At the height of the ongoing controversy over shmita observance, an editorial appeared in this paper (”Shmita pragmatism,” Sept. 18) celebrating the heter mechira as the essential manifestation “of the religious Zionist ethos.” The editorial described the heter mechira as a “circumvention” of “the ancient shmita limitations” using “pro forma bills of sale [whereby] farmers ostensibly turn over their land to non-Jews for the duration of the sabbatical [year].”

To call the heter mechira the essential manifestation of the national-religious ethos constitutes a huge slander against that community. It attributes to religious Zionism an attitude toward Halacha more generally associated with the Conservative movement: Halacha must be brought up to date, and is infinitely malleable in light of new “realities” and the emerging zeitgeist.

Shmita is no more difficult to observe today than in biblical times, when the entire society was agrarian and there was no possibility of importing food. Then too observance of the sabbatical year was a tremendous test of faith, as the Torah explicitly recognizes: “If you will say, ‘What will we eat in the seventh year’ - behold we will not sow and not gather in our crops?” (Leviticus 25:20).

A proper modern approach to shmita observance would seek new agricultural techniques that do not run afoul of the Torah’s requirement that the land lie fallow. And some leading figures in the national-religious world have indeed devoted themselves to that quest.

In no area of human behavior does Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity – “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” – come so frequently to mind as Middle East peacemaking. Periodically, usually near the end of a presidential term, a buzzer goes off in the heads of the departing administration signaling that the time is ripe for the all-out commitment of American prestige and resources to finding the solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that has eluded policymakers for over sixty years.

Thus Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice has announced that she intends to have a peace treaty between the Palestinian Authority and Israel all wrapped up before President George W. Bush leaves office. The quest to achieve that goal begins this week at Annapolis.

On the face of it, nothing has changed since the breakdown of Camp David more than seven years ago that would seem to increase the chances of concluding such an agreement. Just the opposite. In the wake of Camp David, Yassir Arafat and the Palestinians declared a war of terror on Israel in which thousands of Israeli Jews lost their lives. Only after Operation Defensive Shield, in the wake of the Seder Night Massacre in Netanya, in late March 2002, did the IDF retake control of security in all of Judea and Samaria and the terror abate.

In summer 2005, Israel withdrew from Gaza only to find itself under constant rocket attack from the territory it abandoned to Palestinian control. And the Palestinians in Gaza, now under Hamas leadership, have taken advantage of Israel’s ceding control over the Egyptian-Gaza border to smuggle in vast quantities of more lethal and long-range missiles. The experience of the Gaza withdrawal has hardly put Israelis in the mood for territorial concessions in Judea and Samaria that would make it easier for terrorists to direct their fire at Israel’s heartland.

Do Torah Jews have an obligation to use any power, political or economic, that they can muster to force the not-yet religious to live in greater conformity with the Torah’s commands? In determining whether to employ the power at our disposal, is it permissible to take into account such factors as the norms of a democratic society, the chances of stirring up a backlash against religious Jews, or the possibility that coerced conformity to halachic norms could be at the cost of a genuine religious commitment at some later date?

Let me give an example of the type of situation that I have in mind in posing these questions. Imagine a formerly secular neighborhood in Jerusalem into which chareidi Jews have begun to move. The neighborhood has a communal swimming pool. When the chareidi population reaches 30% of the neighborhood, the chareidim ask the community center to set aside hours for separate swimming for men and women, and the community center acquiesces.

Now what happens when the chareidi population reaches 70%? Let us say that the chareidim are in a position to end all mixed swimming and institute only separate hours. Would they be halachically obligated to do so? Would the failure to do so constitute a de facto approval of mixed swimming?

What might be some of the countervailing considerations to exercising our power? For one thing, the hypothetical case described above involves a degree of religious coercion. The chareidi population would not just be acting to ensure its own ability to live as Torah observant Jews, but imposing halachic norms on other Jews. There is no greater hot button issue for the secular population than religious coercion, or one that does more to provoke hostile responses to religious Jews.

The theme of this year’s annual convention of Agudath Israel of America is the necessity to “Wake the Sleeping Giant” by involving all members of the Torah community in efforts to reach out to non-Orthodox and unaffiliated Jews. We are fast approaching the point where intermarriage and assimilation will have so reduced the general American Jewish population that there will be little left to rescue.

