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By Avi Shafran, on April 3rd, 2012 The group of Novardhoker yeshiva bochurim and their rebbe (and his rebbetzin)—along with a number of families—were packed into the train’s stock cars in the summer of 1941. Since Rav Yehudah Leib Nekritz, zt”l, and his talmidim, then in Soviet-conquered Lithuania, had declined the offer of Russian citizenship, the Soviets were providing them an all-expense-paid trip to Siberia. Occasional pieces of bread and cups of water were also offered at no charge during the weeks of travel. Not to mention the cruise across a lake on a barge to the work camp where my father, may he be well, the youngest of the yeshiva group, and his rebbe and friends, would spend the years of the Second World War.
The Siberian summer is oppressive; insects left the exiles at times unrecognizable for their swollen faces. Winter in the taiga, of course, brought challenges of its own, including 40 degree below zero temperatures.
In his short memoir, “Fire Ice Air,” my father recalls that even as the yeshiva exiles arrived in the East, Pesach was already on their minds.
And so, as they worked in the fields, some of the boys squirreled away a few kernels of wheat here … Read More >>
By Yitzchok Adlerstein, on March 27th, 2012 The article on the so-called Bible Codes in Hamodia’s weekly magazine of March 21 is both laden with inaccuracies and dangerous. We hereby set the record straight, albeit briefly.
When the Bible Codes were first introduced as a kiruv tool, we spent hundreds of hours investigating their authenticity, reading the articles of both proponents and opponents, speaking in depth with mathematicians, and meeting the with some of the rabbanim who wrote the haskomos. We recognized how counterproductive it would be to claim something as a chizuk emunah if audiences would discover its flaws. After consulting with gedolei Torah, we were encouraged to sound the alarm – if only so that skeptics would not be able to point with glee to the ease with which Torah-observant Jews could delude themselves into finding support where there is none. This would be a massive chilul Hashem. In fact, we have met too many people whose original enthusiasm for Torah turned to contempt when they came to understand how the Codes presentation that baited them lacked foundation.
Nothing has changed in the last decade, since the debate raged. Those who are interested in background can look at an early paper on the … Read More >>
By Avi Shafran, on March 27th, 2012 A memory from when I was a teen remains vivid. A middle-aged fellow had come to shul one Thursday morning because he had yahrtzeit. The shul hosted a mixture of Jews, some “frum from birth” (though babies can’t really be observant, you know what I mean); some who had become observant as a result of the mentorship of the rabbi (my father, may he be well); and some who hadn’t yet fully embraced their religious identities. This fellow was in the last category, and he was called up for an aliyah to the Torah.
He seemed nervous; he clearly hadn’t assumed such a privilege recently—perhaps not since his bar-mitzvah. In my thoughts, I coached him.
Repeat after me, I silently prompted:“Asher bochar bonu mikol ho’amim (who has chosen us from among all nations) “vinosan lonu es Toraso (and has given us His Torah).”
The man’s life was passing before his very eyes; you could tell. The occasion was both momentous and terrifying to him.
When he began the bracha, he made a strange mistake. First it made me wince. Then it made me think.
“Asher bochar bonu,” he intoned, a bit tentatively, “mikol”—slight hesitation—“haleylos shebechol haleylos anu ochlim…”
… Read More >>
By Jonathan Rosenblum, on March 23rd, 2012 Harvard economic historian Niall Ferguson notes that one of the striking features of the history of past civilizations is the “speed with which most of them collapsed, regardless of cause.” The fall of the Roman Empire took only a few decades. No one foresaw the implosion of the Soviet Union. Today, it is hard to envision how the 17-nation eurozone, born in such fanfare, can muddle through in its current form.
Adam Garfinkle, editor of The American Interest, writes, “I don’t know of any great power in history that lost its foothold or decayed because of external reasons; internal social dysfunction was to blame.” Certainly that was Gibbons’ diagnosis of the fall of the Roman Empire.
