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.

Israel’s poor transportation infrastructure is yet another example of a problem affecting religious and non-religious alike. One of the great challenges facing the Torah world today is ... 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.

Israel’s poor transportation infrastructure is yet another example of a problem affecting religious and non-religious alike. One of the great challenges facing the Torah world today is the lack of housing. A one-bedroom apartment in an old, slum neighborhood in Jerusalem runs over $100,000, and in neighborhoods that were considered a “buy” just a few years ago, two to three bedroom apartments, usually in need of renovation, cost close to $200,000. Such prices are far beyond the means of large families struggling to cover just their day to day expenses. In the meantime, there is almost no building in satellite communities relatively close to Jerusalem or Bnei Brak – Beitar, Elad, Kiryat Sefer. As a consequence, thousands of young couples find themselves living in tiny, windowless apartments reminiscent of the cages used to study the impact of overcrowding on laboratory mice.

In the long-run, there is no alternative but to develop communities on what are now considered the periphery. The ability of such communities to attract residents will depend to a large extent on their accessibility to the center of the country. Without Highway 6, for instance, it is doubtful that planning for a new community in Harish would have proceeded as far as it has. Fast trains linking Beersheba to the center of the country would go a long way to encouraging young families to move to the South. And similarly rapid transit to Haifa would greatly increase the attraction of numerous Northern communities.. An expansion of the periphery would, in turn, lower demand in the center of the country and bring down real estate prices.

Improvements in mass transportation and alleviation of congestion are no less crucial for the general population. Rapid access to the country’s commercial center would make communities on the periphery far more viable economically and more attractive residentially. And infrastructure investments in more highways and faster mass transit would contribute to increased productivity. Every hour a truck driver spends stuck in traffic is a wasted hour and contributes to economic inefficiency.

Chareidi employment is another area in which there is an intersection between the interests of the broader Israeli society and the Torah community. (The two interests are not necessarily identical, just overlapping.) The ability of Israel to compete economically in the world is primarily dependent on brainpower. And the Torah world represents Israel’s greatest untapped source of that brainpower.
From an economic point of view, Israel has no interest in chareidim performing menial work when they are capable of much more productive labor. As a professor of computer science at Bar Ilan University commented recently, “Anyone who can hold kop in Rabbi Akiva Eiger can be taught to be a highly skilled computer programmer.”

In the chareidi world too there is a growing recognition of the importance of new employment opportunities. At HaModia’s last annual Forum for Administrators, Bank of Israel head Stanley Fischer, spoke of the impact on Israel’s economic future of its high rate of non-employment. A number of chareidi MKs and communal leaders responded. Their responses took two forms. The first was to argue that even if both parents in large families worked, their income would still be inadequate (not an argument likely to command widespread sympathy when government welfare payments are growing 2.5 times as fast as family incomes). The second was to claim job market discrimination was responsible for low chareidi employment rates.

Both arguments implicitly accept the necessity of higher and better paid chareidi employment. In his interview with the English Mishpacha two weeks ago, Bnei Brak Mayor Yaakov Asher spoke of the upsurge in vocational education in the wake of dramatic cuts in child allowances.. Still, according to the article, there are only 13,000 employed individuals in Bnei Brak, a city of 165,000 souls. Clearly, it is a rare salary that can support 12.5 individuals.

The impact of poverty on Bnei Brak emerges clearly from the interview: a 20% drop-out from educational institutions among the youth (reflected in rowdiness on Purim requiring “literally thousands of police” to control); women who “are fairly collapsing under their burdens [of working and raising large families].”

Even assuming Rabbi Asher is correct that learning difficulties, rather than sociological dysfunction exacerbated by unremitting economic pressures, are the main cause of drop-outs, poverty still plays a crucial role. Strapped parents and schools (with 45-50 per classroom) cannot afford the testing to identify problems early or the tutoring and therapies necessary to overcome them. Similarly, municipal-sponsored tea parties to help stressed out women with their coping skills are likely to provide no more than a temporary band-aid.

As important as security, water, transportation, and employment are, all Jews in Israel share an even more fundamental interest: the need for a stronger connection to Torah. Without a belief in a unique Jewish mission and the sense of purpose it provides, secular Israelis with the skills to do so will eventually leave rather than live with under constant threat.

It is the responsibility of the Torah community to bear the message of Torah to our secular brethren. The more we show ourselves as feeling bound to them by a common fate the more receptive they will be to that message.

English Mishpacha, January 5, 2010

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.

Our communal institutions are continually strapped for funds. Those responsible for the budgets of those institutions live under constant pressure, and the temptation for them not to examine each potential donor ... Read More >>]]> 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.

Our communal institutions are continually strapped for funds. Those responsible for the budgets of those institutions live under constant pressure, and the temptation for them not to examine each potential donor under a magnifying glass is great. It is not hard to come up with a heter for failing to do so, and it is easy to place the onus elsewhere if something runs amiss.

Many of those who sought to join Rabbi Sherer’s inner circle and were rebuffed, for instance, were men of means, accustomed to being honored for their ability to contribute to this cause or institution. Each of them presumably came with a chezkas kashrus as an upstanding frum Jew. And each of them had numerous of other institutional or organizational affiliations. It would have been the simplest thing in the world for Rabbi Sherer to simply rely on their resumes and gain another major supporter for Agudath Israel of America.

But he refused to hide behind the presumption that others must have thoroughly investigated a particular person before accepting his money or honoring him. He did his own investigations and did not place exclusive reliance on any single person’s judgment.

Why was he such a zealous gatekeeper, when the natural tendency of any leader of a major institution or organization, especially one constantly in need of new funds, is to receive all who wish to draw close with a welcoming embrace? Why did he devote so much time to conducting personal investigations to determine who might one day tarnish his reputation or embarrass Agudath Israel of America?

Certainly it was not because Agudath Israel had no need of money. Rabbi Sherer always carried around in his head a list of new projects he wanted to undertake when the appropriate personnel and funding were in place.

The answer, ultimately, is simple: Kiddush Hashem was his lifetime mission, and he would not do anything that might ever endanger that mission. He lived in absolute dread of anything that smacked of possible chilul Hashem.

The most essential element of the Rabbi Sherer’s sterling reputation and that of Agudath Israel under his leadership was, in the final analysis, not the sharpness of his judgment of character, but the strength of his devotion to Kiddush Hashem. If we wish to protect the honor of Torah and Torah Jewry, as he did, we have no choice but to devote ourselves to Kiddush Hashem and sensitize ourselves to anything that might possibly lead to chilul Hashem.

In protecting against chilul Hashem, he was aided by faith in the words of Torah and Chazal. If Chazal taught, “Do not believe in yourself as long as you are alive,” those words applied to everyone. In his new work, Six Constant Mitzvos, Rabbi Yitzchok Berkowitz defines yiras Hashem, inter alia, as a constant awareness of how easy it is to destroy your life, and the understanding that if you so choose, Hashem will not stop you.

Rabbi Sherer had that palpable yiras Hashem. Precisely because he knew how vulnerable we all are to moral failure and understood the traps that we all face, was he so scrupulously careful in vetting those whose names were associated with Agudath Israel of America.

(That is not to say he was never fooled. No matter how sharp one’s judgment of people, it is never perfect. And even the finest of Jews can make mistakes and slip.)

The greater our yiras Hashem, the greater the number of precautions that we take that no chilul Hashem should ever emanate from our actions, either directly or indirectly. It is said of Rabbi Yisrael Salanter that he refused to be alone in a room with money belonging to others, lest he be tempted to steal. How much more so was he careful with respect to the proscriptions of yichud. If Chazal said, “ein apitropis l’arios,” those words were no mere metaphors or figures of speech, but to be taken literally as expressions of the danger to each of us.

If the great Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, the founder of the mussar movement of character development, did not trust himself, how much more so do we have to recognize our own vulnerability.

That is no less true with respect to our susceptibility to being blinded by money. If the Torah teaches that “bribery blinds the eyes of the wise and make false the words of the righteous,” Rabbi Sherer treated that as an immutable rule of human nature. And from that immutable rule it followed that those who do not view themselves as either “chachamim” or as “tzaddikim” must be even more careful to guard themselves and remain constantly vigilant for signs of being “bribed” in any possible manner.

Because Rabbi Sherer took the warnings of Chazal so seriously, he was always prepared to make the extra effort and take the extra time to ensure that the people upon whom he placed his imprimatur were Jews of sterling character, for whom the development of their middos was an ongoing project. For only then could he have any confidence that they would not one day bring disgrace to the Torah and Torah Judaism.

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 >>]]> 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.”

In Greek tragedy, terrible things do not just happen to the hero; he brings them upon himself. Those things that we term tragic today – disease, natural disaster – events where any explanatory connection to the victim is totally obscure, were not tragic for the Greeks. What aroused their cathartic horror was watching the unfolding drama, in which a person blessed with both good fortune and many gifts self-destructs.

Winessing such self-destruction still horrifies today. For all the efforts to reduce the Woods saga to the stuff of jokes, I suspect that there are many who have experienced the chilling thought: If even Tiger Woods, sitting on the top of the world, could cause his secure life to dissolve overnight, how can I be sure that I will not do so as well? Surely, there has been more than one person on the planet tempted by the frisson of sexual adventure who has reconsidered, in light of Woods’ fate, whether the momentary thrill could possibly be worth the potential for harm. “Calculate the enjoyment of the sin against its cost,” our Sages advise us.

Most of us try to cultivate a certain image that we present to the world. And accordingly, we are vulnerable to becoming laughing-stocks in the eyes of our “world,” however large or small, if our private behavior deviates far from the image we wish to present. The fear of becoming such a laughing-stock may be Tiger’s greatest gift to mankind.

Some may assume that all Tiger Woods’ many words about how his family is the most precious thing in the world were the products of a slick press agent, lacking even the barest modicum of sincerity. I’m not one of them. I suspect the love and admiration he has expressed on so many occasions for his father Earl, a Lt. Colonel in the U.S. Army, and his mother is deeply felt. And if so, how devastating it must be for him to realize that his own children will never grow up to speak of him as a role model for them in the same way.

In all likelihood, Woods loves his children, perhaps even his wife. The trysts were not something he engaged in because he did not care about his children, but, as Bill Clinton once explained, “because he could,” or at least thought he could, without consequences. His unmasking will make it a little harder for the next pleasure seeker to push all thought of consequences out of mind.

WHAT HAPPENED TO TIGER WOODS is notable only because of the magnitude of the crash and the fact that it is taking place in full public view. But sexual adventurism is only one of many ways to risk one’s happiness, and Woods is far from alone in having destroyed his life. If we look about us, we would note that the number of those whose lives are destroyed by their own behavior and the bad choices is far larger than those struck with cancer or other tragedies beyond their control.

Rabbi Berel Wein records in Vintage Wein the story of vastly rich family that fell into endless litigation over the will of the source of the family fortune. At the time of the latter’s death, the value of his estate was sufficient to guarantee each of his heirs and their children a life of financial security. But because the estate was tied up in litigation, the heirs were unable to sell off real estate holdings before the bubble burst. After years of protracted litigation, they were left with an estate worth almost nothing, and hundreds of millions of dollars in legal bills and back taxes owed. Each of us could multiply such tales endlessly.

There is a crucial difference between those who squander their own happiness recklessly and those who are visited with the trials of Job. In the latter category – those who lost their loved ones in the Holocaust, parents of numerous children with severe disabilities, sufferers from life-threatening disease – one still finds many who present a smiling countenance to everyone they meet and continue to approach life in a positive, upbeat mode. They can still rejoice in God’s blessings, and find satisfaction in dealing with adversity. Among those who have made a mess of their own lives out of an inability to control their desires or temper or by virtue of self-destructive decisions one never encounters a happy person.

I wish I could say that self-destructive behavior, like that of Tiger Woods, is unknown among Orthodox Jews, or at least among Orthodox rabbis. But I have no particular desire to make a fool of myself.

I am not aware, however, of any figure revered by a large cross-section of Torah Jewry whose private behavior ever stood revealed to be wildly dissonant from his public image. Vast Torah knowledge is usually one aspect of that reverence, but only when it is accompanied by a lifetime of work on self-mastery of one’s drives and desires, the subtle as well as the commonplace.

Constant, intense efforts at character development, including knowledge of one’s weaknesses and the ability to anticipate the consequences of one’s actions, is, at the end of the day, the only protection of against making a terrible botch of our lives.

Cliff Notes for Readers:

1) I do not generally think it necessary to supply reading notes to pieces I have written. But since this piece was published in last Friday’s Jerusalem Post, it has attracted a sufficiently large number of inane comments on the blogosphere and to me directly that I feel compelled to do so.

2) At the outset, I should say that this piece was written for a general audience, both secular and religious, in the Jerusalem Post, and should be judged as such. I was neither playing insider baseball for the chareidi world — despite one oblique reference to a scandal currently roiling that world — nor evading it. I just happened to have had another subject. To judge from the enthusiastic response of the Post’s secular op-ed editor and other readers who chose to read the column as a I wrote it — i.e., straightforward use of Tiger Woods’ fate as a moshol for lessons applicable to all of us — I largely succeeded.

3) What was I trying to say?: a)People — religious and non-religious alike — can destroy their lives through any number of character flaws, and sometimes just one mistake or one flaw is more than enough; b) contemplating the examples of those who have done so — the more dramatically the better — can serve as a protection against doing so oneself; c) thinking about the prospect of making a laughing stock of oneself or sacrificing forever the respect of those whose good opinion one values by acting in direct controvention of one’s professed values is another way to spare oneself the experience; d) ultimately the only protection from such self-destruction is constant work on one’s character and a belief in Chazal’s warnings about the temptations to which we are all subject.

4) Frankly, I’m astounded by those who chose to read this column in light of the aforementioned scandal, and even more so those who chose to read it as a paean to frum virtue. None of the above points were intended to celebrate the superiority of religious over non-religious people or to suggest that its message only applied to the latter. Indeed I wrote with more of the former in mind since the potential for radical disssonance between professed values and behavior is greater for them. Not by accident did I write that self-destruction is not unknown in the religious world, or even among rabbis.

5) I would still stick by my point that figures revered by a vast cross-section of Klal Yisrael will not stand revealed as having feet of clay. Having one’s picture in the Israeli Yated Ne’eman, even being called harav hagaon by that publication, is not exactly the same as being revered, or proof that one has spent a lifetime working on character development. There are many communal askonim whose middos are of the highest level, but that quality is not known to characterize all askanim, not even all those who serve great Torah figures and upon whom the latter rely.

6) To say that revered figures are never revealed to be something quite different than the public thought is not to say that they never make mistakes or that they are incapable of being misled. Such a claim flies in the face of the history of many machlokesen over the centuries involving figures of towering stature. Much of the current disappointment is a reflection of the mistaken confusion of da’as Torah with something akin to nevuah or infallibility. Until we overcome that illusion we are doomed to many disappointments.

Yosef truly had a “father:” The image of Yaakov Avinu was so powerfully etched in his consciousness that even far removed from his father’s home, the image of Yaakov appeared to him and enabled him to overcome temptation in Potiphar’s house. But when the brothers sold Yosef, the image of their father, whom they had just recently seen, failed to guide them.

Unfortunately, many yeshiva students today have never experienced a close relationship with an adam gadol (great man), and have no image constantly before them that elevates them and provide strength in moments of weakness. Many do not even know what they are missing. In their immaturity, they have come to view consulting with someone wiser and more experienced, as a sign of weakness and lack of independence. When asked for the name of a rav to whom they are close, they cannot name one.

Not long ago, I was speaking with a top ... Read More >>]]> Yehudah begins his plea to Yosef to spare Binyamin, “My lord asked his servants, ‘Do you have a father …?” Yet Yosef never asked the question in precisely that fashion. Everyone has a father. Rather the Torah is hinting to a basic distinction between Yosef and his brothers.

Yosef truly had a “father:” The image of Yaakov Avinu was so powerfully etched in his consciousness that even far removed from his father’s home, the image of Yaakov appeared to him and enabled him to overcome temptation in Potiphar’s house. But when the brothers sold Yosef, the image of their father, whom they had just recently seen, failed to guide them.

Unfortunately, many yeshiva students today have never experienced a close relationship with an adam gadol (great man), and have no image constantly before them that elevates them and provide strength in moments of weakness. Many do not even know what they are missing. In their immaturity, they have come to view consulting with someone wiser and more experienced, as a sign of weakness and lack of independence. When asked for the name of a rav to whom they are close, they cannot name one.

Not long ago, I was speaking with a top yeshiva bochur in one of Israel’s most prestigious yeshivos. I asked him, “Do you have a rebbi?”
“No.”

“Would you like a rebbi?”

“Yes.”

“Are you doing anything about finding a rebbi?”

“There is no one to be a rebbi today.”

That last comment, accompanied by a shrug of the shoulders, suggests a failure to even appreciate that something vital is missing. Had the bochur understood how important the guidance of someone steeped in Torah could be for him, he would have searched for that guide.

A young avreich decided to make a major change in the form of his learning. An older avreich, who had only the most tangential relationship with him, somehow heard of his planned switch and asked him with whom he had discussed his decision. The younger avreich admitted that he had not discussed his decision with any one, and added that he had no one with whom to discuss it. Fortunately for the younger man, the older one agreed to talk over the issue with him “b’makom sh’ein ish.”

The perception that there are no figures to serve as advisors today is well wide of the mark. But it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Those who have never submitted to another’s judgment or sought the opinion of someone more experienced when confronted with challenges or important life decisions will never be able to positively influence others.

I have a number of friends who developed close relationships with Rabbi Matttisiyahu Solomon when the latter was a young mashgiach in Gateshead Yeshiva. Three of them run major institutions today, and their advice is sought daily. Even the baalebos in the group is the type of person with whom one would be well-advised to discuss any difficult decision. Each of them still consults with Rav Mattisiyahu when they find themselves in tough life situations.

The only reason that they are such capable ba’alei eitzah today is that they had the experience of analyzing and talking out difficulties with someone wiser than themselves on a regular basis, and observed how he analyzed issues and helped the recipients of his guidance understand and internalize it.

To be a mashpiah – someone capable of positively influencing others – one must first be a mekabel (a recipient). Rav Menacham Mendel of Vitebsk writes on the verse, “. . . the testimony of Hashem is trustworthy, making the fool wise,” that the words of Torah only make wise one who first recognizes that he is a pesi (a fool), i.e., one lacking in knowledge and understanding.

