Neandershort

Heard on the Web

2011-12-14T14:46:00.003-05:00

משוט בארץ ומהתהלך בה
From flitting about the world and traversing it (Job 1:7). . . .

The following appeared in Scientific American's webzine the other day: Click here. Wow. Without any fuss, fanfare or publicity, Jews and Arabs cooperate. Peace grows from the ground up. A couple of Czechs were involved as well. No surprise to anybody involved in science; the profession is a United Nations that works. And an Israeli scholar not only studies evolution but founds an international institute at an Israeli university devoted to studying it. No surprise there either. Israel has more universities per capita than any nation on earth, and they are at the forefront of groundbreaking research in every field of knowledge.

Here is the comment I wrote on Scientific American's site:

Ali and Hassan -Ya Habibi, don’t you guys know English is the new Esperanto? Why not learn it if you’re working with Israeli scientists? Will your mullahs back home chop your heads off if you seem too Western? And do you actually eat mole rats? I thought they were “haram,” like pork.
If the researchers have a few mole rats to spare, perhaps they should fit them with explosives instead of radio collars and throw them into Arab buses at rush hour. Oh right, Israelis wouldn’t do that even if they had military orders.
Eviatar – studying evolution, huh? Naughty naughty. A big yasher koach (kudos) for standing up to the black-coated old (but not as spry or as sharp as you) greybeards who would march us back to the Dark Ages. Until 120 years as we say.

Kennedy Yahrzeit

2011-11-25T15:51:00.003-05:00

48 years ago today we buried President John F. Kennedy, assassinated November 22, 1963. As it happens, even if he was Jewish the funeral would almost certainly have been delayed that long. As in all homicides, an autopsy had to be performed. Since it was Friday afternoon, nothing could have been done that night or the next day. Dignitaries had to fly in literally from all over the world.

I watched the obsevances on television. The catafalque that once bore the body of Abraham Lincoln taken from the Capitol rotunda on the shoulders of men, the stately procession to Arlington, the horse-drawn caisson, John-John saluting on his third birthday, the riderless horse, the missing man formation above,. . . .

At its destination, the flag-draped coffin was placed on the catafalque over the open grave and Catholic prayers were recited. Then - everybody left with the casket still suspended over the open grave. A few months later my grandfather a"h left this world and I prevailed on my parents to let me attend the kvura. Back in 1964, few eleven-year-old boys did. The plain wooden casket was lowered by hand into the grave, and the men present shoveled earth into the grave until it was filled. Even I clumsily put in a shovelful or two. Four years ago I lost my mother-in-law, and since my wife comes from a small family few men attended the burial in Old Montefiore, where the two latest Lubavitcher rebbes are buried. It was pouring rain, as it was when the Rebbe was buried; that is supposed to mean that the heavens were crying. But the heavens weren't going to make a minyan, so I went into the Rebbe's Ohel and asked if they could spare a few good men. They did, several men in black frock coats trudging in the pouring rain th the graveside. Not only did they complete a minyan so my father-in-law could say kaddish, they took shovels in their hands and filled in the grave along with myself and my son, the only men present who were strong enough to handle a shovel.

So family and fellow Jews performed the last kindness that could be done for my mother-in-law on the face of the earth. Our way is a better way.

Mayhem in Midwood

2011-11-17T02:33:00.008-05:00

Last Friday, residents of Ocean Parkway between Avenues I and J in the Midwood section of Brooklyn were awakened before dawn by sirens and the sound of burning cars. Vandals had set three automobiles afire, apparently by placing gasoline-soaked rags under them and igniting the rags. Swastikas, "KKK" and anti-Semitic slogans were scrawled on the sidewalk as well. This occurred the day after the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the infamous pogrom in Germany that presaged the Holocaust; authorities believe it was not a coincidence. This afternoon, it was discovered that vandals defaced a sign at the Avenue J subway station, renaming it "Avenue Jew."

Torched cars along Ocean Parkway

Sign at subway station, defaced to read "Avenue Jew"

Two days ago was the Yahrzeit of Rabbi Meir Kahane hy"d. When attacks like these happened 40 years ago, he knew what to do and didn't hesitate to do it. Young, strong, tough members of the Jewish Defense League would fan out over the neighborhood beat up anybody they caught attacking Jews and Jewish property. The language of Eisav is the only language these goons understand. We will never be comfortable with it, I hope, but sometimes we have to "speak" it. The police promised to do what they can, but they cannot be everywhere at once, and their numbers are sharply curtailed because of the bad economy. Thank God, nobody was hurt in these incidents, except Holocaust survivors who probably suffered severe emotional trauma at the sight of swastikas on the sidewalk. These were crimes against property, which the police usually assign low priority. Murders, rapes, armed robberies and such get first dibs on the limited resources of law enforcement.

Here is what we can do:

1. If you're strong, take care of yourself and stay strong. If you're not strong, get strong. We know how; we're just lazy or we have our priorities screwed up thanks to two millenia of that crime against nature known as galut.

2. No Jew has any business smoking. It is a one way ticket to sickness, weakness, a miserable life and an early death.

3. Be alert, but follow your normal routine. Show no weakness and no fear. Walk with your head held high, and your hat (black or otherwise), kippa sruga or whatever securely on it. The people who do these dirty deeds want to instill fear in us. Let's instill a little fear in them. Don't be the rasha, the wicked son who lives in the generation of redemption but refuses to be redeemed.

May we all live to see the redemption come to its glorious conclusion.

Happy Anniversary

2011-11-07T16:08:00.002-05:00

Today, November 7, is the 94th anniversary of the Russian Bolshevik Revolution, which they know as the October Revolution. Leave it to those dumb Commies to have an October Revolution in November (the revolutionaries switched from the Julian Calendar to the Gregorian, being the last major country on earth to do so). I remember studying at Columbia in the early '70s. Lenin was God ever there. We had to read selections of his works in our Contemporary Civilization classes, not a bad idea in itself; we came to college to challenge and be challenged, and it it always beneficial to know one's enemy. But from listening to our professors you would never guess that Lenin and his system were the enemy, that they had to build a wall to keep their people in, that it was a crime to attempt to leave the Soviet Union or any of its satellite countries, or "captive nations." As long as the Soviet Union stood, November 7 was a holiday throughout the country, which was the largest nation on earth in terms of land area, spanning eleven time zones and incorporating 104 recognized national groups, most of them seething at Russian domination. The anniversary was also celebrated at Soviet installations throughout the world. In New York that meant the Soviet airline Aeroflot, the trade organization Amtorg, and above all the Soviet mission to the United Nations on East 67 Street off of Third Avenue, across the street from Park East Synagogue.

The Jews in the Soviet Union were one of the recognized nationalities. Stalin even tried to designate a territory for us, the barren wasteland of Birobidzhan near the border with North Korea. Some Jewish Communists actually settled there, but were kept from having any semblance of Jewish life, there or in any part of the Soviet Union. We were forbidden to pray, to observe our holidays and to study Hebrew, the authorities having designated Yiddish as our national language and proclaimed Hebrew the language of the Zionist fascists and imperialists. So we would gather at the mission building to demonstrate aganst Soviet oppression of its Jews. At first the police tried to confine us to the National Guard armory a block away, but we wanted to demonstrate at the mission building so the Commie pigs could hear us. After a struggle in the courts the police were forced to allow at least a small group to demonstrate across the street from the mission, that is, directly in front of Park East synagogue. In a parody of the Russian folk song "Volga Boatman," we would sing:

Russian Mission Boom
Russian Mission Boom
Russian Mission Russian Mission Russian Mission Boom,

the "Boom" expressing a hope that someone would blow up the Russian Mission. In fact, militant Jews did set off some homemade bombs at other less well guarded facilities
Another chant was:

One Two Three Four
Open Up the Iron Door
Five Six Seven Eight
Let Our People Emigrate

When we saw a Soviet yellow submarine unloading diplomats' children coming home from their special school (they wouldn't deign to send their children to America's bourgeois public schools), we would chant in their direction: Yob Tvaiyu Mat! It's a very nasty thing to say to Russian kids. It means "Fuck your mother." The Russians would complain to their ambassador to the United Nations, who would complain to the Embassy in Washington, who would complain to the U.S. State Department, whose officials weren't very happy but had to explain to the Russians that, unlike their hellhole of a country, our citizens were free to speak their minds no matter who is offended.

Hardly any of us would have thought that in 1989 young Germans would tear down the Berlin Wall overnight with chisels and their bare hands as citizens of other captive nations, supposedly contented in a Communist workers' paradise, liberated their own countries, and that by the end of 1991 the Soviet Union itself would be but a bad memory and those who miss it would be able to meet in a telephone booth. Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev once boasted that he would bury us and that our grandchildren would live under Communism. It's hard to believe that the high school students that I teach never heard of the Berlin Wall or the Cold War - to them that is something they read about in history books. We buried their system, and their children and grandchildren leave for Israel and the United States to live in freedom.

So now November 7 provides an occasion to reflect on the difference between our way of life and theirs, and on how fortunate we are to be where we are. With all its faults and troubles, and they are many, our country is still a shining city on a hill, a beacon of hope and freedom to all the world's oppressed.

GOD BLESS AMERICA!

I'm back

2011-11-06T02:07:00.005-05:00

Sorry for not posting for over three months. I had a very busy summer, what with my daughter's wedding and all. I hope to post more often now that the dust settled somewhat.

While I wasn't posting, the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon occurred. Here is a video that you will not see in the mainstream media. The PC police are forever railing about Islamophobia, but it's not a phobia if it's rational and we're not paranoid if the Muslim fanatics are really trying to kill us. Watch it and pass it on to your friends.

One of the talking heads in the mainstream media suggested that henceforth the annual commemmorations should be toned down, the names of the dead not be publicly read, and so forth. No! Remember Amalek! Read the names; every one of them was a human being with a story, and every one of them was murdered by stinking bastards - in the name of God no less. Read the names, and if I could I would set up a giant Jumbotron at the site showing this video over and over.

We also observed the 39th yahrzeit of the Munich Eleven, the Israeli Olympic athletes, coaches and officials murdered by Arab barbarians to make a political point. Shortly after the murders, we learned that the Libyan dictator Muammar Qadaffi was behind the operation. We would demonstate at various locations in Manhattan, chanting:
Who do we want? Qadaffi!
How do we want him? Dead!

Praise God, we got our wish. The brutal dictator is dead, at the hands of his own people, fed up with his tyranny. Now the families of the murdered athletes, and those of the 200-plus victims of the Lockerbie bombing, also orchestrated by Qadaffi, will have some closure. It appears that the Arab Spring will be followed by a winter of Jewish discontent, as the new governments emerging in Libya and Egypt are likely to include Islamist elements hostile to Jews, Israel and the West. But even here there is a silver lining; the government of Israel and the liberal Jewish establishment here will no longer be able to delude themselves about the nature and desires of the Arab-in-the-street. They want us dead, and there is no talking to them. We have to prepare for war, with our immediate neighbors and also with Iran. And if we face the truth with confidence and courage, God will be with us as He always has.

I wish my readers a happy and healthy 5772.

Murder Most Foul

2011-07-20T00:08:00.002-04:00

I’m still having difficulty digesting it, let alone writing about it coherently. Who would murder a sweet little boy, then butcher his body like a side of beef, place the feet in a freezer and the other pieces in a suitcase and dump the suitcase in a Dumpster two miles away? Who? Why? Yet that is what happened to little Leiby Kletzky (Yehuda ben Itta Esther hy”d), a few days shy of his ninth birthday, last week. In the Boro Park section of Brooklyn, a neighborhood composed almost exclusively of ultra-Orthodox Jews. The child set out late in the afternoon of Monday July 11 from his day camp, walking alone for the first time, a few short blocks to meet his mother. Apparently he got lost and asked a stranger for directions. The stranger took him in his car to his (the stranger’s) home, where he was apparently suffocated with a bath towel, chopped up and dumped. A frantic search began within hours of the boy’s disappearance. Thousands from as far away as the Catskills and Lakewood, New Jersey participated, scouring Boro Park and beyond. Many went some 36 hours without sleep. Then the news broke Wednesday morning. Little Leiby was found dead, in pieces. The alleged killer, was in police custody. A lucky break and a lot of old fashioned police work led investigators to the scene of the crime, the Dumpster and the killer, before the remains would have ended up in a landfill somewhere, perhaps never to be found.

Was this the work of a politically motivated Arab or Muslim? The boy’s dress marked him as a member of a Hasidic sect not known for their ardent Zionism, but since when does that matter to an Arab? The boy was Jewish and that’s good enough. But no. It soon became apparent that the suspect was an Orthodox Jew named Levy Aron. The perp walk photo has him wearing a kippa. He worked as a clerk in a nearby hardware store, where co-workers described him as “a little slow” but a good worker. His only prior criminal record was a summons for public urination, though that might change as investigators comb through his past.

These things are not supposed to happen in Boro Park. Children do get lost, of course, but they were always found in short order and returned to their parents. People look out for one another there, the old fashioned way. Orthodox Jews don’t do such things to other Jews or anybody else. There were some attempted abductions, but screaming neighbors always scared the miscreants away. Leiby’s yeshiva teachers described him as obedient to a fault, the kind of kid that would go into somebody’s car if told to, especially if that somebody appeared to be one of us. The kind of kid that probably never struck a blow in anger in his whole short life. Yet marks on the alleged (I hate to use that word in this context but I don’t want to be sued) killer’s arms indicate that the boy struggled. I can only imagine what was going through his head in his final seconds on earth as he was compelled to lift his little hands against another Jew. May he be comforted in heaven by Rav Kook and his son.

As soon as the news broke, heartless ghouls started blaming the boy’s parents for allowing him to walk by himself at such a tender age. But there has to be a first time, and parents are in the best position to judge the maturity of their children and decide when they are ready. It is never easy. When I put my son on his first subway ride alone, to his high school, I was nervously reciting psalms until I called the school and verified that he got there safe. But being a parent is not supposed to be easy (thank God I had little from my children in the way of tza’ar gidul banim) and I knew it was in his best interest to take that step to independence. The object is to raise strong and confident young men – soldiers, not sissies. And who would think this could happen in a place like Boro Park? It was reported that even seasoned investigators, men who thought they had seen everything, threw up when they came upon that grisly scene. What comes to mind is the American GIs liberating Nazi concentration camps. They were no strangers to death, but nothing could have prepared them for what they saw.

As might be expected, people are asking where was God. God did not make automatons, but humans who are supposed to know right from wrong and act accordingly. This horrific murder, like the Holocaust, was a human failing, not a Divine one. We should be asking, “Where were we?” Would a smile and a “hello” or “good morning” to a neighbor who appeared to be troubled have made a difference? We can never know, but it costs nothing and certainly wouldn’t harm. And a misguided ethos of shielding our young from the filth and evil of the outside world – no TV, no radio, no secular newspapers - appears to have backfired. It is possible for a boy to be too sweet, too obedient, too trusting, too angelic for his own good. If this horror serves as a wake-up call to parents to teach children what can be lurking out there and how to protect themselves, little Leiby will not have died in vain.

Now the story is fading from the news, but the authorities continue to investigate. The process can be slow and, to us, frustrating. But the authorities need to build an airtight case; we cannot afford another Casey Anthony. The suspect’s lawyers are likely to mount an insanity defense, though the suspect’s confession will make that difficult. The lawyers are also likely to ask for a change of venue. With everybody screaming for Levy Aron’s head, it is unlikely that we can find twelve people in Brooklyn who can give him a fair shake. I know I can’t, and were I Levy Aron’s lawyer I would want him tried a good distance away, maybe Albany.

