Please note that I am entirely unfamiliar with the facts and opposing positions in this case. But, then, my letter isn’t really about this case, but about how journalists striving for objectivity, balance and moderation ought to go about their tasks.

Dear Ms. Kraft,

I read with interest your 5/6/08 article on the JTA website regarding the controversy over a rabbinic court ruling revoking a convert’s 15 year old conversion, and I have several questions and comments to which I would appreciate your response:

1) You write that the ruling is “prompting thousands of converts in the country to worry if their conversions to Judaism are at risk of being revoked.” How do you know this?

And, since the ruling at issue was based, as you write, on the convert’s acknowledgement “that she is not religiously observant today,” does your reference to “thousands of converts” being worried mean that you are aware of thousands of converts in Israel who made a religious commitment at their conversion but are no longer observant?

2) Could you elaborate on what you were referring to in writing that the ruling prompted, in addition to an emergency Knesset hearing, “public outrage and confusion both in Israel and the Diaspora”?

The only reactions you cite are a “stinging rebuke” by the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA) and statements by Ms. Rouaux, a convert, Rabbi Seth Farber of ITIM and Rabbi Feuerstein of Tzohar. That doesn’t seem to add up to evidence of “public outrage and confusion both in Israel and the Diaspora.” Such may, of course, have taken place, but can you kindly provide more detail about such reactions?

3) You use the term “tolerant” several times to describe the views of those against the ruling. You refer to Rabbi Druckman as one who has “been charged with overseeing a more tolerant, open conversion process in Israel.” Similarly, you describe Tzohar as a group of Zionist rabbis that “seeks to present to Israelis a more tolerant face of Orthodox Judaism.”

As I understand it, the issue at hand is one of Jewish legal interpretation, with the court that issued the ruling presumably having found that the relevant texts, decisors and precedents of the Jewish legal system requiring them to find as they did. Thus, the word “tolerance” seems irrelevant. The notion of tolerance is one with emotional and psychological relevance, but seems quite out-of-place as applied to what I believe the court, and, I assume, its opponents as well, regard as a legal dispute.

As someone schooled in both American and Jewish law, I can tell you that a serious legal scholar would not invoke the notion of “tolerance” in a discussion of legal issues unless the relevant legal code specifically validated its relevance.

Indeed, to use a rather commonplace example, even a layperson would not refer to a traffic court judge who applied the law as written and refused to dismiss a speeding ticket as having acted with “intolerance.” I should note that the term “moderate” which you also use several times, is indeed appropriate for the context in a way that “tolerant” is not.

Perhaps even more importantly, due to its emotive connotation, your use of the term “tolerance” seems to imply a value judgement on your part as to which side you’d like the reader to take in this particular controversy, as well as regarding an overall approach to Orthodox Judaism. Whatever your personal views in these regards may be, I trust that, as an ethical journalist, you wish this article, which is news reportage rather than an editorial, to remain resolutely objective, presenting a full and fair account of the facts and views at hand to allow readers to reach their own conclusions. Is that, in fact, your aim?

4) A final observation: You quote the statement of the RCA which accuses the rabbinical court ruling of being “beyond the pale” of halacha, violating “numerous Torah laws,” creating a “massive desecration of G-d’s name,” insulting “outstanding rabbinic leaders,” and being a “reprehensible cause of widespread conflict and animosity with the Jewish people in Israel and beyond.” You quote Rabbi Farber as saying the that the “ultra-Orthodox . . . are willing to sacrifice on the altar of Jewish history” legitimate converts, and are engaging in an “anti-halachic battle.”

These speakers are, of course, fully entitled to their opinions, but their verbiage does come across as very angry and overheated, or as they put it nowadays, “over the top.” Intolerant, or at a minimum, immoderate, shall we say? Yet, ironically, according to your article those making these statements are the “more moderate” Orthodox opposing the “more zealous” Orthodox. Within the context of this article, at least, these terms begin to seem rather slippery.

I must add that you, as well, employ a bit of overheated language in describing the controversy as a “war” between the two sides. A war consisting of what, one press release? Besides, at least from what you’ve cited in your article, this would appear to be a “war” being waged by only one side. Shouldn’t we at least wait until the opposing army has issued a press release of its own beforing declaring war? Then again, that’s quite a strident press release, so perhaps . . .

Speaking as one writer to another, beware of verbal and written inflation; once one applies such literary hyperthermia to a disagreement like this one, what is left for circumstances truly deserving of such description?

I appreciate your efforts to cover events of import to our people, and I look forward to hearing back from you.

Sincerely,

Eytan Kobre

The CEO and co-founder of The Blackstone Group, a New York investment bank, recently made the largest unrestricted gift to any New York cultural institution: $100 million, to the New York Public Library.

Mr. Schwarzman may well have made gifts to Jewish causes too. Although his current wife is not Jewish and their marriage ceremony was presided over by both a rabbi and a priest, many intermarried Jews maintain relationships to the larger Jewish community and its institutions. The $100 million, though, is going to the public library.

Untold millions of Jewish philanthropic dollars, sums to spin the head of those of us who think in $20 bill denominations, have similarly been donated to causes that, worthy though they might be, do not address needs exclusive to the Jewish community.

Those needs include the Jewish poor, who not only actually exist but comprise a sizable subset of some communities. In New York, fully 145,000 Jews are classified by the government as poor, and another 375,000 as “near poor.” There are considerable numbers of impoverished Jews in other American cities as well, and in Israel and Europe.

Then there are Jewish day schools and yeshivot that subsist on shoestring budgets, forced to pay subsistence salaries – if that – to their teachers and staffs. And, of course, the myriad worthy Jewish nonprofit organizations that oversee social, educational and cultural projects, and rely on the donations of individual Jews to serve the community.

Yet, as in the case of Mr. Schwarzman’s recent gift, the vast majority of private Jewish philanthropy benefits secular institutions like libraries, universities and museums.

According to a 2007 paper, “Mega-Gifts in Jewish Philanthropy,” written by Gary A. Tobin and Aryeh K. Weinberg and published by the Institute for Jewish and Community Research, more than 90% of Jewish individual “mega-gift” dollars over the years 2000-2003 were directed to just such entities. Health and medical causes came next. Jewish causes netted approximately 1%.

The strongly Jewishly-identified part of the Jewish community certainly has its own members of means, and they are generously committed to Jewish causes. But the lion’s share of the fruits of American Jews’ business and professional success seems to reside in less consciously Jewish coffers.

That led a thoughtful correspondent to point something out to me: While the secularist segment of the Jewish world may boast the most well-heeled philanthropists, the have/have-not equation is turned on its head when wealth is measured not in dollars but in the currency of Jewish knowledge.

In that calculus, it is precisely the fiscally unremarkable part of the Jewish population that holds the surplus, and the financially successful portion that is most impoverished.

Which thought led my correspondent to wonder further if the more Jewishly-knowledgeable world is sufficiently generous with its spiritual wealth.

It is a worthy question. To be sure, there are many impressive ventures aimed at sharing Jewish learning with Jews who might not have had previous opportunities to meet it. Such “outreach” and Torah-study groups take a variety of forms. Some produce written material; others offer classes and operate study-halls; yet others arrange telephone study partnerships or community Shabbat meals.

And then there are the websites, like aish.com, beingjewish.com, innernet.org.il, ohr.edu, simpletoremember.com (full disclosure: that one is the brainchild of my dear son-in-law) and Torah.org – each of them a cornucopia of Torah-knowledge for Jews seeking it.

There is, moreover, the celebrated and successful telephone study-partner “matchmaker” Partners in Torah (partnersintorah.org); and there are the major publishing houses, like ArtScroll, Feldheim and Targum (whose url’s are their names followed by “.com”), which offer excellent books in English on practically every Jewish subject under the sun.

Where there is arguably room for greater effort on the part of us observant Jews, though, is on the personal level. Opportunities abound in many of our lives for sharing Jewish knowledge – or, at very least, information about resources like those mentioned above – with Jewish relatives, neighbors and co-workers who may not have had the benefit of a Jewish upbringing.

And there are invitations, too, to be offered – for Shabbat or holiday meals, to attend synagogue services or lectures or Jewish celebrations together. Offering an experience of the vibrancy of contemporary observant Jewish life is the single most generous gift any Jew could possibly give another.

So, whether or not material wealth is flowing from the materially successful secular Jewish sphere to less affluent parts of the Jewish community, there is no reason why spiritual wealth should not flow freely from the latter to the former.

Who knows? my correspondent wonders further. Maybe more determinedly sharing such intangible but meaningful possessions will not only yield personal benefits to the Jewish recipients but constitute a merit for the economic wellbeing of Jewish institutions and charities. Addressing the imbalance in Jewish knowledge, in other words, could be the act of generosity to help trigger a positive change in the focus of philanthropists.

The thought is intriguing but moot. Reaching out to other Jews is the right thing to do.

© 2008 AM ECHAD RESOURCES

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

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

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

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

Another issue is: How did these cases go unreported for so long? The abuse in the Beit Shemesh case went on for many years, and the screams of the children from beatings they were receiving and the marks they bore could not have gone unnoticed. Calev Ben-David, writing in the Jerusalem Post, asked a question that deserves an answer: If, as the chareidi world claims, the perpetrators of these heinous acts did not grow up in the chareidi world, were not educated in its schools, and do not represent it, why was the chareidi community hesitant about reporting their acts?