LONG BEFORE today’s yeshiva bochurim are in a position to influence others, they will face numerous situations in which they need guidance. Too often it is either unavailable or unsought. In the larger yeshivos, it is quite possible for a bochur to enter shidduchim without ever having discussed with a responsible talmid chacham who knows him well what he should be looking for in a wife and how he can discern those qualities.

Even with respect to such lower level technical questions as – How does one talk to a girl? How does one present oneself in a way that one’s good qualities shine forth – many yeshiva bochurim find themselves relying only on such tidbits and clues as can be gleaned from friends who started the process a few months before them. Many of the “tips” so gathered will prove not only useless, but harmful.

One of leading younger (i.e., mid-50s) talmidei chachamim in Eretz Yisrael told me recently that the kollelim are filled with talmidei chachamim of considerable stature in their 40s and 50s for whom there are simply no positions as maggidei shiur or dayanim. They have no one to whom to give over the Torah they have acquired by virtue of decades of intense study.

A relationship with an older rav who takes an active interest in a talented young bochur and makes sure that he prepares and gives over chaburos on a regular basis can be the difference between that bochur becoming a maggid shiur one day and never having the opportunity.
For many young avreichim the future seems to stretch ahead as one endless expanse. A relationship with an older talmid chacham can be crucial in establishing concrete goals and in deciding when it is time to apply one’s Torah learning outside the context of kollel.

I’m pushing sixty and most of my major life decisions probably lie behind me. I can certainly rejoice in the blessings with which I have been showered. And yet the development in recent years of close relationships with two people steeped in Torah and rich in life experience has transformed my life for the better.

If that is true of one of my years, how much more so is it true for our sons. They need “fathers.”

Mishpacha Magazine, December 23 2009

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 kind ... 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 kind of position in sight – who was told that he should nevertheless continue in kollel no matter what? I suspect that I’m a bit older than KollelGuy, and I can say that I have never heard of such a case, and I have heard of plenty of the opposite.

Immediately after the War, there were those who were urged to stay in kollel, even when their chances of success in learning full-time or possibility of satisfaction were slight. In a well-known story, Rav Aharon Kotler told a father who complained that it had been obvious from the start that his son was not suited to kollel: We are in a war, and in a war there are always casualties. The war was one to establish the legitimacy of long-term kollel learning. And, as Rav Mattisiyahu Solomon declared already years ago, that war has been won.

Casualties after the battle has been won are a different matter. As the old Yiddish saying has it, “Even the baker goes to war, but when the war is over the baker is again a baker.” In a similar vein, the Chazon Ish is also widely reported to have said that two generations of full-time learning were necessary to rebuild from the ashes of Europe. Those two generations have now come and gone.

And if KollelGuy asks, so why no announcements in Yated Ne’eman, I suspect he already knows the answer, or should. Ori, a non-Orthodox Jew in Austin, Texas, knows it: The last thing the gedolei HaTorah want to do is destroy the striving for greatness in Torah learning that characterizes the Israeli chareidi community. And any such public announcement would be interpreted as a statement that everything we did, everything we have built over the last sixty years was a mistake. (I emphasized in “Living with Complexity” that just the opposite is the case.) In other words, it would lead to an overreaction more dangerous than the situation it sought to cure.
There is another reason that there will be no such public statements. Any such statement would be met with vicious attacks by the “kenaim,” who would say about the gadol in question precisely what KollelGuy asks me: Who are you? The Chazon Ish did not say what you are saying; Rav Shach did not say it.” Perhaps KollelGuy remembers the attacks on one of the Sages he mentions for his tacit support of Nahal Chareidi. (Even Rav Shach used to say that he was afraid of the stone-throwers.) One of the members of the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah of the United States told me recently that the gedolim cannot even discuss questions surrounding poverty because if they did the “street” would just label them fake gedolim.

I do not know if KollelGuy is the same person who called me the night before KollelGuy’s comment went up to ask me why I’m against kollelim. But I suspect he is. That question is founded on a mistake and misses the point. Both my married sons learn in kollel, one of them in a ten-year dayanus kollel, and I hope and pray that my other five sons will learn many good years in kollel as well. I also learned 12 years in kollel.

I was not writing primarily about what ought to be, but what is.
Perhaps, as a chutznik, KollelGuy is unaware of the explosion over the last five years of training programs – both academic degrees and non-academic – for chareidi men. Changes are taking place, and that is part of the reality with which the gedolim are wrestling. Nor are the reasons too hard to discern, especially when one remembers that there are no historical precedents for a Torah society built around the ideal of full-time learning for every man forever – an entire society of Rabi Shimon Bar Yochai’s. (The number of those learning full-time in Eretz Yisrael dwarfs by many times the numbers of those doing so in pre-war Europe.) The denigration of “working” that one sometimes hears in the Torah community in Eretz Yisrael has scant support in the Torah, and countless sources refuting it — e.g., “Better to

I also suspect that KollelGuy does not have too many economic worries and that his children are still young. In short, he has little first-hand knowledge of the situation of thousands of yungeleit in Eretz Yisrael. I’m not sure whether he feels he is not allowed to think or just not allowed to pasken. But I wonder how he would answer some or all of the following questions:

(1) Do you think there are any differences of kind, not just magnitude, between the homogeneous group of idealists who rallied to the Chazon Ish’s banner and today’s chareidi community of three-quarters of a million nefashos?
(2) Do you have any idea of the degree of poverty in the chareidi world, including among avreichim? Do you see the chareidi world today as vulnerable? What, for instance, would happen if the Israeli Supreme Court ruled definitively that the state cannot fund schools that do not teach a common curriculum? Israeli welfare payments have grown twice as fast as gross family income over the last two decades. What do you think the impact would be if the Israeli government decided that disparity is unsustainable and imposed another dramatic cut in welfare payments, like the cut in child care allowances under Prime Minister Sharon (with Netanyahu as Finance Minister)?
(3) Do you see any cost to traditional Torah family structure from the assumption that the wife will be both the primary breadwinner and primary caregiver to very large families? Do you think most women are capable of sustaining both roles?
(4) Do you think the Gemara knew what it was talking about when it said that the primary source of marital strife is the lack of money? Do you see poverty having an impact on shalom bayis in the Torah community?
(5) What do you think happens to a eleven-year-old who is already struggling and falling behind in cheder when he asks his father what he is going to be when he grows up and his father tells him his only option is to be an avreich?
(6) Is there any point at which the communal cost in terms of drop-outs and broken families is too great to be sustained without being addressed at its core?

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 >>]]> 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 the validity of either goal.

Many of the most difficult choices in life are of this nature. The choice is not between life and death, good and evil, but how to balance two Torah values. The easiest course is often to suppress one side of the equation and to remove the tension. But from such a course, emes will not emerge.

Avraham Avinu and Yitzchak Avinu both were tested in ways that required them to act against their dominant middah. For Avraham, the greatest test was Akeidas Yitzchak, which required him to act contrary to the message he had taught the entire world for decades by sacrificing his own son. Yitzchak’s greatest test, as described by Rabbi Dessler in Michtav M’Eliyahu, came when he affirmed the blessings to Yaakov.

Yitzchak knew that Yaakov was at a higher spiritual level than Esav, and thought therefore that Yaakov should not receive any material blessing but rely exclusively on strict justice. When Yitzchak sensed, because of Yaakov’s voice and the scent of Gan Eden emanating from his clothes, that it was Yaakov standing before him, he recognized a Divine hint to depart from his lifetime emphasis on strict judgment and that Yaakov might also need a blessing of material bounty. Thus his great fear and trembling.

Avraham and Yitzchak were severely tested. But only Yaakov, the man of emes, experienced a life of unbroken travail – from being forced to flee from his brother Esav, to the twenty years in Lavan’s house, to the confrontation with Esav, to the twenty-two years that he mourned for Yosef. Only Yaakov could have said, “Few and bad have been the days of the years of my life. . . (Bereishis 47:9). From Yaakov we learn that fashioning a new synthesis, while holding fast to two competing poles, is the most difficult task. But only by doing so can emes emerge.

Too frequently, when we hear something with which we disagree our initial inclination is to suppress it. Yet often times, both on an individual and a communal level, we would benefit from an airing of both sides of the debate. On most important issues that affect us as individuals and as a community, there is more than one perspective that is relevant. And the truth is more likely to emerge from the clash between the varying approaches than from one side of the debate trying to censor the other.

The great historian of the Italian Renaissance Jakob Burkhardt wrote in the 19th century that the future would belong “to those who see things simply.” And in the next century, we witnessed totalitarian regimes that slaughtered tens of millions of human beings in the name of some easily grasped ideal promising to free human existence from all tension and complication.

THE NECESSITY OF Avraham Avinu and Yitzchak Avinu, with their diametrically opposed defining characteristics, preceding Yaakov Avinu also has important implications for our understanding of Jewish history. Far from being static, Jewish history follows certain cycles and patterns. The Ohr Somayach, in a famous passage, describes one such pattern with respect to recently exiled Jews arriving in a new land and the change from one generation to the next.

After every catastrophic event that destroys the previous equilibrium, there is a pendulum swings until a new equilibrium is found. Let us take one contemporary example. The period between the beginning of World War I and end of World War II completely destroyed a European Jewish civilization built over nearly two millennia. In order to rebuild the entire world of Torah learning destroyed by the Nazis, Rabbi Aharon Kotler in the United States and the Chazon Ish in Eretz Yisrael declared a societal ideal of long-term Torah study for all males that had few precedents in Jewish history. The pendulum swung in one direction, as part of the rebuilding.

As the original small flock of dedicated idealists who rallied to the banner of Reb Aharon and the Chazon Ish has miraculously swelled today to an entire community of hundreds of thousands, encompassing a wide range of abilities and spiritual levels, the pendulum has begun to swing in the other direction in search of a new equilibrium.

But whatever happens in the future it is s crucial to understand that the extreme response was absolutely necessary, just as the pure chesed of Avraham and the pure din of Yitzchak were necessary for Yaakov to emerge. And so it has been with many of the great conflicts in Jewish history, like that between Chassidim and Misnagdim. In retrospect, the extremes of the early Chassidic movement and the fierceness of the Misnagdic response can be seen as necessary for the synthesis of the qualities of both that has emerged.

We could all gain a great deal in the way of tolerance if we recognized that approaches that we dismiss out of hand are often the necessary expression of one pole of an inherent tension. Our task as individuals and a community is too forge our own synthesis from the tension.

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 >>]]> 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.

I am neither a citizen of New Jersey nor the son of a resident of New Jersey, so I have little to say about local issues. Suffice it to say that Corzine started the campaign with extremely low approval ratings, even in a heavily Democratic state, in large part due to the nation’s highest property tax rate and increases in tolls on the state’s highways. The latter issues are of no less concern to homeowners in Lakewood than any other New Jersey resident.

COMPLICATING MATTERS FURTHER was the fact that the New Jersey gubernatorial contest was not just a local one, but was being touted as referendum on President Barack Obama’s term to date. With only two gubernatorial races on the 2009 ballot, those in New Jersey and Virginia were being closely watched for portents about the 2010 midterm elections and as an indication of voters’ feelings about the policies of the current administration.

And by no one were the results being so carefully watched as the more than eighty congressional Democrats representing districts that were carried by George W. Bush in 2004 or John McCain in 2008. To the extent that the fiscally conservative Blue Dog Democrats detected voter anger over the most ambitious attempt to transform the American economy and society since the New Deal, the less likely they would be to support the administration’s ambitious healthcare reform and cap-and-trade bill on carbon emissions, both of which come with a huge price tag in terms of taxes and likely job loss.

The Virginia electorate more closely resembles the make-up of the Blue Dog congressional districts than did that of New Jersey, and national issues played a much larger role in Virginia. But by election day it was a foregone conclusion that Republican Bob McDonnell would claim the Virginia statehouse (though the magnitude of his victory was still a shock). Thus all eyes were focused on New Jersey.

Because of Governor Corzine’s deep unpopularity, voters knew that the Obama team would have little trouble spinning a Democratic loss in New Jersey as a vote on local issues rather than an expression of dismay with Washington D.C. Still, the election had major national implications. If Corzine somehow managed to eke out a victory, after President Obama campaigned for him in the state three times in the last two weeks, it would be taken as a sign that the President retains his star quality and still has the coattails to aid Democratic candidates. That too would be an important factor for the Blue Dog Democrats to consider.

I think it safe to say that if most frum voters in Lakewood were given the chance to vote in a referendum on the Obama presidency to date, the vote would be overwhelmingly negative. And it is clear that many Lakewood voters did view the New Jersey governor’s race through that prism, as an extremely articulate letter to the American Yated Ne’eman from “A Working Stiff” the week before the election emphasized.

Obamacare can only result in severe rationing of medical care, particularly for the elderly. (In Britain, National Health will not pay for an arterial stent for anyone over 59, no matter how healthy he or she otherwise is.) One of Obamacare’s chief architects, Dr. Ezekiel Rahm, brother of the White House Chief of Staff, is not inappropriately nicknamed Dr. Death. He has written extensively on the lesser claims to health care of older citizens. Rationing will confront Orthodox Jews with many heartrending halachic shaylos.

Similarly, there is widespread skepticism in the Torah community about the global warming alarmism of the Obama administration, and certainly about the wisdom of the proposed cap-and-trade bill, which would constitute a massive hidden tax and lead to the loss of tens of thousands of jobs, at a time when the real unemployment level in the United States is approaching 20%.

Though House Speaker Nancy Pelosi managed to ram through a 220-215 House vote on Obamacare, even after the election results had been digested, 39 House Democrats deserted her. Obamacare is expected to have a much harder time gaining passage in the Senate, and the impact of the election results will be felt there. Cap-and-trade legislation was already bottled up in the Senate, after having passed the House, and the election results certainly reduced its prospects of eventual passage.

THE STRONGEST FEELINGS OF LAKEWOOD VOTERS about President Obama’s job performance, however, concern his foreign policy, particularly that towards Israel. From nearly its first day in office, the administration, including both the President and Secretary of State Clinton, adopted a confrontational tone with Israel diametrically opposed to its velvet outreach to the Muslim world. Indeed, distancing himself from Israel was the olive branch held out by tPresident Obama to Muslims. The administration called for an absolute freeze on Israeli construction beyond the 1949 armistice lines, including construction in Jerusalem. In another extremely worrisome step, which has gained too little attention, the administration put the legitimacy of Israel’s nuclear program on the table. Only tiny Honduras – whose constitution the State Department interpreted differently than Honduras’s own supreme court – has endured the same degree of American pressure.

The administration’s push for a quick Israeli-Palestinian settlement has only made the achievement of any such settlement less likely than ever. All Obama succeeded in doing was convincing the Palestinians that they need do nothing to achieve their maximalist demands because the United States will deliver Israel on a platter.

Even more scary to most of those in Israel – where President Obama’s approval ratings hover in single digits – is the total failure of the administration’s policy of engagement with Iran. Iran is ten months closer to achieving its nuclear enrichment goals, without having felt the first taste of American pressure and after having snubbed every American overture. Even the ruthless suppression of widespread demonstrations, after Iran’s stolen presidential election, aroused only a belated and timorous response from President Obama. American passivity has made Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, or the necessity of Israel undertaking a highly risky attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, almost a near certainty.

On the domestic front, the administration has closely allied itself with the new “pro-peace” group J Street. National Security Advisor General James Jones was the keynote speaker at the organization’s inaugural conference, where he promised that the administration would be an enthusiastic participant in all future J Street conferences. Just a few days earlier, Jones gave a flat address at an AIPAC conference, which left delegates sitting on their hands.

Though J Street sometimes claims to be “pro-Israel” (its campus wing has dropped that designation), it would be hard to think of one thing it has done to earn the title. It enthusiastically supported the U.S. administration’s call for a settlement freeze, including Jerusalem; has opposed every sanction resolution or bill aimed at putting pressure on Iran; and even hosted a staging of Caryl Churchill’s anti-Semitic play Seven Jewish Children, which draws an explicit parallel between Israel’s actions today and Nazi atrocities.

While considerations of the security of nearly six million Jews in Israel appear to have played a large role in the vote of Lakewood residents, it is far from clear that their votes will have the same impact on the implementation of Obama’s policies as they will have on the administration’s domestic agenda. Even weak presidents have much more control over foreign policy than over domestic policy, where Congress can be a restraining influence.

Ironically, by lessening the chances of the administration pushing through the most ambitious parts of its domestic agenda, voters may have actually increased Obama’s chances of being re-elected in 2012. Were the true implications of cap-and-trade and Obamacare to be fully appreciated by voters, they would constitute an electoral albatross around Democrats’ necks. But if these bills are defeated, Obama can run again in 2012 as a moderate conciliator, just as Bill Clinton did in 1996, after the early defeat of his health care proposals.

THOUGH I’M FAR FROM CERTAIN OF THE impact of the New Jersey results on the administration’s future Middle East policy, I must confess that as a Jew living in Israel I am heartened by the fact that so many of my fellow Torah Jews in Lakewood took our fate into consideration in casting their ballots. Christie carried every precinct in which Torah Jews are found in large numbers. From those who voted for Christie, out of a desire to protest the Obama administration’s foreign policy, I learn that those same concerns were felt even by those who voted for Corzine. The latter had perfectly valid reasons – the desire to express hakaras hatov to Corzine against the uncertain impact of a protest vote for Christie (ein safek motzi m’dai vadai.)

One of the hardest things about the past year in Israel has been the apparent indifference of the vast majority of American Jews to the threat to our existence. American Jews are the last group in America to have awakened from Obamamania. As I have quoted many times, half of Jews under 35 say that the destruction of Israel would not constitute a personal tragedy. Recently, the Forward carried a widely discussed piece by a young Jew who whines that it has simply become too fatiguing trying to defend Israel to his liberal friends.

To have detected such indifference and fatigue among Torah Jews would have been heartbreaking for those of us living in Israel. Baruch Hashem, we were spared. Thanks.\

Yated Ne’eman, November 11, 2009

But, as the great economist Milton Friedman used to say, “There is no such thing as a free lunch.” Part of the package is that the young mothers are too tired from their high-pressure jobs to ever bring the grandchildren to visit; the grandchildren are raised by babysitters, and the major responsibility for nurturing, as well as housework and cooking, falls on the husbands. Rather than the husbands being left free to devote every moment to learning, all we get is an inversion of the traditional roles, with the woman as the breadwinner and the husband as the mainstay of the home. The story provoked a spate of letters arguing ... Read More >>]]> I envy the ability of my fiction-writing colleagues to sometimes get under the skin of readers in ways that mere “deah zoggers” rarely do. Recently, A.M. Amitz hit a sensitive chord with a story, “Goldmine,” about a family that chooses young women in high-earning fields for their sons, each an outstanding bochur. In one respect, things work out pretty much as planned. The wives are successful, the husbands do not have to work, money is even set aside for the next generation, and the husbands’ parents are spared immense financial strain.

