11 bNissan
I have been searching the internet for the prayer to say upon eating bread on Pessah, and I found it by Googling “zachor Michlalah movies.” There you can see/hear the late Reb Yonah Emanuel who was a teenage inmate in Bergen-Belsen during the Passover of 1944 when the prayer over bread was recited. He reads the entire prayer (it is not a bracha) over bread and describes Pessah in that death camp in this 3 minute segment of a longer DVD. The reason for my search: The recent controversy over selling hametz in the public square during Passover in Israel.
I translated the prayer for bread during Passover into English at the end of this posting.

The controversy and court decision (by a national religious judge!) that permits selling bread in Israel during Passover reminded me of two Seder meals sixty-something years ago.

Passover 1943, Konin Concentration Camp

Before describing Pessah of 1943 in the Konin concentration camp in Poland, Rabbi Yehoshua Aronson gives us, in his memoirs, this startling description of a new arrival, one Dr. Hans Knopf.

He entered the lioness’s den and came out unscathed.

Rabbi Yerachmiel Weiss of Merkaz HaRav Kook, Rosh Yeshiva L’Tzeirim was interviewed by Ilana Dayan three days after the terror attack, on her regular Sunday TV program. Secular Ilana Dayan usually plays hardball so it was surprising that Rav Weiss agreed. He displayed the sterling qualities that make him a leader: sensitivity, deep faith despite grief, patience and complexity. Parts of the interview were broadcast the next day on a haredi radio station. R. Hillel Fendel translated the interview into English “Faith Through Tears.” It is a good idea to skim the English translation first, the better to understand the Hebrew of Rav Weiss.

The interview, in Hebrew, can be seen and heard.. If you read some of the 150 comments posted beside the interview, you will see what a Kiddush Hashem this was.

“What makes Merkaz Harav unique?” was the question posed to me by several American Beis Yaakov seminary girls here for their gap year as we stood on the sidewalk outside of Merkaz HaRav. On the seventh day of the shiva for the eight precious masmidim of Yeshivat HaRav Kook, there was an evening of eulogies at the Yeshiva. Knowing there would be an overflow crowd the yeshiva set up screens in the street so those of us who could not get inside could watch/listen. The previous writers have expressed eloquently what all segments of the Orthodox world have in common with Merkaz HaRav. I think it is also important to touch on what makes Merkaz HaRav unique.

10th of Tevet

“Those who say that suffering such as this has never befallen the Jewish people are mistaken. There was torture comparable to ours at the destruction of the Temple and at Beitar….”

As we approached the fast of the Tenth of Tevet, I reread some of the writings of Rabbi Kalonymos Kalmish Shapira, the Piaseczner Rebbe (pronounced Pia-sech-ner) who made the above observation in 1942 in Warsaw.

How many of us are able to rethink and reevaluate our positions? The Piaseczer did. The historian Esther Farbstein devotes a full chapter to the Rebbe in her comprehensive book Hidden in Thunder: Perspectives on Faith, Halachah, and Leadership During the Holocaust.

Would you like to be a fly on the wall while a battery of secular and modern Orthodox academic experts are discussing the dynamics of change in the haredi world?
If so, then today Tuesday 3 bKislev you can view and listen to the conference (live in Hebrew) taking place at this link for the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem at their website

Here are some highlights for Tuesday, Israel-time. 9-11 am Changes in the public sphere; Consumerism as a political strategy;Limits to consumerism:the case of wigs; The eruv in a multi-cultural society;Chareidim from the ghetto to the Israeli suburbs
11:30am to 1:30pm Volunterrism and medical help (Zaka, genetic testing, philanthropy)
2:30 to 4 pm Education and communication; “An orphaned generation seeks a mother: The mesoret of Sarah Schenirer as a means of post-Holocaust rehabilitation”;
Children’s heroes; Forbidden and permitted media among haredi women/
Final session 4:30 to 6:30pm Halacha, Theology and Education; lectures on Rav Eliashiv shlita, R Shlomo Volbe ztzl; haredi girls’ educaiton between opennessa nd conservation;
theological discussion in popular literature.
Even if you don’t get to view the conference, just reading the list of topics (there is another list for Monday’s sessions) gives you an idea of just how dynamic and varied are the chareidi sectors (plural, there is no one sector) .

I was terribly saddened by the memoir of R.Tzvi Meisels, ztz”l describing his blowing shofar in Auschwitz in 1944. I have, however, questions which really bother me.