I understand Garfinkle to mean that human capital is crucial. The term usually refers to the educational attainments of the population. But it means more than that. Less quantifiable, but no less crucial is the moral character of a people. Russia, for instance, cannot hope to remain a world power with alcoholism rates that have left the average fifteen-year-old Russian male with a lower life expectancy than his Cambodian counterpart.
Riots in France and England in recent years have revealed the growth of a large underclass nearly devoid of any traditional virtues. There is nothing in the lives of the members of this underclass, and particularly those of the young, to give them any dignity. Each welfare payment is experienced as a wound, even as the recipients take those payments as their due for the humiliation thrust upon them by the state.
Theodore Dalrymple, who worked for more than a decade as a prison psychiatrist in England, is the leading chronicler of this underclass of people, characterized by their incapability of accepting any responsibility for their lives, for whom life is something that just happens to them and about which they can make no decisions.
He describes the “cities of darkness” that encircle Paris, housing “a population that derives the meaning of its life from the hatred it bears for the other ‘official’ society in France. This alienation . . . is written on the faces of the young men, most of them permanently unemployed, who hang out in the pocked and potholed open spaces between their dwellings. When you approach them to speak to them, their immobile faces betray not a flicker of recognition of your shared humanity . . . .”
Six hundred thousand Britons have reached the age of 26 never having worked a day; 17% of British youth are neither in school, nor working, nor in training programs. They have never tasted a morsel of food or worn a garment paid for by money earned. But far from breeding gratitude, welfare has only left them with a sense of entitlement to more, as reflected in last summer’s riots.
These developments have hardly left the rest of society unscathed. Between 1959 and 2002, the French crime rate increased nearly sevenfold; from 1993 to 2000 cases of arson increased 25 times.
Continue reading → The Loss of Civic Virtue and its Consequences
By Avi Shafran, on March 20th, 2012 There isn’t a sane person on the planet—at least if evil counts as insanity—who doesn’t wish for Iran to be forced to abandon its nuclear ambitions (or to have them vaporized by one or another air force).
Many American Jews—most Orthodox Jews likely among them—feel that the military option is the only realistic one, and that it needs to be employed as soon as possible. Actually, yesterday.
It’s an understandable feeling. Iran’s president hasn’t made a secret of his lust for a world without an Israel, or of his country’s progress in producing nuclear material. (Though he has tried mightily to make secrets of the whereabouts of Iran’s nuclear facilities and of its less-than-peaceful plans for the uranium it is enriching).
It has become an article of faith for many that economic pressure on Iran is futile, that negotiations will only buy the mullahcracy time. To disagree is apostasy.
In this view, the apostate-in-chief is President Obama. Yes, he declared at last week’s American Israel Public Affairs Committee convention in Washington that “I will not hesitate to use force when it is necessary” regarding Iran. But he is nevertheless inclined to give the unprecedented sanctions that have … Read More >>
By Yitzchok Adlerstein, on March 20th, 2012 She’s no Deborah Feldman. That makes her story so much more valuable to us.
Writing in Tablet, the literary cynosure of every young Jewish iconoclast these days, Avital Chizhik lets us know that she is no dropout, and very much an eager participant in halachic life.
I don’t want to be that girl: the aspiring writer who has broken free of the tightly knit Orthodox community or school system and then proceeds to write about her love-hate relationship with said background. Because the truth is, I’m not that girl who’s broken away. I pray daily, recite benedictions before and after food, study Torah (but not Talmud). I still feel uncomfortable reading Aramaic texts traditionally limited to men. Friday afternoons find me running around the house, covering bathroom lights with special Shabbat covers, choosing tablecloths, filling the hot-water urn. And if it matters, which I suppose it does these days, I dress the part, too, despite being taught otherwise by secular grandparents: I wear modest skirts that reach my knees, sleeves that cover my elbows, and I refrain from any physical contact with males.
I hope that readers will find her tale a success story, rather than the opposite. … Read More >>
By Jonathan Rosenblum, on March 18th, 2012 “Since 1945, I was not as afraid as I am now. I am afraid because anti-Semitism, which I had thought belonged to the past, has somehow survived,” Eli Wiesel intones at the beginning of a new documentary Unmasked Judeophobia. What follows is a 81-minute tour led by highly erudite guides of a veritable horror house of contemporary anti-Semitism.
