Rarely have I felt that a piece of mine was so misunderstood as the one from Mishpacha Magazine entitled posted a couple of weeks ago. More than a few readers accused me of some form of chareidi triumphalism and, as it were, rubbing the noses of the national religious world in the apparent setback to the vision of Eretz Yisrael Hashleimah.
I cannot say that this reading is wrong or that there is nothing in the piece that could lead one to think that was my intention.
What I can say is that what I thought I was doing was something just the opposite. In my own mind, I was addressing the message to the chareidi that we should NOT look upon the withdrawal from Gaza with a feeling of I told you so or with any hopes of the chareidi ranks swelling as a consequence. Rather the withdrawal should be seen as a disaster from the point of view of the religious world in general because of the crisis of faith that it will engender.
(Of course, there were readers who denied that any such crisis would take place no matter whether the withdrawal takes place or not.)
I mention this now only as a prelude to a question. Last week, I spent a long time discussing the withdrawal with a major Torah leader.
As it happens, his geopolitical analysis leads him to conclude that the withdrawal is a necessity for Israel, and he has shared that view with me a number of times over the past year. (Yes, he is aware of the security threats.)
At the same time, he told me that he feels it is crucial that the residents of Gush Katif and Northern Samaria who are going to be removed from their homes feel that the chareidi world is with them in their suffering.
He told me of a visit he had made to Gush Katif two years ago, and how thrilled he was with the dedication to Torah U Mitzvos that he witnessed there kala k chumaro and the beauty of the lives of the residents.
Several days ago, Rabbi Adlerstein regarding the deleterious effects of television, and wrote that children whose classmates were free of its influence could perceive the difference between themselves and other children even in grade school. This post has generated an extraordinary number of comments (both here and elsewhere) from writers who whether wilfully or blindly could not bring themselves to confront what Rabbi Adlerstein actually said.
The addiction to television runs so deep that even its most obvious harm is to be ignored.
I was amused to see one writer assert that Rabbi Adlerstein surely has no knowledge of what it means to have a television, given that he is a cloistered charedi Rabbi. Anyone who has read this journal for a few weeks knows that only the latter adjective (charedi) is anywhere near accurate and a few purists out there might quibble even with that.
Only a bit better were those criticisms which said that Rabbi Adlerstein declared television-free children to be inherently more intelligent, that he failed to distinguish between good and bad television, and that he claimed that his son volunteered that he saw a difference between children without prodding, whereas, in fact, he was being prodded by his presence in the television-free A track.
Rabbi Adlerstein didn t say that television reduced children s intelligence, but that television made them an educational drag. The fact that very bright people achieved a higher education with televisions in their homes hardly disproves the clearly observable negative impact of the TV which, of course, is also getting worse over time. Rabbi Adlerstein isn t the only one to fail to differentiate between PBS and the WB trigonometry still can t be presented by the Count in five-minute segments.
And finally, his son was told that he was in the Yiddish track, but was not told that he was there to be educated along with other TV-free boys. This wasn t a matter of gratuitous separation from others (see my own to Marvin Schick s post in opposition to Kollel-Only schools); being without television made a difference on the basketball court, and a 12-year-old could see this for himself.
Speaking, as I did in my last post, of the failures of democratic institutions, albeit in an entirely different vein, the following is an unpublished letter of mine to you guessed it the Forward, responding to an by a freshly minted Ivy League Jewish Studies grad regarding the 1945 burning of Mordecai Kaplan s prayerbook and the excommunication of its author by a group of American Orthodox rabbis.
Kaplan, it will be recalled, is the dude who invented Reconstructionism (patent pending), thereby inspiring the wag s line that there is no G-d and Kaplan is His prophet. Personally, I prefer to Jewishly identify myself in the way a friend of mine recently did, as a Jew under construction. Shouldn t we all be?
Another legacy of Kaplan is his innovation of the rite of bat mitzvah, having been, it seems, the first to fete his daughter s coming of age in that way. Well, at least that ritual was started by a guy with rabbi in front of his name; the bar mitzvah, by contrast, was probably the brainchild of the American Association of Kosher Caterers.
How, you ask, do I know the bat mitzvah was Kaplan s baby?