So began a challenge from Dr.Tzvia Greenfield, who lives in the HarNof haredi neighborhood of Jerusalem (and ran on the Meretz ticket in the last election). I translated the episode into English (it turns out there are other translations) from the hundred Rabbinic Memoirs edited by Esther Farbstein.

Tzvia Greenfield continues her questioning:

The description of the Shofar blowing of Rabbi Meisels is undoubtedly heartbreaking. But why do you, Esther Farbstein or even (if I may say so) Rabbi Meisels himself assume that the weeping, shouts and begging of the young prisoners on the block awaiting their imminent execution had anything to do at all with his shofar blowing or with Rosh-Hashana in general?
Don’t you think that their heartbreaking crying and yelling was the natural result of their horrible fear from their imminent demise rather than from the sound of the shofar? Did they even HEAR the shofar?? Why attribute their behavior to the shofar blowing rather than simply to their incredible anxiety from death? Isn’t Rabbi Meisels (together with Esther Farbstein) a bit too presumptuous here?
Likewise with the bread for these poor youngsters destined to death: why assume that they begged so bitterly for a piece of bread for the purpose of “mitzva of the holiday meal” when it is so clear that they were simply dying of starvation?
Why assume that they clung to Rabbi Meisels because of his holiness rather
than simply because he was an adult who could perhaps save their lives - so they deluded themselves in their utter desperation? In short - why assume that the whole terrible scene described so touchingly by Rabbi Meisels had anything to do with Rosh Hashana or with any Jewish value?
To me the whole terrible event seems like a natural reaction to the immense fear of death and it has absolutely nothing to do with Yirat Shamayim or kiddush Hashem . I find it rather annoying or at least very problematic (and certainly not professional historically speaking) to attribute this whole experience to Jewish reasons. The poor young people were about to die, and they did not want to. So they cried. This is all. Horrible in its simplicity.
To start talking here of Rosh-Hashana and Shofar blowing seems to me to be not only
misconstrued but actually complacent and even distasteful, if you know what I mean.
Unfortunately these young victims fretted not about Yiddishkeit, but about the loss of their lives. Understanding them now as part of a religious narrative amounts - so I feel - to a betrayal of them.
It’s hard to explain, but I hope you’ll understand.
Tzvia Greenfield sums up:

From the memoirs of Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Meisels, ztz”l describing Rosh Hashanah 1944:

“The experience of one transport that left Auschwitz is seared in my memory. With the grace of HASHEM I was miraculously able to bring a shofar into the camp. On the first day of Rosh Hashanah I went from block to block, shofar in hand, to sound the tekiyot. This put my life in danger and I had to avoid the Nazis and malevolent Kapos. I thank HASHEM that due to His mercy and compassion I was privileged to sound the shofar that Rosh Hashanah some twenty times, coming to a hundred blasts en toto. This revived the spirits of the shattered camp inmates and gave them some peace of mind knowing that at least they could observe one mitzvah in Auschwitz - that of shofar on Rosh Hashanah.”

This begins the four chapters describing Rosh Hashanah in Auschwitz that I just translated into English from the preface to R. Meisels’ book, Mekadshey Hashem. The preface is included in the Hebrew CD-ROM Rabbinic Prefaces put out this year by the Michlalah-Jerusalem containing memoirs collected by the historian Esther Farbstein (who also authored Hidden in Thunder). She discovered over 100 prefaces by Holocaust-surviving rabbis. While the memoir is tragic, it is also moving and hopeful. Anything I could add is superfluous, so I will bring the entire description below, highlighting the paragraph in chapter 9 that made me cry.

Chapter 6 Blowing the Shofar in Auschwitz

21bEllul “Tsunami of porn” is the colorful phrase the Shmuley Boteach coined to describe the skimpy clothing and other phenomena that characterize much of modern behavior.

See his Jerusalem Post Sept.2 oped “Why women dress skimpily in the cold,” After exposing the problem of attire, or lack thereof, he writes:

And the most astonishing thing as all this takes place is the deafening silence. I do not know of a single important female voice decrying the tsunami of porn and the denigration of women in our time.

Well, there has been a voice, and that voice is speaking again.

11 b Menahem-Av

Formerly Orthodox Professor Noah Feldman, writing in the New York Times Magazine , “Orthodox Paradox,” July 22 two days before Tisha B’Av, complains that the Jewish Day School he attended (Maimonides of Boston) does not accept with equanimity his marriage to a non-Jew.