But, as the great economist Milton Friedman used to say, “There is no such thing as a free lunch.” Part of the package is that the young mothers are too tired from their high-pressure jobs to ever bring the grandchildren to visit; the grandchildren are raised by babysitters, and the major responsibility for nurturing, as well as housework and cooking, falls on the husbands. Rather than the husbands being left free to devote every moment to learning, all we get is an inversion of the traditional roles, with the woman as the breadwinner and the husband as the mainstay of the home. The story provoked a spate of letters arguing about its meaning, the implications, and the relative guilt of the various parties.

To me, the story highlighted the plight of many of our daughters, who are receiving in subtle and not-so-subtle ways conflicting messages. On the one hand, their entire education is designed to instill in them a feeling that raising children is the most noble and rewarding task possible – the one for which they are naturally inclined; Chava, the name of the first woman, explicitly refers to her quality as a mother (Bereishis 3:20).

On the other hand, they realize that to become a mother one must first get married. And as they look around, they cannot fail to notice that more and more young men are seeking girls who can take upon themselves the major burden for supporting them in long-term Torah learning. That is especially so as the “rich shver,” able to maintain his daughters for life in the style to which they have are accustomed, becomes an increasingly rare figure. To have any hope of purchasing an apartment in Israel at today’s prices, most young couples will have to take on their own mortgage, plus the expenses of a large family.

As a result, young women are torn. What exactly is expected of them? Is their primary role to raise another generation of Torah Jews, or is it to support their husbands in Torah learning?

Nor is this ambivalence limited to them. Virtually every Israeli seminary has opened training programs in computers, architecture, graphics, and accounting, alongside the traditional teaching and special education tracks. And programs in new fields, like speech therapy, are opening all the time. But the seminaries are not offering academic degrees, lest the girls become “careerists.” (Whether the latter restriction has resulted in fewer young women pursuing academic degrees or simply switched the venue for doing so outside of the seminaries is not clear.)

THE SAME LOGIC that propels boys to seek wives among those in high-earning fields pervades the whole area of shidduchim. Ironically, the more Torah-oriented our society becomes, the more financial considerations enter into the shidduchim process. Even people who are not materialistic in their own lives – sometimes davka the ones who were the least materialistic and, as a consequence, now have few resources with which to marry off their children – find themselves devoting an inordinate amount of time to the financial resources of the other side in discussing shidduchim.

Yet, if we look in Chumash, we will not find one of the Imahos described in terms of her large dowry. In this week’s parashah, the Bais Halevi describes the qualities Eliezer was testing for when he met Rivka: chesed (she rushed to offer Eliezer to drink); intelligence (she did not bring home the same water from which a stranger drank); and sensitivity to others’ feelings (she found a way to get rid of the water without insulting Eliezer by pouring it for his camels).

On its own terms, the concern with money is perfectly understandable. But it nevertheless exacts a high price. The emphasis on money in shidduchim corrupts us and sends our children a false message about marriage. Rav Dessler used to tell the chassan and kallah under the chuppah that their future happiness depended on maintaining the great desire to give to one another that they felt at that moment. A shidduchim process in which the parties are focused on securing their own security or comfort is antithetical to the attitude described by Rav Dessler.

AT A RECENT KENESS of the Simcha B’M'ono organization in Bnei Brak, an organization which seeks to find ways to lessen the financial strains connected to marriage, the speakers directed themselves to the necessity of uprooting attitudes that run counter to Torah that are being advanced in the name of Torah learning. Rabbi Y. Pfeuffer, a rav on the Beis Din of Sheiris Yisrael, began by quoting the Steipler Gaon to the effect that families should not incur debts in order to purchase apartments in Bnei Brak. When someone pointed out to him that the “shpitz” bochurim demand apartments in Bnei Brak or Jerusalem, the Steipler answered: “Klal Yisrael has never been built by ’shpitzim.’ Only those who learn with humility and without demands will emerge as talmidei chachamim. Nothing will come of those who make excessive demands.” The next speaker, Rabbi Yehoshua Ravitz, the Mashgiach of Yeshivas Beis Mattisiyahu, also decried the destruction of middos that comes from the desire to secure a “rich” shidduch.

In the A.M. Amitz story, an approach justified in the name of Torah ended up producing less Torah, with the husbands giving up their second seder in kollel to take care of the house. Is that not what we would expect from all attempts to turn the Torah into a kardom lachpor bah?Even those bochurim who end up with a shidduch that seems to promise financial security may find their “victory” illusory. Innate talent, even early excellence in learning, the Steipler emphasized, are far from certain predictors of future success in learning. If a boy comes to believe that the desired shidduch itself represents success in learning, it may only result in stunting his ambition for future growth in Torah.

As a community, our emphasis should not be on rewarding those asking, “How much is my wife/shver willing to sacrifice for Torah?” but in creating Yissachar/Zevulun support systems for those who have proven over years of intense study how much they are prepared to sacrifice for Torah.

This piece was written prior to the dust-up with Chananya Weissman. I did not discover yesterday that age differentials are not the only problem connected to our system of shidduchim, as long-time readers of this site will hopefully remember. This article did not appear in the Hebrew Mishpacha.

Mishpacha Magazine, November 11 2009

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 >>]]> 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.

So Bostrum and Aftonbladet have an endless stream of headlines ahead of them. But the point is not to predict Bostrum’s journalistic future. It is far more serious.

As the above accusations make clear, demonization of Israel is alive and well in the Palestinian Authority. In every agreement since the onset of Oslo, the Palestinians have solemnly pledged to end the incitement against Jews and Israel in the Palestinian media and to purge it from Palestinian textbooks. And each such undertaking has been promptly ignored.

THE FAILURE TO CURB INCITEMENT has been so constant, so long-standing that it barely elicits a yawn today. But that reflects a profound misunderstanding of the significance of that incitement.

Shimon Peres once remarked, “I don’t care what the Palestinians say, only what’s written in the agreements.” But what the Palestinians say to one another, and particularly what they teach their children is far more important that what’s written in peace agreements.

Incitement and demonization are not just one more treaty violation. They reflect the failure of the Palestinians since the beginning of Oslo to create a constituency for peace with Israel, to educate the Palestinian population to the idea of living side-by-side with a Jewish state. Such an education would have included Palestinian leaders telling their people that they too would have to make painful concessions for peace, that all the so-called refugees and their descendants will not return to Israel, that the clock cannot be turned back entirely to 1947 or even 1966. That has never happened. Even worse, there has been no education to accept the existence of Israel in any borders or to renounce once and for all the dream of throwing all the Jews into the sea.

The Palestinian Authority has gone out of its way to make heroes of the most vicious terrorists – not exactly the way to encourage thoughts of reconciliation and peace. Mahmoud Abbas sent his warmest congratulations to child-murderer Samir Kuntar, upon his release from an Israeli jail, and commissioned festive celebrations in honor of Dalal Mughrabi, the mastermind of the 1973 Coastal Road Massacre in which 37 Israelis were murdered.

At the first Fatah Conference in two decades, the young and old guard competed as to who could be more intransigent with regard to peace negotiations with Israel, as described by the Jerusalem Post’s Khaled Abu Toameh. The resolutions passed included demands that Israel accept the “right of return” for all 1948 refugees and their descendants and hand over to the Palestinians all Jewish neighborhoods built in Jerusalem since 1967.

Other resolutions passed by the conference accused Israel of having murdered Yasir Arafat, urged exploration of a strategic alliance with Iran, and called for the upgrading of the status of the Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade, the Fatah militia most involved in anti-Israel terror. For good measure, Muhammad al-Ghuneim, an extreme hardliner, who opposed the Oslo Accords, was the top vote-getter for the Fatah Central Committee and is now Abbas’s heir apparent.

The effect of decades of incitement to destroy Israel is fully reflected in Palestinian polls. A June 5-7 poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, found that three-quarters of Palestinians reject any possibility of reconciliation with Israel in this generation, even if a final peace agreement were signed and an independent Palestinian state created.

YET LARRY DERFNER (“The Mother of All Missed Opportunities,” Jeriusalem Post, September 10) professes to find in the decreasing rates of terrorism from the West Bank and the round-up of thousands of Hamas activists, indications of a new peaceful intent among West Bank Palestinians. The claim that the round-up of Hamas activists reflects some peaceful intent towards Israel reminds one of the Gemara (Avodah Zara 2b) where the nations at the end of time put forth their various claims to have benefitted Klal Yisrael, only to be told by HaKadosh Baruch Hu that everything they did was only for their own enjoyment.

The round-up Hamas activists owes more to Fatah’s desire to secure its control of the West Bank than to a new attitude towards Israel. And to the extent that reduced terrorist attempts are a function of Palestinian Authority efforts, they likely result from the determination not to provide Prime Minister Netanyahu with ammunition to fend off pressure from U.S. President Obama. The primary reason for the decline in terrorism is the daily and persistent IDF operations and clampdowns on suspected terrorists.

In a recent article for the Hudson Institute, Abu-Toameh argues that no matter how much the Palestinian economy improves, it “won’t change Palestinians’ negative attitude towards Israel, especially not when anti-Israel incitement and fiery rhetoric continue.” The conflict, he writes, is “political, national and religious” in nature, and its resolution depends on “accepting Israel as a homeland for the Jewish people.”

Such acceptance cannot take place without creation of a peace curriculum to replace the current incitement. That is why an end to incitement is not another meaningless and unenforceable promise to be included in a final peace agreement, but rather a necessary pre-condition for peace, without which all negotiations about boundaries and the like, are besides the point.

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.

Each of these claims is false. True, any observer of the Manhattan Orthodox singles scene knows that the number of singles is greater in the Modern Orthodox world, but the problem of women going unmarried ... 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.

Each of these claims is false. True, any observer of the Manhattan Orthodox singles scene knows that the number of singles is greater in the Modern Orthodox world, but the problem of women going unmarried has long been on the chareidi communal agenda. The Novominsker Rebbe, the titular head of Agudath Israel of America, told me last year, that the growing number of those unable to find a spouse are our single greatest communal tragedy. Nearly twenty years ago, Agudath Israel of America, the largest haredi grassroots organization in America, devoted a session at its national convention to the problem of shidduchim and created a special volunteer organization, Invei Hagefen, to address it.

It is also true that exposure to images of romantic love predicated on an intimacy that is impossible for dating chareidi couples makes it more difficult for young chareidim to commit, but no one ever suggested the problem was purely one of external influences.

So what exactly raised Weismann’s ire? The roshei yeshiva’s attribution of the greater number of young women not finding spouses to certain demoraphic realities. And what are those realities? First, that the chareidi community is experiencing approximately a 4% annual growth. Second, yeshiva students tend to marry women between three and four years younger than themselves.

As a consequence, if we assume that roughly the same number of men and women are born each year (actually a slightly larger number of men are born each year), and that each age cohort is roughly 4% larger than the previous year, that means that there will be approximately 116 19-year-old girls for every 100 23-year-old boys.

The theory is borne out by a good deal of observational data. First, in the Chassidic world, where boys and girls marry younger and tend to be almost the same age, one hears much less about a generalized “shidduch crisis.” Second, within five years of returning from their studies in Israel to Lakewood Yeshiva (by far the largest American yeshiva), only 2% of the young men are still unmarried, whereas the number of Bais Yaakov graduates still unmarried ten years after graduating high school is estimated at over 10%.

The communal response urged by the roshei yeshiva’s letter is to take steps designed to encourage a reduction in the age gap in the couple’s being matched together. One such initiative, the North American Shidduch Initiative, paid over $100,000 in incentive bonuses to shadchanim (matchmakers) who successfully matched couples within two years or less of one another in age. (Shadchanim are only paid for successful “matches” and thus will naturally seek the low-hanging fruit without counter-incentives.) Even though NASI can no longer offer financial incentives, its efforts appear to have made some dent in communal norms: The organization has on file over 700 married couples within their parameters in recent years.

Weissman responds with howls of derision. According to him, the roshei yeshiva are under the illusion “that more boys are being born than girls,” and he accuses them of attempting to perpetuate a Madoff-inspired Ponzi scheme to marry off the oldest girls, in the hopes that in the meantime things will somehow even out.

These statements reveal that Weissman has entirely failed to understand the argument being made. The roshei yeshiva are well aware that approximately an equal number of boys and girls are born every year, and that is constant. They are not buying time so that basic demographic realities will “even out.” But rather seeking to change social norms so that those objective demographic realities exact less of a toll.

For his final coup de grace, Weissman seeks to one-up the roshei yeshiva as insufficiently pious. Their attempts at social engineering, he claims, fly in the face of an explicit Talmudic statement that forty days before birth a Heavenly voice declares for whom the in utero child is destined.

This too is sheer silliness. Since we are not privy to that Heavenly voice, it has no implications for our own efforts to match young couples. Does Weissman believe that the Heavenly voice has miraculously destined Chassidic girls for boys their own age and non-Chassidic ones for someone four years older? True, the primary desideratum in matching couples is compatibility, but what reason is there to believe that the most suitable match is less likely to be found among those close in age?

Social norms are notoriously resistant to change, and it remains to be seen whether the average age differential of 3.5 years between husbands and wives in the yeshiva world will be significantly reduced anytime in the near future. Even if it is, there will still be those young men and women who do not find their matches easily, for a host of individual reasons or perhaps none at all. But none of this detracts from the roshei yeshiva’s efforts to deal with the clearest objective cause of the tragedy of chareidi women going unmarried, and thus the one most easily subject to amelioration.

Jerusalem Post, November 3 2009

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 >>]]> 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, with Yehudah adopting the strictest possible interpretation of his surety.

Yehudah’s descendant Dovid Hamelech received the kingship from Shaul precisely because the latter showed himself unworthy by virtue of his refusal to accept responsibility for his failure to slay Agag, as Shmuel had commanded, blaming instead the “voice” of the people. Dovid Hamelech sinned no less grievously than Shaul, but did not lose kingship on that account because he immediately accepted responsibility for his sins, when confronted by the prophet Natan.

THERE IS A SECOND SENSE in which Rabbi Shmuelevitz uses the term responsibility: devoting oneself not just to one’s own betterment, whether material or spiritual, but to the betterment of Klal Yisrael and every individual Jew comprising that Klal. One who accepts the responsibility for Klal Yisrael is imbued with a special, more refined, ability to judge the needs of the nation. “[He] will not need to judge by what his eyes see nor decide by what his ears hear” (Yeshaya 11:3), says the Navi of the greatest of all kings, Melech HaMashiach.

How, Reb Chaim asks, could Esther have declared a three-day fast on the Jews of Shushan, especially one that would involve not fulfilling the mitzvah of eating matzah on the first night of Pesach? And if such a fast was required, should it not have been Mordechai, the gadol hador, who declared the fast. He answers that at that moment a feeling of responsibility for Klal Yisrael beat so strongly in Esther that she was raised above all the chachamim of her generation. That is what the Megillah means when it says, “And Esther cloaked [herself] in kingship” (Megillas Esther 5:1). Just as the king bears responsibility for every single member of Klal Yisrael, so was Esther, at that moment, elevated to the level of kingship.

In our day, that feeling of responsibility for Klal Yisrael and every member of it is best exemplified by our gedolim. The very term gadol is a measure of their sense of responsibility for the needs of the Klal.

One’s gadlus is measured precisely by how many people are encompassed in his “I”. The more people for whom one feels responsible, as he feels responsible for himself, the greater he is. Thus Hashem is described as “HaGadol” because His purview encompasses every created thing. And to the extent that we concern ourselves with others, we grow larger and more G-d-like.

Though it is the gedolim of our time who most exemplify the quality of taking responsibility for the needs of Klal Yisrael, that does not mean that the rest of us can absolve ourselves of responsibility for Klal Yisrael, secure in the knowledge that the gedolim have undertaken that responsibility and are imbued with the special level of Divine insight that goes with its acceptance.

For one thing, the obligation to grow by taking on ever greater levels of responsibility is incumbent upon each of us. Only after the creation of Adam (Man) did Hashem survey His creation and find it “tov me’od (very good)” not just tov. The term me’od lacks specificity; it is not a particular measure. Adam (א-ד-ם and me’od (מ-א-ד) are formed from the same Hebrew letters to teach us that Man has no defined limits, only a potential – and with that potential an obligation — to continually grow. And that he does, Rabbi Shmuelevitz teaches us, primarily by continually expanding the realm of those within the realm of his concern.

Quite apart from our individual obligation to continually grow, there is another reason that we cannot abdicate all personal responsibility and simply rely on our gedolim: They simply cannot do everything by themselves. Indeed precisely because they have taken responsibility for everything that takes place in Klal Yisrael are they unable to devote their energies and thoughts exclusively to the major problems facing Klal Yisrael.

Every machlokes in any yeshiva or major communal institution, for instance, inevitably reaches their doors. Only they command the requisite respect to offer any hope of finding a solution. These issues are urgent; they must be solved or they will fester and eat away at major institutions. Our gedolim have no choice but to devote themselves to resolving them.

But, as a consequence, they are not able to focus on other problems and issues that have an impact on far more Jews and greater consequences for the long-term health of Klal Yisrael. The latter type of issues – e.g., parnassah, housing, shidduchim, drop-outs from the community — are ongoing; intractable, in the sense that they can have no definite resolution, as in a din Torah; involve many separate strands,; and require a great deal of thought, study, and experimentation to discover the means to ameliorate, if not eliminate entirely, their tragic impact.

None of us can possibly provide the solution to even one of these problems, much less all of them. But each of us, guided by the gedolim, can focus on a particular aspect of some problem affecting Klal Yisrael and do what he or she can to improve the situation.

Mishpacha Magazine, Oct. 21 2009

In his preface to the first volume of B’Mechitzasam (the translation of which into English I had the honor of supervising), Rabbi Lorincz describes how he recorded only those stories of the Chazon Ish, the Brisker Rav, and Rav Shach that can inspire others to increased Torah learning, fear of Heaven and good deeds. He entreats the reader not to read the book as a storybook, but to contemplate each story, analyze what it teaches us, and think about how that lesson can be applied in practice.