We now begin the three weeks of semi-mourning, culminating in Tisha B’Av, the anniversary of the destruction of both Temples in Jerusalem. We are told in the Talmud that the reason the Second Temple was destroyed was sinat hinam, gratuitous hatred among Jews. Rav Kook taught us that the tikkun (remedy) is ahavat hinam, gratuitous love. We have seen a beautiful (at least it would have been beautiful in a better context) display of ahavat hinam in the search for Leiby. Thousands of Jews from all walks of life cast aside their differences and, at considerable personal sacrifice, scoured the neighborhood. If we can hold on to this spirit we will be closer to the ge’ula sheleima, the ultimate redemption.

Darwin matters

2011-07-08T17:19:00.003-04:00

Townhall, a conservative webzine, recently published an article by one Marvin Olasky in which he lambasts the theory of evolution, while revealing his utter ignorance of what evolution states, what it does not state, and what a scientific "theory" is and is not. Click here.

His first paragraph defines the issue as political, and important in view of the coming campaign season. His second paragraph raises theological objections that are "literally crucial because they tell us whether the Cross was necessary." The article was lifted from the Christian magazine that Mr. Olasky edits; he apparently did not bother to re-edit it for a secular audience. The crosses (there were many of them) were necessary for the Romans to get rid of people they considered troublemakers, but that's not the real point. The point, which Olasky completely misses, is that the cross (only one is important to him) is irrelevant to American politics and to science. He asserts that "if the Darwin was right the Bible was wrong," but our Constitution could not care less if the Bible was right or wrong. Nor is the word "God" mentioned in the entire document.

The rest of the article raises a grab-bag of social issues that evolution supposedly influenced in a negative way. There is nothing new here; it is difficult to find anything new in the arguments of Christian (or Jewish) fundamentalists. The obvious answer to all these issues is that they are irrelevant. Any scientific theory can be misused or abused; that does not affect the validity of the theory. Arsonists use matches to start fires, but we do not ban matches. Instead we make positive use of matches while we try to catch and punish arsonists. That Olasky and his Christian audience do not understand the function of a scientific theory points to the inadequacy of science education in this country, which those of Olasky's ilk would perpetuate and which bodes ill for our ability to compete in the global economy. China, India and Japan are not Judeo-Christian societies and their science is not stymied by religious nonsense. Their scientists come here to train in America's best graduate schools and then fill positions in our finest research universities while this country does not turn out enough people who are up to the task.

In brief, the function of a theory is to explain data. Data are the "facts" of science, the results of experiment and observation. The more data a theory explains, the wider the range of fields that produced the theory, the more successful the theory is. It follows that scientists do not use the word "theory" the way the general public does. A scientific theory is not somebody's guess, supported by tenuous evidence or no evidence. When scientists dignify a statement by calling it a theory, it is robust, supported by a large body of evidence from many different avenues of research. Accordingly, there are few theories in science. We have the atomic theory, the theory of universal gravitation, electromagnetic theory, quantum theory - and evolutionary theory. All but evolution do not generate political firestorms stoked by religious know-nothings. And evolution is supported by as vast a body of evidence as any of the other theories. As with all scientific theories, evolution has unanswered questions. That's what this business we call science is all about - investigating the unanswered, constantly broadening our understanding of how the world works.

It is worth noting the hypocrisy of politically conservative thinkers who want the government to have our children taught pseudoscience instead of real science. Conservatives say they believe in limited government, yet they don't hesitate to invoke the power of government to enforce the scientific or political positions which they favor, or to suppress those which they oppose. It all depends on whose ox is gored. And evolution helps us understand many of the social problems that fundamentalists blame it for creating. If we are descended from ape-lile primates (and share about 99% of our genes with modern chimpanzees), it follows that human behavior is related to the behaviour of other primates, chimpanzees in particular. Darwin showed that we are animals, but we always knew that we were much more. We, alone among the animals, are capable of conceiving a right and a wrong, and guiding our actions accordingly. I and other religious students of evolution - and there are many more of us than Olasky and his crew care to consider - don't read evolution as a license do do anything our animal nature dreams up. We read it as a signpost and a warning. It shows us how strong our animal nature (what Jews call the yetzer hara) is and how intense our efforts to overcome it with our higher mental faculties must be.

So yes, Darwin is important, but not the way Marvin Olasky thinks.

The Big Weiner

2011-06-24T17:26:00.003-04:00

Help! I have to pay taxes but I'm without representation in Congress. So are all the other poor heavily taxed voters in Congressional District 9. Our Congressman, Anthony Weiner, resigned over a sex scandal, or perhaps a non-sex, or just plain nonsense, scandal. It will be several months before we can have a special election for someone to warm Weiner's seat until the regular election in November 2012, by which time the district may well be gerrymandered out of existence in the mandated redistricting. New York is slated to lose two seats in the House of Representatives based on the results of the latest census.

Remember former Governor Eliot Spitzer? He too resigned over a sex scandal, when his patronizing of prostitutes (okay, high-class "call girls") came to light. He was known in the little black books as "Client Nine." Maybe there's some kind of jinx in the number nine. But Mr. Weiner never, as far as is known, had sex with a prostitute or with anybody other than his new wife. The whole donnybrook is over pictures sent to women (and a 17-year-old girl) over the internet. The pictures are all over the Web now, and we can judge them for ourselves. Just Google "Weiner crotch" and "Weiner shirtless." Somehow, conservative columnist Andrew Breitbart got hold of some of them and made them public. I nominate Andrew Breitbart for tzara'at. He is guilty of gossipmongering for transparent political reasons. Anthony Weiner has been a most effective Congressman, delivering the goods to his district (e.g. "Weiner's Cleaners" powerwashing graffiti off walls) and advocating for a strong foreign policy, and bucking his own Democratic Party in the process. He is also a skilled debater and a forceful advocate for President Obama's health care reforms. I have my reservations there, especially as regards his single-payer proposals. I also want to keep the generous health-care package that the United Federation of Teachers negotiated for me. But these issues deserve to be debated on their merits, not scuttled by dirty gossip from the opposition.

As far as I am aware, the Congressman did not send pictures of himself naked, as so much of the media implied. He sent pictures of himself in his underwear, with a discreet outline of his genitals visible. People of a certain age will remember "Underwear That's Funtawear." The men's briefs featured a strategically placed "Big Mac" or "Home of the Whopper" (I'm sure McDonald's and Burger King raked in handsome profits). The women's panties declared their owners "Slippery When Wet." None of us got particularly uptight; if we didn't like the message we didn't wear the underwear. And today pictures much more risque than the ones Mr. Weiner sent out are all over the web.

Are the Weiner photos any worse than this wrestler, available on a public site?

As far as the shirtless photos go, the man was in a gym for heaven's sake. What is inappropriate about being bare-chested in a gym? Those poor women saw nothing that all of us do not see every day this time of year. Add to that guilt-by-innuendo, when columnists opined that "some of the women might have been under age." The people making the charges have the burden of proof, and none was forthcoming. The age of consent in New York is seventeen. Authorities in the jurisdiction where the 17-year-old in question resided did not have a problem, and neither did the girl's parents, so why do the media have a problem? Conservative pundit Dennis Prager declared that what the Congressman did was worse than an extramarital affair (in which more than one Congressman is known to have indulged), and asked if a teenage boy would rather have his father look at raunchy pictures or have an affair. Well, I'd rather he looked at pictures. Nobody ever contracted a venereal disease from pictures. So Mr. Weiner gave in to a yetzer hara. We all do that on occasion.

What bothers me more than sending the pictures is lying about them once they came to light. If Mr. Weiner was running for the first time, that probably would have caused me to vote against him or sit out the election. But he was our Congressman for a long time, and a very good one. As long as he did not break the law or Congress' code of ethics, the media feeding frenzy was far more unseemly than anything Weiner did. And the feeding frenzy is going to have a chilling effect on the body politic for years to come. If sainthood is now a requirement for public office, who would want to seek public office? Everyone of us is a package. You take us with our good qualities and our faults. And ordinary people will also suffer. I am a biology teacher. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that a 13-year-old student could contact me on the Web with questions about human reproduction. I have no way of verifying her age; neither, probably, did Mr. Weiner. If I keep the conversation on a high level (anatomical names for body parts) but give the student the straight answers she was probably not getting at home or in school, have I done anything wrong? Might I get in trouble for it years down the pike? Such a climate of fear is not healthy for teachers, students or other living things.

We live in a society where sex is used to sell everything from automobiles to zirconia. It is hypocritical, to put it mildly, to jump on a Congressman who sent pictures of himself that were mildly inappropritate (I would not have sent them if I were in his place). So now we lost an effective public official over a tempest in a teapot. Stay tuned.

A Parsha Thought - Unintended Consequences

2011-06-17T14:28:00.004-04:00

Tomorrow we will read Parshat Shelah, whose central theme is the meraglim, twelve spies sent by Moshe Rabbeinu to reconnoiter Eretz Canaan, as it was then called ("Palestine" is never mentioned in all of Tanakh, not once), and report back on the lay of the land, the quality of its produce and its military vulnerabilities. They returned, according to tradition on the evening of Tisha B'Av, and all but Caleb and Joshua reported that the people were tall and exceptionally strong, and it would not be possible for the Israelites to conquer it. All of the adults cried and sulked, and did not listen to the "minority report" of Caleb and Joshua. God decreed that the people would wander in the wilderness for 40 years and that all of the adults, age twenty and up, were to die in the wilderness. Their children, those born in Egypt but not yet 20, as well as those born and yet to be born in the wilderness, whom their parents and grandparents complained would be booty for the Canaanites, would be the ones to conquer and inherit the land.

We often speak of a "law of unintended consequences," whereby significant decisions have unanticipated results, usually negative ones that bite us on the behind. So, I submit, is the case here. Who was supposed to be punished? The adults, for their lack of faith and confidence in God and their agitation against Moshe Rabbeinu that would reach a climax in Korah's revolt in next week's parsha. But in my estimation it was not the adults who suffered most; it was the teenage boys. The adults knew what they did wrong, so much so that a good deal of them embarked the next day on an unauthorized mission against the Canaanites that failed. But the teenage boys, those who were the same age as me during the Six Day War, had no part in the wrongdoing. They personally witnessed the miracles of the Exodus and the war with Amalek, and all that was happening at that magical time of life when a boy is bursting with male hormones and everything seems possible - the same wonderful confluence that changed me and my contemporaries in 1967. I can imagine those boys taking every opportunity to go outside and spar with blunted weapons to get themselves ready for the battles that they were eager to be part of. And now - they were to be punished for the sins of their parents. Grounded for forty years! To a boy that feels like life in prison. Oh, they would enter Canaan all right, when they would be in their forties and fifties, too old and weak to wield a sword or throw a javelin, militarily useless. Imagine the resentment they must have felt toward their parents for condemning them to such misery. When I was in fourth grade or so, my teacher asked me which of the Ten Commandments is hardest for me to keep, and without hesitation I answered the fifth. If I was asked the same question today, I would give the same answer. Perhaps those teenage boys in the wilderness bequeathed their well-founded resentment to their descendants to the last generation.

At this point one might ask why God did not simply kill off the bad generation at once, or perhaps over one year, and allow the young to enter Canaan right away. Ultimately, of course, we can never know why God does what He does, but we glean a little insight from the Hasidic doctrine of tzimtzum. God shrinks himself, as it were, so we can relate to Him in a confined place, be it physical - the beit mikdash - or intellectal. He established the laws of nature as the "constitution" by which He runs the world, and confines Himself to the natural order most of the time, even when it leads to what we mortals view as unintended consequences. The generation of the wilderness had to die before Canaan could be conquered, but they had to die of natural causes, and that takes time. The boys would not fight, but they would train their sons and, when the time came, share in their sons' joy when they went out, weapons in hand, and conquered their land. And that too is something they bequeathed to future generations. Jews have always endured economic and other hardships in the hope that their children would have it better than they did. And so may it be until Mashiach comes and redeems the world, in our time but, if not, in our children's.

Too Hot To Handle (2)

2011-06-15T10:55:00.004-04:00

Prof. Michael Zimmerman at Butler University is circulating letters for Christian clergy and rabbis to sign, asserting that religion and the theory of evolution are compatible. He recently added a letter for Muslim clergy and notes with dismay that it attracted some hateful and vile comments. I posted the following comment to the professor's column in Huffington Post:

Sorry Prof. Zimmerman, but I have to disagree here. When your country is attacked, it is natural (especially for the male of the species) to be full of anger and even hatred toward the attacker. I'm a New Yorker. My country and city were attacked, and I am filled with hatred at the people who did it in the name of their perverted brand of religion. What I see now is what played out in Spain in the 12th century. Fanatical Muslims, the Al-Muahadin (Almohades) poured in from North Africa, took over, and destroyed the regime of "convivencia," where Muslims, Christians and Jews lived together in relative harmony and advanced human civilization immeasurably. Maimonides and others had to flee to other lands, much to the detriment of Spanish culture and civilization.
Of course there are moderate Muslims, but they are not heard above the din of fanaticism emanating from Saudi Arabia, which has unlimited funds to spread their Wahhabi cancer through madrassas around the globe. The Imam Letter can help stop this madness, but only if knowledge of it spreads beyond the scientific community. We need all moderate Muslims, especially those still in positions of authority, to SPEAK UP LOUD AND CLEAR that terrorism is vile and anti-Islamic. By the way, since you will not reproduce those "vile names," your readers have no way to evaluate their vileness.
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

This is not the first time that I posted comments to Prof. Zimmerman's columns in Huffington Post, but for the first time my comment was rejected. I sent a copy to Prof. Zimmeerman, who was surprised that the comment was rejected. He assured me that Huff Post's editors, not he, make the decisons on what comments to publish. I believe him. He says he has no idea why my comment was blue-penciled. I have an idea. There is a taboo in our society against criticizing Muslims. All other religion and their clergy are fair game for criticism, lampooning, cartoons and the like. None of the objects of all this respond with violence - except Muslims. Nor is this something new. Years ago, a movie called "Muhammad, Messenger of God" debuted in theaters. It showed images of Muhammad that some Muslims deemed blasphemous. After a bomb threat (or maybe an actual bomb, I don't remember) at a theater in Washington, D.C., the theater canceled the movie and other theaters declined to show it. Later the movie was edited to remove depictions of Muhammad and was retitled "The Message." At the time, such violence and threats were rare. Today, especially in Europe, it is becoming routine. But our response is as craven now as it was then. Dutch politician Geert Wilders must travel under guard because he has received death threats for fearlessly sounding the alarm about an Islamic takeover of Europe. Danish newspapers were threatened for publishing cartoons making fun of Islam's penchant for violence, and now censor themselves accordingly. Dutch film director Theo van Gogh was assassinated because he had the temerity to make a film critical of Islam's treatment of women. And on and on.

I suspect that this is the reason my comment was too hot for Huffington Post to handle. Freedom is not free. It must be defended in every generation. In my youth the enemy was Communism. Today it is Islamic fascism. If our country ceases to be the home of the brave, it will not be the land of the free much longer.