R Shmuley Boteah defends his friend, Noah Feldman, in his Jerusalem Post oped “Stop Ostracizing the Intermarried” .(There are 224 talkbacks so far!)

An astute comment was made on Feldman’s NYTimes piece by a friend of ours who is an Orthodox rabbi, a Harvard graduate who lives deep in the haredi city of Bene Brak, is a professor of Greek and Classics at Bar Ilan, teaches daf yomi, and keeps abreast of current issues. Our friend himself is a person who embodies and personifies the ability to live in several worlds that Feldman describes as the goal of his Maimonides’ education. Apropos Tisha B’Av and commenting on Feldman’s piece, he quoted Midrash Rabba on Eicha, Ptichta 22.

See my comment at the end of this posting for an update on the actual fining of stores that opened on Shabbat.

3 bMenahemAv
Only in Israel would the hourly news report a storm brewing over whether book stores will indeed violate the Shabbat closing laws and open for sale late Friday night. The cause celebre is the world launching of the final Harry Potter book at 12:01 am July 21 British time, which comes out in Israel on the morning of Shabbat Hazon, at 02:01 am. Eli Yishai, the haredi Shas minister for the Ministry of Industry and Labor, “warns stores over Harry Potter book launch.”
It is within Yishai’s purview to send out non-Jewish (usually Druze) inspectors to fine, indict, and possibly imprison Jewish store owners who open on Shabbat in contravention of the law. (There is a dual prohibition: against opening stores, and against employing Jews on Shabbat).
This led me to ruminate on the subject of religious coercion, a topic treated soberly this week in the Jerusalem Post by YU mashgiach (spiritual guidance counselor) Rabbi Yosef Blau in his op ed “Separation of state and religion? A bad idea.”

I personally opt for educating people about Shabbat, but I can understand the case for “coercion” of Shabbat laws. [In democratic Switzerland, the law forbids you to hang laundry and wash your car in public on Sundays].

When we will read the “curses” in Ki Tavo a few weeks hence, the very last curse is unusual: “Aror asher lo yakim et divrey hatorah Hazot la’asot otam…” (Devarim 27:26). Artscroll: “Accursed is one who will not uphold the words of this Torah, to perform them.” One kushiya is in the term lo yakim (literally one who will not uphold) – the verse could have said lo yishmor, lo y’kayaim, lo yishma [will not keep, will not observe, will not listen to]. Why the unusual term (causitive,hif’il ) lo yakim meaning “one who does not make the law stand up”? Ramban takes this to mean to enforce or coerce study/observance. Ramban:

3 b Menahem Av
Remember the party-crashing in the Kamtza and Bar-Kamtza episode? Well, I had my own experience last week.
Jonathan Rosenblum describes below what he would have told the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute (JPPPI).
In a quixotic gesture to share some insights from the haredi sector, I actually went there. I traveled from the hassidic neighborhood where I live in Netanya to the conference in Jerusalem. I sat quietly through two workshops, and then asked the organizers formally to participate in the conference. I was politely and firmly asked to leave -they claimed that this was only for professional planners. Even my informing them that I had a Master’s degree in Planning from the Technion did not sway them and I understood that they were not interested in hearing from that sector (the haredim) that arguably has had the most success in fighting assimilation.
If I could have stayed, I would have made four points. 1) Practice what you preach. If Jewish tradition is so precious, begin every session at such a conference with some relevant text from Jewish tradition. I brought with me the text of the midrash that I discussed below on July 10 (”People Population Policy Planning Palaver”) on the copper mirrors and their role in the Temple and post-Destruction era. (I even brought some actually copper mirrors!) 2) Use a business model. If I were a business owner and wanted to expand my business, I would emulate other businesses that are thriving. If I were a Martian and I were asked how to ensure the future of the Jews, I would examine closely what the centrist and haredi Orthodox have done and are doing, since it is there that we find negligible intermarriage, early marriage, large families, low divorce. 3) Use the ripple-and-trickle-down model. Allocate scarce resources to the involved core of Orthodox and committed non-Orthodox to increase their effectiveness rather than spreading resources on the indifferent periphery a mile wide and an inch deep. An empowered core will attract some of the assimilating periphery. Make Jewish day schools the highest priority of the Jewish community. 4) Go see what works. At the time the JPPPI was meeting there were at least two other conferences taking place in Jerusalem, both of Orthodox women — Binyan Shalem (4000 haredi dati leumi, hardal women) in Binyanei Haooma and Soferet (Orthodox women writers) in Har Nof.