And it was clear to anyone who every had the privilege of meeting him that he had himself thought ... Read More >>]]> “A prince,” is the description that comes most immediately to mind when thinking about Rabbi Shlomo Lorincz, who passed away last week. That’s what I thought sixteen years ago, when I interviewed him for a biography of Reb Elimelech (Mike) Tress, the inspirational leader of the early American Agudah movement, and my initial impression only grew stronger with each subsequent meeting. Even the briefest time together with Rabbi Lorincz’s presence was sufficient to leave one with the feeling of having been in the presence of royalty. Such was his refinement and nobility.

In his preface to the first volume of B’Mechitzasam (the translation of which into English I had the honor of supervising), Rabbi Lorincz describes how he recorded only those stories of the Chazon Ish, the Brisker Rav, and Rav Shach that can inspire others to increased Torah learning, fear of Heaven and good deeds. He entreats the reader not to read the book as a storybook, but to contemplate each story, analyze what it teaches us, and think about how that lesson can be applied in practice.

And it was clear to anyone who every had the privilege of meeting him that he had himself thought deeply about what he had learned from the towering figures with whom he enjoyed an intimate relationship and applied those lessons in his own life. In the above-mentioned preface, he describes two aspects of the impact of the gedolei haTorah on a person. The first is intellectual and includes both that which one hears from them directly regarding all facets of life and Torah hashkafah and what one culls from observing their ways and character. That can be conveyed.

The second aspect is emotional, and cannot be conveyed in words: “One feels oneself being elevated and suddenly aware of a previously unknown spiritual dimension.” In Rabbi Lorincz’s presence as well, one felt oneself be elevated by his example.
His refinement reflected the degree to which he had internalized the examples of the Torah leaders with whom he was close. But it was also easy to see why the Chazon Ish had tapped him for a leadership role in the Torah world, while still a young avreich in Heichal HaTalmud, then the only kollel in the entire central region, and later sent him to the Knesset as a young man in his early thirties.

First and foremost, he was a true ben Torah. There was nothing about him of the askan who talks about Torah learning but is himself not of the world of Torah learners. As a teenager in the yeshiva of the Pupa Rebbe in his native Hungary, he learned tractate Shabbos eighteen or more hours a day, until he could review the entire tractate in his head in three hours. That knowledge won him a prize, and with his prize money, he purchased a train ticket to study in the Mirrer Yeshiva, something almost unheard of for a Hungarian bochur at that time.

When he left the Knesset, after 33 years of service, he went straight back to the beis medrash from which he had been plucked by the Chazon Ish. For sixteen years, he learned in daily chavrusah with Rabbi Simchah Wasserman, zt”l. In his hesped, his son Rabbi Yosef Aryeh Lorincz, the author of Mishnas Rabbi Akiva Eiger and other important Torah works, related how he had set up a weekly chavrusah with his father in his later years, in which they learned six hours straight without a break. Rabbi Yaakov Feldheim, a chavrusah of his last three years, when Rabbi Lorincz struggled with numerous health issues, said that only once in those three years did he show any sign of tiredness while learning. Learning revived him. In addition to his two volumes of remembrances of the gedolei Torah with whom he was close, he also produced in his later years Milui Shlomo, a volume including many of his own chiddushei Torah.

He commanded the respect of the gedolei hador for his practical intelligence – Rabbi Yaakov Feldheim called him “the smartest man I ever met”, his dedication, and his ability to be mekadesh Shem Shomayim in every setting.

As a young Knesset member, Prime Minister David Ben Gurion used to enjoy talking with him, and once asked him to show him where in the Torah there is any hint to a patur from army service for yeshiva students – which Rabbi Lorincz promptly did in the Rambam’s description of Shevet Levi. He was the only person able to report the impressions of the famous meeting between the Chazon Ish and Ben Gurion from the perspective of both.

Though he represented Agudath Israel in the Knesset during some of the most contentious battles in the history of the fledgling state, including those over the draft of yeshiva students and national service for young women, Rabbi Lorincz commanded deep admiration across the entire political spectrum His appointment as chairman of the Advisory Committe of the Bank of Israel after his retirement from the Knesset – his signature appeared on all Israeli currency until just a few years ago – reflected the respect of his colleagues.

Rabbi Lorincz enjoyed the complete confidence of the gedolei Yisrael, who recognized his complete subservience to them. Yet they also respected his judgment and insistence on not just executing their directives but understanding them in all their implications. From his earliest days in public service, he made it a condition with the manhigei hador who had sent him into public life that he be able to ask them to explain their directives until he had fully understood their thinking. The Brisker Rav once told him, “I’m glad you are not a chassid shoteh, and do not hesitate to repeatedly ask until you properly understand what I mean.”

His son Rabbi Yosef Aryeh Lorincz related in his hesped that his father learned Mesilas Yesharim every day, no matter how busy he was. The Ramchal’s classic sefer was never far from his table.

Even without knowing of that daily seder in Mesilas Yesharim, one could have guessed it. In his section on the Chazon Ish, Rabbi Lorincz quotes the latter’s words in Emunah U’Bitachon (IV:25), “The entire desire of the wise man is to refine his middos.” And it was clear that he shared that same desire. His every word and action bespoke a person who had worked to refine his middos constantly over many years.

His words were carefully measured. He did not speak about himself unless asked, and even then only as much as was necessary. Though of course he appears throughout B’Mechitzasam, he had none of the need to aggrandize himself that one frequently encounters when talking to people about their relationship to great Torah leaders. The focus of his memoirs remained relentlessly on the great figures from whom he drew inspiration.

As a young Knesset member, the Chazon Ish once sent him a message, as he was about to mount the podium to deliver a fiery address against a second term as president for Chaim Weitzmann. The Chazon Ish instructed him not to give the speech. Later he explained: What would you have gained from the speech? Weitzmann will certainly be re-elected regardless of anything you say, and you will only have turned him into a greater enemy of Torah Jewry. That lesson in the necessity of weighing one’s every word remained with Rabbi Lorincz for the rest of his life, and he applied it to his private speech no less than his public.

In Bais HaTalmud of Kelm, they stressed a middah called zrizus b’nachas. Though Rabbi Lorincz’s background was far from that of Kelm, that description fully applied to him. Even in his last years, when I knew him best, he was an extraordinarily productive person. He knew where every record and folder was located, and planned out every moment of his day.

But that productivity was never at the expense of his calm or his courtly manners. As eager as he was for B’Mechitzasam to be published in English, he would never countenance any reduction in continual cross-checking of references and numerous levels of editing in order to speed the process. He knew the dangers of relying on memories of seventy years ago, and made every effort to meticulously check every story.

That continual checking was a reflection of another one of his outstanding qualities: his scrupulous honesty. On two occasions, many years apart, Rabbi Moshe Sherer, the president of Agudath Israel of America, introduced him to me with the exact same words: “He is one of the very few who has never deceived me in any way.” And that description covered a working relationship and friendship of over half a century.

He was the epitome of dignity – always immaculately groomed and dressed. Even in his nineties, he remained a tall, impressive figure. And he treated others with the same dignity and respect. His solicitude for the comfort of his guests was boundless. His chavrusah Rabbi Yaakov Feldheim was astounded by the fact that he never interrupted him while he was expressing a thought in learning, something very far removed from the rough and tumble of Rabbi Feldheim’s formative years in Telshe Yeshiva.

He took pains to personally inscribe the volumes of the English version of B’Mechitzasam, In Their Shadow, for those who had worked on the translation, even if he had never met them personally. Whenever there was any question of how much was owed to one of those working on the project, Rabbi Lorincz always resolved the doubt in favor of the employee.

Rabbi Lorincz quotes the Chazon Ish’s description of a person seeking perfection (Emunah U’Bitachon I: 11): “. . . nothing pains him so much as the pain of injuring another’s pride or withholding kindness from him.” Those words applied to him as well. Shortly before theYamim Tovim, Reb Mordechai Neustadt, head of the Vaad Hatzala L’Nidchei Yisrael, and a follower of Rabbi Lorincz’s from the latter’s early days in Zeireir Agudah Yisrael, came to Eretz Yisrael and visited Rabbi Lorincz to discuss a problem he was facing. Subsequent to their meeting, Rabbi Lorincz called him many times to discuss the matter. Just after the levaya, Mr. Neustadt told me that Rabbi Lorincz showed a concern with his problem far in excess of his own.

The two were scheduled to meet one more time. But Rabbi Lorincz’s son called the night before that meeting to convey his father’s apologies for not calling himself and to push off the meeting. Just the previous day, Rabbi Lorincz had suffered a heart attack, but even so he did not forget the meeting or the obligation to inform the other party that he was forced to postpone.

I never left a meeting with Rabbi Lorincz without thinking to myself that if the rest of us were more like him relations between the secular and Torah worlds in Eretz Yisrael would be vastly different. And that if we could replicate him forty times, we could inspire a massive teshuva movement in Eretz Yisrael. The Torah community continues to be blessed with representatives of great talent and energy, but it is hard to imagine producing another with Rabbi Shlomo Lorincz’s ability to be a walking Kiddush Hashem, for he was nurtured in another world, a world that no longer exists – the world of the pre-war Mirrer Yeshiva and Rabbi Yerucham Levovitz, a world of the Chazon Ish and the Brisker Rav.

Yated Ne’eman, October 21, 2009

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 REBIRTH OF YOM KIPPUR comes about through reconnecting to our most essential self, and thereby wiping off all our accumulated excrescence. That process is symbolized in the Kohen HaGadol’s service with the two goats. The two goats had to be identical in every respect – in appearance, size, and value.

That identity, writes the Maharal, teaches that the two seemingly opposite tasks – the sprinkling of the blood of one ... 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 REBIRTH OF YOM KIPPUR comes about through reconnecting to our most essential self, and thereby wiping off all our accumulated excrescence. That process is symbolized in the Kohen HaGadol’s service with the two goats. The two goats had to be identical in every respect – in appearance, size, and value.

That identity, writes the Maharal, teaches that the two seemingly opposite tasks – the sprinkling of the blood of one goat in the inner sanctum of the Temple, HaKadosh HaKadoshim, and the exile of the other, bearing our sins, far from civilization – are two sides of the same process. The blood of the goat (the blood most similar to that of a human being) represents our life force. When offered in the Holy of Holies, it proclaims that the essence of our life is there.

If our essence is attached to the Holy of Holies, sin becomes something external, easily wiped away. Only then can those sins be sent away on the other goat to Azalzel.. The very name Yom Kippur means literally a day of wiping – the wiping away of our sins through recognition that they have no connection to our essential self.

That process of connecting to our essence on Yom Kippur is hinted to in a well-known Gematria. HaSatan has the Hebrew numerical value of 364. Meaning there is one day in the year, in which his power is absent. That is Yom Kippur, when the yetzer hara becomes again something external to us, just as prior to the sin of Adam HaRishon.

THE ESSENTIAL SELF to which we reconnect on Yom Kippur is the eternal soul that Hashem planted in us when He breathed into the nostrils of Adam HaRishon. That too is hinted to in the Service of the Incense in the Holy of Holies. The incense carried within the power to stop death. Its secret was revealed by the Angel of Death to Moshe Rabbeinu on Sinai, and by Moshe to Aharon HaKohen to stop the plague that broke out after Korach’s rebellion.

The Rambam offers a seemingly more prosaic explanation of the incense in Moreh Nevuchim: The delicious aroma of the incense was necessary to overcome to stench of death created by so many slaughtered carcasses in the Temple. But the Rambam’s explanation actually fits well with the more esoteric understandings of the incense.

The stench of death enters through the nostrils; the same nostrils into which Hashem breathed when He planted within Adam eternal life. Death represents the ultimate contradiction to eternal life; only with the sin of Adam did death enter the world. Just as eternal life entered through Adam’s nostrils, so too is death apprehended most forcefully through the nostrils. The incense, which has the power to stop death, also overcomes the stench, as described by the Rambam.

WE ATTACH OURSELVES to eternal life only through the Torah. The eternal life Hashem breathed into Adam HaRishon was the capacity to receive Torah. All of Creation was contigent on the Jewish People doing so. Thus we recite the blessing, “Who has given us the Torah of Truth and planted within us eternal life,” over the reading of the Torah.

Moshe Rabbeinu received the Second Tablets – the Torah that we possess today – on Yom Kippur. The Mishnah (Ta’anis 26b) interprets the “wedding day” of the King referred to in Shir Hashirim (3:11), as the Giving of Torah to the Jewish people. And Rashi clarifies that the Giving of Torah in question is that of Second Tablets on Yom Kippur.

The Second Tablets did not have the power of the First Tablets to remove sin altogether, and with it death. But they retained the capacity to turn sin into something external to our true essence, and thus capable of being wiped away.

Prior to Moshe Rabbeinu receiving the Second Luchos, Hashem revealed to Moshe the 13 Attributes of Mercy, k’v'yachol, as the leader of the communal prayer (Rosh Hashanah 17b), hinting to fact that only a minyan of Jews can beseech Hashem’s mercy through the recitation of the Divine Attributes.

Divine mercy is essential as well for receipt of the Torah. Even the most intensive Torah study requires for its success an element of Divine Mercy. One who gives up worldly pursuits and sits in learning, says the Gemara (Niddah 70b) should still “ask mercy from the One to Whom wisdom belongs . . . ” Our prayer on Yom Kippur, through the recitation of the 13 Attributes of Mercy, is to attach ourselves to eternal life through the Torah given on the original wedding day.

A dialogue between HaKadosh Baruch Hu and Knesses Yisrael (Berachos 32b) captures the magnitude of Hashem’s mercy. To Knesses Yisrael’s lament that she has been abandoned HaKadosh Baruch Hu replies, quoting the verse, Can a woman forget her infant, so that she would not have compassion on the child of her womb? Even these may forget, but I (Anochi) will not forget you (Yeshayahu 49:15).
“These” that may be forgotten refers to the Sin of Golden Calf, which was introduced with the words, “These are your deities, Yisrael,” and which returned death to the world. That which can never be forgotten refers to Klal Yisrael’s acceptance at Sinai of the commandments, which begin Anochi.

May we all experience the joy of being cleansed of our sins through attaching ourselves to the eternal life contained in the Torah.

I’m grateful to Rabbi Moshe Antebi (www.zyapublications.com) of Lakewood, upon whose superb presentations of the shiurim of Rabbi Moshe Shapiro, shlita, I have drawn extensively.

Mishpacha Magazine, Sept. 23 2009

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 process of human beings becoming ever more shallow has apparently been going full speed for centuries. Consider that there was once an avid popular readership for the pamphlets subsequently compiled as The Federalist Papers, the foremost exposition of the United ... Read More >>]]> 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 process of human beings becoming ever more shallow has apparently been going full speed for centuries. Consider that there was once an avid popular readership for the pamphlets subsequently compiled as The Federalist Papers, the foremost exposition of the United States Constitution and the greatest work of American political thought. Or that Illinois farmers, tradesmen, and craftsmen stood in the hot sun for three straight hours listening to Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas debate in their 1858 senatorial contest. Who can conceive such a thing today when candidates have learned to confine their message to thirty second sound-bites and rarely give the impression that given more time they would have anything of greater substance to add?

The decline in our capacity for thinking in depth has been greatly accelerated by modern communications technologies. A friend of mine, who has been lecturing in South Africa since before the introduction of television, tells me that he can chart the decreasing attention span of his audiences according to the number of years since the advent of the box.

Last year, I watched a friend lecture at one of America’s better law schools from the last row in the amphitheater classroom. Every student had a computer in front of him or her, ostensibly to take notes. But a large percentage were busy surfing the web. I pitied my friend.

The new technologies carry with them the promise of access to unfathomable amounts of information and the ability to connect to millions of other people around the globe. The benefits are felt in countless ways, not the least in breaking the monopoly of the mainstream media on news and opinion.

But these technologies come with a cost, and the tools have too frequently become our masters. Rehabilitation centers have sprung up for Internet addicts unable to tear themselves from their computer screens even to eat and sleep. Many teenagers find the virtual reality of Internet games far more compelling than communicating with actual human beings, and spend every free moment in that reality.

Even those of us who have a life often find that time-saving technologies are eating up hours every day. Every ten minutes, we find check our emails, and once there end up consuming every new scrap of information no matter how uninteresting.

Social networking, which offers the promise of hundreds of new “friends” and being able to keep in touch with everyone one has ever known, can end up degrading the level of human contact. Some spend more time every day presenting themselves on their homepage than communicating directly to real people. And in the process, they are either turned into or revealed as insufferable narcissists, who have decided that what they are eating or when they are sleeping is a matter of general interest.

Members of the haredi community, in which I live, spend far less time plugged in than our secular contemporaries. I doubt that many of my neighbors have any idea what Facebook or Twitter are (not that I would be surprised to hear that “kosher” versions of both have popped up in the next couple of years, if they have not already.) But we are hardly unaffected.

Most of us have had the experience of trying to carry on a conversation with someone furiously scrolling down his Blackberry or of being abruptly cut off in the middle of talking on the phone to a friend because he is certain that whoever is trying to get through must be more interesting than we are.

At the brit of my oldest son’s firstborn last week, I read from a letter that I had written more than a quarter century ago to friends in the States after my son’s pidyon haben. (The friends had just made aliyah, and while preparing their lift discovered this masterpiece in a box in their basement, where it had somehow been preserved from a flood.) As a pulled the onion pages from my pocket, a few of the younger celebrants asked, “What’s that?” They had never before seen a handwritten, personal letter – and certainly never written one.

As a biographer, I worry about the loss of the rich lode of material personal letters formerly supplied. But I worry even more that even if the hard-disks of future subjects can be found, that they will turn out to be far less worthy of attention. Composed in haste, generally short, written with little anticipation of being preserved or even reread, emails rarely represent an attempt to convey a well-formulated thought or more than a snapshot of a passing mood. People who never tried to convey more will end up having fewer thoughts and shallower emotions.

THE PERIOD of the year in which we now find ourselves offers the possibility of reclaiming control of our lives, if we can step back and take a deep look at ourselves. The process is incremental. Two years ago, I resolved not to look at emails before morning prayers. It turned out to be the most successful such resolution I ever made, precisely because it was small and concrete. But it also left me feeling that other “victories” are possible.

I always feel something between awe and wonderment whenever I meet someone who doesn’t have a cell-phone. I’m not prepared to go there yet. But I’ve noticed that such people are generally among the deepest and happiest that I know.

Every Rosh Hashanah is a new creation of the world, and brings with it the potential to experience a taste of the primordial light present at creation — and with it a sense of clarity otherwise absent from our lives. Adam is described as having seen from one end of the world to another, something that is obviously a physical impossibility since the world is round. What this means is that he had absolute clarity that the entire created world exists only because G-d brought it into being and sustains it.