Here are two of the cartoons that led to threats against a Danish newspaper:

Too Hot To Handle

2011-05-27T13:02:00.005-04:00

As I wrote in my last post, I ran a race in Lower Manhattan last week, put on by the American Heart Association to raise money and awareness about the nation's Number One killer. I wore a top, custom designed by me, with the REBUILD flag in front and Osama's bullet-riddled ugly mug in back. The Heart Association posted a photo album with pictures of the race and the people running it to its Facebook page, and sent an email to all participants asking us to upload photos of our own. I sent two photos that I asked a fellow runner to take of me in my top celebrating after the race - celebrating the first fulfilling warm-weather run of the year and, in my case at least, the demise of our archfoe who killed thousands of us on the very ground we ran past; I gave a fist pump when I ran past it. The pictures are here, along with the captions I sent them with:

Here's the front of my shirt - Build 'em BOTH and build 'em TALL. Show the murdering bastards who's boss in New York.

I ran this year; I try to run it every year even though I don't work in the area. While crossing the bridge from the staging area to the start, I said a prayer for the 3000 good Americans killed for the greater glory of Allah, and pumped my fist and shouted "Build 'em tall" when we passed where they died. My custom-made shirt said "Ding Dong the witch is dead." So shall all your enemies perish, Lord.

The next day I discovered that the photos were no longer in the album. I emailed the Heart Association, and its communications director confirmed that he deleted them, since "[w]e don’t feel your photos are appropriate for our audience or the intention of our page." Well, who does "our audience" consist of? Mostly patriotic Americans, I hope. Maybe some tourists, maybe an evildoer or two casing the joint. Why not let them know that we are defiant and we will do whatever it takes to maintain our way of life? And what was our intention? To celebrate, and this pregnant year gave us a little bit more to celebrate.
Have we really reached the point where Old Glory, a plea to see two skyscrapers destroyed by a foreign enemy not even ten years ago rebuilt [Don't we pray three times a day for the rebuilding of the Beit Mikdash, destroyed nearly two millenia ago?] and happiness over a significant triumph of American arms are too hot for a charity that raises funds from good Americans to handle? What is this country coming to?

Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead

2011-05-23T02:35:00.007-04:00

Okay, witches are supposed to be female, but see Rashi to "Mekhashefa lo tehayeh." And we usually don't rejoice at people dying, but in certain cases, e.g. Adolf Eichmann, we make an exception. And so we do here. Osama bin Laden, arch-terrorist, mastermind of the attacks on the American Marine barracks at Beirut, the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the U.S.S. Cole, and of course the murder of some 3000 good Americans at the World Trade Center, is no longer among the living. In scenes reminiscent of the celebrations at the end of World War II, throngs gathered in Times Square, the site of the destroyed Twin Towers, the field in Western Pennsylvania where passengers brought down a hijacked plane before it could reach its target, and other places around the country, throngs gathered to celebrate.

Good riddance to bad rubbish - Crowds gather
at Times Square to celebrate the death of Osama
bin Laden at the hands of elite Navy SEALS

The treasure trove of intelligence captured in Osama's hideout (actually a veritable palace a stone's throw from a major Pakistani military facility) showed that Osama was no mere figurehead. Until the very end, he was actively involved in plotting attacks against us and our allies, with the aim of placing the entire world under a seventh-century Islamic caliphate. Nonetheless, our troubles with Islamic terrorism are far from over. There are "sleeper cells" that will activate and seek revenge. Haman al-Zawahiri, Osama's second in command, needs to swing from the gallows. Freedom-loving people the world over must still remain vigilant; we must get it right all the time, while the enemy need only get lucky once. And those on the front lines against terror should include more - much more - observant Jews in American uniforms; it is our country, our values and our freedom that are being defended.

I must now retire my running top with REBUILD on the front and the N.Y. Post wanted poster on the back. A few days after Osama's liquidation I ran the Wall Street Heart Run, passing the World Trade Center site, in a new shirt featuring Osama's bullet-riddled mug on the back. One fellow runner told me I was giving witches a bad name.

Macabre, bad taste, gloating over the violent death of another human being? Perhaps. But we are not burdened with Christian love-your-enemy nonsense. When the Egyptians drowned in the Reed Sea and the angels sang praise, God stopped them: My handiwork is drowning in the sea and you sing praise? It is instructive that He did not stop us, and Shirat Hayam remains part of the daily service. Men at war cannot be expected to behave like angels, and when an archfoe like Osama bin Laden bites the dust, we are unabashedly happy.

So shall all Your enemies perish, Lord

GOD BLESS AMERICA AND THE U.S. NAVY SEALS

Schnorring for Jailbirds

2011-04-08T16:19:00.007-04:00

A while ago I received a letter in the mail asking for money. Nothing new there; I always get missives soliciting funds for this or that poor family whose breadwinner fell on hard times due to the recession, chronic illness or perhaps he can't get a decent job because he never got a decent education. You see, sitting all day learning Torah does not prepare you for the job market. And sitting all day doing whatever is not conducive to good health. And having many children bli ayin hara with no visible means of support predisposes you to all sorts of stress-related diseases. But this particular letter hit a new low: they are asking for donations to aid the families of Jewish prison inmates, as well as the inmates themselves. Now, these ehrliche yidden are not in jail because they plunked themselves down in front of the Soviet mission. Nor are they there for running a red light. They are there because they committed serious crimes - in some cases felonies. My reaction was not pity but anger: How dare you do what you did, disgrace our people and then ask for charity? How dare you? Here is the text of the letter:

The letter's "poster child" is a teary-eyed little girl whose father is serving a five-year prison sentence for tax evasion. It is stated right up front, without a trace of shame, as if it was normal for Jews to go to prison for cheating on their taxes. As if it was mutar (religiously permissible) to steal from the government, especially our benevolent government. The accompanying material speaks of children suffering for their parents' mistakes. Mistakes? Those parents did not know what they were doing? You don't go to jail for honest mistakes on your tax return. You pay what you owe plus penalties and interest and - finished. The organization's website speaks of providing legal services so that "poverty never dooms one to prison." Guess what? For centuries we lived in grinding poverty under tyrannical Jew-hating regimes where there was no opportunity for economic advancement, and few if any of us went to prison for stealing from the government. Imagine the pogroms that would ensue if they had! And now, in this enlightened country? It's almost routine for Jews to be caught in all manner of white-collar crimes. We are treated on a regular basis to "religious" Jews in full "uniform" - black coat, black hat, the works - led away in handcuffs with the TV cameras rolling. Oh, these families don't have TVs in the house, or computers. Well, guess what? The rest of the world does and the hillul Hashem is incalculable. There is a kosher food program in prison, daily minyanim, Daf Yomi classes, ad infinitum ad nauseam. Prison officials have been fired for giving Jewish inmates special privileges not available to other inmates; one inmate was allowed to host his son's Bar Mitzvah celebration in jail. We are asked to take pity on the criminals' wives, "living as widows with no end to their grief." I find it hard to believe that those wives had no inkling of their husbands' chicanery. For these people it's okay to cheat "the dumb goyim," as long as you don't get caught. Well, guess what? Those "dumb goyim" are not as dumb as you think. And some of the IRS and FBI detectives are Jews, and some are even observant Jews. Why not? It's a living, and an honest one. And when someone cheats on his taxes he's picking the pockets of all honest taxpayers who have to pay more to make up for his thievery. Chances are excellent that you will be caught, you will be sent to prison, you will disgrace your family. And when that happens, don't you dare to add insult to injury by schnorring for charity. There is a word for that: chutzpah. We have urgent needs of our own, like providing honestly for our own families in this economy. We Americans have a saying: If you can't do the time, don't do the crime.

Where's Kakihito?

2011-03-20T02:20:00.004-04:00

Shushan News Service 14 Adar Bet 5771

"Where's Kakihito?" That's the question throughout Japan in the wake of the devastating earthquake, tsunami and reactor blowup that left Japan looking like the atom bomb hit it. Thousands of Japs protested at the Imperial Palace, incensed that their Divine Emperor sits in his comfy palace while his countrymen suffer as they never suffered since the war his daddy started. "It's been a week and still no Kaki. Haven't they got milk of magnesia in the joint?", asked one protester. After several hours the court spokesman came out with a bullhorn, explaining that there were no functioning toilets in the flattened parts of the country, and it would not become His Imperial Majesty's exalted station to crouch in the bushes to do his business. Besides, the spokesman said, bushes have been out of fashion since 2009. A protester bellowed back, "Obama bin Laden must be behind all this. His name is Barak, right? And all this shit hit us like lightning." The spokesman assured the crowd that the country's best engineers were working on the problem and the Divine Kakihito would soon come out.

Unknown to the crowd, Emperor Kakihito had been whisked from the palace through secret tunnels and flown by helicopter to Fukushima, site of a crippled atomic reactor. Persian engineers rigged up a royal deluxe portapotty, with every amenity imaginable, and pronounced it fit for a Shah. No sooner did the Emperor set foot on the tarmac than a commotion arose from the disheveled crowd. "Shah! Shtill! What's all the hullaballoo about?", exclaimed the chief engineer. An official pointed him to where a group of female volunteers was gathered. Signs identified them as "JAPS OF BORO PARK," and everybody was shouting with amazement at their clothing, haridos and jewelry. "Look at that dress she has on," gushed one women, herself dressed in whatever shmattas she could grab as the tsunami hit. "I have a yen for a dress like that." "Fuggedabboudit," said the lady next to her. "Something like that has got to cost more yen than you'll see in a lifetime." After the soldiers calmed the crowd, the Emperor began to address the throng. "We've been through worse before," Kakihito proclaimed. "We Japs are tough, and we'll get through this stronger than ever. But for a while we will have to endure the unendurable -" and he clutched his stomach and made a beeline for the Persian portapotty. Noises from inside caused worry among the crowd, with some speculating that the radiation caused a tsunami in the elderly Emperor's kishkes. A little boy picked up a handful of shitkake mushrooms and threw it at the portapotty, excitedly shouting, "aki-kake, aki-kake." One of the soldiers whipped out a samurai sword and, with bloodcurdling shouts of "Kamikaze! Banzai!" ran up, skewered the boy and, swinging him over his head like a chicken, called out "Thus shall be done to the one who delights to dishonor the Divine Emperor." The volunteers from Boro Park were heard saying to one another, "Yom k'Purim, Yom k'Purim." Soon everybody joined them in what they thought was a prayer for the Emperor's recovery.

V'nahafokh hu. . .

Late-breaking news from Shushan News Service - This sign went up all over New York City's showpiece Central Park. Evidently some putz on a computer did not know that Hebrew and Yiddish are read from right to left, and got the words for rabies, a fatal disease spread by mad dogs, backwards.

Amalek Comes to Itamar

2011-03-17T14:39:00.005-04:00

Last Shabbat at Itamar, a Jewish settlement near Shekhem (aka Nablus), there took place a horrific, stomach-turning multiple murder, particularly brutal even by Arab standards. Arabs burst into the Fogel family home at night and stabbed three children, the youngest only three months old, and their parents as they slept. One child was stabbed through the heart; another had his throat slashed. A daughter who was outside at the time returned home to the bloody scene. The perpetrators escaped and, as of this writing, are still at large. The Fogel family released several pictures of the bodies so that we could grasp the true horror of the deed.

Click here (WARNING: NOT FOR THE SQUEAMISH)

As always, the mainstream media are babbling about a "cycle of violence," "illegal settlements" and such. I don't recall Israelis ever sneaking into an Arab village and murdering little children in cold blood, but for Arabs it's their stock in trade. The question now is: Where do we go from here? The counsels of surrender would tell us that the Fogels, and all the other halutzim (the only ones left!) would have been safer behind the Green Line. And their forebears would have been safer going to America instead of Eretz Yisrael, which the Gentiles preferred to call Palestine. And the Jews would have been safer staying in Egypt than traversing the wilderness and then taking on seven hostile nations (six if the Girgashi left on their own) to claim their patrimony. As if the territory behind the Green Line was ever safe from terrorist attack - anybody remember the seder in Natanya, Sbarros, the Dolphinarium, ad infinitum ad nauseam? As if Israel was safe when there were no "occupied territories." Israelis woke up on June 5, 1967 and decided to go to war for the fun of it - right?

This Shabbat is Shabbat Zakhor, when we remember the cowardly attack of Amalek on the Jews coming out of Egypt. They were not after booty in the manner of all Bedouin tribes; the booty would have been up front, well guarded. They went after the weak and the tired in the rear. Their motive was hate, and their objective was simply to kill Jews. Today's Arabs are Amalek's ideological descendants. They hate us simply because we are Jews, and - Kahane was right - they will not accept an Israel of any shape or size. Remember that - and remember what Rav Zvi Yehuda Kook taught us about the Green Line. It has no halakhic significance. Eretz Yisrael was deeded to us by God and we dare not surrender a square centimeter of it once it comes into our possession. What's more - the Green Line has no legal significance either. It was never a border, only a concatenation of armistice lines. Once the armistice was broken in 1967, the lines became null and void, with the possible exception of the one with Lebanon.

Zakhor. If we leave out the vav of the holam, it can be read zakhar, male. As the Torah predicted, in the exile we had our manhood sucked out of us. We ran from our enemies, but they always caught up with us. We were a people bereft of strength and courage. We are back on our own land now. The ge'ula is already in progress. We are reclaiming our manhood with a holy vengeance. We can hold on to Itamar, and all the Itamars already on the ground, and all that will spring up in the future - and we will. The residents of Itamar already gave us - and our enemies - their answer. They celebrated a wedding yesterday, as if the attack had not taken place. And they celebrated it in Shekhem, at the tomb of Yosef (Josh 24:32), with special permission of the army, since the tomb of Yosef was closed to Jews since the second intifada. Shekhem means "shoulder" - symbol of manly strength. Several years ago I took my strong shoulders to Yerushalayim's Sha'ar Shekhem, stopped at the Young Israel synagogue, and continued on the straight path to the kotel. Before I'm a lot older, please God, I hope to take those broad shoulders of mine to the real Shekhem.

Itamar residents celebrate their wedding in Shekhem

Taking Yes for an Answer

2011-03-01T22:28:00.004-05:00

You must not call conspiracy all that that people call conspiracy. . . .(Isaiah 8:12)

We are now witnessing a phenomenon the like of which has not been seen since the Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe collapsed like a row of dominos in 1989 (one journalist called it "the domino theory in reverse"). It started with one person in Tunisia setting himself on fire to protest that country's corrupt and tyrannical government, and spread like wildfire throughout the Middle East. Millions took to the streets in Egypt and toppled Hosni Mubarak, who had been in power for some 30 years. Mass unrest in Yemen, Jordan and Bahrain forced their despots to institute some sort of democratic reform. Right now the focal point is Libya, where the Egyptian model is playing itself out. Crowds of people fearlessy fill the streets in Libya's cities demanding the ouster of their brutal dictator Muammar Qaddafi, who ruled with an iron fist since 1969. This is the same Qaddafi who was behind the massacre of eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics and the mid-air bombing of a jet over Scotland, killing 270 people. I remember participating in demonstrations in the days following the Munich catastrophe (I was in college then) and chanting "Who do we want? Qaddafi! How do we want him? Dead!". Well, if the brave young people of Libya have their way, we just might have him dead before too long. Maybe he will be hanged on Purim. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

But in Israel and throughout the Jewish world, consternation bordering on hysteria reigns. The "Arab street" is a force to be reckoned with. Newly free Arabs will abrogate treaties with Israel that the deposed despots abided by - never mind that only two Arab countries, Egypt and Jordan, have such treaties and they have hardly led to the kind of relations that exist between the United States and Canada. Some of the demonstrators in Cairo and Benghazi were seen holding up signs denouncing Israel - after decades of brainwashing by tyrants who totally controlled the flow of information, what can we expect?