One prominent speaker at the JPPPI conference engaged in verbal haredi bashing and spouted the usual canards about haredim. I am trying to locate him now and tell them that (a)although I disagree with him, I admire his passion, and (b) I would like to send a driver to bring him for a visit to Laniado hospital medical center founded and run by hard-working Sanz hassidim for the benefit of everyone in Netanya.

To paraphrase commentor #3 (Garnel Ironheart) on Jonathan’s posting below, the essential difference is that the JPPPI participants whom I knowhave discussions, while the Orthodox women I know have babies.

25 bTammuz
The future of the Jewish people is in copper mirrors!

That is what I would tell several dozen world Jewish leaders who are convening right now in Jerusalem in order to figure out how the Jewish people can survive and thrive. Under the aegis of the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, dozens of top Jewish leaders are meeting now to figure out how to keep the Jewish people from shrinking/disappearing through intermarriage and low birth rates. You can follow the schedule and see some sessions on video.
To use an Israeli expression, Orthodox women “hayu kvar b’seret hazeh” – they have been in this movie before. The future of the Jewish people was hanging by a thread during the enslavement in Egypt. Orthodox women today uphold as their role models those Israelite women during the Egyptian enslavement who represent female empowerment. The midrash Tanhuma explains that when the men were distanced from marital life, the women went into the fields where their exhaused husbands were laboring and enticed the men using their copper mirrors, fried fish & chips, and enough wine to arouse the spouse’s desire. Rashi comments that this assertiveness was Divinely rewarded and the women were blessed with super-fecundity, expressed in the hyperbole “shisha b’keres echad” - that they gave birth to six at a time. The copper mirrors were subsequently incorporated into the basin in the Tabernacle and Temple: “Moses made the basin and its stand from the copper mirrors of the women who raised crowds” of chidren. (Rashi on Ex.1:7 and 38:8).

If I were invited to explain at this conference what would ensure our future, I would give a lecture centered around this midrash. What puzzles me is how the leaders, bright and analytical, can miss the answer that is staring them in the face: give every encouragement to those women, mostly in the Orthodox sector, who want to raise large families. Give them the modern equivalent of copper mirrors.

To see a graphic explanation of what the future has in store, see the website “Will your grandchildren be Jews?” The chart there shows that 100 haredi Jews today will become 3401 Jews four generations from now, while 100 Reform Jews will become 10 in that same time span.

I asked a group of American Yeshiva boys who were our Shabbat guests how they would respond to the accusation by Israel Prize laureate Professor Alice Shalvi that in Jewish marriage the woman is the property of her husband. They reacted with consternation and chuckled, “What does she mean? It’s the opposite. The men are the property of their wives!”

Alice Shalvi, professor of English literature and Shakespeare scholar, detracts from her signal achievements which earned her the Prize on Yom Atzmaut (Jerusalem Post “A woman’s work,” April 20) when she allows herself to hold forth on Halacha and Jewish law. Some of her painfully erroneous statements are particularly egregious.

(1) Professor Shalvi objects to the use of the word “ba’al” for husband, saying:

“Well, “ba’al” means owner. A lot of women who use the term don’t realize that if the husband’s the ba’al, the wife is his property. In fact, the whole marriage ceremony is one of purchasing the wife.”

3 bNissan

I heard this question this week at all-day conference at Bar Ilan University on “Tefillat Nashim” – issues realted to women’s prayer. There were over a dozen lectures and workshops, many of them discussing the history and halakha of the relationship of women to prayer and how this changed over the centuries. For example, several lecturers cited material that seems to show that centuries ago European Jewish women were the sondaks or godmothers at the brit mila circumcision ceremonies held in synagogues,but that the Maharam of Rotenberg ruled to discontinue this practice this because of the problems arising in mixing men and women. Others discussed how synagogue architecture and design reflect how women have sometimes been less welcomed and other times more welcomed in public prayer as there were fluctuations in the halakha and planning of women’s sections, Ezrat nashim. During the question period, one woman stood up and asked, “Why do the men hate us so much?” I was taken aback. It seems to me that the main reason for separating men and women in prayer is that the men like women so much!
I thought of this as I read the talkbacks (62 so far) on my current Jerusalem Post op ed (March 21, 2bNissan), “Black hats in the front of the bus.”