Now, the truth is, we do not really know what was observed and not reported, or whether there were reports and they were ignored. These cases did all eventually come to light. Nor should we assume that abuse issues are exclusively confined any particular segment of the community.

Rav Yosef Shalom Elyashiv has ruled that one may not remain silent where there are strong reasons to suspect abuse within the family or in other contexts. Proper procedural safeguards must be in place to prevent witch hunts based on scant evidence, but nothing justifies placing children in danger of terrible physical or emotional damage.

In the past, part of the reluctance of the chareidi community to report abuse to governmental authorities has been a deep, and often justified, suspicion of government social workers, and the fear, based on experience, that some of them are eager for any pretext to remove chareidi children from their homes. In communities where the government social workers are chareidi, there is, in fact, a high rate of reporting of abuse cases (though no one can say with certainty what percentage of the actual cases are reported.)

THE CASE OF THE BURQA WOMAN from Beit Shemesh also brings out a point that has application to many areas. Here was a woman ostensibly acting with such extreme care with regard to tznius, and meanwhile things were taking place in her own home over a prolonged period of time that were the height of immorality and a break down of all boundaries of tznius. How could such a thing happen?

The truth is that we should expect precisely that. Extreme modes of piety often betoken an unhealthy obsession with the particular area regulated by the halacha. The rabbis of Beit Shemesh, including the rav of a community known for its meticulous observance of the laws of tznius, recognized this and spoke out forcefully against the Burqa women.

In the classic work Kav Hayashar (Chapter 52), the author inveighs against external shows of extreme piety. He describes a father who leaves a tzava (ethical will) to his son, in which he warns him to always be wary of all forms of extreme piety. The author describes how that insight later serves the son well when his wife tells him that she no longer wants to leave the house because a man might look at her.

“As Shlomo Hamelech wrote [in Koheles], ‘Be neither too righteous nor too evil,’ and Chazal tell us to be wary of hypocrites, who appear to separate themselves from all materialism and then act like Zimri, while expecting to receive the reward of Pinchas,” writes the author of Kav Hayashar.

And even before the Kav Hayashar, the Gemara provided the same insight when it said that the Yishmaelites, who were always known for their extreme modesty in dress, received nine out of ten measures of immorality that came down to the world.

For Rav Yaakov Kaminetsky “normal” was a halachic criterion. He once said that he doubted that a particular type of matzos were those that the Torah intended since they did not fulfill the verse, “All its ways are ways of pleasantness.” Rav Yaakov had his own chumros in a number of areas, but they were never on showy display. And never did he seek to impose them on others.

I once asked a young man who had been a house bochur in Reb Yaakov’s house what he had seen. He replied, “Nothing, absolutely nothing.” Everything Reb Yaakov did was too worked out in advance to attract attention.

Reb Yaakov was one of the true “tzaddikim,” to whom the author of the Kav Hayashar tells us we should seek to attach ourselves. If there was anything notable about his behavior, it was not the display of piety but his meticulous care with respect to all aspects of mitzvos bein adam l’chaveiro.

Published in Mishpacha May 4, 2008

The former President of the most populous Muslim country on the globe declare that he will not rest until his country recognizes Israel. He then dedicated the honor he received to an unnamed rabbi (in Indonesia!), deceased for a few years, who enriched his life by introducing him to Talmud and Kabbalah.

The previous Archbishop of Canterbury closed his remarks with a beautiful piece of derush based on a beraisa in the first perek of Berachos. Lord Carey has campaigned against anti-Semitism for over twenty years, and stood up to his own church when it moved to divest its funds from Israel

A French-Catholic priest with tears in his eyes tell an audience why he has trekked for a decade through the Ukraine to uncover the previously unknown mass graves that hold the remains of a million and a half Jews murdered by Nazi mobile killing units. So far, he has found over five hundred of such graves. Invoking the words of the previous Pope in his visit to a Rome synagogue, he called Jews his “elder brothers;” he considered it intolerable that so many should be killed and their memories obliterated without any remembrance.

The Chairman of one of the largest studios in Hollywood speak with depth, passion, content and conviction – and with Jewish pride.

Anyone who believes that everything out there is dark and evil does not live on the same planet as I do.

I have read Diamond since my teens, and always been overwhelmed by his versatility. As a writer, he is engaging and clear. He won a Pulitzer for Guns, Germs, and Steel; it is one of the most important secular books I read in the last ten years. [Warning: this is not a pitch or endorsement. Those who believe in a six thousand year-old earth will only be offended by the book, and find nothing of value therein. Those who admit to other possibilities will find remarkable insights into how the Ribbono Shel Olam, by cleverly arranging geographical features within continents, may have engineered the emergence of key groups that would dominate the history of the most recent millennia, and facilitated key discoveries like plant and animal husbandry that would be important in the development of human civilizations. The list of early human achievements at the end of parshas Bereishis will never be the same after reading it.]

Diamond presents his dilemma by contrasting the behavior of a New Guinea society with that of his Holocaust survivor father in law. New Guinea comes first in the article.

In 1992, when Daniel Wemp was about twenty-two years old, his beloved paternal uncle Soll was killed in a battle against the neighboring Ombal clan. In the New Guinea Highlands, where Daniel and his Handa clan live, uncles and aunts play a big role in raising children, so an uncle’s death represents a much heavier blow than it might to most Americans. Daniel often did not even distinguish between his biological father and other male clansmen of his father’s generation. And Soll had been very good to Daniel, who recalled him as a tall and handsome man, destined to become a leader. Soll’s death demanded vengeance.

Daniel told me that responsibility for arranging revenge usually falls on the victim’s firstborn son or, failing that, on one of his brothers. “Soll did have a son, but he was only six years old at the time of his father’s death, much too young to organize the revenge,” Daniel said. “On the other hand, my father was felt to be too old and weak by then; the avenger should be a strong young man in his prime. So I was the one who became expected to avenge Soll.” As it turned out, it took three years, twenty-nine more killings, and the sacrifice of three hundred pigs before Daniel succeeded in discharging this responsibility.

Diamond explicates the rules governing the system of revenge that Daniel’s Handa tribe taught him. Children are taught early to hate their enemy, and to consider it honorable to die in the pursuit of revenge. Revenge is taken not only against an actual killer, and not by the closest blood relative alone. Formal group fights are organized, with their own rules. Each fight has an “owner,” or organizer. Should anyone die, the appropriate person aims to take revenge against the owner of the fight on the opposing side, since the identity of the actual killer often remains unknown. Every fatality produces more avengers on the opposing side, with nothing to stop them other than an alliance of convenience between the two sides against an even stronger enemy.

Daniel concluded his story in the same happy, satisfied, straightforward tone in which he had recounted the rest of it. “Now, when I visit an Ombal village to play basketball, and Isum comes to watch the game in his wheelchair, I feel sorry for him,” he said. “Occasionally, I go over to Isum, shake his hand, and tell him, ‘I feel sorry for you.’ But people see Isum. They know that he will be suffering all the rest of his life for having killed Soll. People remember that Isum used to be a tall and handsome man, destined to be a future leader. But so was my uncle Soll. By getting Isum paralyzed, I gained appropriate revenge for the killing of my tall and handsome uncle, who had been very good to me, and who would have become a leader.”

Daniel’s story would seem to confirm to us the value of societal restraint over its alternative: descending into the chaos that follows from following our darker instincts. But this is where Diamond takes us to the other extreme. His father-in-law, Jozef Nabel, was sent from Poland to Siberia when the Soviets took over. Pressed into service in a Polish division of the Red Army, he returned in uniform to his native village of Klaj, where he learned of the fate of his family. He discovered the identity of the Pole who led the gang that had found out where his mother, sister and niece had been hidden by their Catholic housekeeper for two years. Convinced that all Jews had money hidden away, they shot all three when they had none to offer.

Jozef had the man brought to him, but could not bring himself to shoot him, nor to allow his men to shoot him. Instead, he succumbed to the rule of law – he handed the perpetrator over to the Polish authorities, who incarcerated him for a year, and then let him go.

Diamond tells us that it was not until an advanced age that Jozef could begin to talk about his experiences in the Shoah. When he did, he admitted he thought of his murdered family every day of his life, and of the opportunity that he had lost by not shooting their killer.

We regularly ignore the fact that the thirst for vengeance is among the strongest of human emotions. It ranks with love, anger, grief, and fear, about which we talk incessantly. Modern state societies permit and encourage us to express our love, anger, grief, and fear, but not our thirst for vengeance. We grow up being taught that such feelings are primitive, something to be ashamed of and to transcend.

There is no doubt that state acceptance of every individual’s right to exact personal vengeance would make it impossible for us to coexist peacefully as fellow-citizens of the same state. Otherwise, we, too, would be living under the conditions of constant warfare prevailing in non-state societies like those of the New Guinea Highlands. In that sense, Jozef was right to leave punishment of his mother’s killer to the Polish state, and it was tragic that the Polish state failed him so shamefully. Yet, even if the killer had been properly punished, Jozef would still have been deprived of the personal satisfaction that Daniel enjoyed.