Like a good scientist, I am skeptical. I do not believe in "democracy for me but not for thee." All men desire freedom. Democracy can be messy, cumbersome, fractious and slow; a task as simple as refurbishing a public monument can take years to accomplish, while a dictator will get it done immediately. Democracy is, as Winston Churchill said, the worst system on earth except for all the others. So I am pleased to see the Arabs seizing control of their own destiny. It was the slew of dictatorial, corrupt and rotten regimes that deflected the resentment and frustrations of their own peoples onto the eternal scapegoat, Israel. If all goes well, Arabs will prefer to make their own lives better instead of making those of Israelis worse. History shows us that dictatorships start wars with other dictatorships and with democracies, but democracies rarely if ever start wars with other democracies. We might be on the cusp of a new era of peace between Abraham's children. With the Arabs' oil and the Israelis' brains, miracles can be accomplished.

And what if all does not go well? What if the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and similar Islamist outfits in other Arab countries, the best organized of the underground political groups now coming out of hiding, take over? The result will be a tyranny as bad or worse than the one the masses are shucking off, which itself argues for those outfits not being allowed to rule, at least not without building coalitions with more responsible parties. A triumphant Islamist revolution will stir up hatred against Israel, but we can live with it, as we did for 62 years. They are unlikely to commit to a war that they must know they cannot win. They are mostly Sunni Muslims who, unlike the Shiites who rule Iran, do not have a martyr complex. Like the Communists, they want to live and it might be possible to do business with them. As always, while hoping and praying for the best, Israel must prepare for the worst. We have fought wars against all of our neighbors simultaneously before; another chant from the '70s went, "48, 56, 67, you lose." We will have to beef up our border defenses. With more resources going to defense, there will be less for corruption and political favoritism; we can live with that. With more manpower needed for the army, we will no longer be able to support the armies of able-bodied parasites sitting on their butts in yeshiva, not serving in the real army, not working (at least not honestly) and not paying taxes. We will return to the ethic that prevailed in the early years of the state: Every able-bodied male serves, no ands ifs or buts. Nothing but good can come of that.

Israel has been around for 62 years now, going on 63. The founders have gone to their eternal reward and their dream, praise God, is our reality. But too many of us, including those who run Israel's government, still think like miserable ghetto Jews. In keeping with Lev. 26:35, they hear the sound of a windblown leaf and flee as if from an enemy, but nobody is chasing. Then they close the book, before they get to v.42, assuring us that God has not forsaken us, that he remembers his everlasting covenant with Abraham, that he will restore us to our natural state, masters in our own house. Take a look around, people. Tanakh's prophecies of redemption are being fulfilled. The barren land is fertile. Jews from all over the world, from India to Ethiopia and beyond, are gathered home. The economy is thriving. The ge'ula is already in progress, unfolding before our eyes. We just have to learn to take yes for an answer from the only One whose pronouncements really matter.

Purim Katan

2011-02-18T15:29:00.004-05:00

It's Little Purim, so let's have a little fun.

All we are saying is. . . .

GIVE PISS A CHANCE

One Nation Indivisible

2011-01-28T15:20:00.003-05:00

If you're American and reading this, and did not attend a "black" yeshiva, you certainly know the Pledge of Allegiance. We all recited it every day in school, standing and looking at the flag. We didn't really understand it. What is "allegiance?" What's a republic? During Watergate, some kids said "and to the republic for Richard Stans," Richard Stans being one of the convicted cabinet officers, Secretary of Commerce if I remember right. Later on, we became aware that we didn't have "liberty and justice for all," if you happened to be black, or Catholic, or gay, or identifiably Jewish, etc. We worked our butts off correcting much of what was wrong about this country. And then there's "one nation, under God, indivisible. . ." What the heck was "indivisible"? For a while, I thought that it was really "invisible" and that it applied to God, not the nation. Then again, I used to think that baby girls got made when the mohel (circumciser) slipped with his knife. . . .

Much later, I learned that the original Pledge did not include "under God." It was added during the 1950s to set us apart from the Soviets, who were officially atheist. "One nation indivisible" had awesome significance no matter what your religious affiliation or lack thereof. Whatever your opinion of the insertion, it does terrible violence to the intent of the original author. The Pledge was written after the Civil War by a Union Army veteran. He wanted to stress that the war settled something about our national character that previously was open to debate. We are one country, not fifty (if I'm not mistaken, there were 35 states at the time of the Civil War). The states are subordinate to the federal government and must comply with federal law, right? Of course right.

Well, not quite. Out of frustration with President Obama's successful health care legislation, several Republican politicians in several states are trying to resurrect the concept of "nullification." This doctrine, bandied about before the Civil War, holds that the federal government is a creature of and subordinate to the states, any of which may "nullify" federal law, i.e. simply ignore it within the borders of that state. The logical outgrowth of this is secession, the right of states to quit the Union. One Supreme Court decision after another shot the doctrine down, and for good reason. It is a pernicious concept that would balkanize the country and render it unable to be a leader in the world. It is an abomination, whether any particular result is good or bad. Minnesota tried to nullify the Fugitive Slave Law, which mandated that runaway slaves be returned to their masters, even if they escaped to a free state like Minnesota. By contrast, the Jewish Fugitive Slave Law can be found in Deut. 23:16,17). The Supreme Court did not allow Minnesota to nullify that Act of Congress. We fought a bloody war, after which we amended the Constitution to do away with slavery forever.

During the Civil Rights struggle, several southern states tried to invoke nullification against federal mandates to desegregate schools, intercity buses and the like. Thank God they did not succeed. The Supreme Court, pursuant to Article Six of the Constitution, made clear that federal law supersedes states' rights, like it or not. And lest we think that fears about the Union falling apart again are far fetched, the reference I linked to above tells how a rally in Texas called for not only nullification but secession.

Were these rumblings merely the ravings of a madman they might be safely dismissed. But they are coming from elected officials who certainly should know better. There is a lot not to like about Obamacare, and Congressmen from both parties fought the good fight, but it is now the law of the land. It can only be changed by Congress or the Courts. Everybody on every side of every other issue needs to make it crystal clear that nullification is dead and buried at Appomattox. Just as a private citizen cannot pick and choose which laws to obey, no state can pick and choose which federal legislation will apply in the state. As a Constitutional scholar told the Texas legislature, "If you believe in nullification, you don't believe in the Constitution." To which I might add that you don't believe in America's mission in the world either.

Tu B'Shvat

2011-01-20T12:34:00.005-05:00

Time to go buy some dates and figs and say Sheheheyanu. It's spring in Israel. Remember the ditty we learned in school (my translation):

The almond tree is blooming

A golden sun is shining

Birds on every rooftop

Announce the holiday

Tu B'Shavat is here

The holiday of trees

An Israeli in one of my yeshivah classes taught me this version that they don't teach in yeshivah; if you understand Hebrew you'll see why:

השקדי-ה פורחת

לנאצר יש קורחת

הוא עלה על העצים

ושבר את הביצים

טו בשבט הגיע

החמור הכריע

טו בשבט עבר

החמור גמר

I came across this cartoon today:

In two months it will be spring here. Hang in there.

Hat tip: Yedidye Hirtenfeld from Young Israel of Midwood

Twiblings

2011-01-05T15:33:00.004-05:00

In last Sunday's New York Times magazine there is an article about two babies who were produced in a most unusual way, even in today's age of assisted reproduction. A woman married late in life, wanted children, and could not become pregnant naturally or after several rounds of in vitro fertilization (IVF). She then developed a medical condition that compromised her ability to carry a child safely, so carrying a child conceived with a donor egg was not an option. She and her husband decided to hire two surrogates to carry two embryos with eggs from the same donor (not one of the surrogates) fertilized in vitro with the husband's sperm.

IVF itself is old hat, having been available since the 1970s. It is not unheard-of for a woman with good eggs but unable to sustain a pregnancy to hire a surrogate to carry a child conceived from the woman's egg and her husband's sperm. It is quite common, as such things go, for a woman without good eggs but capable of carrying a child to carry one conceived from a donor egg and her husband's sperm. That is how women in their 50s and even 60s carry to term and give birth. But combining the two is quite unheard-of, at least according to the article's author. Genetically the two children, a boy and a girl born five days apart, are full siblings, but siblings are supposed to be born at least nine months apart unless they are twins. Twins are supposed to share a womb, but these babies did not. Hence - twiblings.

The article did not indicate if the couple was Jewish, so I assume it was not. But if it was, and sooner or later a Jewish women is going to have a child that way, I could imagine some halakhic problems arising. The birth certificate listed the man's wife as the legal mother, as is usual in such assisted reproduction cases. But halakhically, who is the child's mother? The gestational carrier (0ne for each baby)? The egg donor ("genetic mother")? Or the man's wife, who is actually raising the children? If the gestational carrier and/or the egg donor is not Jewish, does the child need to convert, as is the case for an adopted child? If there were two different biological fathers, would the children be allowed to marry each other? If the baby is the first carried by its gestational carrier, does it need pidyon haben? What if it's the first child of the father's wife, or of the egg donor? I could probably think of a few others, but these seem daunting enough. Resolving these quandaries will require poskim well-versed in human reproductive biology and not so put off by the newfangled technology that emotion will interfere with their thinking. Given the current anti-intellectual climate in our community, and the anti-secular trends in Jewish education, such people will be increasingly hard to come by.

Point - Counterpoint

2011-01-04T12:22:00.004-05:00

In a post written on the occasion of R. Meir Kahane's yahrzeit, I referred to an essay written by an American student in an Israeli yeshiva describing his physical breakdown while supposedly growing in Torah scholarship. I just became aware of another student, a recent graduate of my alma mater Yeshivah of Flatbush, who is studying in an Israeli yeshiva and at the same time training for the first full 42-kilometer marathon to be held in Jerusalem this coming spring. Not only is he training, he is spreading the gospel (deep breath, all it means is "good news") of fitness to his buddies and getting them to train. And they are not sacrificing their learning either.

Click here.

Kol Hakavod to all of them. They are real authentic Jews learning - and living - the real Torah. R. Kahane would be proud. And for a shot of fluid and carbs when they are drenched with holy Jewish sweat, they should try this:

It's the real thing!

Snowbound - Don't mess with Mother Nature

2010-12-28T15:05:00.007-05:00

On Sunday night, December 26, a monster snowstorm barreled into New York City. By the time the snow stopped falling about noon Monday, better than two feet of snow was on the ground in some places. High winds continued to cause blowing and drifting until this morning (Tuesday). Shoveling was a Sisyphean task; as soon as one shoveled, fresh or blowing snow obliterated the work. Many homeowners just didn't bother shoveling until late yesterday or today. I was not one of them; I had cleared a path on my stretch of sidewalk Monday morning, and spread calcium chloride on the pavement. My wife could not go to work yesterday because the streets were treacherous when not downright impassable; two broken ankles are enough, thank you very much.

But the point of this post is to show how people made the effects of the storm far worse than they had to be. In Yiddish there is a word "knacker," (both k's pronounced) which has been translated as "big shot," but more often is used sarcastically to describe a person who thinks he's a big shot but he's really a stupid fool. We all knew a day in advance that the storm was coming. The Mayor advised people to keep their cars off the roads. In a storm of this magnitude, most private cars without four wheel drive, and even some with, are likely to get stuck in the snow and block snowplows from removing the snow and making the road minimally navigable. They also block ambulances and fire trucks, with sometimes fatal consequences. Did New Yorkers heed the advice? Too many did not. For instance, my side street had two private cars stuck in the snow, one traveling the wrong way up the one-way street. Knackers. Snowplows couldn't get through; luckily, to the best of my knowledge, nobody needed an ambulance and fire engines did not need to pass. We have a terrific Hatzalah here in Midwood, but even the best Hatzalah people cannot make their ambulances fly over a car that's blocking the street. And even a mild snowstorm presents the danger of unfit people having heart attacks shoveling snow. The drivers of those cars abandoned their vehicles; anyone stranded in a car in this weather is in danger of hypothermia. The cars remained on my street for hours until they could be towed away.

Scenes like this were common; knackers who thought they
were bigger than nature made life miserable for many others.

As if individual wiseguys with total disregard for the common good weren't bad enough, the city was inexcusably caught off guard. Again, we all had advance warning that this storm was on the way. That should have given all concerned ample time to prepare. For individuals this means assuming the worst. Roads will be impassable, stores will not be getting deliveries even if they can open, so stock up on food for several days. Bring everything that can blow around and cause damage indoors (cf. Ex. 9:19 in this week's parsha). Make sure you have sufficient supplies of salt (calcium chloride is more expensive than sodium chloride but it won't harm concrete) and snow shovels. If you are too ill or out of shape to shovel snow, arrange for someone else to do it; here's in opportunity for yeshiva students to earn hesed credit. Then hunker down. Don't be a knacker. Unless you are performing an essential service (police, fire, Hatzalah, etc) do not try to get to work. You will only make a bad situation worse - much worse - for yourself and others. Health care facilities that must be staffed need to make arrangements for skeleton crews to sleep in the facility the night before, so they will be at work when needed. For the City, it means be prepared. The Mayor should have declared a state of emergency and banned private vehicles from the road rather than relying on individuals to be civic-minded and stay home. The threat of hefty fines should deter most of the knackers. Snowplows, salt spreaders and their crews needed to be ready to clear the roads and the subway tracks. Elevated trains cannot run if the snow is deep enough to cover the third rail, and this time it was more than deep enough. One train was stranded for several hours in sight of a station. Without power the heat failed and riders shivered in the cold; luckily nobody became seriously hypothermic. The Brighton line (B and Q) that serves my neighborhood is completely out of service - Astoria to Coney Island - as of this writing! That means that people who might be able to get to work by train were unable to do so and were tempted to drive.

This storm was unusual but hardly unprecedented. People of a certain age remember snowfalls of two feet or more that crippled the city - for a day at most. Preparedness is the key. So is recognizing that nobody is bigger than Mother Nature. Don't be a knacker. If nature says don't drive, don't drive. We just have to live with the fact that we can't always get around in December as if it was May (those who plan weddings in wintertime - hint, hint). And the authorities must rein in the knackers and take the political fallout; that's what we elected them for. And don't hide behind "no money" either. Recession or not, we depend on government to provide essential services. Private cars blocked buses and ambulances, but they did not block trains. Failure to clear the elevated tracks is entirely the fault of the city and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and our elected officials must be held to account. And oh yes, get yourselves in shape so you can shovel your own snow next year.

Scientists are telling us that heavy snowfalls (we had several last year too, but not as bad) will be more frequent, ironically, due to the planet warming up. Warm air holds more moisture than cold, so when a moisture-laden air mass travels north and cools below the freezing point, it dumps its water as snow. What we had yesterday may well be the shape of things to come. As the Boy Scouts say, be prepared.

Res ipsa loquitur

2010-12-16T09:59:00.003-05:00

This Latin phrase is a doctrine in American and British civil law that translates into "the thing speaks for itself." Roughly speaking (I am not a lawyer), it means that sometimes the facts themselves establish that somebody did not exercise proper care, and no further proof is needed. A news item that recently appeared in the New York Post brought that phrase to mind. Most of us heard about a brutal attack this past Thanksgiving on a 26-year-old male yeshiva teacher by two Gentile punks who knocked him unconscious, ripped off his hat, jacket and skullcap and taunted him with "Jew, Jew." The victim was unable to identify his attackers in court, which probably means they will go free.