Because, over the years, I must have read the same sentence in at least 5 or 6 different Jewish papers or books, and always with a sober air of authority (those familiar with the literature know that received wisdom of this sort about the Orthodox tends to get regurgitated repeatedly), in roughly these words: Even the Orthodox have been influenced by the other movements to accomodate modernity, as in their adoption of the bat mitzvah ceremony first performed by Mordecai Kaplan. What a gas.
In any event, when our Jewish Studies grad began his retrospective with the following paragraph, you just knew it wasn t going to end pretty:
I just came back from Kfar Maimon, a sleepy,dusty village of 200 families in the middle of nowhere in the Negev, but also in the middle of the route from Netivot to Gush Katif.
This week it was the site of a 25,000 person strong, three-day demonstration against the Gush Katif disengagement plan. I regret that I did not set out from Netanya early enough to get there until it was mostly over, but I was there emotionally, by listening to the minute-by-minute accounts on the radio. I decided to spend some time there afterwards and talk with participants to try to understand, kli sheni (second-hand) what transpired.
Intellectually I have been against the settlement enterprise since 1967 (5727) , but I found that my heart was with my friends in the religious-Zionist-settler demonstration in Kfar Maimon. Some 25,000 right wing demonstrators came to Kfar Maimon, and this elicited an (almost) equal and opposite reaction of some 15,000 police and soldiers. This was the largest joint army-police action in the state of Israel s history.
In the picture below (Cross-currents July 21, A 1000 words on disengagement ) we see religious soldiers praying minha along with, and on opposite sides of the fense from, the demonstrators whom they are supposed to be containing.
If I have to identify myself ideologically, I would say that I consider the position of the late Rabbi Shach ztz l on the settlements to be pragmatic, and I have written about it at length (see website of English Behar-Behokotai 5762).
Rav Shach wrote that in the Land of Israel we are not yet at home in the sense of a metaphysical conception of the ephemeral versus the permanent, since we are still awaiting redemption, geulah.
We are surrounded by people who hate us and want to destroy us We have not yet reached a state of permanence in our Land, while we are surrounded by enemies. The only true feeling of permanence is when we are in the bet hamidrash, in the study hall. Establishing additional settlements in the Shomron will not guarantee our existence, and will not add to our security.The opposite is true, it will only increase the hatred of our enemies.
No, it s not a typo. Nonoo is Ebrahim Nonoo, who has a fascinating in this week s Forward (boy, with all the press I give those folks, I oughta start drawing commission).
Mr. Nonoo is himself more than a tad interesting, considering that he is a member of the upper parliamentary house of the Kingdom of Bahrain and is also . .
. Jewish.
Although his essay begins with the bracing sentence Whenever I hear the word democracy, I shiver, it is the farthest thing from a jihadist rant.
It is, instead, an enlightening treatment of both the advantages and flaws of Western-style democracies and a persuasive case that there may well be a better form of governance than pure democracy, which Churchill famously termed only the second worst way of ordering a society, all others being first. Nonoo notes the wide-ranging societal dysfunctions secular democracies facilitate or even engender, such as progressive dissolution of the family unit in various ways, reliance on debt to maintain artificial living standards and a liberal justice system based on moral relativism, but he also freely acknowledges the benefits of economic growth and personal freedoms that democracies confer on their citizens.
Because democracies have produced such mixed results, Nonoo argues that a country like his, which, while still a monarchy, recently reconstituted a constitutional, parlimentary form of government, ought not be beholden to the precise democratic model that the United States has been aggressively promoting in the Middle East.
Rather, countries committed to basic governmental reform should be free to chart their own courses of incorporating the positive aspects of democratic ideals while eschewing its more deleterious features in favor of a faith-based approach that preserves traditional religious and moral values. As Nonoo puts it:
So while we in Bahrain wholeheartedly embrace certain aspects of democratization, there are some Western ideals that we do not wish to import. We are creating our own brand of liberalism, one which operates within the confines of our religious, ethnic and social criteria.The social contract we are constructing will guarantee Bahraini citizens their rights within the framework of priorities and values that are dominant in our society.