This is the article that appeared last month on the JTA website. I discussed it here in cross-currents on Feb. 18 in “The Kidnapping of Rosa Parks.” At one point I wrote about women sitting in a separate section at the back of some buses in Israel:

Why women in the back? It isn’t strictly required, but in the Shema prayer we are warned not to follow our roving eyes [“lo tasuru”] and some haredi men take an extra stringency upon themselves to minimize such opportunities. This gift from God - that women nicely distract men - belongs in the privacy of the home…. It’s the men who are disadvantaged because Jewish law imposes more limits on their visual freedom…While self-control is an admirable quality, you shouldn’t put stumbling blocks before the blind… or the sighted.[“lifne iver lo sasim michshol”]

8 b Adar

Two years ago the publisher of Haaretz, Amos Schocken, published an op ed in his own paper extoling the virtues of intermarriage, as a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian and Jewish-Muslim conflict. The Hebrew is still available on the Haaretz website May 8,2005 Ha-im Israel rotzei shalom? It has 400 talkbacks.
The English version of Schocken’s op ed is can be read on the “kibush” website (I couldn’t access it on the Haaretz website).
“Does Israel Want Peace?” dated May 6,2005.

What greater peace can there be between the peoples than thousands of Egyptian, Jordanian and Palestinian students at universities in Israel, and thousands of Israeli students at universities in the Arab states and in Palestine? And what greater peace can there be between the peoples than what is likely to ensue from this: marriages between young Israelis, both Jewish and Arab, and young people from the neighboring countries and from Palestine?

Embedded in the aspiration for peace is a real interest that the Israeli Arabs become an integral and involved part of Israeli society (and not a `sector`), and that Palestinians, Egyptians and Jordanians live in Israel. This can be within Arab families, but even mixed families (one partner Jewish and one partner Arab) should not be ruled out…

Rosh Hodesh Adar.
Sometimes I go to great lengths for the sake of the Cross-currents blog…. Last week I rode the length and breadth of the Land of Israel on the mehadrin buses in order to provide readers with a state-of-the-art summary of the controversial Egged bus lines.

I spent a few hours updating myself on the gender-separate seating. If you have been reading the media reports, you would have suggested I go in full battle gear, perchance I would be accosted by the 300-pound haredi who resembled a Sumo wrestler and commanded Naomi Ragen to move to the back, as she recounts in her interview on National Public Radio. Go to the NPR website and seach for “Jerusalem’s Rosa Parks Fights Modesty Patrols.” You can listen to and/or read the report. Listening is great because you can hear the derision in the speakers’ voices. I am so used to the haredi sector getting short shrift and unequal time that I don’t even mind that the anti-mehadrin side got most of the report, while my pro-mehadrin viewpoint was drastically abridged.

In contrast, the JTA (Jewish Telegraph Agency) was meticulously evenhanded. They had pro and con opeds. Phyllis Snyder, viewing things from her American perch, had written a blistering attack on the Israeli mehadrin buses. But the JTA held up publishing it until they had an oped of equal length defending the buses (by yours truly). They published them simultaneously on their website currently. Go to the JTA website . In the Mid East section you’ll find my “In defense of separate but equal” and Phyllis Snyder’s “Women Don’t belong at back of bus.”

One thing I regret is that in the JTA oped they had to cut, due to word count limits, a passage I quoted from a Naomi Ragen novel. Naomi is acutely aware of the problem of putting temptation in front of someone, so I am surprised she underestimates the attraction women sometimes present to men. This is the passage that was cut:

For those in Jerualem or for those who have friends who can get to Jerusalem this Sunday, Jan. 28 (9b’Shvat). I described the launching of a most unusual Holocaust project in my Jerusalem Post article Thursday 6 b’Shvat (25 Jan) titled The Day the Rabbi Ate Grass,

I describe a new collection of Holocaust memoirs that give us an unmediated glimpse into the world of rabbinic scholars who wrote about their experiences during the Hurban. These autobiographies appear not qua autobiography in the traditional sense, but in prefaces to the scholars’ rabbinic works.