According to the Post account, one of the attackers, when asked by a police detective why he targeted Jews, answered "It was something fun to do. . . they don't hit back." Am I experiencing time travel? Am I back in Vienna in the early 1930s when Nazi bullyboys beat up random Jews in the street? My father alav hashalom, an amateur boxer, mixed it up with them; we needed more Jews like him. Or are we back in the familiar neighborhoods of Brooklyn and so many other places in America, before the Six Day War, when young punks picked fights with Jewish boys for lack of anything better to do? Oh, and please don't call these bullies "toughs". If they were tough they would fight willing opponents in dojos and boxing gyms. These goons attacked Jews because they perceived them as weaklings who would not stand up for themselves. And that, Rabbi Meir Kahane taught, is quintessential hillul Hashem.

When I run through that same area in summertime, dressed in my summer getup, muscles pumping, some Hasidim eyeball me as if I was a visitor from outer space but nobody touches a hair of my head. I project an image that says messing with me would not be fun to do, and I'm over twice the age of the teacher who was beaten on Thanksgiving. Something is rotten and it isn't in Denmark. And something has to change. Punks who start fights with Jewish people need to be beaten so badly that they will wish the cops had gotten to them first. Let the word go forth that attacking Jews is bad for your health.

Res ipsa loquitur.

Hanukkah - A missed opportunity and seized opportunities

2010-12-08T21:17:00.003-05:00

We are about to conclude the eight-day festival of Hanukkah, commemmorating the victory of the Hasmoneans over the Seleucid empire in the second century B.C.E. Can anybody think of any other culture that commemmorates events that happened so long ago? It is said that Napoleon, having stumbled into a synagogue on Tisha B'Av and seen Jews crying, asked why. When he was told that they were crying over a temple that was destroyed some 1700 years ago, he answered that a people that still cries over a temple destroyed 1700 years ago will certainly live to see its restoration. From his mouth to God's ears.

We often overlook that the Hasmonean struggle was against Jewish traitors - Hellenists - even more than against the Greeks themselves. It began when Matityahu (Matthew in English) ran up to a pagan altar and killed a Jew who was about to sacrifice a pig to a Greek idol. The Greeks forbade brit milah, circumcision, and Maccabean soldiers forcibly circumcised the sons of Jews who may not have desired to have their sons circumcized. If the Hasmoneans had not persisted so doggedly, the Jewish people would have been swallowed by Hellenistic culture as were all other conquered peoples, Christianity would not have arisen, and the world would be a different place.

But when I step back and try to see those events objectively, I wonder if I myself and many other observant Jews who share my outlook would not have been Hellenists ourselves. Not all Hellenists were idolaters; many were attracted to the more attractive elements of the culture - art, music, theater, athletics and so on. The fact is that Jews and Greeks got along quite well under Alexander the Great (to this day we name baby boys Alexander), the Ptolemies and even the early Seleucids. We paid taxes and practiced our religion unmolested. Many Jews studied the Greek language and used it to communicate with the rest of society, while using Hebrew and Aramaic to communicate with one another. True, we had to coexist with out-and-out avoda zara (idolatry), but until the rise of Christianity we always have. And we were unable to participate in Greek sports because their athletes competed naked ("gymnasium" is derived from gymnos, the Greek word for naked) and circumcized men were not allowed to compete. Many Hellenized Jews had themselves painfully decircumcized in order to participate; our sources strongly condemn those who "abrogate the covenant of our father Abraham" (mefer brito shel Avraham Avinu). Now, imagine if Antiochus IV Epiphanes ("God revealed") would have been more tolerant and less chauvinistic. Jews and Greeks would have interacted more, and each would have absorbed whatever was most beautiful and uplifting in the other's culture. Jewish youth would have competed in Greek sporting events, but with clothes and without sacrificing to idols. Intelligent Greeks, who were beginning to see that the world was an orderly place governed by natural law, would have questioned their belief in a panoply of gods forever warring with one another; the Greeks made their gods in their own image instead of the other way around. Antiochus missed a terrific opportunity to achieve in the second centure B.C.E. the synthesis that was achieved in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries C.E. Rav Kook taught that it was desirable to "bring the beauty of Yefet [the ancestor of the Greeks] into the tents of Shem." But then we wouldn't have the latkes, the sufganiot and the dreidels.

Battle was joined, initially to restore the religious autonomy that we enjoyed under the Persians and the Greeks up until Antiochus. Against all odds, the Maccabees defeated both the Greeks and their Jewish collaborators and were able to rededicate the Temple three years after the Greeks defiled it. But the Greeks were still ensconced in the Akra fort in or near Jerusalem, and in their many pagan cities (polises) throughout Judah. The Hasmoneans realized that as long as the Greeks held the high ground they would be a constant threat, militarily and culturally. They saw an opportunity to throw them out of the country altogether and they seized it, restoring Jewish political independence for the first time since the fall of the First Temple in 586 B.C.E. The later Hasmonean rulers adopted Greek names (Hyrcanus, Aristobolus and such) and Greek customs, and became Tzedokim (Sadducees), so it might be argued that the Hellenists won after all, but we enjoyed an unparalleled flowering of Torah scholarship as well as material prosperity. As Mahatma Gandhi reportedly asked the British viceroy of India, who would not prefer their own bad government to the good government of strangers?

Hanukkah presents us with at least two opportunities to seize. One is the rediscovery that we have bodies and we have to make and keep them strong to optimize our avodat Hashem. Hey, if God wanted disembodied Holy Ghosts he would have made them. It is said that any literary or cultural movement that comes to the larger society gets to us one or two generations later. Physical fitness became prominent in the mass culture in the 1960s and 1970s; that's when I started lifting and running. But I would see few other Jews at the races. Once in a while a race would be held the Sunday of Hanukkah, and I would run it in a top I made for the purpose, complete with tzitzit; click here and here. When people would ask about the tzitzit, I would explain that in Greek times Jewish athletes would have themselves decircumcized in order to run with the Greeks, so now I'm running while proudly showing the world who I am. Today more and more observant Jews are running (and working out in gyms) and there is even a Jewish running club in Brooklyn: JRunners.

The second opportunity concerns bridging the chasm between religious and secular Jews here and especially in Israel. Hanukkah is a holiday that appeals powerfully to both camps. To us it represents the miraculous victory of Torah over evil forces that would have destroyed it. To the secularists it represents the equally miraculous victory of Jewish fighters restoring Jewish sovereignty on Jewish soil. But they are two sides of the same coin. We can study Torah under foreign domination, but with the proverbial Greeks in the Akra, a constant threat hanging over our heads. And the Torah itself becomes distorted, since authentic Torah is predicated on normality, i.e. Jews running their own affairs and working their own soil.

Carpe diem.

Hesed Shel Emet - A Modest Proposal

2010-11-30T19:02:00.005-05:00

This term figures in Parshat Vayehi, to be read two weeks from this Shabbat, where Yaakov extracts from his sons a promise to carry his body out of Egypt and bury him in Israel. It refers to "true kindness," that shown to the dead who cannot reciprocate in this world. We Jews place a high value on respectful handling and prompt burial of the dead. Ideally, all handling and preparation, as well as the burial itself, should be performed by observant Jews.

I explained in a previous post how it saddens me to see a casket wheeled out the back door of the funeral chapel on a cart like a bale of dry goods being wheeled to a loading dock. It should be carried instead by strong Jewish men. That is usually the case at the cemetery itself, where relatives and friends of the deceased carry the casket to the open grave, lower it and fill the grave with earth. However, I recently had occasion to attend the funeral of a family friend's mother where this was not the case. Death occurred on a Thursday, and the funeral was held the next day. Friday at this time of year is a bad day for a funeral, as if there was any such thing as a good day for one, what with people having to work and prepare for Shabbat. The chapel was practically empty, and there was no minyan at the cemetery for Kaddish to be recited. Of the men that were there, most were elderly and unable to handle a shovel. The Gentile cemetery workers had to carry the casket from the hearse to the grave and lower it in. I and one or two others shoveled as much earth as we could and covered the casket, and then the cemetery workers completed the filling-in.

All this happened because of the timing and the fact that the deceased had few friends or relatives who could attend. It no doubt happens too often for comfort. The resulting indignity could be mitigated if the cemetery workers were observant Jews. Part of the sickness of galut is an aversion to manual labor, as if it was shameful to make a living with one's hands. But not everybody is capable of mastering the Talmud or memorizing the Krebs Cycle. There are people who cannot sit in one place and focus on a text for any length of time, but who like to make things, fix things and otherwise work with their hands. Our society marginalizes such people instead of making use of their talents. If they are blessed with physical strength, they could support themselves honorably by handling Jewish burials when no other Jews are available. Such work might also appeal to recent graduates temporarily unable to find jobs in their fields. As a side benefit, the work itself would keep the workers fit and strong. And they will be getting paid for it in both worlds.

In Memoriam: John F. Kennedy

2010-11-22T21:56:00.003-05:00

Today being the 47th anniversary of the tragic assassination of our 35th President, I wish to direct the reader's attention to an article which appeared recently in the Jewish Press, and to my reply, posted online but not printed in the paper:

http://www.thejewishpress.com/pageroute.do/45857

I purchased a DVD containing written and audio transcripts of President Kennedy's memorable speeches and much more from Media Outlet. Would anybody have imagined 47 years ago that so much useful information could be packed into one inexpensive, easily accessible disc, to have at one's fingertips whenever needed? The following is the full text of President Kennedy's inaugural address, delivered January 20, 1961:

We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom-- symbolizing an end as well as a beginning--signifying renewal as well as change. For I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forebears prescribed nearly a century and three quarters ago.
The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe--the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God. We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans--born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage--and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty. This much we pledge--and more. To those old allies whose cultural and spiritual origins we share, we pledge the loyalty of faithful friends. United, there is little we cannot do in a host of cooperative ventures. Divided, there is little we can do--for we dare not meet a powerful challenge at odds and split asunder.
To those new states whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny. We shall not always expect to find them supporting our view. But we shall always hope to find them strongly supporting their own freedom--and to remember that in the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.
To those peoples in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required--not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.
To our sister republics south of our border, we offer a special pledge --to convert our good words into good deeds--in a new alliance for progress--to assist free men and free governments in casting off the chains of poverty. But this peaceful revolution of hope cannot become the prey of hostile powers. Let all our neighbors know that we shall join with them to oppose aggression or subversion anywhere in the Americas. And let every other power know that this hemisphere intends to remain the master of its own house. To that world assembly of sovereign states, the United Nations, our last best hope in an age where the instruments of war have far outpaced the instruments of peace, we renew our pledge of support--to prevent it from becoming merely a forum for invective--to strengthen its shield of the new and the weak--and to enlarge the area in which its writ may run.
Finally, to those nations who would make themselves our adversary, we offer not a pledge but a request: that both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction.
We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed. But neither can two great and powerful groups of nations take comfort from our present course--both sides overburdened by the cost of modern weapons, both rightly alarmed by the steady spread of the deadly atom, yet both racing to alter that uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind's final war.
So let us begin anew--remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.
Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of belaboring these problems which divide us.
Let both sides, for the first time, formulate serious and precise proposals for the inspection and control of arms--and bring the absolute power to destroy other nations under the absolute control of all nations.
Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths, and encourage the arts and commerce.
Let both sides unite to heed in all corners of the earth the command of Isaiah--to "undo the heavy burdens [and] let the oppressed go free."
And if a beachhead of cooperation may push back the jungle of suspicion, let both sides join in creating a new endeavor, not a new balance of power, but a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved. All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.
In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than mine, will rest the final success or failure of our course. Since this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty. The graves of young Americans who answered the call to service surround the globe.
Now the trumpet summons us again--not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need--not as a call to battle, though embattled we are --but as a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation"--a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself. Can we forge against these enemies a grand and global alliance, North and South, East and West, that can assure a more fruitful life for all mankind? Will you join in that historic effort?
In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility--I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people of any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it--and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.
And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country.
My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but together what we can do for the freedom of man.
Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us here the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own.

It is a source of consolation for me that, even in 1961, speeches were recorded for posterity and it is possible to hear the President's words in his own voice. Here is a link to an audio recording of the inaugural address taken from the disc referred to above:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=KJOJKY0U

Victors, Not Victims

2010-11-12T12:55:00.004-05:00

On November 2, Sergio Britva, an immigrant from Brazil, won gold at the World Masters Weightlifting Championships, 35-39 yr age group, 105kg (231 lb) body weight, in Poland. Silver went to an Iranian athlete while a German took bronze. The German lifter shook hands with the Israeli, but when the Israeli offered his hand to the Iranian, he refused to take it, and as the Israeli flag was raised above those of Germany and Iran, he looked down at the floor.

The following dispatch from the Young Israel listserv says it better than I ever could:

Click here to watch a stirring video that every Jew and every supporter of the State of Israel must see. The following is an account of the event captured in the video, courtesy of crossingtheyarden.com:It’s been awhile since an Israeli weightlifter was in the news. The year was 1972 and members of the Israeli delegation to the Munich Olympics, including several Israeli weightlifters, were taken hostage by Arab terrorists. When the German police botched the rescue operation, the terrorists executed all the hostages. It took about a day for the Germans to realize that continuing the games was in really poor taste. They stopped for the funerals and after the Israeli athletes were safely in the ground, continued on.Thirty-eight years later, an Israeli weightlifter makes the news again. This time, the Israeli is not a victim, he is the champion. The story of Sergio Britva, an immigrant to Israel from Brazil who won the weightlifting world championships last month, is not to be missed.If you have not yet seen the video of the awards ceremony, it is a must see. The world championships for this category of weightlifting were held a few weeks ago in Poland. Sergio lifted a combined total of over 300 kilograms. That’s like lifting a bus load of Sumo wrestlers above your head.He won the gold medal over the second place finisher from Iran and the third place finisher from Germany. Does it get any better than that? An Israeli beats an Iranian and German in Poland! Just to make sure that everyone knew where he was from, Sergio draped an Israeli flag over his shoulder as he took his spot on top of the winner’s podium. Good thing he brought the flag since the announcer forgot to mention which nation he represented. I guess the flag and the team shirt with the word “ISRAEL” in huge letters wasn’t a big enough hint.With a huge champion’s smile on his face, Sergio shakes hands with the third place finisher from Germany and then extends his hand to the runner up from Iran. Showing true class, the Iranian refuses to shake the hand of the athlete who beat him. That’s ok, Hadad, they don’t give medals for acting like a human being. Whether you shook his hand or not, you can still think about how you disgraced your poor excuse of a country every night and day by letting the Zionist enemy take you to school.I could watch what comes next a hundred times and not get bored. To the strains of “Hatikva,” the Israeli flag is hoisted high over that of Iran and Germany. The announcer tells everyone to “Please stand up for the Israeli National Anthem.” Could you imagine the emotions going through Sergio’s mind as he watched his nation’s flag and listened to our country’s anthem - aptly called “The Hope.” That’s right all you anti-Semitic losers, stand up and watch the Israeli flag hung in victory.I just read an article about how the Iranian athlete is now under fire for even standing next to the Israeli. He only did so because otherwise the Iranian delegation would be barred from future competitions. I am glad that they won’t be. I can’t wait for the next time.I’m kind of fond of that song.