The current issue of the Columbia Journalism Review provides independent confirmation of positions taken by two of the favorite people in my life Rav Moshe Feinstein zt l and my youngest son, Akiva .
It did not take Rav Moshe, the greatest halachic decisor of the last generation, too long to weigh in concerning television.
In its earliest years, when sitcom families still had two parents, and their children brushed their teeth, made their beds, and lived in houses surrounded by white picket fences, you could also not find too much salacious material on the airwaves. There was suggestion, to be sure, but nothing explicit. So Rav Moshe s objections to the new medium did not focus on titillation, but on values.
How, he asked, can you watch something that turns murder into something frivolous?
Decades later my children found themselves in what was called the Yiddish track in their day school. Although theirs was (at the time) the only haredi school in town, the parent body evidenced a much more varied continuum of behavior than in the analogous schools in Flatbush.
The administration would have liked to ban TV at home as a condition of enrollment, but they would have lost half the school. On the other hand, there was pressure to segregate the kids from the better homes (i.e.
ones without TV) so that they could achieve more of their potential without being subject to the educational drag of children from less spiritually rarified families. (The assumption was a gross generalization, but it harbored a good deal of truth.)
The administration came up with a ruse.
They formed a Yiddish track, knowing that none of the families who really valued TV would live with such an anachronism. It worked. None of the children enrolled in this track had televisions at home, and the track did turn out to be the A track of the school.
They didn t do all that much teaching in Yiddish either, and were able to drop the ruse altogether after a few years. It was sort of comical while it lasted the young sons of Iranian rabbis who were often a large portion of the class proudly declaiming their Rashis in Hungarian Yiddish. Go figure.
I just spoke with a wonderful man named Rabbi Dovid Vandervelde. He is a real estate manager, and serves as the (unpaid) president of a licensed adoption agency. You may have received an email that originated from him.
Several weeks ago, he sent an email to a woman with an update on current issues. Included in this email was a brief mention that he needed to find a good family to adopt two boys.
Two Jewish boys, brothers aged 7 and 9, are now separated from each other and in foster care.
They needed immediate placement in a warm, frum home, and the agency was given all of one month to find that suitable home or they would remain separated and sent to (possibly) non-Jewish homes.
He gave the woman his phone number, and of course his email address. She forwarded the message to a few people.
And they forwarded it on. And then it stormed the Jewish Internet.
July 15, 2005
The debate over the Gaza withdrawal has become one of competing nightmares.
Opponents fear, along with recently retired Chief of Staff Boogie Yaalon, that the Palestinians will be emboldened by Israel s retreat to launch a third, more violent intifida. Supporters are terrified that Israel will become a pariah state, if the withdrawal does not take place, and pressure will grow for a one-state solution.
Neither nightmare is implausible.
Each side of the debate poses strong questions. Opponents wonder how Prime Minister Sharon plans to prevent Gaza from becoming an arms bazaar, especially if Egypt is entrusted with policing the Philadelphia corridor and the Palestinians are eventually allowed to build a port and reopen their airport. What will Israel do, if missiles hit Ashkelon or Ben Gurion airport?
Will we reoccupy Gaza and northern Samaria, and if so, what was gained?
Many years ago, one of the Rabbis teaching through was embarrassed to realize he had sent out a weekly message concerning the Torah Reading for Parshas Bila am. It was a very understandable slip, though, because Bila am and his intended curses, which G-d inverted to blessings on our behalf, are really the topic this week.
[The Hebrew names of the readings are simply based upon the first relatively-unique word this week begins VaYar Balak, Balak saw. Seeing is used far more commonly than the name of King Balak, so the reading is called by his name. But in actuality, Bila am is discussed more.
] The following thought is even more tangential since the topic of the week is blessings, and a visitor to my home gave an interesting insight into a blessing that is part of Birkas HaMazon, the Grace After Meals, there s a connection
In Birkas HaMazon we ask, please may we not need, HaShem our G-d, not the gifts of human beings, and not their loans, but only Your full, open, Holy and generous Hand
So a chassid was visiting the Spinka Rebbe, and saw the Rebbe saying this blessing, and thought it interesting how we all even the Rebbe ask for our own needs. The insightful Rebbe, though, shared the following.
The Rebbe explained that people come to him for his blessings.