I wrote:

Whereas a rabbinic scholar will write in a more guarded manner in the body of a work, in the preface he can “let his hair down.”
Take for example the preface to an important book by Rabbi Yitzhak Yaakov Weiss, who was well known after the war as a fierce opponent of Zionism. When he comes to write the preface, he drops his political persona.

20 bTevet

R. Avraham Ibn Ezra complained in a poem (all translations below are mine, SLS):

“If I were a candle maker, the sun would never leave the sky.
If I were a shroud maker, not a single person would die.”

He concluded his poem in resignation:

21 bKislev

What is the ideology behind a conference titled:Halakhah and Ideology?
It looks like it will tilt in the direction of suggesting that most halakhic decisions are ideologically motivated. But I will withhold judgment until I hear some of the sessions that will take place in Jerusalem on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday 21-23 bKislev (Dec. 12-14) at the Van Leer Institute.[the list of lectures is in Hebrew and English].

It is an academic conference, not many rabbis or halakhists will be speaking. I wonder if they attempted to invite any active poskim. From the titles of some of the sessions, it seems there will be a number of lectures questioning whether what is considered halakhah is not an ideologically driven position. Typical is an opening lecture by David Landes in English with the intriguing title, “The Vision of a ‘Non-Ideological Halakhah’ in the Grip of Ideology” and Shalom Rosenberg, “Implicit Ideology in the Disputes of the Sages.” On Tuesday David Sorotzkin will speak on “The Satmar Rebbe: Reconstruction and Deconstruction of the Halakhah as an Ideological Tool” .
The Orthodox feminist Dr Gili Zivan will speak on “What Remains of Halakhic Discourse when it is Recruited for Ideological Goals?” I am puzzled because Gili pushed through a women’s aliyot mehitza minyan at her religious kibbutz over the objections of the kibbutz rabbi. I wonder if that isn’t halakhic discourse recruited for ideological goals?
The issue of such “shira hadasha” women’s aliyot in Orthodox minyanim will be given a whole evening. The organizers are to be commended for balancing the panel, with Prof. Eliav Shochetman who has written a kuntres against this innovation, and R Mendel Shapiro who wrote an Edah article promoting women’s “qeri’at ha-Torah” [sic]

R. Dr. Dov Frimer, a traditionalist known for his 100-page article with his brother on Women’s Prayer Services in Tradition (Winter 1998) will also be on that panel.
There will probably be few, if any , haredim at the conference, although I would happy to be wrong. I wonder whether the minimal visibility of haredim at such venues is due to the organizers not making an effort to invite people to the “right” of themselves, or to the reluctance of haredim to participate. I have compiled a list of a few dozen haredim in academia and in public discourse who could be presenters, moderators, respondents, or panelists in such conferences (available from me on request).

16 bKislev 5767

“After the prince lost the first two diamonds that the king gave him, the king gave him a beautifully cut glass gem for the prince’s ring.”
That is the parable used by Rav Zvi Zeltzer, principal of the Beer Sheva Beit Yaakov school, to explain in the 1970s one way haredim relate to the state of Israel. Many of the then-religious-Zionist-American olim who immigrated to Beer Sheva 3 decades ago sent their daughters to the haredi Beit Yaakov because at that time it was the best alternative. Some parents worried about what would happen on Yom Atzmaut (nothing happened, neither for nor against), what would transpire when their girls would go to the Bnai Akiva clubhouse which happened to be on the street where the principal lived (nothing happened).

In those days I had been blissfully unaware of the hashkafic divisions in philosophic outlook among the Orthodox, one advantage of coming from a non-observant home. After several decades I find these differences fascinating and important, reflecting a healthy passionate intensity.

I discussed some of these issues in a Jerusalem Post interview with Prof.Yakov Rabkin, author of the recently published The Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism.

17 bMarHeshvan 5767 Wed. night

I just returned to Netanya from the three-hour Supreme Court session on the proposed Homosexual Parade scheduled for Friday (19 Heshvan). The three justices were inclined to insist that the parade take place in the quiet Hebrew University/Knesset area (rather than downtown), but the decision of Jerusalem Police chief Ilan Franko was critical. He said that by calling up an unprecedented number of police, a whopping 9,000, the police could handle it. That is even more than were called up for the Disengagement! That was at 8:30 pm when the session ended. But as we walked outside the Court, there was new information about events related to the morning’s IDF incursion into Gaza and Franko seemed to think that the parade would have to be postponed. So as of my writing (midnight Israel time) the parade is postponed.
An opinion piece I wrote against the “Gay Pride Parade” appears in the Jerusalem Post today, Nov.8. It’s not the parade route that is the problem; rather the parade’s roots go back to Supreme and local Israeli court decisions in the past dozen years, all favoring homosexual activity and liasons. I point out that…