Sergio Britva at the medal ceremony. On the video you can see him blinking back tears.

Israeli flag raised over the medal platform, above those of Germany and Iran

ברוך אתה ה' אלו-ינו מלך העולם אוזר ישראל בגבורה

ברוך אתה ה' אלו-ינו מלך העולם שהחיינו וקימנו והגיענו לזמן הזה

Rav Shmuel Kamintezky at Kingsway

2010-11-11T14:04:00.005-05:00

My synagogue, Kingsway Jewish Center, hosted an Agudat Yisrael conference on parenting last Sunday that featured Rav Shmuel Kaminetzky, introduced as a prominent Rosh Yeshiva and a member of Aguda's Moetzet Gedolei Torah (Council of Torah Sages), and Rav Yakov Horowitz, a prominent Torah educator who specializes in "at-risk youth." I and many other congregants were surprised that a modern synagogue like ours would host Agudat Yisrael, but our rabbi, Etan Tokayer, figured we had nothing to lose; Rav Kook preached ahavat hinam, gratuitous love, as a remedy for the gratuitous hate that led to the destruction of the Temple. I asked Rabbi Tokayer if he was aware that Rav Kaminetzky signed on to the Slifkin ban (after the fact). He replied that he was not, and that he is surprised. He then encourged me to attend the meeting, although I am past the parenting stage of life, and ask R. Kaminetzky.
I attended the meeting. Much of the advice given was pedestrian (we have to spend time with our children - duh), but I would take issue with two items raised by Rabbi Horowitz:

1. Make children conform to the school's rules, in school and out. If you don't like them and can't get the hanhala (school's management) to change them, submit to their authority or find another school. In an ideal world, the hashkafot of parents and school would dovetail, but in the world we live in that is not always the case. Nor can the parents always find another school, either for financial reasons or because there simply is none in reasonable commuting distance. It becomes a question of who's working for whom. I say that the school is working for the parents, and that the parents do not surrender their authority when they enrol their children in a school. On the school's premises and/or during school time children must conform to the school's rules, but off premises and on their own time what is acceptable to the parents is acceptable, whether walking on a particular street, talking to members of the opposite sex or the like.

2. Rabbi Horowitz related an account, pubished in Mishpacha magazine, of a parent who came to him concerning his seventeen-year-old son who came to him with doubts regarding ikarei emuna, basic principles of faith. After asking a "higher authority," R. Horowitz advised the parent to encourage the adolescent not to give up hope, that we are allotted seventy years on the planet give or take, and therefore his child has 53 years to resolve his doubts. R. Horowitz spent most of his life working with troubled Orthodox teenagers and I must defer to his judgment as long as the questions concern matters of belief. But what happens when we go from emuna (belief) to metziut (objective reality)? What happens when an intelligent seventeen-year-old is fed "facts" by his parents and yeshiva teachers that are demonstrably false, i.e. that the earth is 5771 years old and/or that humans are not descended from other animal species?

That, of course, brings me full circle. During the question and answer period, I called R. Kamintezky out on his letter; I had several copies on hand for disbelieving members of the audience. Before I could complete my question, the moderator cut me off saying that the Rosh Yeshiva could only take questions on the topic of the lecture, i.e. parenting and education. Never mind the obvious connection between miseducation (where I come from education is supposed to open minds, not close them) and children becoming at-risk and eventually leaving the fold. I am an adult and I could handle being slapped down that way. But all too many inquiring students, some as young as Bar Mitzva age or younger (I started having doubts in seventh or eighth grade) are slapped down in the same manner (or worse, physically) and cannot handle it. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, you can fool some of the kids all of the time and all of the kids some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the kids all of the time. Eventually they will discover that we have been lying to them and playing them for stupid. And then they will reach one of two conclusions:
1. The Torah contains lies, or
2. The gedolim are fools, pathologically out of touch with reality.

I have reached the second conclusion. I fear that most of our disaffected young people will reach the first.

In Memoriam: Rabbi Meir Kahane

2010-10-28T13:02:00.008-04:00

Real Torah vs Fake Toyrah

We recently commemmorated the twentieth yahrzeit of Rabbi Meir Kahane hy"d, murdered by an Arab terrorist in New York in the fall of 1990. I came under his influence as a high school student in the 1960s, through his columns in the Jewish Press and his numerous public appearances in Brooklyn. I had enrolled in one of the karate programs that his Jewish Defense League had set up in Brooklyn. One day after class Rabbi Kahane came in and spoke to us. He told us it was high time young Jewish men were doing this, that if we were to survive in our changing neighborhoods rife with anti-Jewish assaults we would have to break the stereotype of the Jewish "patsy" (his word), gentle, scholarly, unaccustomed to (and repelled by) fighting, unable or unwilling to defend himself. This was not news to me. A while before, in 1967, I had begun lifting weights and transforming myself from a sickly little boy into a robust young athlete. I had begun living "muscular Judaism" before becoming aware of the phrase.

Rabbi Kahane taught us that the Torah as studied and lived by generations of Jews in galut (exile) was not the genuine article. I might add that even the typical European pronunciation of the word, Toyrah (as if a yod followed the holam), has an unmanly, kvetchy ring to it. Rabbi Kahane taught us that there is nothing Jewish about being physically weak, unable to stand up for ourselves in the street, and ultimately being herded naked into gas chambers. In fact, it was the essense of hillul Hashem (desecration of God's Name). I am reminded of visiting the Holocaust memorial at Mount Zion in Jerusalem on my first trip to Israel with my family for my Bar Mitzvah. The guide pointed to several bars of soap in the front and told us that they were made from the bodies of Jewish victims and were inscribed with the German initials for "Pure Jewish Fat." It would be laughable if it were not so disgusting and tragic. Since then, all soap, ashes and other derivatives of Jewish bodies at that memorial were properly buried. The Germans discontinued soap manufacture because it was uneconomical, not due to any shortage of Jewish fat. Neither is there any shortage of Jewish fat today; look around in shul and you'll see more pregnant men than pregnant women. Well, nobody is going to get much soap from this (58-yr-old) Jew. The real Torah, according to Rabbi Kahane, presumed normal Jews and a normal Jewish nation. Jews who do not sit all day and half the night hunched over books. Jews who work Jewish soil in the hot Israeli sun. Tough, strong Jews who crush any enemy that dares attack us. The kind of Jews that we meet in Tanakh, the study of which, he taught, is sadly neglected in most yeshivot [but not in my alma mater, Yeshivah of Flatbush].

Cut to 2010. I'm in the bakery shopping for Shabbat and pick up a free copy of the Five Towns Jewish Times. I turn to an article titled "Olympians We're Not" by one "Talmid X," who is spending the now-customary post-high-school year at an Israeli yeshiva. The author describes his physical breakdown caused by sitting for most of the day in a "beis medrash" (Would someone please tell me how a hirik got transformed into a segol?). He tells of how a fifteen-minute stint in the Israeli sun heaving around "enormous sacks of potatoes" had him spending the rest of the afternoon in a bathroom stall suffering from dehydration (and presumably diarrhea). He describes the Israeli summer sun as "boiling", and an "oven. . .set at approximately two million degrees." Well, guess what? I was in that Israeli sun in 1974, when I was roughly his age. I spent the major part of the day not hunched over books but picking grapes in Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu in Emek Bet She'an. I ate like a farm hand because that's what I was, and I did not gain a pound. When I and my friends were not working in the fields we were traipsing all over the country, climbing hills and exploring caves. We traveled in a pickup truck, not an air conditioned bus. We hiked up Masada, the cable car being for weaklings only (when it passed overhead, we called out "too-reest, too-reest"). Talmid X, at best, engages in over-the-top hyperbole that discredits the rest of what he has to say: Just how heavy were those "enormous sacks of potatoes" that broke him in fifteen minutes? At worst, he commits the sin of the meraglim, the spies sent by Moshe Rabbeinu who returned with a report full of lashon hara about Israel. Ovens were the fate of weak Jews before there was an Israel. The Israeli sun is wonderful. It's beautiful. It challenges boys and, if they rise to it, turns them into men. The human organism is designed to function in the heat. Our ancestors made their living running gazelles down to exhaustion in the hot African sun. If 15 minutes in the sun dehydrated Talmid X, then the problem is Talmid X, not the sun. Diarrhea is most likely the result of eating food that was not properly refrigerated, though dehydration can make it worse. At any rate, Imodium works like a charm. Here are a few pointers for managing summer heat.

A Jew is commanded to take care of his/her health and avoid behavior that will make him sick, e.g. smoking and sedentary living. Just as we cannot say that we're too busy learning and have no time to put on tefilin, we can't say that we're too busy learning to keep ourselves healthy. If the yeshiva does not give you time to exercise, then make the time. Even if it means you arrive late for a shi'ur or skip one. Sick Jews learn sick "Toyrah," and dead Jews don't learn any. Get up a bunch of friends and work out together. Your yeshiva probably has a mashgiah ruhani; make yourself the unofficial mashgiah gufani. You might find yourself gaining fresh insights into your learning while you're running around in your underwear; strange and beautiful things happen when your heart's pumping rhythm to your brain. You might even want to carry around one of those voice-activated recorders to record those insights, flesh them out when you get back and surprise whoever is riding you for missing shi'ur. The worst thing that can happen is you'll be kicked out of that yeshiva. So? Find another one, one that teaches the real Torah and not the distorted and corrupt Toyrah.

Not in Our Name - Gay Bashing and Orthodox Rabbis

2010-10-20T01:14:00.005-04:00

These last several weeks have seen a spate of suicides of gay teenagers who gave in to despair after being harassed and bullied at school and on the streets. There have also been several violent attacks on actual or perceived gay people. Against this backdrop Brooklyn's very own homophobic rabbi Yehuda Levin joined with Carl Palladino, the Republican candidate for governor of New York, in gratuitously spewing anti-gay hate on television.

It's easy enough to say this is somebody else's problem and look the other way, but in light of our own history and authentic Judaism's view of the world I for one cannot do so. We ought to know that when the human rights of one group are diminished, we are not far behind. And we ought to be outraged by the violence being perpetrated against actual or perceived gay men, because we Jews, Orthodox Jews in particular, were victims of the same kind of violence in the not so distant past. To venture out of doors with a kippa [skullcap] on one's head was to become a walking target for rowdy young Gentiles with nothing better to do than pick fights on the street with Jewish boys. For both gays and observant Jews, the violence and bullying stemmed from the same stereotype - that we were patsies, weaklings unable or unwilling to defend ourselves. And even if this common bond did not exist, our Torah teaches that all human beings carry the image of God and are entitled to respect and dignity. That should be axiomatic, but it seems to have escaped some prominent Rabbinic figures. Steven Greenberg, the first and so far only openly gay Orthodox rabbi wrote an article for the Jewish Week describing his experiences on moving to a new city and entering an Orthodox synagogue there. The rabbi of the shul asked him to leave, and told him that the ruling had come from a rabbi whose authority exceeded his own. I don't get it. No ruling could be issued unless someone asked for one, and that someone presumably was the synagogue rabbi. And in the absence of a recognized Sanhedrin, there is no rabbi whose authority exceeds that of the mara d'atra, the synagogue rabbi, in the confines of that synagogue. It sounds like that synagogue rabbi is a wimp, but it gets worse. Rabbi Greenberg spoke on the telephone with the rabbi who gave the order barring him from the synagogue. It turns out that this man is a prominent Rosh Yeshiva. Rabbi Greenberg told him that he, Rabbi Greenberg, was attempting to find a way for young gay and lesbian Jews to remain part of the Orthodox community, and that some of them become so desperate that they attempt suicide. The rabbi responded that perhaps it is a mitzva for them to do so; that since they are guilty of a capital offense they might as well administer their own punishment. Huh? Suicide is now a mitzva for people who commit capital offenses? Never mind that homosexuality is not a capital offense, only anal sex is, and many of these conflicted young people have not had anal sex. I never heard of any rabbi, let alone a so-called gadol, saying the same for people who violate Shabbat, curse or strike their parents, or commit any other capital offense. Only a qualified Sanhedrin may carry out the Torah's death sentences, and in the 2000-year absence of a "court of competent jurisdiction" these sentences are left to God. Rabbi Greenberg writes how he experienced extreme difficulty keeping his composure. I feel his pain; similarly situated, I doubt if I would have been able to keep my own.

I wish Rabbi Greenberg had informed his readers of this prominent Rosh Yeshiva's name and that of the Yeshiva he heads. Perhaps he gave the man his word that he would not, in which case he has to keep his word. Perhaps he feels divulging this information would be lashon hara, but here the Jewish public needs to know, since we presumably revere him and relate to him as an authority figure. It should be obvious that we cannot accept the authority of a "leader" who regards suicide as a mitzva. We must make it crystal clear that such a vile man does not utter such abominations in our name. Each one of us should sign the online pledge to speak out against anti-gay harassment and bullying; it might just save a life.

Since the Slifkin affair, the haredi rabbinic leadership has been piling outrage upon outrage and failing us at every turn. It is increasingly difficult to give these people the benefit of the doubt - that they are ignorant, or senile, or prisoners of an old world that no longer exists. It is becoming evident that the Torah world is being led by evil and godless men. Heaven help us all.

Basil Pizza and the Limits of Kosher Supervision

2010-10-17T02:49:00.002-04:00

Last week's New York Times Magazine featured an article about Basil Pizza and Wine Bar, an upscale pizza and dairy restaurant on Kingston Avenue just north of Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The establishment, like most kosher eateries in Crown Heights, is under the supervision of the OK, a kosher supervision orgnization popular with the Lubavitch community in the area. I never visited the restaurant so I can only comment on what I read in the article. According to the author, the establishment was visited by Rabbi Dan Yoel Levy, head of the OK, who expressed concern about the conduct and dress of patrons and demanded access to surveillance video. Rabbi Levy, who disputes details of the author's account of his visit, apparently had received complaints about lingering youth in the establishment. He asserts that it is his responsibility and that of kosher certifying agencies in general to monitor the entertainment (no crude comedy, no female singers and so forth) and make certain that young men and women were not socializing inappropriately.

I beg to differ. We look for the hashgaha (supervision) sign in the window for assurance that the food is kosher. We cannot determine that by looking at the food. We are fully competent to judge the quality of the entertainment, the socializing, the ambiance for ourselves, thank you very much. Basil was established with the idea of attracting a mix of Hasidim, other Orthodox Jews, secular Jews and non-Jews under one roof. It is a setting where people are expected to linger, to talk, to socialize. Such establishments often cater private birthday parties and waitresses bring out a cake and sing "Happy Birthday." No Happy Birthday at Basil. No Ella Fitzgerald over the loudspeakers. Things were not always so uptight in our community. I remember attending community sedarim at my late uncle's shul in the late 1960s or early 1970s where my female cousin sang. She was a member of the Zamir Chorale at the time, a high school choir that regularly performed in public. Her singing was superb. Nobody complained; we all kvelled.