To gain that clarity of vision about the nature of the world and our relationship to it, we must first turn down the noise, cut out the distractions, stop overstimulating ourselves, and accustom ourselves to once again think deeply.

Jerusalem Post, September 18 2009

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 >>]]> 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 paper printed anything offensive to Muslims of a violent bent, the government would have fallen over itself to express its regrets.

And while an academic has the right to his opinions, private donors who find his views or research repugnant are equally entitled not to support that research. Given the fungibility of money that might mean withholding support from the university that employs him.

Nor do professors’ statements become immune to criticism because they are uttered in a classroom. Professors, like everyone else, should expect to have their work evaluated. Just as parents and students have an interest in knowing which professors have a tendency to get too friendly with female students, so do they have a right to form judgments about which professors are using their classrooms for political indoctrination. Groups like Campus Watch and Isracampus foster such informed judgments by publicizing both the published utterances and classroom statements of university lecturers.

In general, it would be foolish to refrain from contributing to a university based on the views of one faculty member one finds repugnant. Doing so would eliminate virtually every potential recipient. But Neve Gordon is not a solitary rogue professor on the BGU campus. The BGU Department of Politics and Government, which he chairs, fits the description of former Minister of Education Amnon Rubinstein of academic departments in Israel in which no traditional Zionist could be appointed. Before he published his Los Angeles Times piece, Gordon shared his message with his department colleagues. According to Professor Fred Lazin, there was a “unanimous decision not to let him step down [as chairman].”

BGU President Rikva Carmi professed to be “shocked” by the Gordon’s boycott call. But she has in the past defended him as a “serious and distinguished researcher into human rights,” and lashed out at academic monitors of his output, which appears regularly on anti-Semitic and Holocaust denial sites and Aljazeera.com, as “Kahanists.”

Nor did Gordon’s boycott call come out of the blue. For years, he has described Israel as an “apartheid state.” He once joined 250 International Solidarity Movement members serving as human shields in Yasir Arafat’s Ramallah compound, where he was photographed holding hands aloft with Arafat and quoted expressing doubts about the latter’s involvement in terrorism.

Gordon is the last person entitled to hide behind the cover of free speech and academic freedom. He once labeled his former army commander Aviv Kochavi a “war criminal,” forcing Kochavi to forego graduate studies in England for fear of prosecution. Gordon filed a libel suit against Haifa University Professor Steven Plaut, over the latter’s sharp criticism of his ISM escapades and of Ha’aretz’s choice of Gordon to write an effusive review Norman Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry, which alleges, inter alia, that the number of those murdered in the Holocaust is greatly exaggerated. Before filing, Gordon then went forum-shopping to Nazareth, where neither he nor Plaut live, in search of a suitably sympathetic Arab judge.

ISRAELI AND JEWISH ISRAEL-BASHERS constitute an major, perhaps insuperable, obstacle to any attempt to defend Israel in the court of world opinion. Anyone attempting to defend Israel abroad will inevitably be confronted with some statement characterizing Israel as a racist, apartheid state, perpetrating war crimes against the Palestinians, from the mouth of an Israeli academic or journalist. The fact that the source is Jewish or Israeli is assumed to provide credibility.

Sadly many Jews who care deeply about Israel’s existence help fund its delegitimization. The New Israel Fund raises millions of dollars annually from American Jews. Donors are told that New Israel Fund supports Israel as a Jewish state and opposes the “right of return” for Palestinian refugees, and that the NIF does not fund organizations that engage in propaganda or support boycotts of Israel.

None of these claims are true, as two recent studies of NIF grantees prepared by the Center for Near East Policy Research demonstrate. The Coalition of Women for Peace, and NIF grantee, recently sponsored a speech by Naomi Klein in support of the movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BSD) against Israel. Six NIF grant recipients – including CPW, Mossawa, and Machsom Watch – petitioned the Norwegian government for economic sanctions against Israel.

Ittijah, an umbrella group of Israel Arab NGO’s, issued a statement prior to its attendance at Durban II in Geneva in which it charged that “the Jewish character of the state of Israel contradicts international law” and referred to the “racist character” of the State. The draft constitution prepared for Israel by Adalah, the Legal Center for Minority Arab Rights in Israel, another NIF grantee, calls for Israel to recognize responsibility for the Nakba of its creation and to recognize “the right of return.” Adalah participated actively in the preparations for the U.N. sponsored Israel-bashing fest in Durban and in the drafting of the conference resolutions.

The director until recently of I’lam – the Media Cener for Arab Palestinians in Israel, Balad MK Hanin Zoabi, was one of the signatories of the Haifa Declaration calling for the negation of Israel’s Jewish character. She supports Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons and has participated in Israel Apartheid week activities in the United States. The organization’s Empowerment Coordinator calls for the return of the Palestinian refugees to their homes and its director of International Relations describes Hamas as “a genuinely emancipatory liberation and resistance movement.”

Perhaps the best indicator of the NIF’s real agenda was unwittingly supplied by a 2001 letter writer to The Jerusalem Post. Evalyn Segal recounted how she was a “devout Zionist” until she made the “haj” to Israel on a 1989 NIF study tour and had her eyes opened to the “racist contempt of the Israel government . . . towards the Palestinians [and] how the founders of Zionism schemed from the start to take over, by any means necessary, the whole of Palestine and to cleanse it of Palestinians.”

The prophet Yeshaya (49:17) long ago foresaw that “your ruiners and destroyers will come from amongst you.” But generous American Jews, committed to Israel’s existence, should not be supporting the destroyers’ efforts.

Published in the Jerusalem Post, 4 September 2009

A short book by veteran mechanech Rabbi Dovid Sapirman, A Mechanech’s Guide to Why and How to Teach Emunah deals with one such contemporary communal aspect. Published by Torah Umesorah, the booklet carries the haskomos of two of North America’s leading poskim, Rabbi Shlomo Eliyahu Miller and Rabbi Moshe Mordechai Loewy.

Rabbi Sapirman begins with a startling statement: “Emunah is not usually included in the curriculum of our educational system. Yeshivos and Bais Yaakovs rarely address the thirteen ikarim (principles of faith), and most students don’t even know what they are.”

These subjects are not taught, he asserts, because it is assumed, wrongly, that our children have somehow absorbed emunah by osmosis, as a consequence of being raised in “homes permeated with emunah, trained in Torah institutions, and immersed in a frum atmosphere.”

The result is that our children “accept the doctrines of emunah superficially, because this is all that they know.” But they have ... Read More >>]]> Elul is a month devoted to deepening our connection to HaKadosh Baruch Hu. Ultimately, that process must take place on the individual level. But, as the Baal Shem Tov and Rabbi Yisrael Salanter each recognized, in response to spiritual crises in their times, it also has a communal aspect.

A short book by veteran mechanech Rabbi Dovid Sapirman, A Mechanech’s Guide to Why and How to Teach Emunah deals with one such contemporary communal aspect. Published by Torah Umesorah, the booklet carries the haskomos of two of North America’s leading poskim, Rabbi Shlomo Eliyahu Miller and Rabbi Moshe Mordechai Loewy.

Rabbi Sapirman begins with a startling statement: “Emunah is not usually included in the curriculum of our educational system. Yeshivos and Bais Yaakovs rarely address the thirteen ikarim (principles of faith), and most students don’t even know what they are.”

These subjects are not taught, he asserts, because it is assumed, wrongly, that our children have somehow absorbed emunah by osmosis, as a consequence of being raised in “homes permeated with emunah, trained in Torah institutions, and immersed in a frum atmosphere.”

The result is that our children “accept the doctrines of emunah superficially, because this is all that they know.” But they have not internalized those doctrines and made them their own. “A large percentage of our youth are religious only because they were brought up that way, and they believe only because that is what religious people do,” writes Rabbi Sapirman.

To the extent that our children lack firm convictions in the basics of our faith – Hashem’s existence; Divine Providence, the truth of every word of Torah – they are handicapped. Even if they sail along perfectly comfortable as frum Jews – we are denying them the excitement of an intense relationship with HaKadosh Baruch Hu.

The effects of the absence of a deep connection may only manifest themselves later in life. The much discussed phenomenon of “adults-at-risk,” generally results not from any particular trauma, but from waking up one day in mid-life and suddenly discovering that one has no idea of why one is doing the things that one has been doing all one’s life. Rabbi Sapirman describes speaking to many people of various ages who are tormented by fundamental emunah and hashkafah questions that could and should have been answered shortly after the age of bar mitzvah.

If our children have not internalized the fundamentals of emunah, they are vulnerable to the myriad temptations with which they are bombarded. The average bochur in his late teens, for instance, says he believes, “but truthfully he neither believes nor disbelieves. He is simply moving along the conveyor belt that leads him from cradle to kollel.” While he may continue on the belt indefinitely, “woe to him . . . if he is every confronted with fundamental questions. . . . Woe to him, too, if [he is] ever faced with a serious nisayon, like the temptation for something immoral or dishonest.” Confronted with temptation, the simplest path is to succumb and console oneself that he doesn’t really believe – especially if, in fact, such belief as one professes is not the result of any serious reflection.

The accuracy of Rabbi Sapirman’s analysis was recently confirmed by a maggid shiur in one of the major yeshivos in Eretz Yisrael. We were discussing a recent controversy concerning the impact of of learning in Eretz Yisrael on American bochurim. He stressed that the negative consequences of the freedom afforded many bochurim in Eretz Yisrael is almost always a reflection of their weak grounding in the basics of emunah and hashkafah. They have heard many shmuessen on ameilus b’Torah (striving in Torah learning), he told me, but have only a very hazy knowledge of the principles of our faith.

As they grow older, many students feel that they are actively discouraged from asking questions, and fear that they will be labeled apikorsim (heretics) if they do. That perception, writes Rabbi Sapirman, is unfortunately often correct. He devotes much of his book to refuting various justifications for this defensive attitude on the part of teachers and principals.

That defensive attitude exacts a great toll. An angry response to a student’s question leaves the particular student at whom it is directed suspicious that the rebbe or mechaneches does not really have an answer, perhaps even that there is no answer. And it raises similar suspicions in those who did not ask as well.

There is no justification for rejecting questions just because the one asking is no longer a child. Certain questions only arise with increased intellectual sophistication, and sometimes answers that were satisfactory for one age are no longer satisfactory for older students. As the great mashgiach of our generation Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe used to say, “There is no such thing as a heretical question, only a heretical answer.”

Even the classic expression of Jewish faith given by our ancestors at Sinai – na’aseh ve’nishmah (we will do and we will understand) – only came after Hashem had revealed Himself, His Divine Providence, and the truth of Moshe Rabbeinu’s prophecy to them through the awesome miracles in Egypt. Our children have not witnessed those miracles, and it is unfair to expect such affirmations from them without having given them the means to absorb the lessons of Egypt.

Any question that will be asked has already been discussed in one of the classic Jewish texts. If the greatest Torah thinkers thought it necessary to respond to these issues, why should they be considered beyond the pale? (Just knowing that the questions have been considered worthy of response by the greatest Jewish thinkers, the Steipoler Gaon writes, is often an important element in strengthening the questioner’s faith.)

Reb Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz taught in Torah Vodaath all the classical works dealing with the basic issues of belief, including The Kuzari, Chovos Halevavos, Sha’arei Teshuva, and the major works of the Ramchal. He knew, following Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, that the only way to defeat negative forces is with a more powerful positive force.

The good news, according to Rabbi Sapirman, is that the vast majority of our young people expect to be frum all their lives and are eager, even desperate, to believe. If we fail to provide them the tools to do so at a deep level, we are seriously shortchanging them.

Published in Mishpacha Magazine, 4 September 2009

Most of the comments to date have focused on what I am assumed to have meant rather than on what I actually said. About the latter there has been relatively little dispute. So perhaps it would be well to first review the areas of broad agreement. My first major point was that the year or more of learning in Eretz Yisrael has changed in important ways in recent decades. Whereas once only individual bochurim, who were self-selected and tended to have high aspirations in Torah learning, came to Eretz Yisrael to study, today it is pretty much assumed that all yeshiva bochurim will spend one or two years in ... Read More >>]]> My op-ed “Under the Guise of Learning in Eretz Yisrael ” in the July 23 Hamodia has occasioned more than the usual amount of comment, both in the form of an unusually large outpouring of published letters to the editor and in phone calls and private comments conveyed to me. Some of those comments have been favorable, even effusively so, and some no less critical – at least one anonymous caller took the time to call from the States to convey his opinion that I had lost my Olam Haba, chas ve’shalom.

Most of the comments to date have focused on what I am assumed to have meant rather than on what I actually said. About the latter there has been relatively little dispute. So perhaps it would be well to first review the areas of broad agreement. My first major point was that the year or more of learning in Eretz Yisrael has changed in important ways in recent decades. Whereas once only individual bochurim, who were self-selected and tended to have high aspirations in Torah learning, came to Eretz Yisrael to study, today it is pretty much assumed that all yeshiva bochurim will spend one or two years in Eretz Yisrael. The latter run the gamut of commitment to learning and spiritual levels.

One or two readers did write that I should not overly idealize the situation of 35-40 years ago when they studied in seminary or yeshiva in Eretz Yisrael. But, in general, there was agreement that the situation is radically different today. Whether that reflects a change in the quality of bochurim or has some other explanation can be debated. At least one maggid shiur in a major yeshiva in Eretz Yisrael, who learned in Eretz Yisrael as a bochur, told me that in his opinion the major difference between then and now is not the quality of the bochurim but the multitude of lures to which today’s bochurim are exposed, which simply did not exist then. He mentioned Internet and DVD’s at the top of the list.

My second major point was that parents should not feel that they have fulfilled their parental obligations with the provision of a plane ticket, tuition, and spending money. They do not cease to be parents just because their son is thousands of miles away, and that means that they still have a responsibility — perhaps even a greater responsibility given the temptations — to monitor his behavior and spiritual development. I included an illustrative, but by no means exhaustive, list of ways that parents can remain involved across the ocean.

On this point, there was absolutely no disagreement. As far as I’m concerned, if the piece did nothing more than encourage parents to remain actively involved and provided them some tools for doing so, such as ongoing contact with their sons’ rebbeim, Dayeinu.

My final point was that parents must know their sons well before sending them to Eretz Yisrael to learn. Convincing themselves that their sons are perfect and their emunah rock-hard, when that may or not be the case, does not serve their sons well. When the freedom afforded by learning far from home in Eretz Yisrael proves too much for a particular bochur, it is often comforting for his parents to assure themselves that they sent him from home without blemish and whatever occurred happened only once he left the United States.

There are no doubt such cases. But, according to those knowledgeable in the field, it is more common that what may have only been small imperfection in the foundation was exacerbated in the conditions of freedom far from home. In some cases, bochurim took more efforts to conceal certain negative behaviors – watching movies, Internet use – when they were in yeshiva in the States than they do once they are further away from home. But the behaviors were present, even if to a lesser degree, prior to arriving in Eretz Yisrael. If we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that several problematic and potentially addictive behaviors – e.g., drinking and gambling – are more often encountered in the American chareidi community than in the Israeli. Excessive drinking was once considered not to be a “Jewish” problem. But those days are long gone.

SO MUCH FOR WHAT I DID WRITE. But authors are responsible not only for what they write explicitly, but also for the way that their words will be understood – chachamim hizaharu b’drveichem. So I’d like to clarify some of those matters which were read into my words.

Some, I am told, assumed that I was writing with one or two specific yeshivos in mind. That is not true. The dangers are far more widespread than any particular yeshiva or yeshivos. At the same time, that does not mean that I was writing about all yeshivos or that there are no differences between them. Investigating those differences is one crucial aspect of parental responsibility. The size of the yeshiva, the percentage of bochurim living in dorms, the existence of clear rules and expectations and the strictness with which they are enforced vary greatly from one yeshiva to another. All these factors can make a great difference, and it is incumbent on both parents and bochurim to sit down and discuss these matters. At the same time, there are no fixed rules that apply to every bochur. A large yeshiva, with many maggidei shiurim to choose from, for instance, might make it easier for a particular bochur to find a shiur suited to him and develop a close relationship with a rebbe than would a smaller yeshiva.

At least one letter writer understood me to argue that because times have changed since Rabbi Nachum Partzowitz, zt”l, sat in a relatively small beis medrash in Mirrer Yeshiva and was readily accessible that bochurim should no longer come to Eretz Yisrael to learn. That was not my point. The writer was quite right in saying that just because some things have changed does not mean that everything must change. One of the reasons that we do not learn judicial punishments from a kal ve’chomer is the limits of human logic to determine the consequences of different circumstances. On the other hand, when circumstances change, we should at least note the changes and ask whether they have implications for other decisions.

Frankly, I’m amused that anyone thinks I have an opinion about what percentage of bochurim should come to Eretz Yisrael or where they should study. As President Obama might say, such issues are both above my pay grade and way beyond my areas of competence. At the very most, I am pointing to certain considerations that parents and bochurim might keep in mind, and which they can discuss with whomever they consult on such issues.

It is clear that at least for the foreseeable future the overwhelming percentage of yeshiva bochurim will spend one or more years learning in Eretz Yisrael. There are, at present, few yeshivos for bochurim of a certain age in America. Whether more such yeshivos come into being will depend on parents and bochurim and upon the various American roshei yeshiva and representatives of daas Torah. (Extraneous considerations, like concern about shidduch prospects, will also no doubt continue to play a role.)

Perhaps the most outraged callers were yeshiva bochurim who charged that I had implied that most or even a significant number of bochurim, increased their exposure to negative influences during their time in Israel, and had thereby lessened the honor of yeshiva bochurim. Let me be clear: I am not a sociologist and I did not conduct surveys of the various yeshivos with large numbers of bochurim from chutz l’aretz. Even if I had done so, the results would not really give a full picture because we could never know how many of the same bochurim who experienced difficulties in Eretz Yisrael would also have experienced problems had they remained in the States. It would be naïve in the extreme to think that remaining in the States is a fool-proof vaccine against all social ills, and for some bochurim remaining the States, where they may have already fallen into bad company or ways, might present similar or greater dangers.

Over the last several weeks, I have received lengthy calls from bochurim who assure me that in their yeshiva no more than 5% of the bochurim are not shteiging in learning. And I have also received calls from respected avreichim, who learned in Eretz Yisrael as bochurim and who retain contact with the yeshivos in which American bochurim learn, who tell me that the scope of the problem is greater than suggested in my piece.