The tour starts with the Moslem world. Though classical Muslim sources provide a rich lode of anti-Jewish material, contemporary Islamic anti-Semitism fuses Islam with traditional European anti-Semitism, including Nazi race theory. The Muslim Brotherhood, which spawned Hamas and is poised to dominate Egypt, discovered early on that Jew hatred served as an excellent recruiting tool for the death cult promoted by Hassan al-Banna in his 1938 tract “The Art of Death.” From 1936 to 1938, its membership grew from 800 to 200,000, due to the Brotherhood’s mobilization against Zionism.
Pograms swept through ancient Jewish communities in Arab lands in 1941 and again in 1945-6. But the Arab defeats of 1948 and 1967 introduced a much more virulent element into Muslim anti-Semitism. Prior to 1948, the primary image of the Jew in Muslim culture was as a physical coward, according to Bernard Lewis. Traditional European anti-Semitic tropes provided the salve for the humiliation of defeat by the Jews: The Arabs were not defeated by the 600,000 Jews of Palestine, or later Israel, but by a world-wide conspiracy, with its tentacles around every Western government. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion became and remains a best-seller in the Arab world. From the illiterate masses to societal elites conspiracy theories involving Jews hold thrall the Arab mind – e.g., claims by an Egyptian minister that Israel somehow orchestrated shark attacks on bathers in the Gulf of Aqaba.
Exterminationist rhetoric is commonplace in contemporary Islam. Prominent Sunni theologian Yusuf al-Qaradawi, hailed as a returning hero in Tahrir Square, calls upon his followers to “kill the Jews wherever you find them.” The Hamas Charter is equally explicit that not a single Jew should be left alive in Palestine. And most ominous, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei describes Israel just like the Nazis described the Jewish people – as a “cancer.” Cancers must be eradicated.
Next stop Europe. European elites fret hysterically about Islamophobia, but attacks on Jews dwarfs those against Muslims. The Holocaust is no longer an anti-body protecting Europe from the anti-Semitic virus. Shmuel Samuels of the Simon Wiesenthal Center views the 1982 bombing of the Copernic Synagogue in Paris as the turning point. The blast triggered 73 shootings and bombings of Jewish targets in Western Europe, 29 in France. That spate of violence ended with the machine gunning in the Jewish quarter of Paris, which left 6 dead and 22 injured.
With the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000-2001, there were 500 attacks against Jews in France. And after Operation Cast Lead, there were 900 anti-Semitic attacks in Britain in a single year. The need to protect Jewish institutions so far outstripped British police resources that a Community Trust had to be created to guard Jewish synagogues and institutions.
Physical violence is the smallest part of the problem. London is the hub of hubs of the delegitimization of Israel. Cartoons of Israel soldiers as Nazis or Israeli prime ministers eating Palestinian babies have gone mainstream and garnered prizes. An “expose” in the mass-circulation Swedish tabloid Aftonblandet claiming that Israel harvests body parts of murdered Palestinians went viral.
Israel Apartheid Week is a regular feature of campus life on many university campuses, even in the U.S., and institutions as prestigious as Harvard put their imprimatur on conferences devoted to one-sided Israel bashing. Even Jewish professors feel intimidated. Kenneth Marcus relates that as Director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, he found that college professors are even more afraid to step forward than students. Professors told him of meeting in secret to discuss campus anti-Semitism, lest they be labeled “Zionists” and subject to retaliation.