The owner of Basil Pizza is understandably conflicted about Rabbi Levy's request for ongoing access to video feed. On one hand, he does not want to lose the hashgaha because that might kill his business. On the other, he feels that complying would violate his customers' privacy and that it just feels "creepy" - to which I might add "un-American." While I doubt if there is any legal right to privacy in a restaurant open to the public, I as a customer would not want my every move scrutinized by a bunch of greybeards, and knowing that that was the case might cause me not to go in. The owner and non-Jewish manager already require waitresses to dress modestly and even admonished customers for contact between men and women that would go unnoticed in any other restaurant of its type in the city. What goes on in the kitchen is within Rabbi Levy's purview; what goes on at the tables and at the bar is, quite bluntly, none of his business. If he or any kashrut supervisor receives complaints on that account, he should direct the complainers to the restaurant's management and/or advise them to exercise their unquestioned prerogative to withhold their patronage. While video cameras in the kitchen might facilitate the requirement of yotze v'nikhnas [the supervisor's need to go in and out of the kitchen unannounced], the purpose of surveillance video in the public area of a restaurant is to deter and, if need be, detect criminals, not to give rabbis a window on the behavior of patrons.

Accordingly, my advice to the restaurant's owner is this: If you gave Rabbi Levy your word, contractually or otherwise, that you would provide a video feed, you have to keep your word, at least for the duration of the contract. Post a sign informing your customers that the restaurant is being monitored by video and that the kosher supervisor has access to the feed. If you did not give him your word, then respectfully decline to provide the feed. If the hashgaha is taken away, there are other hashgahot who would be glad to pick your establishment up, and that most of your customers would consider reliable.

I am not likely to patronize Basil, since I have little occasion to be in Crown Heights except when I run there in summertime. I would feel funny entering an upscale establishment of that sort in my summer running attire. Nevertheless I like the idea of such a place, and I wish it success.

Answering Rabbi Lapin

2010-10-17T01:55:00.004-04:00

Rabbi Daniel Lapin, who supports the Christian Right in its efforts to weaken separation of church and state in this country, had a column in a recent issue of the Jewish Press. My online reply is as follows:

Keep religion and the state separate, thank you

Rabbi Daniel Lapin's essay is based on a speech he delivered at last month's Glenn Beck event. Glenn Beck is not one to let facts get in the way of his Bible thumping and his simplistic solutions to America's social problems and neither, it seems, is Rabbi Lapin. America never was severed from its Judeo-Christian roots. Each of us is free to practice any religion or none. Separation of church and state is written into our Constitution by design. The courts have been interpreting it more strictly than in the past; that suits me fine, as it probably would have suited Thomas Jefferson, who stated in 1785,". . . it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. In neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." Let us examine each of Rabbi Lapin's three M's in turn. On marriage he asks rhetorically, "Does anyone really suppose that marriage evolved naturally?" Well, I and most scientists do, since it is a "cultural universal," meaning it is present in just about every culture on earth, even those that never heard of the Bible until Christian colonizers, imperialists and missionaries brought it to them. Tremendous advantages accrue to children who grow up in a stable two-parent home, advantages that enhance their probability of surviving and having children of their own. Marriage is still the norm, so much so that even gay men clamor to marry one another. Money - We all learned in Economics 101 that money is a medium of exchange, unit of account and store of value, not a "spiritual vision." Every culture has norms for ownership of property, whether private or communal. Every culture prohibits stealing. That too is a cultural universal. Rabbi Lapin asserts that, "without the Bible, we would all be living in . . .equal poverty." What does he make of Japan, China and the other Asian "tiger economies" whose people are doing quite well for themselves and are neither Jewish nor Christian, nor do they consider our Bible holy to them? Most of us, no matter our religious persuasion or lack thereof, never mugged a little old lady or held up a convenience store. We acquire our money by honest work and are good with God or good without God. Manners - Rabbi Lapin finds their roots in the Biblical account of God creating humans separately from animals, and recalls his mother telling him not to "eat like an animal." Well, my mother would tell me not to eat like a particular species of animal, namely a pig, to which most Jews have a visceral aversion and which supposedly likes to wallow in dirt. Rabbi Lapin here is simply repeating a tired canard that the modern outlook on human origins encourages people to "act like animals." Well, as every pet owner knows, dogs act like dogs and cats act like cats - and pigs act like pigs. Why shouldn't humans act like humans? Humans are highly social primates who for most of our history competed with other species that are larger, stronger and faster than we. Social cooperation was the only way to successfully compete, and even today when we no longer run down big game with primitive weapons we cannot manage without getting along with one another. Every culture, Judeo-Christian or not, possesses a set of social mores, manners if you will. It does not really matter what those manners are, and behavior that is de rigueur in one culture might well be taboo in another. Every society's set of rules fosters group identity and group cohesion, which in turn enhances survival. Whole books have been written on the probable evolutionary origins of human behavior, a fascinating topic known as sociobiology.

Pirke Avot enjoins us to "correct yourself and then correct others." Our Orthodox community has plenty of social pathology, and we need to work on ourselves rather than shove our religion down the throats of others. Would Rabbi Lapin return to the pre-1960 halcyon days when a Jewish boy with a kippa was a walking target for physical attack by rowdy Gentiles who learned in their parochial schools and in their homes that we killed their god? When students, including Jewish ones, in public schools were taught to recite Protestant prayers and sing Christmas carols? When Jewish shopkeepers could not keep their shops open on Sunday if they so chose? When children died of a host of diseases that have since been conquered by modern science? When one in ten Americans could not be served at lunch counters and other places of public accommodation, could not live in certain neighborhoods even though they could afford to, could not attend certain colleges even though qualified, could not even drink from public water fountains, simply because their skin was dark? I will take modern America with all its imperfections any time, thank you.
Zev Stern, Ph.D.

My printed reply, shortened due to space limitations, appears here.

English - May its sun never set

2010-10-03T20:31:00.004-04:00

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
(John Lennon)

Many years ago, when we were young, we grooved to this song by John Lennon. Whatever we think of its message now, most of us did not appreciate then or now how lucky John Lennon was to be able to write those words and how lucky we are to understand them. As I first learned from the preface to a little-known English dictionary, English is unique among widely spoken languages in having separate words for "heaven" and "sky." Speakers of Romance languages like French and Spanish cannot distinguish between these two concepts; in French, for example, the word "ciel" must suffice for both. Therefore, to the extent that thoughts depend on words, a French or Spanish John Lennon would not have been able to conceive that song or write it.

This is only one example of how beautifully nuanced, expressive and rich in shades of meaning the English language is. A person with a rich English vocabulary, acquired by extensive reading, can express just about any conceivable thought. Is it any wonder that the English text of international agreements is usually the "authentic" one, and that any scientist with anything worth publishing publishes in English?

I was reminded of this yesterday, Shabbat Bereshit, because modern Hebrew should have the ability to distinguish heaven from sky but for some reason does not. Shamayim can be used for heaven and rakia for sky. Too bad that Biblical Hebrew conflates these words from the very beginning: God called the rakia "Shamayim [Gen. 1:8]." And He put them [the sun, moon and stars] birkia hashamayim [Gen. 1:17]. When I went to Israel in 1965, I and my family flew from Lod to Eilat on Israel's inland airline, known as Arkia, or "to the sky (rakia)." The condition of the dinky propeller plane made us suspect that it would indeed take us up to heaven, but thank God it only reached the sky and Eilat. When children are taught basic Hebrew vocabulary (in those yeshivot that actually teach basic Hebrew vocabulary), the teacher often points to the sky and says, "yesh ananim ba-shamayim [there are clouds in the sky] ," when rakia would be more apt.

A similar paucity of vocabulary creates difficulty understanding the writings of Rav Kook. He would write savlanut, a word that today means "patience." But more often than not, he meant "tolerance." The reader must figure that out from the context, since at the time he wrote Hebrew did not have a word for tolerance (!) and savlanut connoted both. Today we use savlanut for patience and sovlanut (with a holam) for tolerance. The Academy for the Hebrew Language in Tel-Aviv oversees modern Hebrew and coins such words as appropriate, continuing the tradition of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. Perhaps the Academy should enforce a distinction between shamayim and rakia as well. Even so, it is extremely unlikely that Hebrew will ever match the expressiveness and versatility of English, except in spiritual matters, where Hebrew is probably superior. I am glad that it is my privilege to speak, read and understand English. Whatever one's first language is, English should be his or her second. As we once said of the British Empire that brought Western civilization to half the world, may the sun never set on it.

A Pregnant Year

2010-09-08T15:27:00.005-04:00

This coming year, 5771, will be a Jewish leap year. The Hebrew term is "Shana Me'uberet," which literally means a "pregnant" year. We add a thirteenth month every few years to keep the lunar and solar years in synch. You might have noticed that Pesah and Rosh Hashanah came out unusually early this civil year. The lunar year is eleven days short, and if the regression were allowed to continue Pesah would be celebrated in winter, not in spring as the Torah dictates. Next year, starting with Purim, the holidays come unusually late.
Jewish mysticism has a "pregnant" year carrying "excess baggage," blessings or, God forbid, curses. 5708, the year Israel became a state, was a leap year; the state was declared May 14, which is as late as Yom Ha-atzma'ut ever comes. Similarly, Jerusalem was liberated in 5727, also a "pregnant" year, and Yom Yerushalayim rarely comes later than June 7, the civil date of the miracle of 1967.
May the coming year be "pregnant" with even greater miracles and "give birth" to the ge'ulah shelemah, the final redemption.
I wish my readers and klal Yisrael a ktiva va-hatima tova.

Remember Munich

2010-09-05T15:27:00.003-04:00

Today, 26 Elul, and tomorrow, are the yahrzeits for the eleven Israeli athletes butchered by Arab Amalekim at the Munich Olympics in 1972. Moshe Weinberg and Yosef Romano were shot in the morning during the seizure of the hostages, and the remaining nine were killed at the airport during a botched rescue attempt by the West Germans that night. It happened 38 years ago, so the Hebrew and Gregorian dates coincide as they do every nineteen years. The world sowed the wind then and is still reaping the whirlwind now.

Click here and never forget.

Bottom Rail on Top

2010-09-03T02:35:00.004-04:00

I was watching Ken Burns's PBS documentary on the Civil War the other day. A runaway slave fighting for the Union recognized his former master in a column of Confederate prisoners, and told him, "Hello, massa. Bottom rail on top this time." It reminded me of an incident that occurred in the New York City Marathon back in my younger days when I was running it nearly every year and clocking respectable times for a recreational runner. As was my custom, I was wearing a sleeveless top with the Israeli flag on the chest and back. I caught up with a badly faltering German runner in the last mile. I remembered the death marches, where Jewish concentration camp inmates were marched by the German S.S. westward toward Germany, ahead of the advancing Red Army. The S.S. would point their guns at the starving, half-dead inmates and shout, "Schnell, Schnell" - fast, fast. Many who could not keep up were shot on the spot. Now, I knew I had nothing against a fellow athlete about my age who was not even born until after the Holocaust, but in the last mile of a marathon your brain plays tricks on you. As I passed the German, I turned toward him, made the universal gun sign (index finger pointed at the target and parallel to the ground, thumb perpendicular to index finger, other fingers turned inward as if in a fist) and called out, "Schnell, Schnell." I don't know what if anything he said or what kind of facial expression he had when he got a good look at the Israeli flag on the back of my shirt.

Finishing my last N.Y.C. Marathon
in 2003

Remember - 23 Elul

2010-08-29T13:45:00.006-04:00

It's that time of year again. Last week we read the injunction to remember what Amalek did to us on the way out of Egypt. Some authorities consider that reading a Biblical command (mitzva d'oraita) ths year since, 5771 being a leap year, there will be thirteen months between Shabbat Zakhor of 5770 and 5771, and the passage must be read or listened to every twelve months. 23 Elul is the yahrzeit for some 3000 innocent people in the World Trade Center, in the Pentagon and aboard four hijacked airplanes who were murdered by the Arab Amalekim on September 11, 2001. It comes out on this coming Thursday, September 2. So take a fresh look at the images I posted here some time ago. If you are in New York, make an effort to visit the World Trade Center site; September 11 this year is Shabbat Shuva. Too many of us pass the site by, as they pass life by, as if nothing happened. They don't want to deal with the implications of having powerful enemies out to kill us, enemies who are nothing if not persistent. They just shrug off every terror plot foiled that would have killed hundreds if not thousands more. They do not seem to care that the good guys have to get it right each and every time, while the Amalekim have to get lucky only once, and as any general will tell you, sometimes the enemy simply gets lucky. They push it all to the back of their minds as we once did the threat of nuclear holocaust, because to deal with it would impair one's ability to function normally.

So visit the site. Recite a few psalms, and El Malei Rahamim for the dead. Never mind that people will look at you like you're crazy; they did that with Avraham Avinu too. He stood on the side of sanity when the rest of the world was crazy. If you see a Jew passing by, remind him or her that it's the yahrzeit of the 9/11 butchery. To forget is, God forbid, to invite more of the same, and worse.

NEVER FORGET!

One Nation Indivisible

2010-08-20T14:17:00.004-04:00

In a recent issue of the Jewish Press, one Lewis Regenstein, a Jewish writer in Atlanta, Georgia, defends and praises his ancestors who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. I cannot stand seeing the Confederacy praised. If I had my way, Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy and Alexander Stephens, its vice president and the whole Confederate cabinet including its Jewish secretary of state Judah Benjamin, would have been hanged for treason.
Regenstein's article, my posted comment and those of several others - I'm gratified that I was not the only one motivated to take pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard - in protest, can be seen here. Note well the quote, brought by Josh Meyers, of the above-mentioned Alexander Stephens, defending slavery in fine style worthy of Adolf Hitler.
My letter in the printed edition was chopped by the editor (no hard feelings - he was just doing his job) and can be seen here.
Those who romanticize Confederates and the Confederacy are generally neo-isolationists who are not comfortable with the U.S.A. being a superpower or, as they put it, the world's policeman. But the world has plenty of robbers, and I do believe in American exceptionalism, that America's unprecedented military and political power is no accident and what with it comes a sacred obligation to confront the robbers of the world and defeat them. Google Lewis Regenstein and you will find him keeping company with some real right-wing anti-government kooks.
Thank God the Union won and we are and, with God's help will forever be, one nation indivisible.

Hot Fun in the Summertime

2010-08-10T11:45:00.007-04:00

Okay fellaz, it's my favorite time of year. SUMMER! And it's a hot one. I'm a hot weather nut; sue me. I'm not walking around in a haze of depression. My body, mind and spirit are open to the sensual pleasures of the season. The simple pleasures that you don't experience in your air conditioned room. The feel of the wind against your chest. The sound of leaves rustling in the breeze. The sight of people in parks and playgrounds, all sizes and colors, having fun. The feel of my chest heaving and muscles pumping on a run, of sunshine on my shoulders, of my body glistening with sweat. The ethereal spiritual experience of davening minha in Prospect Park, dressed in running clothes, surrounded by natural beauty and children at play. Rav Nachman of Bratslav [Bratislava, Slovakia] used to leave town to daven in natural settings; maybe he knew something that today's uptight gedolim don't.

You can't run in Brooklyn without straying out of your immediate neighborhood, in my case Midwood. Go to the north and east (Crown Heights, Prospect Park, Brownsville, East New York) or south (Coney Island) and you see a commodity that is increasingly rare in Midwood - real men. Men who respect themselves enough to take care of themselves. Men who are strong and vital. Men like the one you see here are not at all unusual outside the frum community. They refresh my soul, and provide a needed antidote to the ever-increasing number of poor excuses of men I see in shul, men with fat bellies that resemble those of pregnant women. Call me a Hellenist, but these people offend my esthetic sensibilities and, along with the building being overcooled, sabotage the experience of tefilla. In my peregrinations outside the frum community I see men after my own heart; they enjoy the season and are not above having a little fun. And guess how many times I was physically attacked or threatened by any of them? Zero. Zilch. Zip. Nada. We pass each other and no words need be spoken. A wink, a nod, a gesture communicates the message. We belong to the fraternity of the fit, the brotherhood of real men. We're better than all those weaklings cooped up in their air conditioned rooms letting life pass them by.