What a righteous man decrees, G-d fulfills, so they come to the Rebbe to pray on their behalf. But that, of course, is not guaranteed. Sometimes, he said, the blessing is granted immediately G-d fulfills what he prayed for right away.
Sometimes the blessing is delayed. And sometimes, of course, the response is negative.
Published in Mishpacha Magazine, July 14, 2005
The impending removal of 8,000 Jews from the Gaza Strip constitutes a trauma of unprecedented magnitude for the national religious world in Israel.
That trauma is both theological and sociological.
On the theological level, religious settlers have been betrayed by the very state that they came to view as holy. As Hillel Halkin points out in the March 2005 Commentary, Rabbi Tzvi Yehudah Kook, the most important figure in national religious thought since 1967, spoke frequently of the holiness of the state [of Israel], and that holiness was in no way conditioned on the Torah observance of its citizenry.
Now that same state has become the instrument of the most dramatic retreat yet from the vision of Greater Israel which has dominated religious Zionist thought since 1967.
From the Six Day War on, religious Zionists viewed themselves as the vanguard of societal renewal. Since the Rabin assassination, however, the national religious community has been forced to recognize that they are a vanguard with no followers.
Far from representing an ideal for secular Israelis, they are increasingly viewed as public enemy number one. When Israelis describe secular communities beyond the Green Line, such as Alfei Menashe, they refer to communities and their residents. But if the community is religious, it will inevitably be referred to as a settlement and its residents as settlers.
The latter two terms have become as pejorative as they are descriptive.
Israel is these days experiencing a major crisis concerning its unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. Below are some impressionistic notes from the field.
The streets of Jerusalem are ablaze with the color orange which has become a potent symbol of solidarity with the Jews scheduled for expulsion from Gaza. Strips of orange are cropping up everywhere: On apartment porches, on children s bookbags, on briefcases, in wrist bracelets. Orange ribbons are festooned on automobiles, on flagpoles, on tree branches, in gardens a bumper crop.
One can sense a gradual turning in public opinion against the proposed eviction and withdrawal. Even the recent polls although not always to be trusted show a clear swing away from governmental policy. Another very powerful sign is also widespread: bumper stickers reading, Yehudi lo megaresh Yehudi A Jew does not drive out another Jew.
No one seems to understand what Sharon has in mind. We hope Sharon does. One might have expected this of a Peres or of one of the left-wing doves.
But what caused Arik Sharon this old soldier who was the hero of the settlers, who encouraged them to build and develop barren lands to turn his back on his most passionate supporters? In the election for Prime Minister, Sharon overwhelmingly thrashed Amram Mitzna who had proposed this kind of withdrawal. For Sharon now to adopt the rejected plan of his opponent boggles the mind.
His former supporters are more than puzzled and disappointed; they feel betrayed. No one can figure out what grand strategic purpose is being met by this one-sided retreat. Israel receives nothing in return except winks and nods and the Arabs interpret it as yet another victory for terror.
The frustration is deepened by the fact that many leading military people consider Gaza and its 25-mile coastline to be of immense strategic value.
Arab pledges of quiet and peace are risible. Even now, there are daily killings and rocket attacks, and daily our government mumbles things about not withdrawing under fire.
The inmates have taken over the asylum, and they do not deign to explain their position. Instead, those opposed to the withdrawal are stigmatized for incitement. Democratic norms are falling by the wayside in order to bulldoze this program through.
Jonathan Rosenblum wrote: I have been thinking for some time about how to fashion an argument against the Gay Parade in Jerusalem (and elsewhere) that would resonate with non-religious people and those who do not view homosexual acts as sinful. Citing Leviticus will be inadequate.
I have also thought about this for a very long time (not in the context of the parade, but in the overall context of gay marriage) and have concluded that there is no such perspective; those who do not accept that there is a G-d Who gave us Leviticus have no source for a consistent moral code.
Absent this consistency society can legislate whatever it wants based on passing trends. For example, witness the shift in morality concerning abortion, euthanasia and gays over the past 35 years. The great ethicist Peter Singer has written that we find that we can no longer accept the ethics of the past.