Continue reading → Purim in Contemporary Guise
By Guest Contributor, on March 15th, 2012 By Shaul Gold
[Editors’ note: We received a large volume of comments, which were held up in the queue until Rabbi Gold could pen a response to their general drift. We have still not determined why so many of our readers assumed that “trembling before Rashi” is somehow the equivalent of granting Rashi veto power over interpreting pesukim. Rabbi Gold wrote nothing of the sort. Clearly, many rishonim disagree with many other rishonim; many disagree with Rashi. Rabbi Gold commented upon the tendency of many (and I have heard this myself many times - YA) to be dismissive of Rashi as hopelessly stuck in a primitive, literalist mode that is beneath enlightened moderns, chas v’shalom. Rabbi Gold argued that whether accepting his pshat (from which we always have something to learn, or preferring another, Rashi (as well as other Rishonim, but especially Rashi considering the centrality of his work on Chumash in the life of so much parshanut that followed) must always be approached with reverence. We will let Rabbi Gold explain in his own words.]
I would like to address some of the comments that Purim prevented me from addressing. I was, and yet remain, confused as to … Read More >>
By Avi Shafran, on March 13th, 2012 I have an abiding appreciation of animals. My family has shared living space at one point or another over the years with: a small goat, a large iguana, a beautiful tarantula, an assortment of rodents of various sizes, and scores of tropical fish (the latter our only current pets).
We didn’t choose some of those creatures. Several were Purim gifts from talmidim of mine when I served as a rebbe. The boys meant well and I came, in time, to appreciate each present. The only one we didn’t keep very long was the goat, which repeatedly escaped from our back yard to feast on a neighbor’s lawn. (We sold her—the goat, that is—within a few weeks to a girl who lived on a farm.)
We always treated our animals well—buying and feeding the tarantula the live crickets it craved and making sure the mice and hamsters got their exercise and fresh air. (The untimely demise of that one member of the order rodentia left too long in the sun was entirely an accident, Chana; there is no reason to feel bad.) And I try to be careful, as per the Talmud’s exhortation regarding animals, to feed our fish before … Read More >>
By Guest Contributor, on March 7th, 2012 Young Writers Submission by Daniel Weiss
One of the claims that Haman leveled against the Jews was that they were “separate and scattered,” that they lacked togetherness. Of all the negative characteristics he could have singled out, he chose this as the defining feature with which to describe us to the King. The Midrash states that this is precisely what made the Jews vulnerable to annihilation, what opened the door to a decree of our death. It was significant then and it is still very much a reality today due to the diversity that is present across the Jewish spectrum. Yet, we were purposely born as a nation with twelve tribes because diversity has its benefits, benefits which are worth understanding.
In social psychology there is a concept called group polarization. The basic idea is that when members of a group have similar opinions about an issue, discussion within that group does not balance out their opinions but rather makes their opinions more extreme than they were going in. For example, if before going into the jury room, members of a jury all believe that an individual is guilty, then they will come out feeling even more strongly … Read More >>
By Avi Shafran, on March 6th, 2012 The little boy was petrified, as one might imagine, by the gorilla who sat down next to him at the table in his (the child’s) home. I hadn’t meant to scare the kid; I was just tired and needed to get off my paws.
It was a very long-ago Purim (the child is now a father and accomplished talmid chochom) and a group of us had rented costumes to use in Purim visits to homes while collecting for a worthy charity. The gorilla suit was very realistic (and very hot).
Sheftel, as I’ll call the boy (because it’s his name) was around three years old at the time. I was around 19. I felt bad, and immediately removed my head—that is to say the gorilla’s.
Sheftel’s eyes shrunk back to their normal size and the scream that had lodged in his lungs never made it to his wide open mouth. He saw it was only me.
When, a bit later, I replaced my gorilla head, Sheftel let out a scream. I reminded him from inside that it was only me. He screamed again. I took off the head and he immediately calmed down. I put it back on … Read More >>
By Yitzchok Adlerstein, on March 5th, 2012 I’ve fallen terribly behind in offering our readership a report on the annual convention of the Association of Jewish Orthodox Programs (AJOP). I posted one piece on Rabbi Lowenbraun’s decision to test the feasibility of committing some of the tools and resources of the kiruv community to energize parts of the mainstream community that are suffering from feelings of apathy and disconnect.