Diamond leaves us with this unsettling choice between two options, neither of which seema to work. But Jozef’s situation was atypical. He had had the chance to mete out measure-for-measure justice in one fell swoop, in a single instant, for a crime of uncommon severity and that caused uncommon pain. Losing that opportunity would make Jozefs out of all of us. Most of us, however, deal with the instinct for revenge in far less pressing situations, where other options may exist.

Diamond may have overlooked some of these. Our Torah presents a third way. We certainly do not invalidate the desire for revenge, especially after great loss. A gemara (Yoma 23A) excludes people who have suffered physical or psychological pain from the prohibition against revenge-taking and grudge-bearing. While it is not clear that this distinction is halachically dispositive, (it seems to be the subject of a dispute among rishonim; the Chofetz Chaim, Introduction, Lavin, #8-9, rules stringently in the face of a safek issur d’oraiso), it nonetheless is true that the feeling for revenge, the need we feel within, is not itself invalidated. We are taught to tame it, to consider our pain within a broader context, not to disown the tendency.

This is illustrated by the explanation of R. Aharaon Halevi in Sefer HaMitzvos (#242), who is one of the rishonim who takes a stricter view about revenge even for the infliction of pain. He sees bitachon as the key to the mitzvah, and the balm that can heal the wounded soul. We resist the urge for revenge by remembering that nothing happens to us – not the things we like, not the events we detest – without Divine consent, without fitting into a Divine scheme. When we understand the role of hashgacha pratis in our lives, we do not necessarily comprehend more, but we become aware that we are victims of neither blind fate, nor of the caprice of evil human beings who have unfettered license to harm us with impunity. Murderers and other evil people must be resisted and punished – but their exercise of their own free will is not complete. They cannot act without G-d’s permission. We cannot begin to understand why that permission is given – not in the case of a single human tragedy, and not in the case of a Holocaust – but we do know that He understands His reasons. The certainty that there is an explanation, even when it is withheld from us, pushes the natural desire for vengeance lower on our list of priorities, if not eliminates it altogether.

This approach has a time-honored role in Jewish behavior. Holocaust survivors more recently have shown us another way as well. I have never heard survivors obsess about tracking down their tormentors from Buchenwald and doing them in. To be sure, there were some who pursued this path; the rest of us cheered when we read of their exploits. It was not the rule, however, either because most did not care enough after a while, or they simply had no way to accomplish it.

Observant survivors did get their vengeance, not by acting on the instinct, but by sublimating it. They quietly rebuilt their lives, while struggling with their nightmares. Many gradually opened up in time to discussing their ordeals with their children and the world at large. They took unusual pride in a different kind of vengeance. They restarted families. They built shuls and schools and mikvahs and yeshivos. They watched Torah Judaism not only rise from its ashes, but flourish numerically beyond anyone’s wildest projections. They saw a State of Israel survive the onslaught of those who would finish Hitler’s work in 1948, and watched the fledgling grow into a giant. There was no sweeter revenge than the spiritual rebirth of a people whom the world believed to be poised on the brink of extinction. Vengeance was gained first by survival, and then by triumph.

Diamond, true to his calling, would like us to believe that the heart of the New Guinea tribesman beats in all of us, in whole or in part. We do not have to accept, however, that there is no satisfactory way of transcending or escaping our darker instincts. Our survivor parents and grandparents may have proved that, among all the other important lessons we learned from them.

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

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

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

Barak expanded the Court’s power exponentially by abrogating traditional legal doctrines of standing and justiciability to a degree unparalleled in the world. He admits as much in his interview with Shavit. And he unilaterally declared a “constitutional revolution” on the flimsy evidence of two Basic Laws passed in the middle of the night, after scant debate, and with less than a quarter of the members of Knesset voting. Ours is thus the first constitution discovered by a judge rather than emanating from solemn deliberation.

Barak employed his dominance of the judicial selection committee to prevent anyone who did not share his judicial philosophy from ascending to the Supreme Court. He fought the appointment of Ruth Gavison, an internationally renowned legal scholar, solely because she, like Friedmann and Posner, does not share his judicial philosophy.

Judges in the lower courts knew that their advancement depended on the favor of Aharon Barak. So did law professors who aspired to careers on the bench. And finally, so did the attorneys-general and state prosecutors who hoped to follow the traditional path to the Court. They faithfully snuffed out any who dared to challenge the Court’s power. Justice Minister Yaakov Neeman, Reuven Rivlin when his appointment as Justice Minister was being mooted, and Bar Association president Dror Hoter-Yishai were all neutered on the basis of trumped-up indictments, quickly dismissed by the courts, or criminal files subsequently closed.

FRIEDMANN’S PROPOSALS do nothing to strengthen his power. Rather they are designed to reduce the power of the Court President to enforce uniformity. Extending the term of lower court presidents and deputy presidents from four to seven years, while doing away with reappointments, would increase the independence of the court presidents and remove their incentive to keep one eye perpetually cocked on the Court President. Taking away the selection of lower court presidents and deputies from the Court President and giving it to a committee of judges and ex-judges, would lessen the power of the Court President to enforce uniformity of thought over the entire judicial system.

Doing away with the practice of “temporary” appointments of lower court judges to the Supreme Court – a practice designed to allow the Supreme Court justices to ensure that would be colleagues can be counted upon to toe the line – would again open up the judicial system to more internal debate and fresh thought.

The Friedmann proposal that terrifies Barak most is that to end the chokehold of the sitting justices over appointments to the Court itself – a chokehold that Barak weakly justifies as necessary to preserve collegiality. Yet Barak admits that “most constitutional courts in the world are chosen by political bodies.” And no democracy invests sitting justices with the power over the judicial selection process they exercise in Israel.

To justify the Israeli anomaly, Barak offers only the self-interested claim that the process has produced excellent justices. In addition, he argues there is a distinction between Israel and other democracies. They are civilized, whereas our politicians are a group of dangerous troglodytes ever eager to trample individual liberties – for instance, the right to marry citizens of an enemy entity and bring them to live in Israel.

Defenders of our current judicial system, Barak chief among them, claim that it is necessary to protect minority rights. But it turns out that the minority they are most eager to protect is the Court itself, and the “right” at stake is that of the Court to determine societal norms to an extent found nowhere else in the world.

When judges import new values into the system or effectively rewrite statutes according to their own lights, writes Barak, they are merely giving effect to the people’s most cherished norms and standards. But if all he wanted to do was ensure that legislators legislate and executives execute in accord with fundamental societal values, he should be the foremost proponent of a constitutional court based on European models. In fact, he is the staunchest opponent.

The reason is that the values Barak and his acolytes want to enforce are not those of the Israeli people but their own. Last week’s bizarre Supreme Court decision granting citizenship to Messianic Jews whose fathers are Jewish is a glaring example. The Court not only overturned its own precedent in the Brother Daniel case, but the Knesset’s codification of that decision in Section 4A(a) of the Law of Return, that one who chooses another religion is not a Jew for purposes of the Law of Return.

Our Sages tell us kol haposel b’mumo posel – one sees in another his own faults. Barak’s accusation that Friedmann seeks to exercise total authority over the judicial system provides a powerful example of that ancient truth.

Published in the Jerusalem Post May 1, 2008

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

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

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

Others wrote that anyone who thinks the greatest problem facing American Jewry is Pesach in hotels is loony. Taken literally, that is correct. What I presume the rabbi I quoted meant is that the external performance of mitzvos, without any inner connection to the mitzvah itself or the One Who commanded it, is the central problem. Too often we view adherence to a checklist of mitzvos as the price we pay for living in an Orthodox community that we find comfortable, rather than a means of connecting to the Ribbono shel Olam.

Extravagant Pesach vacations are only a glaring illustration of the disease. But the lack of inner feeling for the mitzvah is felt in many other areas — the teaching of tznius primarily as a set of restrictions, the hyper-competitive nature of our educational systems, which sometimes does little to encourage ahavas haTorah, the inability to really talk to Hashem in davening. (But these are big subjects for another day.)

MOST CORRESPONDENTS RESPONDED FAVORABLY to the column, which may only reflect that most of us cannot afford a yearly week with the whole family in a hotel. I was happy to hear from one communal rav that I strengthened his decision — or rather his wife’s decision — not to accept an invitation to be a “scholar-in-residence” over Pesach. And if I reminded those who are going away that they will also be missing something: Dayeinu.

Just before the Chag, I asked an older couple I was visiting whether they would be going to one of their children or a hotel for Pesach. The wife looked at me in horror. “I pray that I will always be able to make the Seder in my own home,” she replied. “My children remember the month from Purim to Pesach as the happiest of the year. The family worked together, and then we would take breaks and sit around talking.” Even today, all twelve children and the almost 90 grandchildren take their turns helping with the Pesach cleaning.

But if truth be told, I was more bothered by some of the words of support than the criticisms. A few people offered the insight that the money spent of Pesach vacations would be more than enough to allow our schools to pay rebbeim and teachers a decent salary and on time.

I agree that families who spend a fortune on Pesach vacations should not then seek tuition deductions. But it is naïve to think that if people cut back on Pesach expenses they would give more tzedakah. The opposite is more likely.

Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner, zt”l, was once asked by a certain gvir whether he should make a simple wedding or the kind that would be generally expected from those in his socio-economic class. The man was perfectly sincere in his question, and eager to do whatever Rabbi Hutner advised. Nevertheless, Rabbi Hutner told him to make a gvirish wedding. When his talmidim wondered at this, he explained, “If he is tight with himself, he will be tight with others as well.”

Some professed to find something ironic in the fact that the same magazine that published my piece also advertises for Pesach hotels. But there is no irony or contradiction. If anything, it is to the credit of our publisher that he did not hesitate to publish a piece that might have offended some major advertisers. For one thing, I do not speak for Mishpacha. Nor do the advertisements. It is naïve to think that readers view advertisers as if they had the full imprimatur of the Vaad HaRuchani.

A few years back, a respected Torah journal refused to run a second time an advertisement for a treadmill that showed a man learning the daf while jogging, after many readers complained that the image demeaned Torah learning. So there are limits. But, in general, we should not expect (hopefully) profit-making businesses to screen out ads that are not contrary to halacha.

Nor do I find problematic advertisements for products beyond the means of most readers. Those ads keep down the price of the magazine. Rather than pretending that there are not those whose standard of living is much higher than our own it is incumbent upon us to learn and teach our children that opulence brings few of life’s real pleasures.

But most disturbing to me was the suggestion of one reader that “the rabbis” should just place a ban on Pesach hotels. No, no, no – a hundred times no. Once we recognize that there are perfectly valid reasons for some people to go to hotels no ban is possible. The rabbis would soon find themselves not only dealing with Pesach shaylos and selling chametz, but with Vaadim L’Inyanei Hotels.

More important, the bans would be widely ignored. Chassidic rebbes can enunciate and enforce sumptuary laws on their own communities because their authority is unquestioned. But outside those courts lies an Orthodox world of infinite variegation, in which no figure commands universal authority. Our rabbonim are wise enough to know that commands that are widely ignored only serve to lower the esteem of Torah.

Bans are not chinuch, as we have written. Indeed they often make true chinuch more difficult by focusing attention and discussion on the propriety of the ban rather than the underlying issues of avodas Hashem. As always our true, far more difficult task is not to rely on bans but to instill an understanding of Pesach so deep and uplifting that Cancun cannot compare.

This article appeared in this week’s Mishpacha.

What pained me then, though, and still does, is the tragic subtext of Pastorgate – that the sort of rank idiocy that was spewed from the pulpit at Chicago’s Trinity Church may not be unusual in churches that cater to African-Americans. Senator Obama’s statement, back when he still sought to preserve some of his pastor’s dignity, was telling. “I can no more disown [Wright],” he said, “than I can disown the black community.” Did he mean to in some way equate the two?

Well, Wright certainly did. On his talk-show vanity tour, he boasted that “This is not an attack on Jeremiah Wright. It is an attack on the black church.” The same sentiment was expressed by Wright’s successor at the church, Reverend Otis Moss 3rd, who said: “You cannot caricature Rev. Wright. This is an attack on the collective black church.” The first assertion, although in a sense Mr. Moss may not have meant, is undoubtedly true; no caricature could convey Wright’s lunacy more vividly than the thing itself. As to the second, we can only hope it is not so.

That the Detroit NAACP – a branch of an organization traditionally empowered by mainstream civil rights advocates, including many religious men and women – saw fit to invite Wright to address its recent forum is not encouraging.

I spent my childhood in a racially mixed neighborhood; one of my best friends was a black boy a bit older than I. Junie and I would wrestle, play ball and ride our bikes on the rocky hills near where we lived in Baltimore. We had “kid to kid” conversations, too. He learned a lot about how religious Jews lived, and I learned things from him too. (Quite the critical thinker, he once knit his brow when we passed a local synagogue advertising the availability of High Holiday seats for purchase, and asked me incredulously, “You gotta PAY to PRAY?” It was a good point.)

Another black presence in my formative years was Lucille, our “cleaning lady.” She would come to my parents’ modest home once or twice a week and help my mother with ironing and housekeeping. We children, following our parents’ example, always treated Lucille with great respect, and, not to be cliché, she really was in many ways part of the family. My mother, may her memory be a blessing, would serve her lunch each day she came. And when Lucille grew older and unable to do any real work, my mother, mindful of our housekeeper’s financial neediness, made a point of continuing her “employment,” having her come over and wipe off a counter or two, so that she could be given her wages – and lunch, of course – as compensation, not charity.

Then there was Dhanna, the librarian in Providence, where my wife and I raised our children, who was so kind to them during their frequent visits to the public library, always smiling at them, helping them find what they were looking for and proudly placing the artwork they produced for her on her desk for all to see. And Desi, our own young daughters’ friend from those years, who became quite conversant with the laws of kashrut and Shabbat.

To be sure, I have had unpleasant encounters with blacks. Like in my youth, when a group of boys who had asked my classmates and me to join our baseball game, once at bat, decided to turn the Louisville Sluggers on us. Or the “Heil Hitler” that one teenager delighted in shouting at my father and me when we walked to the synagogue. Even today, I come across the occasional anti-Semite of color.

But more than the occasional pale-faced one too. There are good and bad people in every population. Mindful of the Talmudic imperative to judge “all men favorably” (Avot, 1:6), I have never measured any human being by any yardstick other than his own words or deeds. And my wife and I always sought – and I think successfully – to instill that attitude in our children.

Mere months ago, I would have imagined that preachers in black churches speak to their flocks about serving G-d and living moral lives, about humility, self-respect and love. And maybe most do. But the current presidential campaign’s sideshow of “Wright stuff” has been sadly educational. If even a minority of black church leaders are of the Trinity mold (both the word’s senses intended), feeding their congregants the sweet poison of suspicion and hatred, the dream of a truly color-blind society will have been set back a century – even if an African-American is elected to the very highest office in the land.

And, of course, as elsewhere in the world, the general anti-American and anti-white ravings of black religious leaders like Wright and Farrakhan exhibit an undercurrent of anti-Israel sentiment – today’s “respectable” proxy for anti-Semitism. The latter famously sneered at Israel’s “dirty religion” (he meant Zionism, he later clarified helpfully). And the former, pairing Israel with South Africa, charged that both countries “worked on an ethnic bomb that killed Blacks and Arabs.”

I can’t imagine Junie or Dhanna or Desi sitting through such tripe. What anguishes me is that, for all I know, their children or grandchildren may be.

© 2008 AM ECHAD RESOURCES

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

Many people are aware that those words not only mean something, but offer real structure and guidance towards the self-improvement that sefirah is all about. People have looked for a long time for a text that doesn’t leave the spiritual climb towards Sinai during these seven weeks so amorphous and uncharted. The person to write such a work would need to be a talmid chacham with a good command of a breadth of sources, including kabbalistic ones, good language skills, and a love for people and sensitivity to their inner dynamics.

Sefiros (the book; TorahLab ISBN 9780981497419) arrived on my doorstep this morning, a gift from my friends at AJOP and the book’s author, my old friend Rabbi Yaacov Haber (writing with Rabbi David Sedley), who possesses all the qualities mentioned above. I couldn’t resist perusing it, and I am enthusiastic about the parts that I’ve seen.

Most of what you will find in English on the sefiros is nonsense (or worse), the product of Kabbalah Center wannabes whose gray matter has been softened by the drivel they write. Some of the omer self-help manuals I’ve seen are well-meaning, but related in no manner of form to the pattern of progress (or more accurately regress) through the sefiros as we find them in the siddur.

Sefiros suffers from neither of these inadequacies. Rabbi Haber’s explanations of the sefiros (and the daily intertwined connection between them) are down to earth, but based on familiarity with seforim of considerable depth. Sources are provided. His tone is modest; he concedes from the outset that he cannot provide an exact fit for each of the forty-nine sefirah combinations. His attempts are well-thought through and reasonable, which is thrice difficult, since he provides practical suggestions each day in regard to one’s relationship with Hashem, with other people, and with oneself.

The sefer is worthwhile not only for its potential for enriching the omer period, but for acquainting the uninitiated with the arcane vocabulary of kabbalah-lite. (References to the sefiros are so common in seforim well-traveled by the masses, that some knowledge of them is required of all Jews who take such seforim seriously.) The treatment of kabbalah bears the imprint of one of my mentors, Rav Aryeh Kaplan zt”l, and it is so noted in the acknowledgements. For those who find even his distillation of kabbalah too weighty, Sefiros is a further distillation that will be attractive.

I hope I am not being picky by pointing out one area that I would have treated differently. The book refers to sefiros, in part, as “a mystical revelation of G-d’s ‘character’….They show us different aspects of G-d’s personality as we perceive Him in the world.” It quite properly encloses the word “character” in quotes (although not the word “personality”), and goes on to caution that we can never use any “physical terms because He is completely beyond human comprehension. Words like ‘kindness’ or ‘strict justice’ are meaningless when applied to an eternal, unchanging Creator.” It tells the reader that sefiros are “not descriptions of G-d Himself, but are themselves part of His creation.”