OURS IS not the first legal system to begin legalizing same-sex relationships. Already in antediluvian times people were drawing up contracts between men and men, and men and animals. With deep psychological insight the Midrash points out that God did not regret his Creation even when, in the era of Noah, homosexuality and bestiality took place. He did not bring the Flood upon the world because homosexual couples conducted parades. Rather, the last straw was when they drew up contracts conferring the veneer of normality on aberrant behavior.

The Midrash rabba observes: “The generation of the Flood was not blotted out from the world until they wrote marriage deeds for males and males, and males and beasts, thus fully legalizing such practices.”

Before the gates and books are closed on Hoshana Rabba, I would like to make the following amends.
1) Apologies to Rahel Jaskow . Yaakov Menken and others were unfairly harsh with Rahel Jaskow in the discussion below on Beinisch: the bane of the Supreme Court? . My primary focus in my posting was on the Supreme Court and Justice Beinisch. I think the Court used Women of the Wall to promote the Court’s activist agenda. The WOW were a pawn in a struggle between the judicial and legislative branches. That stuggle was my primary interest – I too didn’t care that much per se about WOW but rather felt that the Court should not be interfering with religious matters. Rahel Jaskow is one of the most sincerely spiritual people I know. She has a beautiful voice (I bought her CD Day of Rest) and Rahel wants to use her voice to worship Hashem. Although I think the Wall is not the venue for this, I realize that she and many of the women in WOW got caught in the aforementioned power struggle. It is the Court I wanted to criticize, not specifically WOW.

2) Apologies to Dorit Beinisch . My original post was critical of Justice Beinisch and her using WOW to promote her own position which seems to be adversarial vis-a-vis Orthodox authority, and supportive of feminist positions. I was happily surprised to read that having assumed her responsibilities as Supreme Court President, she is modifying her outlook. Specifically, I read the following description of Yom Kippur services at the Jerusalem [Orthodox] Great Synagogue in a Jerusalem Post column by Greer Fay Cashman:

But the surprise dignitary was Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch, who as far as any of the powers-that-be could tell, had not previously attended High Holy Day Services at the Great Synagogue. Asher Schapiro, the chairman of the congregation, was seated alongside Yehezkel Beinisch, the husband of the president of the Supreme Court, who is well-known for his love of music. Schapiro asked Beinisch if they were there to hear Cantor Naftali Hershtik and the choir. The reply was in the negative. The reason for their presence was that Dorit Beinisch considered it her duty as president of the Supreme Court to make an appearance on the Day of Judgment in the Great Synagogue of the capital of Israel. [emphasis mine, SLS]

Was Biblical Ezra the Scribe ultra-Orthodox? What lies behind this seemingly silly question is a set of serious questions: When did Torah-observant Jewry divide into Orthodox, modern Orthodox, ultra-Orthodox, etc.? Were Moshe Rabbenu, Ezra & Nehemia, Maimonides, Rashi, and Yehuda Halevi haredim?

This came to mind when someone asked me whether Ezra, the fictitious hero of Dawning of the Day, Rav Haim Sabato’s newest novel, was haredi.

For those who will be in Jerusalem on Monday after Simhat Torah (24 bTishrey) Oct. 16, there will be an evening devoted to the Dawning of the Day at 8 pm at Mishkenot Shaananim (Yemin Moshe, near Montefiore’s windmill down the block from the King David).Rav Sabato will speak (in Hebrew) and answer questions, and several literary critics will speak (in English).

The Friday English Haaretz published my review (co-authored with Jessica Setbon) of The Dawning of the Day, the exquisite translation into English translation (by Yacob Dweck a young scholar of Syrian descent) of R. Sabato’s K’Afapey Shahar. We know a lot about the book’s hero, Ezra Siman Tov, an Aleppo (Syrian) Jew living in Jerusalem’s Mahaneh Yehuda. We even know that

Ezra Siman Tov has a secret - a dark, sinful secret. He hides from it, but it intrudes like a specter on his peaceful life in the Jerusalem community of immigrants from Aleppo (Halab). “For several years he wept and pleaded for his sin to be pardoned, and he scrubbed and scoured the stain with all his might.”

