read More >>

Peter Beinart’s “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment” in last week’s New York Review of Books is an important piece – important in the same way as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s 2006 screed “The Israeli Lobby:” It will be widely quoted and pernicious in effect.

Beinart begins with the results of focus groups conducted by pollster Frank Luntz with Jewish college students in 2003. In their discussions of Jewish identity, the subject of Israel never arose spontaneously, and when forced upon them, the students were careful to distinguish between themselves and Israelis. First and foremost, Luntz found, the students “reserve[d] the right to question the Israeli position.” Second, “they desperately want peace.” And third, “some empathize with the plight of the Palestinians.”

According to Beinart, those results constitute a damning indictment of the American Jewish establishment, which blindly supports Israel. Forced to choose between their Zionism and their liberalism, the students have — justifiably in Beinart’s view — checked their Zionism.

For Beinart, Israel’s history can be divided between a halcyon pre-1967 period, when an embattled Israel committed to social justice rightly commanded the love and support of Jews all around the world, and the present, in … Read More >>

The precondition for the acceptance of the Torah, which we will be experiencing again in a few days, was that the Jewish people first achieve the status of “k’ish echad b’lev echad ­– as one man with one heart.” In our ever more fragmented world, with Jews increasingly defining themselves in terms of various subgroups, it becomes ever harder to imagine that state. Even within the religious world, there are ever proliferating divisions.

Klal Yisrael consciousness, the awareness of all Jews as part of one body, is ever more attenuated. Even when we pay lip service to the concept of Klal Yisrael, we often do so in the manner of the old Marxists. For them, the proletariat represented the universal class, upon whose advancement hinged the salvation of mankind; and for us, the advance of the interests of our particular group represents the salvation of Klal Yisrael. We easily convince ourselves that the interests of our particular group, and those interests alone, are synonymous with the interests of Klal Yisrael.

There is one man, however, who embodies for me Klal Yisrael consciousness in our time: Kurt Rothschild, an octogenarian, short of stature and long on influence. Kurt … Read More >>

I always find it amusing when readers of fiction seek to engage the fictional characters – or their creator – in argument. Such was the case, in the Mishpacha Magazine serial “Whispers in the Wind” a few months back, when Binyomin Levine, an outstanding bochur in Lakewood, delivered an impassioned defense of his friends who smoke to his date, Tzippy Hoffer. Binyomin does not smoke and considers it a “foolish” habit. But he nevertheless urges Tzippy to tell her friends not to automatically dismiss a bochur who does, as many of his friends smoke, including “some very accomplished bnei Torah.” The habit must be put in perspective, he explains: It is one of the few outlets that bochurim have for dealing with the extreme pressure of intense learning.

Though I feel a bit silly, I want to urge Tzippy’s friends to ignore Binyomin. Sure, Binyomin is absolutely correct that some fine learners smoke. Still, I would never agree to a shidduch for a daughter if I knew the boy smoked, even if he were the proverbial “best boy” in Brisk. (That threat alone, however, is not likely to turn the tide against smoking, as I have only one daughter, and she is happily married.) Continue reading No Smokers for My Daughters

A few years back, I spent two or three hours in the Boeing Museum of Flight in Seattle. It wasn’t enough. The story told there cannot help fill one with awe.

The fantasy of human flight goes back to the Greeks; Leonardo Da Vinci studied the flight of birds intensely and drafted plans for a flying machine. But the history of actual propelled flight is barely a blip on the timeline of human history. Little more than a hundred years separate us from Wilbur and Orville Wright’s first success in getting their flying machine aloft on a beach at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. And it was only 65 years from that first flight of 12 seconds, covering 120 feet, until Neil Armstrong stood on the moon.

Man has conquered the heavens in a century. Commercial flight has shrunk the globe in ways that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors. And there have been parallel technological leaps in other areas as well. In just the last thirty years, communications to the remotest corners of the world have become instantaneous. Over the last century, advances in medicine and technology resulted in the near doubling of human life expectancy. Who could … Read More >>

I saw something remarkable as I came out of shul the morning before Purim. By the nearby garbage bin, the founder of the shul was throwing out a bunch of soppy tzedakah flyers, which had endured a full night of rain. How do I know that he was doing something remarkable? Because more than one hundred others, myself included, had already stepped over or around the unsightly pile of ruined flyers, rather than throw them out.

The larger group, of which I was one, knew that one of the two people who have almost single-handedly kept the shul functioning for twenty years would clean up the mess. (There is an important lesson here for parents: Even if it is easier to do things yourself than to ask one of the children to help, we do them a disservice by sparing them — at least if we want them to grow up into decent, responsible human beings.)

The justified assumption that someone else would remove the ruined flyers helps explain my laziness and that of a hundred others. In addition, I suspect we were each afraid of becoming a “freier (sucker)” by virtue of doing more than our fair share. … Read More >>

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. Continue reading Not a Zero-Sum Game

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. Continue reading Above All — Don’t Make a Chilul Hashem

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 to garner a billion dollars in endorsements are dropping him right and left. It is not even clear that he can regain his status as the world’s best golfer. Last year, after reconstructive knee surgery and missing the opening months of the golf tour, he still won six tournaments, far more than anyone else. But as one competitor put it, “He could still be the greatest golfer in the world with a broken leg; it is less clear what impact a broken psyche will have.” Continue reading Tiger and Us

[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 … 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 to deliver a bloc of voters, the greater their pull in the corridors of power. That ability to deliver a bloc of voters is why, for instance, Hillary Clinton so assiduously courted Skver in her first run for the Senate from New York.

On the other side, there were a number of factors in favor of Christie, or, perhaps more accurately, against Corzine. As a liberal Democrat, Corzine staked out unambiguously anti-Torah positions on a host of social issues. Nor was his conduct in his private life anything to hold up as a model for our children. Continue reading A Tough Choice for Lakewood Voters

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 Hilary Clinton that Israel poisons Palestinian wells. Continue reading Why Palestinian Incitement Matters

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. Continue reading Confronting the Shidduch Crisis