The relatively short window of opportunity remaining and the untapped potential of all Torah Jews – and not just kiruv professionals – will be the focus of most of the speakers. But I would like to address another aspect of the ba’al teshuva phenomenon that is too frequently overlooked: the positive impact that ba’alei teshuva have had on American Orthodoxy over the past 25 years.

As one who travels frequently to communities on the other side of the Hudson River, I am frequently struck by the extent to which many out-of-town communities are primarily made up of ba’alei teshuva and geirei tzedek. Nor is this phenomenon limited to out-of-town communities.

At a recent Shabbos meal, we entertained four or five English-speaking bochurim currently learning in Eretz Yisrael. True, they were not learning at Brisk (or one of its satellites). But their yeshiva is for boys who come to Eretz Yisrael already serious about their Torah learning. Each of these bochurim came from a family where one or both of the parents are ba’alei teshuva, and they told me that the same is true for well over half the boys in the yeshiva. In sum, the American Orthodox world is experiencing something of a population transfer.

The name Rabbi David Fohrman flashed brightly on my radar screen for the first time in twenty years this past summer. I was in Lawrence, and a good friend told me that he had been challenged by his partner in Torah learning, a highly successful hedge fund manager, to prove that the Torah is the product of a single Author.

My friend had arranged for his learning partner to meet a number of people, and asked if I wanted to join them. The last stop on our highly stimulating tour was Rabbi Fohrman.

Though Reb David and I had learned in the same yeshiva about two decades ago, I was completely unprepared for the brilliance of his presentation. For two hours, he held us transfixed as he showed repeating ideational patterns in Bereishis. He demonstrated how many of the key events in the story of Creation are related as chiasms – or, as they are sometimes known, at-bash patterns. In this literary form, the first idea mirrors the last, the second idea mirrors the next to last, etc. Or, to put it another way – the key ideas follow a pattern of A-B-C-B-A, with C forming the fulcrum.

After showing how this was true for the story of Creation, he then demonstrated how the same ideas and literary patterns are repeated in the story of the Flood (re-creation), and of Avraham Avinu (the creation of the Jewish people).

When last heard from, we were lamenting the alienation of younger, non-Orthodox American Jews from Israel, as detailed in a recent study by sociologists Stephen M. Cohen and Ari Kelman. Those findings parallel a great deal of social science evidence describing the rapidly waning sense of peoplehood among American Jews and declining willingness to affirm any special responsibility to one’s fellow Jews (see Cohen and Wertheimer, ‘Whatever Happened to the Jewish People,’ Commentary, June 2006).

Some have attempted to put a happy face on these findings by arguing that while Jewish ethnic identity is plummeting, Jewish religious observance is holding steady and perhaps even increasing. Unfortunately, there is little consolation to be found in that direction.

Whatever can be said of religious observance that downplays mutual responsibility of Jews for one another, it is not Judaism. Lawrence Hoffman, a professor of liturgy at Hebrew Union College, describes the new Reform Siddur as taking into account ”a growing emphasis on personalism as opposed to peoplehood, the individual’s search for the sacred. . .”

That emphasis on the subjective experience of the worshiper as providing the validation of religious ritual is borrowed from 18th-century German Protestantism. But it has far earlier antecedents. The essence of pagan ritual, Rabbi Yosef Ber Soloveitchik observed, is that it derives meaning only from the emotional impact upon the one performing the ritual.

Yitzchak entreated Hashem opposite his wife because she was barren. And Hashem answered him, and Rivka his wife conceived (25:21)

According to Rashi, both Yitzchak and Rivka were praying for a child, but Hashem answered only him and not her. Why? Answers Rashi: Because there is no comparison between the prayer of a tzaddik who is the child of an evildoer to the prayer of a righteous person who is the child of a righteous person.

I suspect that most of us have at some point found ourselves puzzled, even angered, by Rashi’s comment? Why should the merit of a tzaddik be greater by virtue of being the child of a tzaddik? If anything, is it not more meritorious to have completely separated oneself from a house of evil, as Rivka did, than to continue on in the path set by one’s parents.