I suspect both are right – each one according to the slice of the reality with which he is most familiar. While it might be useful to have accurate figures on the percentages of bochurim engaging in problematic behavior, for our purposes it is sufficient that parents and bochurim alike recognize that problems can develop or become more severe and take precautions accordingly.

One last point: I did not mean to imply that Eretz Yisrael, the very air of which, Chazal tell us, makes one wise, somehow corrupts those who come here to learn. Eretz Yisrael is the world center of Torah learning, and contains the largest number of exemplars of the ideal of Torah l’shma. There is an intensity of Torah life, removed from excessive gashmus, that is not found anywhere else in the world. For those seeking aliyah b’ruchnios, the chances of reaching their full potential are greater than in Eretz Yisrael than anywhere else.

Against this ideal is the reality that some unspecified percentage of yeshiva bochurim far from reaching their greatest potential while learning in Eretz Yisrael experience various forms of spiritual decline.

The only purpose of these articles has been to stimulate discussion so that parents, bochurim and roshei yeshiva can properly balance ideal versus reality for each individual bochur, and begin to develop the tools to make it more likely that each bochur reaches his maximum potential wherever he is learning.

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 >>]]> 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 the chareidi community in the same way.

Should we be concerned about the view of the secular public? Or is it enough for us to rely on the power of the chareidi parties in the governing coalition to preserve some level of government funding of chareidi educational institutions?

Perhaps. But there is no guarantee that the major parties will not unite one day for the express purpose of changing Israel’s electoral system to greatly reduce the power of the chareidi parties. We have already seen, in recent years, government coalitions in which the chareidi influence was minimal. In addition, the Supreme Court, not the Knesset, might take upon itself the question of state funding of chareidi education.

AT THE VERY LEAST, then, a case can be made for the development of arguments designed to persuade secular Israelis if not of the value of a Torah education, at least of the justice of funding the chareidi educational system. The most likely form for such an argument goes under the rubric of “multiculturalism” – the idea that states should respect the various subcultures that make up the citizenry. (A number of Western democracies do fund religious education albeit not without strict curricular requirements.)

Multiculturalism has the advantage that it holds sway over much of the Left elites. That is why so many feminists are willing to look the other way to abuses of women in Muslim societies around the world.

At the same time, some of the negative consequences of multiculturalism have begun to be noticed. Many blame multiculturalism for fostering the emergence of cultural minorities in the West who are deeply hostile to their host country, while enjoying many benefits from those host countries. A Moslem takeover of a number of Western European countries no longer seems a far-fetched nightmare scenario. Every Western European country today has a significant and fast-growing Moslem minority that does not feel any allegiance to the laws of its host country, insists on the enforcement of its cultural norms, even in the face of the governing law, in areas where Muslims constitute a majority, and which contains cells of those violently opposed to the civil authorities and prepared to resort to terror against them.

If Torah Jews are perceived by secular Israelis the way that Western Europeans perceive their Moslem enclaves, then any argument based on the multicultural ideal is bound to fail. Unfortunately, such comparisons are becoming more and more frequent, in large part triggered by the recent rioting in Meah Shearim and attempts to aggressively enforce chareidi cultural norms in mixed neighborhoods.

Ma’ariv’s Ben-Dror Yemini entitles a recent oped, “The Taliban is Here.” His piece is, inter alia, an attack on the multiculturalism, which in his view has allowed the most extreme elements in Moslem societies, whether in the Gaza Strip or Western Europe, to impose their will on those societies. And the same, he writes, is taking place today among the chareidim. He does not claim that the majority of chareidim support the rioting, only that the violent minority of chareidim will dictate to the majority and from there to the larger society. He concludes with a call on Israel’s political leaders to act quickly to curtail chareidi autonomy, including our educational system.

I have known Yemini for more than a decade, and worked closely with him for many years on the issue of the Israeli Supreme Court. As op-ed editor at Maariv, he brought me to the oped page, in large part to provide a chareidi voice. Chareidim has never been a particular subject of his, and in all the time we worked together, I never detected the slightest hint of animus towards chareidim. But clearly the recent rioting and news reports of the aggression of certain groups in Ramat Beit Shemesh have traumatized him.

In a similar vein, the Jerusalem Post’s Evelyn Gordon recently urged Mayor Nir Barkat to employ collective punishment against Meah Shearim, until the damage is paid for and the riots stop. She employed exactly the same justification used for cutting off electricity to Gaza: If the majority opposes the terrorists, then they must be forced to act to stop them; and if they support them, we have no reason to continue facilitating their attacks on us.

Gordon is herself Orthodox, and has a number of close chareidi friends. As a columnist, she is the voice of calm, patiently building her case block-by-block. That she is now drawing parallels between chareidim and Gaza terrorists is an ominous indication of just how much damage the recent riots have caused to our image.

I cite Gordon and Yemini not in agreement — the rioters constitute a tiny fraction of chareidi society — but as sociological data of how damaging the riots have been to our image with the secular public.

In the midst of the Viet Cong’s 1968 Tet Offensive, CBS’s respected anchorman Walter Cronkite, uncharacteristically interjected into his nightly broadcast his opinion that “victory” in Vietnam was impossible. President Lyndon Johnson, watching in the White House, commented, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the nation.”

If we’ve lost Yemini and Gordon, we’ve gone a long way towards losing any chance of convincing secular Israelis of the justice of our position.

Mishpacha Magazine, 19 August 2009

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 >>]]> 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, rather than by the generic term “terrorists.”

Consider this absurdity, then. Even after the arrest of ten suspects for last Sunday’s brutal lynching, the Israeli press and radio scrupulously refrained from blaring headlines identifying the principal assailants as Arabs. Yet after the attack on the teen center, the media engaged in wild speculation about the religious identity of those responsible even prior to the culprit being caught.

Even those who did not jump to the conclusion that the murderer himself was haredi were quick to assign blame to haredi politicians for “incitement” against homosexuals. Just hours after the shooting, homosexual activist Danny Zak declared, “The Shas party has the blood of two innocent kids on their hands.” Rachel Metz wrote in these pages, “Regardless of whom the killer turns out to be, . . . such violence was a perhaps inevitable response to the incitement by several haredi leaders over the years.” Meretz MK Nitzan Horowitz, the Knesset’s only openly homosexual member, attributed the murders “to the incitement of entire communities against us.”

Again, such accusations are logically absurd. How is it possible to attribute the murderer’s motivation to the remarks of any politician, no matter how ugly or stupid, until his identity is known? How much more so if the perpetrator was an “insider” at the counseling center, as now appears likely.

THE LOOSE CHARGES OF “INCITEMENT” brought us back to the worst days after the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin, when “incitement” was brandished as a tool to delegitimize the entire national religious community and silence all critics of the Olso process.

In screaming “homophobia,” homosexual political activists have lifted a tactic from the Islamists’ playbook. The latter have demonstrated just how effective a tool the charge of “Islamophobia” can be. Public officials are intimidated from mentioning pertinent facts that relate to the threat of radical Islam. After Scotland Yard uncovered a plot to blow up ten planes over the Atlantic, it announced only that the plotters were of southeastern Asian ancestry and English-born, but not their jihadist motivation. And when Canadian Mounties arrested a group planning to bomb parliament and behead the prime minister, they described the plotters as drawn from a broad cross-section of society, while neglecting to mention they were all Muslims.

Human rights commissions in Canada and elsewhere have taken on the mandate of censoring anything any Moslem finds to be offensive. Author Mark Steyn and his publisher MacCleans were dragged before the Ontario Human Rights Commission and found to be “racist Islamophobes” for an article by Steyn detailing the Moslem demographic takeover of Europe. Yet no Muslim cleric in Canada has been convicted by the same commissions for calling for the murder and subjugation of Jews and other infidels.

Even quoting from the Koran can land you in hot water, as Dutch politician Geert Wilders found out after screening his movie Fitna, based primarily on Koranic quotes. An Australian human rights commission fined two Christian preachers for quoting from the Koran.

Homophobia is used in the same fashion. One Christian preacher in Western Canada was banned by a provincial human rights commission for quoting Leviticus’s characterization of male homosexual acts as “an abomination.” And quoting the Biblical prohibition can run one afoul of many university speech codes.

Homosexual activists have not yet resorted to the threat of murderous violence against those who challenge their views, but they can get pretty nasty. A teenage beauty contestant in California, who expressed the unremarkable view that marriage should be limited to a man and woman, was not only publicly humiliated by one of the judges but subjected to weeks of vituperation.

Ubiquitous charges of “homophobia” are too often used to stifle public debate. And political correctness masquerades as science. When the board of American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its classification of mental disorders in 1973, its decision had nothing to do with new scientific or mental evidence. The letter to members urging support for the board’s decision was written and paid for by the National Gay Task Force.

And the APA’s recent advisory to therapists not to tell clients that it is possible to change their orientation through therapy was not based on evidence that such therapy does not work, only the absence of proof that it does. Not one therapist who practices reorientation therapy was on the panel, whose advisory flew in the face of a 2001 study by Columbia Professor of Psychiatry Dr. Robert Spitzer of 200 men and women, which showed that “contrary to conventional wisdom, some highly motivated individuals . . . can make substantial change in multiple indicators of sexual orientation.”

Homosexual activists would have us believe that homosexual orientation is inevitable – i.e., genetically determined, immutable, and that it is wrong to counsel those seeking to overcome same sex attractions. As therapist Shlomo Zalman Jessel writes, “[I]f Bill tells me that he is attracted to his neighbor Fred’s young child and he wants to reduce those attractions, I . . . can try to help him. If Bill has an unwanted attraction to Fred’s wife, this too I am permitted to help him with. But if Bill has an unwanted attraction to Fred, then it’s regarded as unethical for me to help.”

Each element of the homosexual activists’ catechicsm can and should be debated before society puts its imprimatur on homosexual behavior as no different than heterosexual. There is no “homosexual gene” — at most a genetic predisposition. Even in identical twins, raised in the same environment and sharing the same genes, in 50% of the cases where one twin is homosexual the other is not. Many highly motivated individuals, including some religious Jews, who struggle with same sex attractions have overcome them – often with therapy — to form loving, happy marriages.

Even if they still experience some same sex attraction does that mean they are less fulfilled for overcoming them? Don’t we all experience unbidden sexual impulses from time to time? And don’t most of us rejoice when we control them?

The contemporary world has degraded the very definition of humanity by urging upon us fulfillment in the form of submission to every desire. The ancients had it right it teaching that we most fully realize ourselves as human beings by giving conscious shape to our lives through choosing to do certain acts and refrain from others.

The Jerusalem Post, 21 August 2009

That insight strikes with particular force today. What gentile looks at us and thinks, “Perhaps they really are the Chosen People?” What non-religious Jew looks to the Torah world and finds his curiosity aroused about the source of such refinement and simple mentschlikeit? The janitor in an Orthodox-owned factory recently asked his boss, “If you really are the Chosen People, why are you all so corrupt?”

We each carry around a set of adult pacifiers to grab onto at such moments. Who has not repeated many times Rabbi Berel Wein’s famous line, “Don’t judge Judaism by the Jews.” But the Torah is judged, for better or worse, by the behavior of Torah Jews. Meeting a Torah Jew who exemplified something he or she has never before encountered serves as a major ... Read More >>]]> The final stanza of Eli Zion, the last kinnah recited in many shuls on Tisha B’Av, reads, “. . . for Your Name, which was desecrated by the mouth of those who arose to torment her . . . .” Following the interpretive principle that the conclusion (chatima) is determinative, we infer that the greatest tragedy associated with Tisha B”Av is the Chilul Hashem caused by the destruction of the Temple.

That insight strikes with particular force today. What gentile looks at us and thinks, “Perhaps they really are the Chosen People?” What non-religious Jew looks to the Torah world and finds his curiosity aroused about the source of such refinement and simple mentschlikeit? The janitor in an Orthodox-owned factory recently asked his boss, “If you really are the Chosen People, why are you all so corrupt?”

We each carry around a set of adult pacifiers to grab onto at such moments. Who has not repeated many times Rabbi Berel Wein’s famous line, “Don’t judge Judaism by the Jews.” But the Torah is judged, for better or worse, by the behavior of Torah Jews. Meeting a Torah Jew who exemplified something he or she has never before encountered serves as a major impetus for virtually every ba’al teshuva.

Rabbi Zev Leff likes telling a story of the Telshe Rosh Yeshiva, Rabbi Chaim Mordechai (Mottel) Katz. A non-religious Jew once asked him, “Rabbi, how do you explain all these religious Jews who lie, steal, and cheat on their income taxes.”

Reb Mottel replied, “I have the same question about all those religious Jews who eat on Yom Kippur, drive on Shabbos, and don’t keep kosher.” The man looked perplexed. “Those aren’t religious,” he said. “Well, neither are those you mentioned,” Reb Mottel replied.

Unfortunately, writing all those who lie, steal and cheat out of the ranks of Orthodoxy only takes us so far. For one thing, the former view themselves and are viewed as others as frum Jews.

Nor can their self-image be dismissed as simply a bluff. An Orthodox prison chaplain relates how he once brought a prisoner a set of the Four Species for Sukkos. The prisoner, however, rejected the esrog, telling the chaplain, “I’m makpid (strict) on a pitom.” The chaplain could not resist asking, “About a pitom you are strict, and about defrauding widows you are lenient?” But obviously the prisoner did feel some connection to Hashem. Otherwise, why would he have cared about the pitom either?

If we carried Rabbi Katz’s answer to its logical conclusion, where would we draw the line? Most of us are not candidates for federal penitentiary. But how many would feel comfortable having Rabbi Shimon Schwab, zt”l, examine our books, if he were still alive? A rabbi once called Rabbi Schwab and began his question, “A frum Jew who runs a cash business . . .” He had gotten no further when Rabbi Schwab shouted, “WHAT!”

Thinking that Rabbi Schwab was hard of hearing, the rabbi began again, “A frum Jew who runs a cash business . . .” Again, Rabbi Schwab shouted, “WHAT!” After the third try, Rabbi Schwab explained that running a cash business – i.e.., evading taxes – cannot be reconciled with being a frum Jew.

Even if we could pass the Rabbi Schwab bookkeeping test, how many of us can say that we have never lowered the respect for Torah Jews by our public behavior – e.g., the way we drive, reacting angrily when irritated by a sales clerk? I know I couldn’t pass that test.

NO DOUBT many Torah Jews could pass the Rabbi Schwab bookkeeping test. They just don’t happen to be the ones who receive any media attention. Someone raised in the Breuer’s kehillah of Washington Heights once told me that he had never ever experienced the slightest temptation to cheat on his income taxes. Just as the prisoner mentioned above could not imagine taking an esrog without a pitom, he could not imagine trying to short change the government.

That contrast suggests that much Chilul Hashem results from an educational failure. We are failing to transmit what Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv calls the central educational message for our time – i.e., the Name of Heaven should become beloved through your actions. In the Haftorah read on Tisha B’Av, the prophet Yirmiyahu offers Hashem’s explanation of the Churban: “Because they have forsaken My Torah, which I set before them, and have not obeyed My voice, nor walked therein” (Yirmiyahu 9:12).

If forsaking Hashem’s Torah meant failing to study Torah or observe the commandments, Rabbeinu Yonah asks, how can we understand the inability the Prophets and Sages to identify the causes of the Churban (Nedarim 81a)? Rabbeinu Yonah explains that the generations preceding the Destruction learned Torah and fulfilled the mitzvos. What they failed to do was give sufficient thought to what it means to obey His voice and walk in His ways – i.e., to inquire what kind of human being Hashem seeks to fashion through His mitzvos. Chazal express this idea by saying that they did not recite bircas HaTorah (the blessings prior to learning Torah).

German Jews raised in the Hirschian tradition, with its constant emphasis on Mentsch Yisrael and the educational message conveyed by every single detail of the mitzvos, are protected against viewing mitzvos as a mere checklist of commands, with no implications for our character development. Rabbi Schwab’s prophetic denunciations of all forms of Chilul Hashem, which are currently circulating widely, capture this aspect of the Hirschian tradition.

The Sfas Emes asks why Moshe Rabbeinu reproved the Bnei Yisrael at such length on the eve of entering the Land. After all, the perpetrators of those sins had already died in the Desert. He answers that it is the task of each generation to correct the failings of preceding generations and that requires knowing those failings.

When it comes to countering the Chilul Hashem represented by the destruction of the Temple, however, we seem to be adding to rather than repairing the damage. The need for each of us to dedicate himself to Kiddush Hashem in every action, large or small, public or private, is the most important lesson of Tisha B’Av 5769.

I would like to thank Rabbi Dovid Miller and Rabbi Zev Leff for the above insights.

This article was originally published in Mishpacha.

At that time, Reb Yaakov expressed his bitterness at other institutions that had been quick to take in the expelled student. Had they not been so quick to forgive his cheating, Reb Yaakov felt, the student might have come to realize that cheating is a serious matter. Instead it became a way of life for him.

Reb Yaakov did not make exceptions for cheating on secular subjects. He knew that dishonesty is habit-forming. He also knew that children must learn early that actions have consequences, sometimes very serious ones, and that those consequences cannot always be wiped away by saying, “I’m sorry.”

Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky delivered a similar message recently to a yeshiva bochur who sought his blessing prior to his trial for driving without a licence. The bochur in question had hit a wall ... Read More >>]]> Whenever some scandal breaks involving Orthodox Jews, as happened with a vengeance last Erev Shabbos, I’m reminded of a story about Rabbi Yaakov Kaminetsky. When Reb Yaakov was Rosh Yeshiva in Torah Vodaath, a high school student was caught helping another student on the state-sponsored regents exams. Reb Yaakov immediately expelled him. Decades later that former student was involved in a major financial scandal, which made front-page headlines.

At that time, Reb Yaakov expressed his bitterness at other institutions that had been quick to take in the expelled student. Had they not been so quick to forgive his cheating, Reb Yaakov felt, the student might have come to realize that cheating is a serious matter. Instead it became a way of life for him.

Reb Yaakov did not make exceptions for cheating on secular subjects. He knew that dishonesty is habit-forming. He also knew that children must learn early that actions have consequences, sometimes very serious ones, and that those consequences cannot always be wiped away by saying, “I’m sorry.”

Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky delivered a similar message recently to a yeshiva bochur who sought his blessing prior to his trial for driving without a licence. The bochur in question had hit a wall while driving. (A few weeks earlier, another chareidi teenager severely injured an infant whom he struck while driving without a license.) After Reb Chaim found out what the trial was about, he refused to give his blessing that the bochur not receive a prison sentence, “You are mamash a muderer. Adaraba, let them put you in prison,” Reb Chaim told the shocked young man.