I’m not sure how to understand that last sentence. Many will take it to mean, I believe, that sefiros don’t accurately describe G-d. Instead, they are approximations

of Him, using inexact, tentative human language which we understand to be a concession to our limitations. If this is true, however, then they do not have to be part of His creation. They are just labels and handles, and not part of anything. I would have much preferred R. Aryeh Kaplan’s formulation in Inner Space: “The sefirot are the most basic modes of G-d’s creative power. The sefirot thus constitute the inner structure and makeup of the Olamot…They allow us to speak about…what He does, without referring directly to what He is.”

Sefiros are part of creation, providing some of the spiritual rules built into the universe, similar to the way that the rules and constants of Nature are part of the physical universe. On the other hand, Rabbi Haber’s formulation contains an ironic element that altogether too many people do not notice. Using the word “personality” in reference to Hashem is double inaccurate. First, for the reason he notes himself. Second, because within the word “personality” is the word “person,” which HKBH decidedly isn’t.

I hope Rabbi Haber will forgive me for my obsessiveness. It has nothing to do with his fine work. I am increasingly concerned by the lack of theological sophistication in many people I meet. (Could it be related to the narrowing of scope of what people learn, with classical seforim like Moreh Nevuchim and Kuzari shunted to the side by even many serious Torah students?) Too often, I hear (and I have asked friends and mentors who concur) people speak about HKBH as if He were Superman with no vulnerability to Kryptonite. They use human language in regard to Him without appending the word kevayachol/ (as if it were) as people used to do. It gets worse. They make assumptions and predictions about His behavior on the basis of what is “logical” – as if we had any grasp at all of Divine logic (kevayachol!) There are recurring phrases I hear: “Hashem would never treat a person in such a manner; Hashem wouldn’t disappoint a person who did X; of course He would not say ‘No’ to a person who did Y; He wouldn’t produce anything positive through people like that.” I will be much relieved if readers all tell me that I am the only person who hears these things, and there is nothing to worry about!

In any event, the difference between us probably only raises the question as to whether writing Sefiros came from chesed she-b’chesed or gevurah she-b’chesed. Chesed it is, and readers will enjoy and benefit from its acquisition.

1) The Pesach Shabbos kettle (amusement value)

Two days before Pesach, someone approached me to say that she had decided to boil out her Pesach Shabbos kettle to check that it was working and to clean it ahead of Yom Tov. Having done this, she opened the lid to empty the water and discovered a piece of bread inside it. Yes, you are reading this correctly, she had actually boiled bread in her Pesach kettle.

2) The Pesach utensils (disorganisation award)

After Yom Tov, a man phoned to say that he couldn’t remember which of his Pesach utensils were designated for meat and which for dairy. This Passover-amnesia apparently applied to all his silverware, cooking pots, serving dishes and other utensils. Fortunately, he knew which set of flatware was which.

3) The bottle of whisky (best real question for this year)

On the hectic Friday before Pesach, a congregant emailed me with the following conundrum. He had a vital one-day overseas business trip planned for Chol HaMoed, which had been organised weeks before. However, his company had just asked him to transport a very expensive bottle of whisky, which was to be offered as a prize on a stand at the event he would be attending. He would not own the whisky, nor, ostensibly, derive any personal benefit from it. Would this be permitted on Pesach?

The answers:

1) As this episode occurred before Pesach, the Shabbos kettle could be kashered.

2) As there was no chametz involved, the utensils could be kashered on Chol HaMoed.

3) This subject is dealt with in the Shulchan Oruch (או”ח ס’ ת”מ), in a passage that I never imagined would have any practical application. When a Jew is responsible for chametz belonging to a gentile, even when he receives no benefit, he may still transgress the prohibition of owning chametz on Pesach. The key issue is liability – a Jew is not permitted to agree to care for a gentile’s chametz over Pesach if he would be required to pay for it in the event of its loss or theft. The Shulchan Oruch records a further view (that of the Behag and the Rosh) that even if the Jew is only obliged to pay if he is negligent in caring for the chametz, he still may not act as a trustee for it. And on Pesach itself, even when there is no liability whatsoever, the Mishnah Berurah (שם סק”י) rules that ideally, one should never agree to care for a gentile’s chametz. While it is certain that the conveyor of the whisky would not be liable for theft or loss, it seems likely that his employer would hold him accountable were he to be negligent in caring for it. Anyway, since this arrangement was to be instigated on Chol HaMoed, I advised him to avoid it even where there was no liability at all.

Moadim LeSimchah

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

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

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

The Palestinians strategy is predicated on draining our will. They have long regarded the diminishing connection of the Jews of Israel to their past and the Land as their Achilles tendon. That is why Arafat tried so hard at Camp David to get the citizens of the secular Jewish state to admit that the Temple Mount is far more important to the Palestinians than to them, for by doing so he would have succeeded in severing one more tie between the Jews of Israel and their history.

A story from the memoirs of Palestinian parliamentarian Selah Temari encapsulates Palestinian thinking on this point. While imprisoned in an Israeli jail for security offenses, Temari came to the conclusion that Israel was far too powerful to ever destroy. He even began to study Jewish history to gain insight into the perseverance of the Jewish people in the face of so much adversity.

Then one night he was looking through the bars of his cell, and he saw his Jewish jailer eating a pita. “How could you be eating bread?” he asked. “Don’t you know it is Pesach.” The jailer replied,” Do you really expect me not to eat bread because of something that happened 3,300 years ago?”

That night, records Temari, he twisted and turned all night. By the morning, he reached the conclusion that the Palestinians could expel the Jews. A people that had lost its sense of connection to its past and to the Land could be defeated.

JUDGE TAMAR BAR-ASHER TSABON, who ruled two weeks ago that the chametz Law does not apply to restaurants and supermarkets selling chametz, but only to displays of chametz that can be seen from the public thoroughfare, all but invited the Knesset to rewrite the statute. Meir Shetreet’s statement in this week’s cabinet meeting that there is no room for further legislation because the court has spoken is pure ignorance. Judge Tsaban did not presume to say what the law should be or question the power of the Knesset to amend it.

Her decision was a narrow, technical one that turned entirely on the interpretation of one word — b’pumbi (in public) — in the statute. Her opinion had nothing in common with that of Court President Aharon Barak four years ago striking down a longstanding Knesset statute empowering municipalities to ban the sale of pork within their borders. In that case, Barak created out of whole cloth a “right” to easy access to pork products.

Second, Judge Tsaban did not suggest that the law in question could not be enforced because it has its source in traditional Jewish religious practice. She did not follow the path of Justice Barak in the Mealreal case, in which he struck down a 50-year-old administrative ban on the import of non-kosher meat on the grounds that Israel is not a “theocracy.” In Barak’s eyes, any law that has an obvious source in religious practice is inherently suspect, even if enacted by a democratically elected, secular Knesset. Banning the sale of whale meat on ecological grounds is permissible; banning the sale of pork out of respect to Jewish tradition is not.

Finally, she did not seek to uproot the legislative intent root and branch, as the Supreme Court did when it allowed Kibbutz Mizra to restyle itself as an agricultural research institute, and under that guise to continue the commercial production and sale of pork products, thereby circumventing a Knesset statute against raising pigs.

BY LEAVING THE DOOR OPEN for the Knesset to amend the chametz Law by simply erasing a single word, or by substituting the words “in a public place (b’makom tziburi)” for the word “in public,” Judge Tsaban pointed the way for the Knesset to reinforce Jewish identity in Israel.

Some might argue that such symbolic statements have no impact. My own life, however, gives me a different perspective. I grew up in a highly identified but non-observant Jewish home. Friday night was always a special meal – attendance was mandatory, attire semi-formal, the Shabbat candles lit, and Kiddish recited. The food might not have been kosher, and the candles may have been lit after Shabbat, but there was a sublimal message: Being Jewish is a privilege, and like all privileges it imposes obligations.

But for that Shabbos table, I doubt that either I or three of my brothers who also became religious would have ever been prompted to inquire more deeply into what it means to be Jewish. That’s why Tzippi Livni is right to insist on the educative power of certain symbols.

At no time of the year are we surrounded by so many symbols whose meaning is engrained in the collective conscious of the Jewish people as at the Seder table tomorrow night.

Chag Kasher ve’Sameach.

The reason, perhaps, is that I am not in the inner circle. When you are a member of the core group, you have to focus on the expected causes for adulation of a gadol – gadlus in Torah, devotion to the cause, leaving behind many talmidim and institutions, serving as a link to the glory days of pre-War Lita. These were all fully true of the Rosh Yeshiva, and a succession of Torah luminaries, yibadlu lechaim tovim – Rav Shmuel Kamenetsky, shlit”a, the Novominsker Rebbe, shlit”a, Rav Malkiel Kotler, shlit”a - extolled these virtues in their remarks at the levayah.

I left the yeshiva almost thirty years ago for the opposite coast. I’ve been back very few times, and my sons did not (with one brief exception) attend any of the many branches of Chofetz Chaim. I have had much time to look at the yeshiva and the Rosh Yeshiva (the two are really inseperable) without the constraints that come with proximity. It has left me with more to say, rather than less.