The source of our confusion is that we do not properly understand what is meant by a tzaddik who is the child of a tzaddik. Had Yitzchak just emulated the example of his father Avraham he would not have been considered a tzaddik. Indeed, explains Rav Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler, anything we do solely because our parents taught us to do so does not confer any merit upon us.

I was asked recently to speak to a group of foreign journalists about the haredi community in Israel and take them on a tour of Mea She’arim. I refused the second request. A tour of Mea She’arim alone, I explained, would only reinforce one of the most common misconceptions of the haredi world - that Mea She’arim typifies haredi Jewry or, at the very least, represents the haredi community in its unsullied, uncompromised form.

Mea She’arim is in many respects sui generis - linguistically, behaviorally and in terms of the historical memories that shape the community. Outside the hassidic world, Yiddish usage is in steep decline in the haredi community. Most present-day Israeli yeshiva students, for instance, do not speak or understand Yiddish. But it remains the lingua franca of Mea She’arim. The overwhelming majority of haredim eligible to vote do so, whereas most denizens of Mea She’arim do not.

Most importantly, the mindset of Mea She’arim has been shaped by a different history. Its residents represent the so-called “Old Yishuv” that has been locked in battle with the Zionist interlopers for well over a century. It is a community that views itself as being under siege from the outside world.

Though the rest of the haredi community was also ideologically hostile to Zionism, its historical memory has not been shaped to nearly the same degree by the Old Yishuv’s hundred-year war with Zionism. Rabbi Avraham Yeshayahu Karelitz (universally known as the Chazon Ish, the name of his multivolume halachic work) arrived in Palestine from Europe in the 1930s and quickly established himself as the ideological leader of the “New Yishuv.” He once referred to the self-proclaimed “zealots” as Jews from before matan Torah (the giving of the Torah). By that he meant they had been rendered incapable of balancing a multiplicity of factors as demanded by the Torah.

More than the Calf Wants to Nurse

One aspect of the Torah community in Eretz Yisrael that never ceases to amaze me is the incredible number of “mitzvah entrepreneurs” who see a problem and sally forth to fix it. Though they may do so in Don-Quixote fashion, unlike Cervantes’ hero they often achieve remarkable results. Tapping the energy of these “entrepreneurs,” and providing them with the tools they need is a communal priority.

A week or two ago, a young man knocked on our door. From the look on his face, I assumed that he was collecting for himself. I was wrong.

About four years ago, he and another friend heard about a 40-year-old man stricken with cancer who had a great desire to meet some of the famous singers in the religious world. With that Chaim L’Nefesh Yisroel was born.

The most frightening thing about The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy is how bad, shockingly bad, it is. That two professors at two of the world’s leading universities could have produced a book so lacking in serious scholarship or even basic familiarity with their topic; that a major publishing house put its imprimatur on the book; and most significantly that it has attracted a wide readership and thrust the two authors and their views into the limelight is truly cause for concern.

The two authors Stephen Walt of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago purport to prove that American foreign policy has been subverted by the so-called ” Israel lobby” to the benefit of Israel and at great damage to the United States. One would expect a book about American policy-making to actually examine the decision-making process of American policymakers. Yet Walt and Mearsheimer do not cite, much less rely, on government documents.

They have spent no time in the archives. Nor have they interviewed key policymakers. Of the book’s 1,247 footnotes, only three refer to correspondence with a primary source and only two mention interviews with sources. No Congressman was interviewed, even though the picture of Congress as “Israeli-held territory” (in Patrick Buchanan’s pithy description) is adopted by Walt-Mearsheimer. Even reading through the vast secondary literature on American Middle East policymaking was two much for the distinguished professors. That literature attributes little impact to domestic political concerns on American foreign policy.

So how do our intrepid authors know that the Israel lobby has wielded such an immense influence on American foreign policy? “Elementary, my dear Watson, elementary.” They deduce that influence. To members of the “realist school” to which Walt-Mearsheimer belong, the war in Iraq was utter and total folly. Indeed a folly so complete that no rational explanation can be offered for it. And since according to realist dogma all nations pursue a narrow set of “interests,” any action totally at odds with those interests must be explained by some outside force. The only one that occurs to Walt-Mearsheimer is the stranglehold of the Israel Lobby on American foreign policy.

“The plural of anecdotes is not data” goes an old saying. Yet when one attempts to examine a wide variety of social phenomenon in the Israel Torah community, hard data is hard to come by.