At some point I hope to summarize one of the sessions that I delivered, entitled “The Top Ten Reasons Why Frum People Are Unhappy With Their Yiddishkeit.” I pulled no punches, but deserve little credit for candor. I live on the West Coast, relatively out of the reach of those who detest candor and honesty. Truth be told, though, nothing I said held a candle to the breathtaking courage of Rabbi Benzion Twerski of Milwaukee, who spoke to 600 people, roughly evenly divided between kiruv professionals and laypeople from the New York area who drove up to Stamford to try out some of what Rabbi Lowebraun put together for them. R. Twerski spoke after the two other scheduled speakers at this session, namely R. Shmuel Kamenetsky, shlit”a, the Novominsker Rebbe, shlit”a, both members of the … Read More >>
By Guest Contributor, on February 29th, 2012 By Shaul Gold
One of the defining moments in the development of my hashkafas hachaim (outlook on life) occurred during a Shiur Klali (weekly lecture) I attended as a talmid in Yeshivas Mir Yerushalayim.
The Rosh Yeshiva, R’ Nochum Partzovitz, ZT”L, was a son-in-law of Rav Chaim Schmuelevitz, ZT”L, and one of the preeminent Maggidei Shiur that emerged after the War. He was one of the famed Mirrer talmidim from Shanghai and a talmid of R’ Boruch Ber Levovitz (Rosh Yeshivah in Kamenitz and a Talmid Muvhak of R’ Chaim Soloveitchik). R’ Nochum’s awe and reverence of R’ Boruch Ber and R’ Chaim Brisker was well known.
R’ Nochum suffered from arterial sclerosis and, when I arrived at the Yeshivah, was already confined to a wheelchair. He gave a daily shiur, a chaburah on Thursday nights, and a preview of the Shiur Klali on Motza’i Shabbos. The preview shiur was unique in that, while it was ostensibly a small gathering in his apartment, it was, in fact, attended by hundreds of talmidim from other Yeshivos that gathered in the hallway and stairway to hear the shiur. The shiur was a great strain for R’ Nochum physically, but was an … Read More >>
By Avi Shafran, on February 28th, 2012 I can’t pride myself on having a good long-term memory (as my wife can attest, that’s an understatement), but a February 1 New York Times article did spur my sluggish hippocampus.
The Times article was about Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood and it noted that “an undercurrent of unease, suspicion and resentment from some longtime residents” remains from the 1991 “riots that exploded between blacks and Hasidic Jews”—as if marauding gangs of Jews and blacks had spent four days attacking one another, when, in fact, the besieged Jewish residents of Crown Heights cowered and prayed as their non-Jewish neighbors attacked them and their property.
My flashback (well, slow dawning) was of correspondence I initiated, as Agudath Israel of America’s director of public affairs, with editors and a reporter at the Old Gray Lady in 2002.
That year, in the context of a court reversal of the federal civil rights conviction of Lemrick Nelson Jr. for the killing of Yankel Rosenbaum during the Crown Heights riots, the Times similarly characterized the disturbances in two different articles, as “violence between blacks and Orthodox Jews.”
I telephoned the reporter whose byline appeared on the reports and asked him whether he … Read More >>
By Jonathan Rosenblum, on February 27th, 2012 I had not gotten very far in the new issue of Klal Perspectives before being enveloped in warm, fuzzy memories of my childhood. The subject of the issue is changing gender roles in the Orthodox world and its impact on the family – not a subject by itself designed to arouse warm feelings.
In his lead article, Rabbi Moshe Hauer of Baltimore acknowledges that the social trends that have so dramatically changed the family dynamic from what it was fifty years ago are likely here with us for the indefinite future – whether it is women working to provide a second salary to help meet the expenses of a large Orthodox family or functioning as the principal breadwinner while the husband learns in kollel. But he argues that it is not only the family structure that has changed but also to some extent the centrality that family occupied in the lives of our parents. As a modest step to reverse the attitudinal shift, he offers the modest proposal of reemphasizing the family dinner.
I have often asked myself why my parents were successful in ways that few were in the upper-middle class Chicago suburb in which I grew up. … Read More >>
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