Erev Yom Hakippurim, 5767.
My Netanya neighbor Livia Bitton Jackson wrote in her Holocaust memoirs, I Have Lived a Thousand Years and Elli: Coming of Age in the Holocaust that she forced herself and her mother to eat soup crawling with maggots, in order keep from perishing from starvation. Another neighbor Frank Ross sucked on coal because the oil kept hunger pangs at bay. A hungry Edith Cohen chewed on a chicken skin for 4 days without food in a cattle car on the way from Hungary to a Auschwitz. So for them, a simple 25-hour fast on Yom Kippur is…. a piece of cake. Child’s play.

I wrote about this in an article that the Jerusalem Post published in the opinion section of its Friday weekend Magazine Sept.29: Survivors’ Yom Kippur: September 1945.

But while the first postwar Yom Kippur was not difficult gastronomically for survivors, it was painful emotionally. Holidays mean family, and most survivors, generally adolescents and twenty- and thirtysomethings who could withstand the tortures that felled the very young and the very old, were on their own.
The adolescent Edith Cohen was undaunted by the looming fast, having become an old hand at living with a growling stomach. But she was in turmoil because her parents and four siblings had been murdered in the camps, and she had no one to give her the traditional holiday blessing.

If you look in the Yom Kippur mahzor you notice that in addition to the usual Friday night blessing by parents of children, there is an additional blessing for this special night. Orphaned Edith Cohen had no one to bless her in the Feldafing DP camp in 1945. She knocked on the door of Rabbi Yekutiel Halberstam, the Sanz-Klausenberg Rebbe, who had thrown himself into rehabilitation of survivors in the DP camps, having no time to mourn his own loss of wife and eleven children. Edith pleaded to the Rebbe:

Everyone, Together, Come Home.

Avi Shafran was remiss in his op-ed A Prophecy Sadly Fulfilled, which appeared in the Jerusalem Post this week and attracted 104 talkbacks so far. He was right on the money when, 5 years ago, he wrote in an article in Moment Magazine about the lack of fealty to halakha in the Conservative movement. He now writes:

Hence my “prophecy”: Conservative movement would come in time to “halachically” sanction what the Torah forbids in no uncertain terms. My prediction, of course, required no supernatural powers, only the natural one of observation.

He referred to same-sex relationships and that the Conservative movement would condone this in their clergy and lay people. He originally titled the piece “Time to Come Home” suggesting that for Jews who belong to Conservative synagogues and who care about halakha “that their true home (hence the title) was in the Orthodox community.”

The president of Israel took a leave of absence for a day this week. Why? In order not to be present at the swearing in of Dorit Beinisch, the new head of the Israel Supreme Court. [He is being questioned on allegations relating to harassment.]

Judge Beinisch will always be associated in my mind with the type of activism that led her to vote in 2000 to change the prayer arrangements at the Western Wall’s women’s section. She voted to allow the Women of the Wall to conduct Torah readings in tallitot and tefillin, changing long-standing “minhag hamakom.”

The decision was appealed by Elyakim Rubinstein, and in 2003 nine judges went down to the women’s section to check things out. They ruled that the Women of the Wall can pray at the wall, but at a separate southern section called Robinson’s Arch. The nine-judge appeal modified (in reality, overturned) the earlier decision. Judge Beinisch stuck to her guns and voted again for Women of the Wall, but there was a majority of 5 judges who voted for the Robinson’s Arch proviso. Suprisingly, then-Court President Aharon Barak was among the latter. Justice Beinisch is considered a clone of Barak, but in this case she diverged from his opinion (or he diverged from hers.) I had written about this earlier in Cross-Currents last summer.

Judge Beinisch represents the activism that interferes where the court should not. This pertains not only to the ezrat nashim of Orthodox women (I don’t think Judge Beinisch frequents women’s sections of synagogues, aside from checking out the Wall); but this exaggerated court activism and inappropriate interference also has led her to instruct the army, income tax, and other arms of the government how to execute their responsibilities. You can read her decisions in Hebrew by going to the Israel Supreme Court website. For the Women of the Wall decisions ask for number 2258/95 (the earlier decision in 2000) and then the appeal 4128/00 (the 2003 decision on the appeal). If you have trouble finding them, contact me and I will send you the two files. The decisions on Women of the Wall run to the dozens of pages.