One of those phenomena would be disaffected youth. How widespread is the problem? What are its causes? Is it possible to identify youth who might be at risk in coming years at a young age, and what types of early intervention might be effective? These are just a few of the critical questions worthy of investigation.

This past week I finally found someone who has been studying all these issues and collecting hard data in order to create effective early intervention programs. In the course of our long conversation, he observed that the “drop-out” rates in so-called mixed communities, like Petach Tikva, Rechovot, and Haifa, are dramatically lower than in all chareidi communities, like Kiryat Sefer, Beitar, Elad, and Bnei Brak.

That remark was far from the focus of our discussion, and we did not dwell on it. But it is still worth asking what are some of the differences between growing up in a mixed community and an all chareidi community.

This past Yom Kippur Israeli security forces averted a major disaster when they uncovered a fully prepared explosive belt in the heart of Tel Aviv at the last moment.

The drama worthy of a Hollywood thriller began about a week before the planned attack, when security forces, presumably acting on intelligence information, rounded up 40 Hamas operatives in the Ein el-Hilweh refugee camp. Among those captured were a suicide bomber, his recruiter, and the driver who was to smuggle him into Tel Aviv.

While their capture was a set back for those behind the operation, they still had plenty of time to recruit another bomber and driver. They had already succeeded in smuggling an explosive belt in three separate parts into Tel Aviv and in assembling it there. Not until early Friday morning, less than 24 hours prior to the onset of Yom Kippur, did security forces capture Nihad Sahkirat, the planner of the operation, in a refugee camp in Nablus.

The details of Shakirat’s interrogation are not fully known, but we can be confident it was not a pleasant one from his point of view, as the security forces confronted the classic “ticking bomb” situation. For once common sense prevailed, and the Israeli Supreme Court did not intervene to protect the “rights” of Shakirat.

Something about the scene struck me as completely incongruous. The members of the second Am Echad delegation – a group of concerned American Jews representing a wide spectrum of American Orthodoxy – were gathered at the Knesset to exchange views with Knesset members from a number of parties.

At some point, Eliezer “Cheetah” Cohen, a pony-tailed, former IDF helicopter pilot, who served as an unlikely representative of the Russian party, Israel Beitainu arrived late. He entered in a state of high agitation. “I just learned that the Muslim Waqf is destroying Har HaBayis,” he told us. He went on to describe how heavy bulldozers were being used to transform an underground area known as Solomon’s Stables into a new mosque. The dirt being removed by massive bulldozers from the site – tons of it – was being dumped into the Kidron Valley.

The secular “Cheetah” described all this with much pain and anguish in his voice. While those of us who direct our hearts three times each day towards HaKodesh HaKodoshim absorbed what he was telling us with a calm demeanor and occasional sympathetic tongue clucking. Thus the incongruity.

The memory of that meeting returned recently with the announcement that the Waqf is engaging in another major project on Har Habayis. This time it is digging a 1300 foot trench over 1/12 meters deep, again using bulldozers and heavy machinery. All this has been done with the permission of Prime Minister Olmert.

The woman said to the Serpent, . . . “Of the fruit of the tree which is in the center of the garden, G-d has said: ‘You shall neither eat of it nor touch it, lest you die’” (Bereishis 3:2-3).

By adding a seemingly innocuous prohibition against touching to the prohibition on eating, Chava brought death to the world and changed the course of human history forever. She provided the opening that the Serpent needed. He pushed Chava into the tree, and she did not die. The Serpent was then able to convince her that just as she had not died as a consequence of touching the tree so she would suffer no adverse consequences as a result of eating from it.

The story of Chava and the Serpent cautions us as to the potential danger of excessive stringencies. A talmid chacham once explained to me the rare, but not unknown, instances of wives of kolleleit dressing inappropriately. When they were in seminary, he said, they were told that certain colors of stockings were forbidden. When they noticed that competing seminaries had different forbidden and permitted colors or that the forbidden colors changed from year to year, they concluded that nothing they were taught about tznius was really halacha.

Even stringencies adopted by an individual may have consequences far beyond him. Nearly three decades ago, Rabbi Aharon Feldman, Rosh Yeshivas Ner Israel, told a group of new chasanim how he had called a certain husband to make an appointment to discuss the latter’s shalom bayis problems. The man replied that he could not come that night because he would be baking his matzos one at a time, in a private kiln, far out of the city.