I would argue instead, as Henry James said, that a great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
Our current cultural debate about gay marriage necessarily engages two camps who cannot hear each other precisely because they are living under different mental and psychological regimes one has a G-d given moral system while the other, unfortunately, does not. (If this sounds familiar, you might want to think about the current debate in Israel about the disengagement plan .
) Once G-d is not in the picture the world pretty much becomes do as you wish, with periodic adjustments to window dress a perceived morality which upon objective scrutiny does not have much in the way of legs.
I ve had a recurring thought of a way to explain to others our opposition to the gay lifestyle. In a nutshell: It is an essential aspect of our Jewishness that we strive to be other-oriented rather than self-oriented.
This leads us directly to G-dliness, or is perhaps a subset of G-dliness, as we strive to serve His needs rather than our own. By marrying someone who is wired like me (a male) or even someone not wired like me but nonetheless innately familiar to me (a female, but a close relative of mine) I will not become as other-oriented as I would had I married someone who is completely different than I am. (This also gives context to the linkage between feminism no differences between roles of men and women and the gay lifestyle.
)
While Dr. Schick has just contributed a new article, I think his , about Jewish outreach, warrants further analysis and exploration.
To an extent kiruv (Jewish outreach) requires a suspension of reality.This is not necessarily a bad thing because from a religious Jewish standpoint, the reality of American life is harsh. The many good people who engage in kiruv blot out circumstances that suggest that their efforts are akin to a steady uphill climb. We should admire them all the more because of what they have accomplished.
While I understand Dr. Schick s intent, I disagree that those involved with outreach cannot remain cognizant of the harsh reality of assimilation. On the contrary, I think it is a powerful motivating factor.
The largest Jewish group in America today is the unaffiliated. They have not found any meaningful form of Jewish expression, and are thus paradoxically more open to Jewish outreach than those satisfied with a non-halachic expression of Jewish religious involvement. There are millions of Jews to be reached, and who are open to being reached.
When the Supreme Court cut the constitutional baby in half and ruled that some Ten Commandment displays are kosher and some are not, the spokesman for the Orthodox Union warmly welcomed the development. Good public relations, but bad Judaism.
What is there to celebrate when four Justices say that any public display of the Ten Commandments violates the First Amendment?What is there to celebrate when in all likelihood, the Supreme Court ruling will mean that most displays will be ruled unconstitutional? What is there to celebrate when we continue to have decisions that are hostile to religion?
I know that the Ten Commandments issue is not per se that important.People do not respect religion because a tablet is installed in a public place. No one s belief or behavior is affected. As a practical matter it makes small difference whether the Ten Commandments can be posted in a public place.
What concerns me essentially is not what the Supreme Court did but how we as Jews and particularly Orthodox Jews look at the matter. Overwhelmingly, American Jews are not only secular, they embrace a brand of secularism that is hostile to religion. This may not be the conscious intent, yet it is what emerges from the totality of our advocacy against religion.This attitude strikes me as risky, both for Israel and American Jewry because it invites counter-hostility from Christian groups.
Last week s reported that Washington lobbyist David Saperstein, director of the Reform movement s Religious Action Center, called on liberal religious and political leaders to launch a campaign to cut in half the number of abortions performed, currently estimated to be as high as 1.3 million per year, within two years.Saperstein told the Forward that such a campaign would help liberals take back the moral high ground on this highly divisive issue.
Saperstein s call to action is deserving of praise not only on its own merits, but also because it so very politically incorrect and, thus, vanishingly rare, for a pro-abortion activist to put aside the issue of whether abortion is legal and acknowledge that the procedure itself, stripped of its legal protections, is morally problematic. In fact, while Saperstein urged liberals to take back the moral high ground, Joshua Halberstam, in an in the Forward earlier this year, argued that on this and a host of other issues, the rightists did not hijack the moral high ground they found no one standing there.Written from a liberal perspective, the piece is worth reading in its entirety; the following is an excerpt:
For years I ve tried to get my students to talk about it. It can be almost any controversial issue, but we never get there; my students, like most of my academic colleagues and New York City Upper West Side friends, and the American left in general, have long ago ceded actual moral judgments to others, i.e.,moral conservatives. And all of us , red and blue, pay the price.