Despite my having gone “my own way,” much of what I am (at least the things I would take pride in) is attributable in no small degree to the Rosh Yeshiva – even the fact that I went my own way! The Rosh Yeshiva did not smother people in his personality. He was large enough to allow individuality and even non-conformity, even as he himself believed that rules and details helped the majority stay focused on the chief occupations of yeshiva life. He spoke openly about chinuch and pedagogy (come to think of it, he spoke openly and frequently about many topics that are ignored in other yeshivos), especially as part of the world of mussar in general, and Slabodka in particular. He would tell and retell stories about the uncanny educational abilities of the Alter, giving the credit not to the individual alone, but to the mesorah of mussar he represented from Kelm and before. It behooved an educator to take into account the needs and the talents of each talmid as an individual, and to address and nurture them. This could mean at times that he would refrain from imposing his view on a talmid who needed space, or something a bit out of the ordinary. (I was privileged to be part of a not-so-small chevrah who were all fiercely individualistic, and maintained their identities.)

He could and did embrace uniformity in the yeshiva in regard to the key principles of the yeshiva, such as commitment to the service of Klal Yisrael. In regard to externalities like dress (within certain limits), he was fiercely opposed to regimentation. His objection here was not that it denied freedom of choice to the individual. I don’t think he thought of it in those terms – he had strong feelings about conservative and semi-formal dress, not to create uniformity, but to enhance kavod haTorah in both the talmid and those he interacted with. His objection was again an outgrowth of Slabodka. The mussar personality must make self-development a real avodah. Wearing a uniform detracts from that avodah, because consciously or otherwise, the wearer of the official colors tells himself that he has already arrived and joined the elite group, and would be less likely to worry about internal matters.

If he had a uniform himself, it consisted of one item – a smile that almost never vanished. A well-developed sense of humor, including self-deprecation, accompanied it. He could energize you with that smile and a freely offered hug – something I appreciated in my dating days after a bad break-up that he somehow always found out about within hours.

His appreciation for individuality, at least when married to yiras shomayim, allowed him to advocate his own position to the hilt, explain exactly why he disagreed with others, and still not look down upon those with whom he disagreed. If their honest search came up with different answers, he would still disagree, but he was quick to point out that neither he nor the Ribbono Shel Olam could have any complaints to the party in error. In that sense, he was a pluralist before the word became PC.

He paid a price for being an iconoclast. He was aware that his yeshiva didn’t quite fit in with many of the others, but he would not compromise on his principles. Neither would he disparage the others. He taught how important it was for bnei Torah to feel that they are part of a greater Torah effort shared by all other yeshivos.

Nowhere was this felt as strongly as in the general resistance to his well-enunciated derech of learning. Ironically, those who mocked it were unaware that what he really championed was one of the most traditional views of the yeshiva world, at least of the name roshei yeshiva. Chofetz Chaim is notorious (sorry, that is the most effective word that comes to mind) for proceeding through a sugya at the pace of a paraplegic snail. (It is only partially true. At least in my day, the yeshiva was just as adamant that talmidim cover ground at a brisk pace – faster than what was going on in other yeshivos - in the long bekiyus seder. Like people who took education seriously, there was accountability for quotas of output, with hanhala members regularly monitoring progress.) The slow progress in iyun seder was not for everyone. (It wasn’t for me or my children.) But at its essence, it represented a commitment to the primacy of Gemara and Rishonim. Talmidim would learn lots of acharonim, but not for their own sake. They could never be more than tools to unravel the many layers of meaning in a Rishon or gemara itself. This attitude – one championed by many other roshei yeshiva of the last generation, is very different from what is often found in more yeshivish places, in which (as my youngest son aptly put it) the gemara acts as a heichi timtzeh to plow through interesting acharonim. He demanded rigor in reading Rishonim, because that was the real key to success in learning, and because emunas chachamim created the confidence that time spend digging for gold in the words of a Rishon was almost always worth it.

Emunas chachamim was enormously important to him. He communicated the notion to talmidim not by demanding it as a sine qua non of yeshiva life, but by painstakingly demonstrating its importance, deflecting the objections to it, and teaching about its successes. It was not a monopolistic emunas chachamim, but one that allowed for divergent opinions. (In my case, this sense of emunas chachamim essentially launched my intellectual career, and put me at odds with the stated principles of the yeshiva. The Rosh Yeshiva was enormously practical. He believed that you taught what you knew best, and shouldn’t be consumed with guilt for not being able to be all things to all people. He knew lomdus, and he knew mussar. The cocktail of both of them refreshed the souls of most talmidim. Somehow, I had a slightly different shorech neshamah. I needed something more. Hashgachah had it that in a short period of time, I stumbled upon two other great influences on my development, Rav Nachman Bulman zt”l, and Rav Aryeh Kaplan, zt”l. Both of them introduced me to a wide range of seforim outside the main reading list of Chofetz Chaim. Both slaked my own inner thirst. Yet I would never have committed myself to the effort involved in learning the seforim they insisted upon had I not had the absolute confidence in chachmei hamesorah I got from the Rosh Yeshiva. His success in teaching me ironically assured that I would drift off in a slightly different direction! He did not seem to resent it, or the fact that I chose to work outside his own large network. The last time I really saw him was when I was sitting shiva for my father A”H in Kew Gardens Hills just a few years ago, and he showed up unannounced to be menachem aveil – despite my decades away from the yeshiva. On the other hand, he pretty much never forgave me for not becoming a shul rav, whose value he believed in, which was very different from the attitude of some of his peers who saw the rabbinate as an also-ran.)

All of this may boil down to a single perception, one not likely to be made by the inner circle. To those who never knew him at all, the loss of the Rosh Yeshiva should still be reckoned as a great tragedy, and not just because of the passing of an enormous adam gadol. The Rosh Yeshiva proved the historians of mussar incorrect.

Customary wisdom has it that chassidus succeeded, and mussar failed. To be sure, mussar had a huge impact upon the yeshiva world. Mussar classics became standard fare. The office of mashgiach was added to many a yeshiva. A heightened awareness of midos issues very much continues to this day.

As a movement that could capture the imagination of the many, and transmogrify the masses, mussar pales by comparison to chassidus. Historians offer a simple explanation. Mussar is very demanding. It takes intelligence and commitment to succeed. (So do many levels of chassidus, of course. But chassidus has some ground level elements that are accessible to the hamon am behaviorally and externally, that are exciting to the masses. Chassidus became a mass movement; mussar impacted Lita the most, and its stellar overachievers were individuals here and there. It seemed hopelessly limited to the relatively rare individual with superior intellect and heightened sensitivity. Even the flirtation with mussar in the non-Jewish world in the wake of Alan Morinis’ work would not change that equation.

The Rosh Yeshiva proved them all wrong. He did not make mussar the darling of the entire frum world, but he proved that it could become, even in contemporary times, an important mass phenomenon. Chofez Chaim produced, and continues to produce, a special kind of graduate. Minimally, they are almost always nice guys – polite, cooperative, refined people who can engage others in conversation. Maximally, it took a good number of talented people and turned them into superstars. Typically, they take teaching and pulpit positions disproportionally greater than their absolute numbers.. To be sure, they have had their disappointments, their disputes, their failures. They just seem to have fewer of them. People for the most part have fewer complaints about their interpersonal skills. Mussar on the group level may not guarantee Souls on Fire, but it does a demonstrably good job in making ordinary people a few notches better, and good people skilled mentors.

The Rosh Yeshiva did not have any children. People will be quick to point out that he had hundreds of children in his talmidim. This is certainly true. There seems to be some cruel irony, however, that he left no one to even say kaddish for him.

The Sochatchover explains somewhere that Ben Azai lost nothing by not marrying. HKBH created marriage as a vehicle to allow people to ratchet up their chesed, forcing them to reach beyond themselves and learn to give in ever increasing quantities. Ben Azai was so enthusiastic about his Torah, and so good at it, that he contributed the same gifts to the world through his Torah as others would have through raising families. This is also true of the Rosh Yeshiva.

Personally, I suspect that there is something more going on. When I first got married, I was part of a chevra kadisha that served all of Queens and Nassau. All of us were from the yeshiva; the Rosh Yeshiva was not thrilled with our participation, but did not stop us. (He feared that the daily, constant involvement with death was unhealthy for young people working at building our new marriages.) We quickly learned one of one of the traditionally-held bonuses of chevra kadisha work. After 120 years, we would be greeted in shomayim by all those we had helped in their final journey. I suspect that chevra kadisha members do not have a monopoly on receiving admirers. Somewhere in shomayim, a huge crowd is of neshamos is gathered to give honor to the Rosh Yeshiva. Saying kaddish in that minyan is none other than Rav Yisrael Salanter himself, in grateful recognition of what the Rosh Yeshiva did for him.

All of us – those who knew him and those who did not – should miss the Rosh Yeshiva. תהא זכרונו ברוך

If preparations for Pesach are draining your energy, take a six minute break and watch this. You won’t be disappointed. Turning up the volume will increase the adrenalin - and the pride.

[Thanks to Michael Eisenberg, Esq., Los Angeles]

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

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

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

Then one night he was looking through the bars of his cell, and he saw his Jewish jailer eating a pita. “How could you be eating bread?” he asked. “Don’t you know it is Pesach?” The jailer answered him: “Do you really expect me not to eat bread, because of something that happened 3,300 years ago?”