The historic bargain linking American Jewry and Israel since the founding of the State is coming to an end. The terms of the deal were unspoken, but clear: Israel would provide American Jews with a sense of pride and identity as Jews, and they, in turn, would shower upon Israel their financial and political support. But Israel is no longer a source of pride for non-Orthodox Jews, and the identity it provides is not one which they wish to share.

That conclusion emerges from a recent study published by sociologists Stephen Cohen and Ari Kelman. They found that American Jews under 35 do not care very much about Israel. They are not just apathetic about Israel, that indifference is “giving way to downright alienation,” write Cohen and Kelman.

More than half of Jews under 35 said that they would not view the destruction of Israel as a personal tragedy. The death and expulsion of millions is something they could live with. By those standards, they probably would not see the Holocaust as a “personal” tragedy either.

What young Jews under 35 feel towards Israel goes beyond apathy to outright resentment. Israel complicates their social lives and muddies their political identity. Only 54% profess to be comfortable with the idea of a Jewish state at all. In Europe and on elite American campuses, internationalism and a world-without-borders are the rage. The Jews of Israel, with their stubborn insistence on protecting their nation-state, are, as always, out-of-sync.

Of all the silly sentences produced by American pop culture, my personal choice for silliest is Erich Segal’s, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” (Who but a Yale professor could have written something so dumb?) “Love means always being prepared to say you are sorry,” is far sounder advice to newlyweds.

Certainly, the Torah places a high premium on the willingness to seek forgiveness from both G-d and man. Verbal confession is one of the essential elements of repentance. And Maimonides, in his Laws of Repentence, teaches that on Yom Kippur G-d will not forgive our sins against our fellow man until we have made restitution and received his forgiveness. Thus the custom of requesting mechillah (forgiveness) as Yom Kippur approaches.

Neither admitting that we have wronged someone else or seeking his forgiveness comes easily to most of us. Who has not experienced holding a phone in the air while trying to summon up the courage to make an uncomfortable phone call to someone we have injured? And usually the receiver is replaced with the call still unmade.

Even with loved ones, whom we can be pretty confident of having recently injured, we tend to put off our requests for forgiveness to late on Erev Yom Kippur. The lateness of the hour leaves less time to dwell on unpleasant details. But it also provides none of the purgative power of a serious request for forgiveness, with all the soul-searching entailed.

Rav Dessler, following the Vilna Gaon, learns the opening words of ya’aleh ve’yavo as descriptive of a process of ascent that brings our neshama ever closer to HaKadosh Baruch Hu. The seven terms of ascent – ve’yipakeid v’yizacheir are considered one term — parallel the seven heavens that divide us from HaKadosh Baruch Hu.

According to this scheme, the terms ve’yipakeid v’yizacheir, correspond to the highest degree of closeness to Hashem, when our neshamah stands in His immediate presence. And what precisely is the zichroneinu u’fikdoneinu that we call upon Hashem to remember at that moment of greatest intimacy?

Remembrance, when used in reference to Hashem, refers to His focus on the essence of the thing, on its name at the moment of Creation (Ramban to Bereishis 8:1; Maharal, Gevuros Hashem chap. 64). What we call upon Hashem to remember at that moment of greatest intimacy is the unique mission with which He charged us at the moment of our Creation.

Each of us has some mission in life that is ours and ours alone. No two human beings are born with the same talents or the same challenges; no two are born into the same familial situation or the identical time and place in human history. These unique aspects of each of us constitute the raw material within which our mission in life will unfold.

The more important something is to us, writes the Avnei Nezer, the greater the preparation we will devote to it. Athletes prior to a major competition or an important game, for instance, will train harder.

Elul is our preparation for the most crucial period of the year: the Yomim Noraim. Too frequently we do not utilize this period to the maximum. In Eastern Europe, it was not uncommon for married men to return for the entire month of Elul to the bais medrash in which they had learned in their youth, and to spend the entire month immersed in preparation for the Yomim Noraim. Our frenetic, fast-paced lives today seem to offer us no such opportunity. We consider ourselves to have done well if we can snatch a few hours during the month to really think about the Judgment that awaits us.