Nor did Reb Chaim accept the idea that secular laws meant to protect the safety and smooth-functioning of society are to be treated as nuisances. To the bochur’s protestation that he knows how to drive well, Reb Chaim responded that there is no such thing as “knowing” how to drive without having passed the driver’s tests. To the young man’s continued pleas, Reb Chaim’s responded, “The best thing for you is to sit in prison and learn not to be a murderer.” In other words, hopefully the prison sentence will help you realize the seriousness of what you did so that you don’t actually kill someone while driving.

LIKE ATTITUDES TOWARDS CHEATING and unsafe behavior, a sensitivity to the impact of one’s actions on the image of Torah Jews and Judaism tends to be formed early. As in everything else connected to middos development, that sensitivity is formed through small everyday actions. Rabbi Avraham Birnbaum recently wrote a column in the American Yated Ne’eman in which he described the fellow in front of him in a checkout line who was talking loudly on his cellphone the entire time he waited in line. He continued to do so, even as he threw down his credit card on the counter and signed his receipt, without even glancing at the cashier. When Avraham reached the checkout counter, he smiled and asked the cashier, “How are you today?”

The cashier was surprised by the question and asked, “I hope you don’t mind my question, but is there a reason why so many of ‘you people’ are so rude and don’t seem to acknowledge my presence?” Fortunately, I read Rabbi Birnbaum’s piece the same day another email arrived about the Waterbury Yeshiva and how it obtained a favorable long-term lease on a former campus of the University of Connecticut.

The elderly mother of the mayor of Waterbury lived adjacent to the yeshiva, and she frequently told her son how impressed she was with the quality of the students in the yeshiva. The latter, it seems, always rolled her large garbage cans to the street for the local garbage pick up. The mayor arranged a visit to the yeshiva, and was so impressed with the Rosh Yeshiva and the bochurim that he arranged for the yeshiva to lease the campus.

I don’t know anything about the fellow who preceded Rabbi Birnbaum in the checkout line or the backgrounds of the bochurim in Waterbury Yeshiva. Nor are any of us just a product of our upbringing; we all have free will. But a refinement of middos is very much a function of the messages and models to which one is exposed. Certain homes and certain yeshivos are distinguished by the refinement of their products. Those who grow up with an emphasis on Kiddush Hashem tend to make better representatives of HaKadosh Baruch Hu.

WHILE ALL AREAS OF MIDDOS DEVELOPMENT require constant reinforcement throughout life, in no area is this so much the case as in the development of one’s emunah. The issues that may trouble a teenager or an adult are not likely to occur to a child. And the answers given to a child of five or six will often not suffice for an older person. Thus there is a need for continually more sophisticated treatment of the basic issues of emunah. But even with respect to emunah one cannot overstate the importance of instilling in our children a deep awareness of Hashem’s presence and concern for us.

Last week, I happened to pass on the street, an elderly lady who has come to our home collecting for nearly a quarter of a century. When I asked her how she was, she burst into tears. “I’ve been looking for you for nearly six months,” she told me, “but you and your wife are never home.” It seems, the last time she was in our home she had not enough change. I told her that I was mochel the change and to forget it. But she could not. For six months, she told me, she was sure she was going to come back as a gilgul because she had failed to give me five shekels.

I felt shamed by the depth of her emunah expressed in her tears of joy in finally having the chance to pay back five shekels, not to mention her sensitivity to the slightest trace of gezeilah (theft).

With just a touch more of Sarah’s emunah or her abhorence at having in her possession money that does not properly belong to her, it is doubtful we would have been treated to last week’s scenes of religious Jews being frog-marched by the FBI.

This article was originally published in Mishpacha.

She was the daughter of a gadol — Rabbi Ephraim Zuravin; the daughter-in-law of a gadol — Rabbi Aharon Feldman, Rosh Yeshivas Ner Yisroel; and the wife of one of Eretz Yisrael’s most distinguished young talmidei chachamim — Rabbi Shlomo Feldman, the author of important volumes on Seder Taharos. Yet the thousands who attended the levaya came because of Rebbetzin Feldman herself.

Black-cowled Yerushalmi women were seen hugging non-religious therapists at MESHI, the Jerusalem gan and school for children with serious disabilities founded by Lifsha Feldman, each trying to comfort the other. Simple Jews and gedolei Yisrael stood together sobbing along with the maspidim over the magnitude of the loss to Klal Yisrael and to her husband, ten children, parents, brothers and sisters. One young boy in a wheelchair asked his mother why he was being punished yet again with the loss of his beloved principal. It would have taken Rebbetzin Lifsha herself to answer that question.

Lisha Feldman’s passing ... Read More >>]]> A great woman passed away suddenly last week in Jerusalem. Lifsha Feldman was only 45, but she had in the last decade of her life deeply touched the lives of hundreds of Jewish children with serious physical and mental disabilities and their families.

She was the daughter of a gadol — Rabbi Ephraim Zuravin; the daughter-in-law of a gadol — Rabbi Aharon Feldman, Rosh Yeshivas Ner Yisroel; and the wife of one of Eretz Yisrael’s most distinguished young talmidei chachamim — Rabbi Shlomo Feldman, the author of important volumes on Seder Taharos. Yet the thousands who attended the levaya came because of Rebbetzin Feldman herself.

Black-cowled Yerushalmi women were seen hugging non-religious therapists at MESHI, the Jerusalem gan and school for children with serious disabilities founded by Lifsha Feldman, each trying to comfort the other. Simple Jews and gedolei Yisrael stood together sobbing along with the maspidim over the magnitude of the loss to Klal Yisrael and to her husband, ten children, parents, brothers and sisters. One young boy in a wheelchair asked his mother why he was being punished yet again with the loss of his beloved principal. It would have taken Rebbetzin Lifsha herself to answer that question.

Lisha Feldman’s passing was as close to literal mesirus nefesh as we are likely to see in our times. She joyfully took on herself burdens and pressures that no normal person could bear. Even with 65% of the budget covered by the government, MESHI must raise $2 ½ million dollars a year, just to cover operating expenses. And that does not include the cost of building a new facility to serve the ever growing number of children in MESHI.

“He rak chashva al hazulat — She thought only about others,” her husband repeated over and over in his hesped. She passed away around midnight. The next morning a delegation including Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, Education Minister Gidon Saar, Deputy Health Minister Rabbi Yaakov Litzman, and Speaker of the Knesset Ruby Rivlin was scheduled to visit MESHI to discuss its financial needs. Rebbetzin Feldman had asked the staff to dress up in honor of the visitors, never dreaming that it would be for her own levaya instead that they would be dressing in holiday clothes.

MESHI’s VERY EXISTENCE is nothing less than a miracle. Fourteen years ago, the Feldman’s ninth child, Ruchama, was born with a serious heart defect that required surgery in France. During that surgery, she suffered a cerebral embolism that left her permanently brain-damaged, though that was not immediately recognized. Not until Ruchama was nine months old were the Feldmans informed by doctors at Hadassah Hospital that Ruchama had suffered irreversible brain damage. Even then, it did not fully sink in that even with all the investment of energy and money in the world, Ruchama would never be just like other children.

When she finally absorbed the message, however, Lifsha Feldman did not despair. Instead she determined that she would do everything possible to ensure that Ruchama reached her maximum potential. She began by forming a non-profit organization that raised money to supply extra therapies for a group of religious children within Jerusalem’s Alyn Children’s Hospital.

Three years later, she decided that was not enough. She went to all the existing institutions for children like Ruchama and determined that none were providing all the care and therapy that she wanted for her daughter. That led to her decision to open her own institution.

The announcement of that decision was greeted with scoffing and derision. The scoffers were more than justified. How could a mother of ten, with no experience in special education, or administration, or the Israeli bureaucracy, or fund-raising, create a state-of-the-art facility? (Until then, her work experience consisted solely of having run a nursery school in her home for fifteen years.)

Lifsha was advised to try to work within an existing institution for improvements. But she insisted on realizing her dream. MESHI opened its doors with 35 children. None of the staff were prepared to give up their previous jobs because none were convinced it would survive the year. Today it serves 180 children, and employs more than that number of staff, including therapists, social workers and psychologists.

The same goal that Lifsha Feldman set for Ruchama is the goal for every child in MESHI: that they reach their maximum potential, no matter how great or small. In some cases, that might mean just the ability to hold a spoon or sit in a chair, and for others, whose disabilities are physical rather than cognitive, that might mean eventual integration in regular schools. Each child’s therapeutic program is “sewn to fit the child,” not dictated by the number of therapies the Israeli government will cover.

I VISITED MESHI about half a year ago. Every square inch of space is utilized, and each room individualized. There are rooms for specific therapies — speech, physical (large motor), and occupational (small motor) — and a “white room,” which cost $70,000, to trigger sensory development.

The amount of equipment is mind-boggling. The exercise room in the school has more treadmills and elliptical machines than most Jerusalem gyms. In one room, I saw two specially-designed vests like those used by astronauts in weightlessness. They are used as part of a new therapy developed in Poland. Each costs several thousand dollars. The oversized tricycle I saw a 12-year-old boy pedaling in the school playground cost $4,000. In one classroom, each child has a specially designed computer, which they use to communicate. One boy can only move his cursor via a specially-rigged sensor attached to his ears.

Mrs. Feldman related to each child as if they were own. Every morning, she stood outside greeting each transport bringing children to the school to make sure that they were removed from the vehicle gently. A neurologist who regularly examines the children at MESHI related that Mrs. Feldman could sit and discuss over 100 children at a time with him, without a file in front of her, with as much clarity as if she were discussing her own child.

A visit to MESHI has a way of putting many things in perspective. One’s Modeh Ani cannot be the same Modeh Ani afterwards. Has your bank overdraft got you down? Try looking at a little boy left permanently impaired when a play accident severed a major artery and left his brain deprived of oxygen. Irritated by a child’s failure to clean his or her room? Try imagining what it is like for parents who have to physically assist a child weighing sixty pounds or more with every basic activity, or to make sure that the child is never left unaccompanied for even a moment at home.

And yet it would be far from the case to say that a visit to MESHI is depressing — just the opposite. In every room — except those dedicated to particular therapies — there were six to eight children and an almost equal number of adults — a teacher and her assistant, together with various therapists and assistants to do the hands-on therapies.

The love and dedication evident on the faces of the young women working with the children was reflected by the children. I could not help thinking that young women who derive such joy from working with children whom no amount of effort will ever make “normal” will surely make fantastic mothers. The patience needed to repeat exercises over and over again to develop motor or communication skills and the ability to appreciate every small advance that a child makes will serve them well with their own families.

THE OVERWHELMING impression I left MESHI with is how much goodness and caring there exists in the world. And it was Lifsha Feldman who set that tone.

A few years ago, Israel Radio interviewed Mrs. Feldman. I have listened to that 40-minute interview at least three times. It is impossible to convey in words the impact of just her tone of voice. I have never heard the deep simchas chaim (joy in life) to be found in a life of ruchnios conveyed so well. There is something close to song in the calm and serenity with which she discusses the challenges of raising a severely handicapped child.

“It is easier for a religious family to accept something like this — or at least so I think — because they know that everything is directed from Above. Not just directed, but directed for our benefit,” she tells the interviewer. For that reason, she and her husband never thought about bringing a malpractice suit or spent any time dwelling on the cerebral embolism Ruchama suffered in surgery. No point in questioning Hashem’s dictates.

These words are spoken without a trace of bravado or of someone trying to convince themselves. She and her family have been fortunate, she tells the interviewer, in that it has been so easy to see the blessing from what happened to Ruchama: the hundreds of children who have benefited from MESHI as a result.

It is not just the children of MESHI who have gained, she says, but her own family as well. The children have learned to be more sensitive because of Ruchama, not to be embarrassed by disability, and that helping their sister and parents is an expected part of life. Ruchama’s six-year-old younger sister told her mother at one point, “When you and Tatte can no longer take care of Ruchama, she’ll go from one of our houses to the other.”

The interviewer is totally captivated by Lifsha. Admitting the difficulty secular parents have raising one or two children, she asks, “What’s it like to be the mother of ten?” “Nifla (wonderful)” is Lifsha’s one word reply. She makes it sound easy. “Remember,” she says, “they are all different ages. They don’t all come home at the same time. The younger ones have their time when they come home. And the older children have theirs. And when the older boys come home from yeshiva, they also have their time.”

O.K., she admits, maybe a mother of ten has to invest a little bit more energy and attention to make sure she doesn’t miss anything with one of the children. But when she describes her joy at having the whole family — children and grandchildren — gathered around the Shabbos or Yom Tov table, and the feeling of absence if even one child is missing, she is utterly convincing. Her greatest joy, her husband told me at the shiva, was watching him learn with the children.

Lifsha Feldman lived at a very high level, and it comes across not just in what she says but the way she says it. Every time the interviewer cites some achievement of hers in MESHI or at home with the word, “You,” she reflexively responds, “We,” either in reference to the staff of the school or her family. One of her sons related in his hesped, how he was once sent to deliver a large sum of money and lost it. When he told his mother, she replied simply, “I accepted upon myself never to get angry about anything to do with money.” Her husband confirmed at the shiva that this was not a one time occurrence.

One cannot listen to the interview without thinking that if every Jew in the world had a chance to meet Lifsha Feldman just once, the Jewish world would look much different. The interviewer asks at one point why MESHI serves both religious and non-religious children — meaning, “Why have you taken on the financial burden of helping non-religious children as well?”

“Lama lo — Why not?” she replies. There is no educational reason to separate these children, she says. As long as the parents don’t have a problem with a school run by chareidim, we don’t have any problem either.

Lifsha Feldman is irreplaceable. Her boundless love for all her children — her own and those of MESHI — was not of this world. But MESHI has long been a family project. Lifsha’a brother Asher Zuravin and mother Rebbetzin Hadassah Zuravin bear most of the fund-raising burden. Lifsha’s sister and daughter both teach in MESHI. And they are all determined that the work for which Lifsha Feldman gave her life continue and that the children of MESHI continue to receive any and everything that can help them reach their potential — not least of all overwhelming love.

My talk with Rabbi Pappenheim was part of my efforts to get the inside scoop on the rioting in Meah Shearim over the arrest of a pregnant mother of four from the Toldos Aharon community on charges of having interfered with the medical treatment of her son. Even before I reached Rabbi Pappenheim, I had spent hours on the phone with various askanim who have been involved in negotiations with the police and welfare authorities. Each of them left me with an extremely positive feeling that our community has askanim of such mesirus nefesh and sophistication. They have built up relationships over the years that allow them to explain elements of the chareidi community to governmental authorities and the latter to the community.

A resident of Meah Shearim for seventy years, Rabbi Pappenheim founded Beit ... Read More >>]]> With Meah Shearim resembling a war zone last week, and the top headline in every newspaper blaring, “Chareidim . . .,” I felt the need for a voice of sanity. I found him in the person of Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim, one of the veteran leaders of the Eidah Hachareidis. Our conversation on Erev Shabbos left me feeling like a parched traveler who finds a desert oasis.

My talk with Rabbi Pappenheim was part of my efforts to get the inside scoop on the rioting in Meah Shearim over the arrest of a pregnant mother of four from the Toldos Aharon community on charges of having interfered with the medical treatment of her son. Even before I reached Rabbi Pappenheim, I had spent hours on the phone with various askanim who have been involved in negotiations with the police and welfare authorities. Each of them left me with an extremely positive feeling that our community has askanim of such mesirus nefesh and sophistication. They have built up relationships over the years that allow them to explain elements of the chareidi community to governmental authorities and the latter to the community.

A resident of Meah Shearim for seventy years, Rabbi Pappenheim founded Beit Lepleitot, a residential educational facility for girls whose families are unable to raise them – he has already attended the weddings of over 2,500 graduates – as well as Jerusalem’s first convalescent home for new mothers.

I wanted Rabbi Pappenheim’s perspective on the recent demonstrations and the ensuing violence. I was surprised both by his vigorous opposition to the demonstrations and his reasons. When I asked if I could quote him by name, he told me, “The minute you say, ‘But don’t quote me,’ you have lost 90% of your power.”

He offered me four reasons for opposing the recent demonstrations. Three were practical concerning the impact of the demonstrations on the future of Torah Judaism in Eretz Yisrael and on the participants in the demonstrations themselves. The fourth – and most surprising – concerns the impact on the Redemptive process itself.

Rabbi Pappenheim explained that the recent Shabbos demonstrations were triggered by Mayor Barkat’s bombastic announcement of the opening of a municipal parking lot on Shabbos in anticipation of thousands of Shabbos visitors to the city. The mayor was perceived as laying the ground for the opening of all commercial establishments in the city. While in full sympathy with the demonstrators’ cause, Rabbi Pappenheim nevertheless feels that the demonstrations have been a disaster.

Rabbi Amram Blau, the founder of Neturei Karta, chose Mahatma Ghandi as a model of civil resistance, Rabbi Pappenheim explained to me. He and his followers always adopted passive means, even when beaten by police. Today, however, once a demonstration starts it almost inevitably turns violent because no one can control the demonstrators. Invariably, some hot-headed youth will throw a stone, the police respond with full force, and soon a full-scale riot has erupted.

The participation in violence – i.e., the appropriation of the tools of Esav – leaves its spiritual mark on those involved. In addition, after every violent demonstration, there are a large number of arrests, and even one or two nights in jail can permanently scar those arrested. Rabbi Pappenheim relates that the veteran leader of the Eidah Hachareidis, Rabbi Gershon Stemmer, would not allow any posters for demonstrations in the later years of his life out of fear of the impact of Israeli jails on those arrested.

The Torah community in Eretz Yisrael today faces an urgent housing crisis, says Rabbi Pappenheim, who was one of the moving forces behind the development of Ramat Beit Shemesh as a Torah enclave. If the secular population becomes convinced that it is impossible to live together with chareidim, they will fight with all the means at their disposal to drive chareidi young couples away from the cities in which they grew up and to resist any housing solutions for those couples. Chareidi violence ensures that secular resistance.

But the greatest damage of violent demonstrations is not to the Torah community, but to the Torah and Hashem, k’v'yachol. Rabbi Pappenheim quotes his teacher Rabbi Yosef Tzvi Dushinsky, the late chief rabbi of the Eidah Hachareidis, to the effect that that the Redemption does not require that all Jews first become fully observant, only that there be some drawing closer to Hashem. The rest Hashem will do.