Say the topic is pornography.I gamely ask my class: Do you think pornography is degrading? Ignoble? Liberating?
The hands go up: People have a right to see what they want. Three other hands: Who decides what counts as porno anyway? I say: Okay, let s agree, censorship is absolutely wrong: Now about pornography what do you think about it?
Another hand: According to the First Amendment .
There are things you can t learn from books. You ve got to learn them from lawyers.
Strange as this seems, it is supported by Maharal. At least the first part.
Maharal on Avos 2:9 (according to his division of the mishayos, which is not the customary one) writes: These matters (i.e. the good path that a person should cling to) they did not learn from the Torah. They understood them by examination of their surrounding reality.
While Maharal does not specifically mention attorneys, a message I received this week got me thinking that there may be room to include them. A few paragraphs in a decidedly non-Torah communication got me thinking about the way we might look at issues, positions and disputes within our community.
(Note: For anyone interested in a bit of commentary on the Supreme Court s Ten Commandments rulings, which haven t been addressed on this site, see my piece today on .)
Boy, does that Daf Yomi juggernaut have power! Until this morning, the next Siyum HaShas (celebration of the conclusion of the seven-and-one-half year, page-a-day cycle of Talmud study), set to take place, G-d willing, in the summer of 2012, was on a collision course with the 2012 summer Olympic Games, both vying for the use of the same New York- area stadia.
So what happens?First, a religious Jew single-handedly stops the stadium-building effort on which New York s bid for the Games seemed to hinge. (Interestingly, only days before New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver put a halt to the proposed West Side stadium project, it had gotten a green light from another religious Jew, this one a New York State Supreme Court judge who rejected last-ditch legal challenges to NYC s sale of the stadium site to the Jets those [frum] Jews really do control everything, don t they?!
)
But, Mayor Bloomberg (not a Daf Yomi learner yet, so far as we know), forged ahead undeterred with the city s Olympic bid, pulling out all the stops, enlisting big-name politicians and athletes, wining and dining the International Olympic Committee (IOC) decision-makers, and, indeed, it seemed as if the force, if not the Force, was with the Big Apple.
As a basketball player, I was always something of a streak shooter, and I m afraid that the same will be true of my contributions to this site. Every time I finally summon up the energy to write something I m reminded of the immense power of the blogsphere and its capacity to generate interesting discussion among many people with something to say, and can hardly wait to write again.The countervailing force, of course, is that no one makes you write for the blog and there are no editors demanding their material by a certain time as with the print publications for which I write. But let s keep shooting while hot.
I have been thinking for some time about how to fashion an argument against the Gay Parade in Jerusalem (and elsewhere) that would resonate with non-religious people and those who do not view homosexual acts as sinful.Citing Leviticus will be inadequate.
My first thought was to express opposition to such parades as a part of a general opposition to any public celebrations of any form of sexual behavior. In other words, I would also be opposed to a parade of heterosexuals who wanted to proclaim the nature of their private activities to the entire world.
Cross-Currents is trying hard to stay out of the political arena. Not that its contributors think that politics is outside the arena of Torah commentary. My guess is that every contributor to this blog feels quite strongly that there are Torah insights that can and should be brought to bear on every important facet of life, including politics.For pragmatic reasons, however, we ve chosen to stay clear of politics (and certain other controversies regarding which certain of us have very strong opinions) simply because we would like to stay acceptable to the largest group of readers possible, and few things inalterably turn people away than what they see as bad political judgment.
I am hoping that my colleagues can come up with approaches to the impending disengagement that transcend politics, that offer something for pretty much everyone. I will throw out the first pitch.Actually, I will throw out two ideas that resonated with me, and that make no political assessments.
The first comes from a draft of a letter that Rabbi Pesach Lerner, the chief exec. of the National Council of Young Israel prepared, but has not yet sent.He gave me permission to cite from it, while he continues to deliberate about revisions. The letter describes the enormity of the human toll to those whose lives and communities are threatened with upheaval. What he describes is true, regardless of whether one thinks disengagement is the greatest crime against the Land of Israel since the Biblical spies in the wilderness, or whether one thinks it is a necessary evil.
Here is the conclusion of his letter:
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