The metaphor of the athlete training for a big game, however, does not do full justice to the demands of Elul. If an athlete fails to train, he has increased his chances of losing, but he has not yet lost. Not so with us if we let Elul pass by without focusing on the task at hand. In that case, we are not in the same place we were before; we have further distanced ourselves from Hashem.

The great Jerusalem maggid Rabbi Shalom Schwadron used to give the moshol of a young man who emigrated from Eastern Europe to America. After many years of separation, his elderly father was consumed with a desire to see his son again. He sold everything he owned to purchase a ship ticket to America.

The tripartite division of the recent CNN series God’s Warriors into Jewish, Christian and Islamic segments conveyed its underlying message: Religions produce murderous fanatics. That particular trope features in all the recent spate of books proclaiming, “I am an atheist, and if you had any brains, you would be too.”

That thesis, however, is badly flawed. First, religious fanatics prove no more about the inherent nature of religious belief than Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot prove about non-belief.

And the implicit equation of Jewish, Christian and Islamic religious fanatics is absurd. In the first two categories, CNN’s Christine Amanpour dredged up Dr. Baruch Goldstein and a handful of (largely unsuccessful) Jewish terrorists from the 1980s and a few Christian abortion clinic bombers. (The former allowed Amanpour to segue into a BBC-style frontal attack on Israel and the “Israel lobby,” already admirably dissected by Jonathan Tobin and Andrea Levin in these pages.)

Radical Islamists, by way of comparison, have killed thousands around the globe in recent years - in New York, Madrid, London, Bali, Tanzania, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Jordan, Afghanistan and Iraq. An Iranian regime with the declared mission of spreading the worldwide reign of Islam is on the verge of possessing nuclear weapons, and an already nuclear Pakistan could fall under Islamist rule.

This post deals only with Rabbi Angel’s views, not with MO, in general, and was written and published last month before the piece on Noah Feldman. Steve Brizel, who was critical of the Feldman piece, urged me to post this one. In short, I have no wish to revisit the general issue of Modern Orthodoxy. Any criticisms with respect to this post itself are, of course, welcome.

Rabbi Marc Angel, former president of the Rabbinical Council of America, is retiring after 38 years as the spiritual leader of Manhattan’s Congregation Shearith Israel. But he is not going quietly into the night. In a recent interview with the Jewish Week, Rabbi Angel charged that Orthodoxy, including his own Modern Orthodox movement, is “to a certain extent slipping over the line to a cultic, superstitious kind of religion.” He bewailed the loss of creativity within modern Orthodoxy and the growing resort to “so-called authorities” by local rabbis.

The Angel interview was reminiscent of last year’s valedictory address of Ismar Schorsch as chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary (Conservative), in which Schorsch excoriated the movement he had headed for years. But whereas Schorsch complained that his movement increasingly has no standards, Rabbi Angel complained that the standards of Orthodoxy are ever stricter.

For all the harshness of his critique, Rabbi Angel offered few concrete examples of what precisely is bothering him. He mentions the question of whether it is permitted for men to attend the opera, but it is hard to believe that issue is what is exercising him. Recently, he has vociferously dissented from the view that geirus (conversion) requires an acceptance of yoke of mitzvos — a view that was axiomatic to his mentor at Yeshiva University Rabbi Yosef Ber Soloveitchik — and he even called for the dissolution of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate, in part, because of its failure to convert more immigrants from the FSU.

In his Kuntras HaBechirah, Rav Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler makes a truly frightening statement. No matter how elevated one’s actions, if those actions are only the result of one’s training, then they confer no merit upon the one performing them. Only those actions that result from the exercise of one’s free will are attributed to a person.

That which we do as a form of imitation of our role models or as a result of some form of coercion is not truly ours. One only can only lay claim to those mitzvos to which one brings something of oneself – some thought, some feeling while performing the mitzvah.

Rav Dessler taught that we define ourselves only through the exercise of our free will. And that only takes place when there is an aspect of internal struggle. That struggle is the opposite of rote behaviour – mitzvos anoshim m’limuda.

Our very relationship with Hashem depends on the exercise of our bechirah. Any true relationship must be based on the individuality of both parties – on what is intrinsic to them and not compelled by circumstances beyond their control. And that process of self-definition requires the exercise of our bechirah.