Never has the time been so ripe for such a spiritual arousal, Rabbi Pappenheim feels. The “isms” that once drew Jewish youth have lost their appeal. The spiritual hunger of Israeli youth manifested in their travels to the Far East in search of enlightenment was already foretold by the Prophet: “Behold, days are coming . . . when I will send hunger into the Land; not a hunger for bread nor a thirst for water, but to hear the words of Hashem. [People] will travel from sea to sea, and from north to east; they will wander about to seek the word of Hashem, but they will not find it” (Amos 8:11-12).

If we who claim to represent Torah make it appear as something ugly and violent to the larger Jewish world, we guarantee that those who hunger for the words of Hashem, will not seek it among us, but in foreign pastures.

My last question to Rabbi Pappenheim is: Do most residents of Meah Shearim share your Klal Yisrael perspective? He admits that they do not, and offers a historical explanation. Two hundred years ago, Torah Jewry began to feel itself under assault from the forces of Reform. Those communities that preserved themselves were those that followed the Austritt principle and cut themselves off from the larger Jewish community, which was perceived as a threat. As necessary as that separation was, it gave way, in time, to the loss of Klal Yisrael consciousness.

But today Torah Judaism is flourishing – the biggest threats are from within not without – and it is time that we once again turn our attention to slaking the spiritual thirst of our Jewish brethren and hastening the Redemption.

In most cases that is exactly what happened. Yet it is unfortunately not the case that every American bochur learning in Eretz Yisrael was innocently minding his own business when jumped by the police. Credible reports reaching those askanim who deal with these matters in recent weeks point to a leading role of at least some American bochurim in the recent demonstrations. Those demonstrations turned into riots, with stone throwing at police and burning garbage cans, which caused Meah Shearim to resemble a battle zone or downtown Newark circa 1964.

Even if the American bochurim present just wanted to see the “action,” rather than trigger it, their presence at the demonstrations would raise questions about their judgment, especially since every yeshiva in the vicinity posted signs warning talmidim against participation in the demonstrations. In addition, their arrests emphasize ... Read More >>]]> After every demonstration that turns violent in Jerusalem, there are inevitably a spate of frantic calls from American parents whose sons have been arrested at the demonstrations, sometimes after having been beaten badly by the Israeli police. And in almost every case, the story is the same: “My son just went to see what was happening out of curiosity, when the police jumped him.”

In most cases that is exactly what happened. Yet it is unfortunately not the case that every American bochur learning in Eretz Yisrael was innocently minding his own business when jumped by the police. Credible reports reaching those askanim who deal with these matters in recent weeks point to a leading role of at least some American bochurim in the recent demonstrations. Those demonstrations turned into riots, with stone throwing at police and burning garbage cans, which caused Meah Shearim to resemble a battle zone or downtown Newark circa 1964.

Even if the American bochurim present just wanted to see the “action,” rather than trigger it, their presence at the demonstrations would raise questions about their judgment, especially since every yeshiva in the vicinity posted signs warning talmidim against participation in the demonstrations. In addition, their arrests emphasize how little control or knowledge their parents have of what they are doing while learning in Eretz Yisrael.

The damage to the bochurim themselves from participation in demonstrations likely to turn violent can last long after the bruises and broken bones inflicted by out-of-control Israeli police officers have healed. Criminal records and being expelled from the country with orders not to return are just two of those consequences. During the latter years of his life, Rabbi Gershon Stemmer, the long-time leader of the Eidah Hachareidis, would no longer sign on any poster for a demonstration because he could not take responsibility for those arrested and what might happen to them in even one night in an Israeli jail.

The scars from participation in demonstrations are but a subset of the untoward consequences of the unsupervised freedom that many bochurim enjoy, but cannot handle, when they are supposed to be learning in Eretz Yisrael. One of the most knowledgeable observers of the American chareidi community told me recently that cases of bochurim returning from Eretz Yisrael having been exposed to excessive drinking, drugs, and gambling are growing all the time. Nor can anyone take consolation that this phenomena is limited to boys who came to Israel with “problems” in these areas. We are talking about bochurim from the finest families and most respected yeshivos, who had never experienced trouble of any kind prior to coming to Eretz Yisrael.

LEARNING IN ERETZ YISRAEL at some point after high school has long been a sacrosanct rite-of-passage among almost every segment of American Orthodoxy. Unquestionably the impact of a year or more in Eretz Yisrael has been uplifting, even life-changing, for most of those who come here to learn. The experience of a year or more in yeshiva in Eretz Yisrael has brought about something akin to a transformation of American Modern Orthodoxy, with many more young men than ever before returning to the United States with a deep commitment to Torah learning.

And in the yeshiva world, it is easy to understand why bochurim are so eager to come to Eretz Yisrael to learn. Most of them learned in yeshivos where the roshei yeshiva themselves learned for many years in Eretz Yisrael and view one or another of the legendary figures of the Israeli Torah world as their main teachers. The bochurim have been raised on stories of their rosh yeshiva’s years of unsurpassed joy in learning in Eretz Yisrael, and they can hardly wait to experience something of the same themselves.

But as is often the case, we make a mistake when we extrapolate from a small group of highly idealistic individuals to a large tzibbur encompassing the whole gamut of individuals of varying talents and spiritual levels. The yeshivaleit in the pre-War Eastern European yeshivos were of necessity very different from today’s yeshivaleit by virtue of the fact that each of the former had to make a conscious decision to defy the zeitgeist, which had turned the “bench-warmers” in yeshivos into figures of derision to many. At best, each of them was one of a select few from his town who pursued advanced studies in yeshiva. Today virtually every yeshiva bochur has grown up in a society in which everyone his age is learning in yeshiva.

Similarly, it impossible to compare the experience of American yeshiva bochurim in Eretz Yisrael 35 years ago to the experience today. Then the decision to learn in Eretz Yisrael was a brave individual decision, not simply a matter of following the trends. The bochurim of yesteryear made a decision to submerge themselves in the Torah world of Eretz Yisrael. They were generally a small minority in much larger Israeli institutions. Often times, they were in rural environments, like Beer Yaakov, completely cut-off from the creature comforts of America.

A friend of mine, who serves as a prominent neighborhood rabbi today in Jerusalem, recalls going three months at a time without speaking to his parents. In those days, the only way to make a phone call to the United States was to go to the main Jerusalem post office, and those calls were considered prohibitively expensive for most. (Bochurim actually wrote letters to their parents.) Plane flights were beyond his family’s budget, and he did not go home for almost three years. Yet, he says with a smile, most of what he knows today is a result of those three years of uninterrupted learning.

The fifty or so American bochurim in the blatt shiur of the legendary Rabbi Nachum Partzovitz, zt”l, in those days could speak to Reb Nachum in learning virtually all day, either in the beis medrash where he sat learning two sedarim or in his house.

Today, it is much easier for a bochur to take America with him to Eretz Yisrael. Rather than submerging themselves in an Israeli Torah environment, many live in their own apartments, with other English-speaking apartment mates. They are in frequent and easy contact with their parents, when it suits them, and they often fly home one or two times a year.

Once one of the great advantages of learning in Eretz Yisrael was the ability to cut oneself off to a very large extent from all the distractions of America. Today, modern communications technology makes it possible to take almost all those distractions with one. The head of seminary for girls from more modern homes already told me a decade ago that the power of the seminary to effect dramatic transformations in girls had greatly diminished. The secret in the old days, he said, was that for the first time in their lives the girls were able to really hear Torah without all kinds of backround noise. Today they bring the backround noise with them. A girl’s mother calls her before class, as she is entering the mall, and after class, when she’s coming out. And if the girl manages to hide a DVD player or the like, then there is little opportunity for Torah to penetrate..

The expense accounts of today’s bochurim allow them to regularly eat outside of the yeshiva. In contrast, my friend remembers that his monthly spending money was $20 dollars of which half was spent on seforim. He proudly points to his overflowing bookshelves as the product of those years. He ate and slept in the yeshiva, and spent almost nothing.

Nor do most bochurim today experience anything like the close contact with towering Torah figures like Reb Nachum, Rabbi Chaim Shmuelevitz, Rabbi Moshe Shmuel Shapira, Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe, Rabbi Yosef Ber Soloveichik, or the great Ponevezh Roshei Yeshivas –Rabbi Shmuel Rozowsky, Rabbi Dovid Povarsky, and Rabbi Elazar Schach — that their predecessors of one or two generations ago experienced.

SO FAR WE HAVE BEEN DEALING primarily with the reasons that the profound, life-changing experience of learning in Eretz Yisrael is less easily achieved by today’s bochurim than by those of a few decades back. But beyond the greater effort that a bochur must make to gain the maximum from the atmosphere of Eretz Yisrael, which makes one wise, we return to where we began: the danger of dramatic spiritual decline among bochurim who have too little accountability and are under too little supervision.

That is why the serious problems that we hear about are more common among bochurim than among seminary girls. The latter live in dormitories, not private apartments, have strict curfews, and spend most of their days filled with classes, where their absence is likely to be noted.

Too many parents send their sons of to Eretz Yisrael thinking that their task as parents is complete for the year, now that they have paid their tuition and air fare and placed their pride and joy on a guaranteed path of spiritual ascent. That is a terrible mistake. Parents must remain involved in their sons’ lives, and not just assume that the yeshiva is acting in loco parentis. That means first and foremost making sure that their son has a rebbe or other figure who feels a sense of responsibility for his growth during the time he is in Eretz Yisrael and being in regular contact with that rebbe. It is perfectly natural for a parent to inquire where his son ate on Shabbos, and equally natural for a parent to contact the hosts to thank them afterwards. Such conversations afford parents at least one source of information about their sons, without appearing to be spying upon them inordinately.

It would also be helpful ifֲ rebbeim and roshei yeshiva in America made efforts to maintainֲ their relationship ֲ with talmidim when they are learning in Eretz Yisrael. The Novominsker Rebbe, for instance, visits Eretz Yisrael at least once a year to maintain contact with Novominsk talmidim who are learning in Eretz Yisrael. Those contacts reduce a bochur’s feeling that he is all on his own, and has been dropped into a hefkervelt.

Parents should also attempt to cut down on the distractions to which their sons are subject. Whatever is gained in ease of communication by bochurim having a computer or cellphone with internet connectivity is greatly outweighed by the dangers involved. Cutting down on distractions also means making sure that they do not have too much spending money at their disposal and keeping close track of their expenditures. If a bochur, for instance, explains that the Chivas Regal on the credit card was for his Shabbos host, the parents should know that no host in Eretz Yisrael expects such presents or will even appreciate them. Kabdeihu ve,chashdeihu is also a good rule for a father going over his son’s credit card bill. True, it is possible to circumvent most parental supervision at a distance of thousands of miles, but it helps for bochurim not to think that their parents are asleep at the wheel.

The last and most important rule is at the same time the hardest one for parents to fulfill: Know your child. Do not assume that simply because your son has always been a “good boy,” who learns well, and does not get into trouble, that you have nothing to worry about. Rabbi David Sapirman, a mechanech in Toronto with forty years experience, writes in a Torah U’mesorah publication, “Why and How to Teach Emunah,” of many top notch yeshiva products who “when it comes to emunah . . . neither believe nor disbelieve. He is simply moving along the conveyor belt, which takes him from cradle to kollel. He goes through the motions, and may even be very happy doing so. But his lack of conviction permeates all that he does. These youngsters are as much at risk as the disenchanted, although they may not be aware of it yet. . . . Woe to him, if ever faced with a serious nisayon, like the temptation for something immoral or dishonest. Only real conviction can enable one to withstand temptation, not a robotic life style.”

And that is just the point. The time spent learning in Eretz Yisrael, without in many cases adequate supervision or accountability, is filled with many temptations. Before sending one’s sons to learn there, parents have to know whether their sons have a real connection to HaKadosh Baruch Hu, whether the image of Yaakov Avinu will confront them in moments of temptation, and whether they are truly filled with aspirations for growth in Torah. Or are they just “good boys,” who have never gotten off the conveyor belt. If the latter, caution is advised.

It would be accurate to say that the haredi public is united in its resentment of being tarred with the violence in Meah Shearim. It is also true that few haredim can understand why a pregnant mother was jumped and shackled by police as she left a meeting with her social worker, and then held without bail for three days in the most primitive prison conditions. (The municipal social workers in Jerusalem’s Bukharian Quarter social service office were besides themselves over the police action.)

Hadassah Hospital could easily have started with a civil proceeding to prevent the mother from seeing her child, which is what the mother was told was going to happen before her visit to the social worker. The police used imprisonment to force the woman to confess or submit to psychiatric examination by a psychiatrist of their choice (rather than a neutral court-appointed psychiatrist). None of the conditions for a denial ... Read More >>]]> The lead paragraph of a front-page story in Monday’s Jerusalem Post describes “the entire haredi public as having formed “a united front . . . to support the Jerusalem mother who allegedly starved her three-year old boy.” That statement is grossly misleading, as the article itself makes clear.

It would be accurate to say that the haredi public is united in its resentment of being tarred with the violence in Meah Shearim. It is also true that few haredim can understand why a pregnant mother was jumped and shackled by police as she left a meeting with her social worker, and then held without bail for three days in the most primitive prison conditions. (The municipal social workers in Jerusalem’s Bukharian Quarter social service office were besides themselves over the police action.)

Hadassah Hospital could easily have started with a civil proceeding to prevent the mother from seeing her child, which is what the mother was told was going to happen before her visit to the social worker. The police used imprisonment to force the woman to confess or submit to psychiatric examination by a psychiatrist of their choice (rather than a neutral court-appointed psychiatrist). None of the conditions for a denial of bail applied, especially if she were placed in the home of one of the communal rabbis who immediately offered to house her. She was in no position to interfere with the police investigation, did not present an ongoing danger, and was not a serious flight risk.

But it is absolutely false to state that there is any kind of consensus that the mother is innocent or a categorical rejection of the claims of Hadassah Hospital. In yesterday’s Mishpacha, by far the largest circulation haredi weekly, Rabbi Mordechai Gotfarb of the Toldos Aharon community is quoted as saying, “Of course, if she were diagnosed with Munchausen-by-proxy disease, then we would understand that the child would have to be taken away.”

Rabbi Moshe Sternbuch, the head of the Eidah Hachareidis rabbinical court, did not reject out of hand police claims in a statement issued last Friday: “If their allegations are true, this woman deserves the appropriate medical treatment, but not to sit in a prison cell, with such subhuman treatment.” He went on to categorically reject “any talk of boycotting the hospital,” as “against halacha and self-damaging,” in light of the fact that “many in our community receive their services with great care.”

That does not mean, of course, that every claim of the hospital and police is accepted at face value. Many haredim would still like to know what were the presenting symptoms when the boy in question was placed in Hadassah’s children’s oncology ward and how his mother could have prevented him from eating under the noses of the hospital staff during the nearly seven months he has been hospitalized. But there is a willingness to wait until trial for the full presentation of the facts.

IF THERE IS ONE THING, HOWEVER, about which there is a nearly unanimous agreement across all sectors of the haredi community, it is condemnation of violent actions, such as throwing stones at police and burning garbage cans. From the beginning of the Shabbos demonstrations, after Mayor Barkat’s bombastic announcement of the opening of a municipal parking lot, as if he were the secular Saladin recapturing the city from the haredim, Rabbi Sternbuch has issued countless public proclamations stating clearly, “Anyone who commits acts of violence declares that he doesn’t belong to our community.”

For weeks a sign has hung in the Mirrer Yeshiva, hand-written by the Rosh Yeshiva, Rabbi Nosson Tzvi Finkel, so there can be no mistake, forbidding not just any violent actions, but any participation in demonstrations at all. “No one can give you a heter (permission),” the sign adds for emphasis.

My editorial in this week’s Mishpacha quotes veteran Eidah Hachareidis leader Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim strongly condemning the recent demonstrations, and a long interview with Rabbi Pappenheim appears in today’s Mishpacha. He points out that Rabbi Amram Blau, the founder of Neturei Karta, modeled his tactics on Mahatma Gandhi. He and his followers always acted passively, even when being beaten by police. Today, however, inevitably some hot-headed youth will throw a stone at police and trigger a riot.

As a consequence, Rabbi Pappenheim says, the demonstrations do grievous harm to the interests of the entire haredi community, and especially to those who participate in them. But his most shocking criticism is that they push off the Redemption. A stronger condemnation, in haredi terms, does not exist.

Rabbi Pappenheim quotes his teacher Rabbi Yosef Tzvi Dushinsky, the late chief rabbi of the Eidah Hachareidis, to the effect that that the Redemption does not require that all Jews first become fully observant, only that there be some drawing closer to God. The rest, writes Maimonides, Mashiach will do.

Never has the time been so ripe for such a spiritual arousal, Rabbi Pappenheim feels. The “isms” that once drew Jewish youth have lost their appeal. The spiritual hunger of Israeli youth manifested in their travels to the Far East in search of enlightenment was already foretold by the Prophet: “Behold, days are coming . . . when I will send hunger into the Land; not a hunger for bread nor a thirst for water, but to hear the words of G-d. [People] will travel from sea to sea, and from north to east; they will wander about to seek the word of G-d, but they will not find it” (Amos 8:11-12).

Those who make Torah Jews and Judaism appear as something ugly and violent, guarantee that their fellow Jews who thirst for the word of G-d, will seek it in foreign pastures. The burning of garbage cans in Meah Shearim does for the image of Torah Judaism what the Watts and Newark riots of 1964 did for the image of inner-city blacks.

IF THE HAREDI RABBIS and public are so opposed to violence, secular Jews ask, why don’t they stop it. That question, however, derives from one of the common misconceptions about the haredi community: that it is led by a half dozen rabbis whose word is law. While it might be true that no haredi MK would openly oppose Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv, for example, the latter cannot even command obedience in his own Meah Shearim neighborhood.

Rabbi Aharon Feldman, today a member of the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah of Agudath Israel of America, remembers that during the Ramot Road demonstrations of the early ’80s, he and a group of some of the most respected young roshei yeshiva in Israel went out to urge the hooligans from Meah Shearim, who were throwing stones, to stop. “They just laughed at us,” he told me.

Those hooligans represent a haredi educational failure. Even the fact that yeshiva students, some of them American tourists, participated or went to view recent demonstrations out of curiosity represents another type of educational failure. A Talmudic education is supposed to develop qualities of judgment and foresight.

But the violent few do not represent the values of the Torah or of the overwhelming majority of haredi Jews. That is the only issue on which a haredi consensus exists.