That night, records Temari, he twisted and turned all night. By the morning, he reached the conclusion that the Palestinians could expel the Jews. A people that had lost its sense of connection to its past and to the Land could be defeated.

If that story encapsulates the essence of the Palestinian strategy and hopes for the future, nothing better captures the success of that strategy than a speech given by Prime Minister Olmert prior to his becoming prime minister. Speaking to an overseas audience, he said, “We are tired of fighting, tired of winning … ”

Israel’s weariness of ceaseless war and threats of war is understandable. And it is reflected in a number of worrying trends. After Yasser Arafat’s decision to go to war with Israel in 2000, monied Israelis began buying up homes abroad and moving their money out of the country. Brain drain among academics has reached near crisis proportions. The rate of emigration of researchers and professors almost doubled between 2002 and 2004 — from .9% to 1.7%, according to a recent study of the Shalem Institute.

In a recent letter to Azure, Professor Aaron Ciechanover, a 2004 Nobel Laureate in chemistry, lays the blame for the latter phenomenon on the bankrupt educational system. “Science and technology are universal subjects,” he notes, “Independent of nationality … Israel is certainly not the best place to learn or build a career in these professions.” Thus only a strong sense of “national responsibility” can, in the long run, prevent the mass emigration of those in these fields. But that is precisely what modern Israeli society in its “attempt to copy, unsuccessfully, the developed societies of the West in an effort to be like every other nation” has not provided its young.

In a similar vein, Haaretz’s Ari Shavit attributes the failures of the Lebanon War to the country’s elites, who, in his analysis, sapped every ounce of national will in the insane believe that Tel Aviv could be another New York on the Mediterranean, a “fun” society, to quote Prime Minister Olmert’s most famous campaign promise.

What both the Palestinians and the Jewish critics of the current direction of Israeli society agree on is that without a national identity, a sense of purpose, a connection to the Land and to Jewish history, weariness will ultimately sap the Jews’ ability to defend themselves.

THAT ANALYSIS IMPOSES A RESPONSIBILITY ON THE TORAH COMMUNITY. For apart from a connection to Torah it is impossible to imagine where the requisite national will and purpose will come from. Yair Sheleg once wrote in Haaretz that chareidi yeshivah bochurim contribute more to Israeli society than they would in the army because they are the last repositories of an unadulterated Jewish identity.

On the one hand, there is a widespread sense among secular Israelis that something has gone terribly awry. And there are indications of a new openness to Jewish tradition as a source of the answer — e.g., dozens of Gemara shiurim in the heart of Israel’s financial and hi-tech districts, mikvaos being built on the most left-wing kibbutzim, over 4,000 telephone chavrusos pairing secular Israelis with chareidi study partners.

On the other hand, significant barriers remain to be overcome. The first is convincing secular Israelis that we care about them, not just as potential baalei teshuvah but as our Jewish brothers. And that requires truly believing it ourselves.

The fact that we do not share equally in army service, and the insularity we have of necessity adopted to protect against a spiritually toxic environment make it harder to convince secular Israelis of our concern. But the first step from our side is acknowledging our responsibility.

In addition, we must demonstrate to secular Israelis that the Torah is a Toras Chaim — that is not only a set of texts to be studied in the beis medrash, but that it provides guidance for every challenge confronting us as individuals and as a nation. That requires, inter alia, producing compelling material, based on Torah sources, that addresses both societal and individual concerns. It also means being prepared to denounce quickly and forcefully ugly behavior, even when perpetrated by those who have adopted the cloak of frum Jews.

Our responsibility derives not only from our obligations to our secular Jewish brothers but also to ourselves. If the state of Israel goes down at the hands of our enemies, chas v’shalom, it will take with it the more than five million Jews living here. We are all in this boat together.

The looming threat of a nuclear Iran is but the most glaring example of that general rule.

Chag Kasher v’Sameach

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.

“In the summer of 1942 a limousine came into camp. Several SS officers stepped out, followed by a serious and grandly dressed old Jewish man. The chauffeur unloaded six leather suitcases, each bearing a label with its owner’s name. As we observed this impeccably dressed Jewish gentleman with his six expensive leather suitcases in a Jewish slave-labor camp, we went into a fever of curiosity. We strained to observe this heartening phenomenon that burst into our benighted camp.”

This description of Dr. Knopf, along with large portions of Rabbi Aronson’s memoir, are now available in English in Esther Farbstein’s Hidden in Thunder: Perspectives on Faith, Halachah, and Leadership during the Holocaust.
She points out that the memoir describes the special status of this Jewish doctor from Germany with telling details such as his having his own room-cum-clinic, and his owning fine silk pajamas.

“He was given a room that, as a German patriot, he decorated with photographs of himself on horseback and medals from his glittering military past as an officer in World War I. Sometimes he would dandify himself by putting on his officer’s uniform. Knopf treated the Jews with condescension and estrangement, ashamed to come into contact with fellow Jews.”

Slowly, however, he began to realize the connection between the Jews’ fate and his own. The memoir describes the transformation wrought in this assimilated Jew, for by the time Passover rolled around in the spring of 1943, Dr. Knopf was deeply involved in seder preparations. “The German-Jewish doctor of all people insisted we hold the seder despite our fatigue and the late hour.”
Perhaps it was contact with deeply rooted scholars such as Rabbi Aronson, that triggered this metamorphosis. “When he discovered that I was a rabbi, Knopf never stopped pestering me; he would often pour out his heart to me. He told me how devoted he had been, how he had served and fought for the German homeland. As I observed this disillusioned Jew, I became heartsick.” Rabbi Aronson survived to write his memoirs and to become the beloved chief rabbi of Petah Tikva,
Many inmates came to Rabbi Aronson with the dilemma: to eat hametz or not? Realizing that most were too weak to last a week without bread, Rabbi Aronson responded with guidelines. Hametz was to be eaten on Pessah, but in order to minimize the transgression involved he ruled that each bite should be less than kzayis, “the volume of an olive” and the bites should be spaced at long intervals. Esther Farbstein points out that the desire to ask halachic questions was a form of spiritual resistance and heroism for two reasons. It reflected a cherishing of mitzvot as a raison d’etre which kept many Jews going and it was a form of defiance, their way to assert freedom in a slave-labor camp.
Back to our dandified Dr. Knopf who when he had arrived kept the other Jews at arms’ length. Here he was, ten months later deeply involved in preparations for the seder. His turnabout is poignantly expressed in one of the most moving descriptions in the Aronson memoir. Where would they find the means to bake the matza? Knopf had a stove in his clinic/room. He risked his life and insisted they bake the little bit of dough that they sequestered in his very room. They were not found out, and held a seder that year, although the doctor did not survive in the long run.
However Rabbi Aronson did survive. He went on to become the beloved chief rabbi of Petah Tikva, and to write his memoir immortalizing Dr. Hans Knopf who risked all to bake matza.

Passover Bergen-Belsen, 1944

By 1944 there was no question that Jews must eat hametz to stay alive. Rabbi Avraham Levisson from Holland dealt with this issue in Bergen-Belsen. Esther Farbstein points out that he had been active from the start of the war in finding solutions to tragic dilemmas as the Dutch Jews were concentrated in Westerbork, Holland from 1939 onwards ( he encouraged inmates to give their wives a conditional get, lest they become agunas). Beginning in 1942 each Tuesday a selection was made of Jews who were transported by train to death camps such as Auschwitz and elsewhere. “Rabbi Levisson was known to the inmates as ‘Rabbi Simcha’ (‘Rabbi Happiness’) because of his warm, positive attitude toward them. He organized extensive religious activity. In 1943 he was deported via Westerbork to Bergen-Belsen.” In 1944 Rabbi Levisson and his father, along with the Chief Rabbi of Rotterdam Rav A.B. Davids and a number of Jews surreptitiously gathered in one barrack to quietly hold a seder.
Man cannot live on potatoes alone. The Dutch rabbis, seeing the Jews could not survive without eating bread on Pessah, composed a prayer to recite upon eating hametz during Passover.
You can see/hear Yonah Emanuel, one of those present in the camp, read this prayer and explain the circumstances in a segment from the DVD „V’Hi She-Amda” about Pesach during the Holocaust, produced by Zachor After the prayer was composed, other inmates wanted copies. Since there were no Xerox machines, typewriters, or carbon paper in the camp, Yonah’s older brother Elhanan Emanuel, hy”d, copied it again and again by hand in the concentration camp after his twelve-hour shifts of slave labor. Rabbi Levisson himself gave the few potatoes he saved for Passover to his own father, who was even weaker than he was.
This week I spoke with Rabbi Levisson’s daughter, who now lives in a religious neighborhood of Ashdod, to get the background details behind the prayer. She had been hidden as a baby with a Christian family in Holland. She explains that her father died of exhaustion on April 25,1945, on a train shortly before the train was liberated by the Soviets. Her family and many others recite the prayer over hametz on Passover at the seder each year, immortalizing the spiritual heroism that it represents. For the Hebrew version see the aron-hasfarim.co.il website.