On the Road

I’m writing while traveling in America with my wife and two youngest sons. As always, I find travel to be a great stimulant. The lack of familiarity with one’s surroundings forces one to open one’s eyes and to observe the world around with a keener eye and in sharper detail.

At the Boeing Museum of Flight in Seattle, for instance, I had a chance to contemplate the fact that less than seventy years separated Wilbur Wright’s first flight, which lasted a few seconds and carried the him little more than one hundred feet, from Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon. I never would have thought about this particular aspect of the unquenchable human thirst to explore new vistas – itself one of the wonders of the Creation – had I not been at the Museum. (The Museum also forced me to reflect on how quickly the Wright brothers’ invention was employed to transform the nature of warfare and greatly multiply its destructive force.)

At the same time, the breaking out of familiar patterns entails its own risks. One of the gedolei hador once quipped that Ben Gurion Airport has more yiras Shomayim than any other place in the world – i.e., many Jews leave their yiras Shomayim at the departure gate. Being removed from one’s familiar surroundings while traveling makes, it is easy to feel as if all the old rules have been temporarily suspended.

My post on Noah Feldman’s recent essay in the New York Times provoked an unusually large number of responses — most critical of my post and many unflattering on a personal level. I was travelling in the United States during most of this flurry of responses, and only had a chance to read them in dribs and drabs. A fuller reading, however, only confirmed my initial impression: I did not recognize myself or anything I wrote in most of the comments, which were mainly of a tone that has made this an increasingly unsatisfying forum in which to participate. That I may not have perceived all my many failings is itself not so surprising — no one recognizes his own blemishes — but, in truth, I did not recognize them even after having them pointed out to me in such detail.

Harvard Professor Noah Feldman’s lengthy whine in the July 22 New York Times Magazine about the failure of Boston’s modern Orthodox Maimonides School to acknowledge his marriage to a Korean-American fellow professor and the subsequent birth of two children in its alumni Mazel Tov bulletins triggered a panic attack in certain Orthodox quarters. It shouldn’t have — or at least not for the reasons it did.

Why did the Times choose to publish an essay about an event that took place nearly a decade ago, and which has no evident “news hook,” especially when both Feldman and the Times knew two weeks before publication that the essay’s opening vignette and emotional core had never occurred? The picture of Feldman and his then girlfriend had not been deliberately excised from a tenth high school reunion picture. They had simply been cut off, along with 16 others, by the photographer’s lack of a sufficiently wide-angle lens.

The answer, I suspect, is that the Times’ owners, with their Jewish last names, but whose religious affiliation tends towards the Episcopalian today, have been spooked by the growing ascendancy of Orthodoxy in Jewish communal life, just as their German Jewish forbears were spooked by the arrival in America of poor and often religious Jews from Eastern Europe.

In this reading, the Times’ publication of Feldman’s piece is a reflection of Orthodoxy’s surprising rebirth in America. (Monday’s Jerusalem Post noted that three-quarters of Jewish births in the UK are haredi, and pointed to similar trends around the world.)

“I believe with a perfect faith in the coming of Moshiach. And even though he tarries, I still await his arrival every day.” Those words form one of the 13 basic principles of faith of the Rambam. Yet, as I write barely a week before Tisha B’Av, I find myself doubtful that this Tisha B’Av will be filled with festive rejoicing.

That glum thought was triggered by watching From the Ashes, a new offering from Aish HaTorah scheduled to be screened in Jewish communities around the world this coming Tisha B’Av. The documentary basically follows Rav Noach Weinberg, founder of Aish HaTorah, on a visit to the death camps in Poland, together with 60 Aish HaTorah rabbis, interspersed with various participants discussing the experience.

The central metaphor of the documentary - one that is pounded home relentlessly in various ways - is that there is a spiritual Holocaust facing the Jewish people today no less devastating in its implications for the Am Hashem than the physical extermination of six million Jews in the Holocaust. Those six million constituted approximately one-third of the Jewish nation. At least two-thirds of Jews today have little connection to the Jewish people, certainly not enough to prevent them from intermarrying.

For Reb Noach, the “spiritual Holocaust” is no metaphor; it is the driving force in his life. And he seeks to make it the driving force in the life of every Jew with whom he comes into contact.