To be said with utmost concentration before eating hametz on Pessah:
Master of the Universe,
It is manifest and known to You we want to fulfill Your commandment that we celebrate the holiday of Passover by eating matza and abstaining from hametz.
But to our great sorrow our servitude prevents us from fulfilling these precepts.
We are not masters of our own fate and our lives are in danger.
Therefore we are ready and willing to keep the mitzva: „So that you shall live by them” [v’chai bahem, Lev. 18:5] and not die because of keeping the mitzvot. Therefore we are commanded to do what we must in order to remain alive; thus by eating hametz we will be keeping Your other precept, „Be ever so careful with your life.” [Deut. 4:9]
We pray that You keep us alive and sustain us
so that we merit to survive to fulfill Your commandments wholeheartedly in the future. Amen

This week every radio talk show in Israel and every newpaper discussed the “hametz” law. I was surprised no one made a point that I often make when there is a charge of religious coercion: In Switzerland it is against the law to wash your car or hang laundry on Sunday. You get fined! But how come no one calls that ‘religious coercion” ?

FOR those who read Hebrew, you can read the entire trial decision permitting the sale of hametz on the internet. Judge Bar-Asher Zaban pinned her decision on the interpretation of the word „pumbe” - what is public versus private space.

For those in Israel — Hidden in Thunder, from which these two examples were adapted, will be sold at half price and is among the hundreds of books on sale at significant discounts in the annual book sale at the Merkaz Harav Kook Yeshiva Jerusalem, from the Sunday after Pesah until the following Sunday (22bNisan to 29bNisan, 10am-9pm, Fri. Til 1pm) in person or by phone. People outside Jerusalem can phone in credit-card orders that will be delivered, tel.02-651-5592.

Rav Leibowitz was a Rosh Yeshiva for over 60 years, inspiring generations of students. This is a tremendous loss for all of Israel.

The Templeton Foundation is committed to supporting rigorous academic exploration of what it calls “spiritual realities,” and is generally G-d friendly, without shying away from hard questions. It’s current “conversation” shows up in full on-line, supported by a two page advertisement in the current issue of Atlantic Monthly.

Hard scientists, soft scientists, philosophers and others weigh in on the topic “Does science make belief in God obsolete?” and the result is predictable. Many of the participants talk past one another, staking out familiar positions while dodging the volleys from the opposition by hiding behind the usual platitudes.

One theme of the anti-theists (אפ”ל) is that science has obviated the need, or even the allowable place, for G-d by answering the questions that generated belief in the first place. Typical is the contribution of Christopher Hitchens, who while certainly not the participant most familiar with science, is such an effective writer that he probably bats cleanup in the lineup of authors who have promoted atheism to the public.

The original problem with religion is that it is our first, and our worst, attempt at explanation. It is how we came up with answers before we had any evidence. It belongs to the terrified childhood of our species, before we knew about germs or could account for earthquakes. It belongs to our childhood, too, in the less charming sense of demanding a tyrannical authority: a protective parent who demands compulsory love even as he exacts a tithe of fear. This unalterable and eternal despot is the origin of totalitarianism, and represents the first cringing human attempt to refer all difficult questions to the smoking and forbidding altar of a Big Brother. This of course is why one desires that science and humanism would make faith obsolete, even as one sadly realizes that as long as we remain insecure primates we shall remain very fearful of breaking the chain.

There you have the one-two punch against belief: First, people used to turn to religion to provide answers to intractable questions. Today, science has the answers to those questions; religion and belief are no longer necessary. Second, the religious mindset is the root of much global and historical evil.

Hitchens’ broadside succeeds where it does because it is arguably true that many people believe in G-d through one or more of the “G-d of the gaps” arguments. G-d, Who can do anything, explains those larger-than-life phenomena for which people cannot find any other explanation. The issue might be the origin of the universe, or the intricacy of its function, or the apparent near universality of certain ethical considerations. Whatever lies beyond the existing limits of understanding is attributed to G-d.

The argument is entirely true. G-d indeed is the explanation of what we don’t understand. He is also the source of everything we do understand. Simply put, He is the source of everything. We have Rishonim who used some of these arguments as evidence of His existence, so they cannot be taken lightly. An open question, however, is whether the same arguments remain as practically effective in different times and cultures. At some points in history, there were simply no attractive alternative explanations available – not even wrong ones. Amalek – which equals safek in gematria – has done a good job through the ages. Today, when everything can be doubted, there are alternative explanations available, and tomorrow there will be more of them than today. These alternatives – even if wrong - dilute the power of the arguments. People whose reason to believe is the lack of alternative often lose faith when provided with one.

Pesach reminds us, however, of the other approach to belief, the one in which answers came before the questions. This approach, often linked to Rav Yehudah Halevi and the Kuzari, puts national experience ahead of reason or philosophy. Jews believe because they were there, because they experienced the inyan Eloki, the manifestation of a Divine element, in their lives over an extended period of time, and in different ways. The reality of the shared experience may have generated different questions, but the order is decidedly the opposite of the “gaps” approach. Knowledge of G-d came first, because His Presence was unmistakable in our national history. At the Seder, we share the history first, and then wring from it principles and interpretation only after. We have been doing this for over 3300 years, and likely would never have survived without reliving the experience each year.

In short, Jews began with answers where others had questions. At times, we had questions where others would have found answers.

Rav Asher Weiss, shlit”a related this story a year ago in Los Angeles. As the situation in the Kovno ghetto deteriorated, there was no thought whatsoever about obtaining matzoh for Pesach. None, except for one Moshe Golding. He could not bear to think of Pesach without matzos, so set out to do the impossible. Before anyone else began to think of Pesach, he was scavenging for single kernels of grain, lovingly collecting them and secreting them away. When he had a small bag full, he took two bricks and ground them into a small quantity of flour. On erev Pesach, he carefully mixed the flour with water, and rolled small matzos out on a piece of metal over a flame.

It almost worked. As he was preparing his matzos, a German soldier burst in, and asked him what he was up to. He didn’t answer. The German swung his rifle butt at his head, again and again, knocking all his teeth out. Somehow, though, he did not break the matzos.

That night, the first night of Pesach, there was a late night knock on the door of Rav Ephraim Oshry zt”l, the Rav of the Kovno Ghetto (and later author of Shut Mi-Ma’amakim on responsa of the Holocaust, whose English language version earned him the National Jewish Book Award.) Rav Oshry opened the door, steeling himself for the worst when he saw Golding. He was sure that Golding would ask him to explain how it could be that in the midst of such fortitude in the performance of a mitzvah, such a fate could befall him. Rav Oshry did not have the answers to replace those that Golding might have found on his own.

That is not what happened, however. Golding had neither answers, nor the questions Rav Oshry supposed he would. Instead, he asked his rav a different question.

“I think I am the only person in Kovno with matzos. The problem is that I have no teeth with which to eat them. Yes, I know what you’ll tell me. If I soften them with water, I should be able to swallow them. The problem with that, rebbe, is that my father was always makpid not to eat gebrokts (matzoh that has been allowed to become wet). What should I do, rebbe? Under the circumstances, is it permissible for me to soak the matzos in order to fulfill the mitzvah?”

Rav Asher Weiss framed the story perfectly. Some people, he said, survive on answers. Klal Yisrael, however, has survived at times through questions – questions no one else would think of asking, and that reflect the tenacity of our commitment to HKBH.

In the merit of the answers we will share with our families in the approaching days, may we quickly find the answer to the question of when our long galus will come to an end!

According to Rabbi Tzadok HaKohen, the way to discover the core meaning of a Biblical word is to look at the first time it appears in the Torah. In the case of הגדה, the root word first occurs in the story of Adam and Eve. When God addressed Adam after the Sin, we find the following dialogue:

The Lord God called to Adam and said to Him, ‘Where are you?’ He said, ‘I heard your voice in the Garden and I was afraid because I am naked, so I hid.’ [God] said, ‘Who told (הגיד) you that you are naked? Have you eaten from the tree from which I commanded you not to eat?’ (BeReishis 3:9-11)

Rashi explains that God’s question is to be understood in the following way:

How do you know? What shame is there is standing naked? (Rashi ad loc.)

Before the sin, Adam and Eve wore no clothes but were not ashamed (BeReishis 2:25); however, they subsequently acquired a sense that there was something embarrassing about being naked.

It can be seen from this that the word הגיד means to acquire new information. This has an interesting implication for Seder night: the story must be told in a way that is new and exciting for the participants. One cannot fulfil the requirement of הגדה (which is primarily directed at one’s children) by merely reading the text or presenting a stale version of the Exodus. Instead, one must find a new angle on the story each year and create interest and fascination by finding new nuggets of information and by telling it in a refreshing way: one that will grab the imagination and retain peoples’ attention well into the night.

Based on ‘Hegioney Halachah’ Haggadah by Rabbi Yitzhok Mirsky

The Avney Nezer of Sochaczew pointed out that an accurate reading of the word הגדה can be derived from the Aramaic Onkelos translation of the word:

And you shall tell (והגדת) your son on that day as follows: because of this that God did for me in bringing me out from Egypt. (Shemos 13:8)

And you shall point out to your son… (Onkelos ad loc.)

It seems that the word הגדה means to show or to demonstrate that something is true, rather that merely tell a story. This fits with the Rambam’s version of the text of a key paragraph of the Haggadah:

In every generation, one is obliged to see oneself (ל