And yet I'm surrounded, as I never am in the bleak winter, by people whining and kvetching. Oh, it's soooooo hot. It's boiling. It's gross. And the government chimes in with its "heat advisories." Let the temperature break 90 F and the public health authorities are telling people to stay inside with the air conditioner, don't go out, don't God forbid do anything strenuous. This in a society where more than half of all people, children included, are overweight or obese; I suppose the fat pigs outside the frum community heed these warnings and stay indoors when the weather gets hot. When you're writing heat advisories for the majority in New York, you're writing them for the fat, the weak and the self-pampered. So let me take a stab at writing a heat advisory for strong, fit men - and any females who actually use their bodies instead of merely inhabiting them (I think of them as "honorary men").

1. Stay away from air conditioning as much as possible, except on fast days when you can't drink. In about two weeks you will acclimatize to the heat and actually feel cold in temperatures you consider warm in the winter. Our ancestors made their living chasing down big game on foot in a tropical climate; our genes have not changed much since then. Going in and out of air conditioned surroundings confuses the brain; it doesn't know what temperature regime to adjust to.

2. Hydration, hydration and hydration. You need water, and also salts (sodium and potassium) to replace what you lose in sweat. Carry money on your runs so you can stop in a convenience store and get something to drink. Powerade and now Gatorade are certified by the Orthodox Union.

3. Sweat is not ucky, yucky and gross. It's the precious gift that nature and nature's God gave us to cool our bodies in hot weather. If you're a kohen in the Beit Hamikdash sweat is a bad thing (Ezekiel 44:18); otherwise it's just fine, thank you. Expose as much skin as you dare; the more surface area for sweat to evaporate from, the better. If you should stop sweating during a run, that is cause for concern.

4. Take it easy in high humidity since humid air impedes evaporation of sweat, but don't retire to your room unless you're feeling really bad. Just go slower and shorter.

5. Monitor your body. Pay attention to the color and volume of your urine. Copious amounts of clear or pale yellow urine means you're okay, just keep drinking. Scant and deep yellow urine means you're dehydrated; drink plenty and slow down. Every so often, taste your sweat; just lick a fresh drop from your shoulder or above your lip. If it tastes salty, slow down, have a sports drink and/or eat a salty snack. You might find yourself craving potato chips. If you're on a low salt diet consult your physician, preferably an athletic one. If your sweat does not taste salty- good news! You're acclimatized! A hormone called aldosterone kicked in, and it's keeping the sodium in your blood where it belongs. It's also washing away potassium, so drink some orange juice (o.j. on ice is one of the simple pleasures of the season) and/or eat a banana when you get home. If you're sweating profusely and feeling okay, it's all right to push yourself a little.

6. Use sunscreen but don't obsess over it. When I was a kid suntan lotion had SPF numbers of 4 to 8; anything over 15 was considered overkill. Unless your skin is extremely fair, melanocytes (cells containing dark pigment) will rise to the surface and protect you, but blocking out the sun completely blocks the signal for this response to kick in.

7. If you feel dizzy, lightheaded or cold (!), or you notice that you stopped sweating, do not push yourself. Stop running (or other vigorous activity), seek shade (or air conditioning) and drink lots of fluid. If you don't feel better in a few minutes, seek medical attention. If you do feel better, call it a day and take it easy the next day.

8. When you get home, drink l'chaim on a sports drink and enjoy a cool shower. Let yourself go. Whoop and holler if you feel like it. Revel in the irony. Savor it was you would good wine. You've earned it.

All Jews to the showers!

YEEEEE-HAW!

9. Seek the company of other athletes and avoid that of whiners and kvetches. They just make others as miserable as they are. You deserve to get every last bit of enjoyment out of the summer. It does not last nearly long enough in these parts.

10. Repeat after me: SOFT LIVING NEVER DID ANY MAN OR ANY NATION ANY GOOD!

Sign of the times

2010-07-30T18:12:00.003-04:00

Tomorrow's haftara asks, "Can a woman forget her offspring, to have pity on the child of her womb? These may forget, but I [God] will not forget you." The question is usually read rhetorically, as in "Is it possible that a woman could forget her child? Yet even were that to happen, I won't forget you."
I prefer to read it as a simple statement of fact: These too will forget, but I won't forget you. We live in crazy times when women seek to kill their own pre-born babies, and the U.S. Supreme Court found in the Constitution a right to do so - in an opinion that many legal scholars consider badly written, the outcome having been decided in advance for political reasons and the Justices contriving a legal justification afterward. God is telling us that this crime against nature will happen, but He will not forget us.

Surely Mashiach is coming.

Mourning in the Morning

2010-07-19T16:56:00.010-04:00

These past three weeks we carried out certain mourning practices commemmorating the destruction of Jerusalem and the First and Second Temples, in 586 B.C.E. and 70 C.E. respectively. No shaving, haircuts, live music, and for the last week no meat or wine, except on Shabbat. Some of us do not wash clothes, wear freshly laundered clothing or shower. Tonight and tomorrow we will fast, sit on the floor, read Eicha and say Kinnot.

Every year at this time I experience considerable cognitive dissonance. We are mourning in the morning of our redemption - reishit tzmihat ge'ulateinu. It hits us in the face no matter how much we try to pretend otherwise. For 62 years we have had our state, and it is flourishing beyond anybody's wildest dreams. Until 1967 it was truncated, with Jerusalem split down the middle. I remember my teacher telling me that the Beit Hamikdash burned down long ago, and I, all of six years old, asking why the Fire Department didn't put the fire out. I was also told that one wall was left standing, but we could not get to it because it was in Arab hands. Later I learned of the armistice, according to which Jews were to be allowed access to the kotel. But the Jordanians never kept their commitment and for nineteen years the best we could do was climb to the top of Mount Zion or the YMCA tower, look out to the Old City and the Dome of the Rock, and imagine the kotel in the general vicinity. Then came the Six Day War and all of Jerusalem was ours. We could go to the kotel, broadened and beautified. We still do not have a Beit Mikdash because two mosques occupy the site, and Israel's government left the mosques under the control of the Muslim Waqf, thinking that the Arabs would then make peace with us. The Jewish Quarter, destroyed by the Jordanians, is all rebuilt and the Jewish presence in Jerusalem is greater even than when the Batei Mikdash stood. Even the Muslim Quarter sports a Young Israel synagogue. Torah study and Torah institutions rival anything that existed during the Temple periods. We like to castigate ourselves for not deserving the presence of God among us that the Temple embodies. However, in fact the people living then were no better than we. A case can be made that they were more wanting. Certainly while the First Temple stood many if not most Jews worshiped idols and Torah observance was sadly neglected. When Cyrus gave the Jews permission to return from Babylon and rebuild the Temple, only a tiny minority actually did so; the rest preferred the comforts of what they had come to think of as home - sounds familiar? And the Second Temple period featured plenty of assimilation of Greek and Roman culture; even the Hasmonean kings adopted Greek names along with their Hebrew ones. The Temple succumbed to military defeat, made inevitable by disunity and internal bickering; for every two Jews you have three opinions. Disunity and internal bickering certainly continue to hinder us today and we need to work on ourselves there, to put it mildly, but the orgies of self-flagellation popular at this time of year are quite uncalled for.

To put things in perspective, just recently the Jewish Press carried on its front page a picture of a pro-Israel demonstration with people holding up Israeli flags in front of the Roman Colosseum! Imagine - Israeli flags at the Roman Colosseum - financed according to some scholars with the spoils Titus brought to Rome from the destroyed Jewish Temple! If only Titus and Vespasian could get up and have a look!

Whose flag flies on top of Masada - Rome's or ours?

The Old City's Young Israel synagogue, in the Muslim Quarter (!), midway between Sha'ar Sh'khem and the kotel.

Finally, here is an armored unit of Zahal, the Israel Defense Forces, being sworn in at Masada.
Whose flag, whose language, and whose fine, fit young men?

I was, praise God, privileged to raise a son who was sworn in to the Israeli Army in a similar ceremony at the kotel. I can hardly imagine a greater joy for a Jewish man, except for the rebuilding of the Temple itself. May that come about quickly in our time, and before I am too old and weak to place one brick on top of another.

Arab-Jewish Cooperation in Hevron

2010-07-12T10:43:00.002-04:00

From Arutz Sheva: The mainstream media don't want us to see this:
Jews and Arabs work together to save Hevron's olive trees.

Arabs and Jews in Hevron are supposed to be forever at one another's throats. However, they recently cooperated beautifully to save 2000-year-old olive trees from an invasive parasitic plant. Some had to be cut down completely, leaving only a stump. However, olive trees are so hardy that sometimes even the stumps regenerate.
This is precisely the kind of phonomenon envisioned by the Elon Plan. After the total defeat of the terrorists, Arabs wishing to remain in Judea and Samaria will resume their citizenship in the already-existing Palestinian state, namely Jordan, and will live and work side by side with Israelis. For this to work on more than an ad hoc basis, Israel must come down on the terrorists with a heavy hand and convince the local Arabs that cooperating with terrorists will bring them nothing but death and misery. Never mind the local leftist media, never mind world public opinion, never mind Obama, the United Nations, the European Union, etc, etc. This solution is best for Israel, Jordan and the local Arabs. If we will it, it is no fairy tale.

In Defense of Summer Vacation

2010-07-02T17:56:00.008-04:00

We often hear from education "reformers" and tabloid editorial writers that the summer vacation should be abolished. This proposal is usually accompanied by attacks on "lazy teachers" who get summers off when nobody else does. We are told that summer vacation was originally instituted when America was an agrarian society and children were needed on the farm, summer being the busy season for farmers. Now that few children are needed for farm chores, summer vacation outlived its usefulness. I am not sure how true this is; wasn't harvest season in autumn, when kids return to school? But in any event, summer vacation for students and teachers is a venerable American tradition, and that alone argues for keeping it. We Diaspora Jews keep an extra day of Yom Tov, originally because word of the correct date, based on the sighting of the new moon in Jerusalem, might not have reached outlying areas in time. However, we have had a fixed calendar since the fourth century C.E. There is absolutely no doubt of the correct dates of our holidays. We keep the tradition of the extra day simply because it's a tradition; minhag avoteinu b'yadeinu.

Some traditions (and features of a language) originate for one reason and acquire new meanings with the passage of time. For instance, Shavu'ot originated as an agricultural observance, evolved into a commemmoration of the giving of the Torah (zman mattan Torateinu) and is now, praise God, returning to its agricultural roots. Similarly, summer vacation might have originated to free children for farm work, but it took on new utility that more than justifies holding on to it. It is said that two months without learning causes children to forget everything they learned in the previous year. If so, wouldn't kids working on farms have also forgotten their lessons? Does urbanization ruin kids' brains? The sad fact is that children, regardless of where they live or how they spend their free time, tend to forget what they learned as soon as they take the test, unless it is relevant to their lives or of particular interest. I remembered most of what I learned in science, biology in particular, because that is my passion. I fell in love with biology before I fell in love with my wife - or met her. I forgot most of my Shakespeare, except for some quotable quotes (the fault, dear Brutus. . . .). The summer does not cause children to forget what they learned, but it provides an opportunity for learning of a sort that one cannot get in a classroom. Warm temperatures and long hours of daylight enable children (and adults) to recharge their batteries, and acquire habits of physical activity that are absolutely essential for their good health. Playing with friends builds social skills that are not acquired sitting behind a desk but that are necessary for society to function. And children are free to read what they wish, and experience the ethereal joy of learning not because some adult is forcing them to, not because they have to pass a test, but for the pure joy of learning something new. Looking back to my own childhood, most of our parents were struggling and travel was out of the question. But the public library was our home away from home, and we explored the world in books, some of which were borrowed in June, taken to summer camp and returned in September. Summer camp itself was our first experience away from home, and we learned to solve our own problems instead of running to Mommy. You don't get that kind of learning cooped up in a classroom. Most of the summer's seasonal jobs, such as lifeguarding and manning concession stands in parks and beaches, would go begging if not for students off from school. These students are learning that they have to work for the things they want.

Columnists and editorial writers in tabloids begrudge teachers our summers off - and would have children develop sedentary habits that will condemn them to a lifetime of misery. Face it - how productive are you cooped up indoors when the sun and surf beckon? Are you able to concentrate on work when you have to dress in a manner inappropriate for the summer's heat? Instead of abolishing summer vacation for teachers and students, we ought to experiment with prolonged time off for workers in general during nature's time for fun in the sun.

A Parsha Thought - Yiftah in His Generation

2010-06-18T14:10:00.003-04:00

Tomorrow we read my bar mitzvah parsha, Hukkat, with its haftara recalling the war conducted by the judge Yiftah against Ammon. Our sages tell us that Yiftah was not the best of the judges, that he was a ba'al gaavah (arrogant fool) who made a rash vow and was too proud to go to the High Priest and have it annulled. We are told, "Yiftah in his generation is as Shmuel in his generation," Shmuel being the paradigmatic wise and scholarly leader of the nation. Our leadership may not be ideal, but if it is the best our generation can produce we have to follow it.
Let's look at the character of Yiftah. He is a gibor hayyil, a military man from a wealthy and prominent family. But he had problems early on. He was born to an isha zona, some sort of innkeeper or secondary wife; the word zona in Tanakh does not necessarily connote a prostitute. In an echo of what we see with Yitzhak and Yishmael ("the son of this handmaid shall not inherit with my son Yitzhak"), and what so often happens in polygamous societies, the sons of the primary wife dispossessed Yiftah and threw him out of the house. Others gravitated to him and they lived by their wits until the leaders of the nation asked them to fight the Ammonites. The text characterizes Yiftah's followers as anashim reikim, empty people. But if they were so empty, why were they chosen to spearhead the campaign against Ammon? I submit that Yiftah was a "tough guy," young, strong, ready to fight at the drop of a hat, and a natural leader. His followers were tough guys like himself, dispossessed, empty of material wealth, living on what they could honestly acquire with their strength if not by outright banditry. They had a little bit of Eisav in them. Brothers do share genes, and sometimes you need an Eisav to deal effectively with the Nimrods of the world, and the Ammons. They would have been empty of scholarship as well; most people living hand to mouth have neither the time nor the inclination to sit in yeshiva. But Torah learning was not going to chase away the Ammonites. Yiftah and his gang were up to the task, and the powers that be wisely recruited them.
Today, alas, we are afflicted with a total vacuum of leadership. We don't have Shmuels, scholars who live in the real world and can teach us how. At any rate, such men are not in positions of authority. Our "leaders" are old fools who think they can erase reality be banning books. The lifestyle they promote is an unsustainable fantasyland where one need not work for a living with one's brains or one's hands, where "the Lord will provide," somehow, perhaps with thieves and professional schnorrers. And we don't even have a Yiftah. The people who figured so prominently in building the state, empty of Torah learning but full of mesirut nefesh, willing to sacrifice themselves to lay a foundation upon which a structure of learning can be built, are no more. Obama says jump, and we all say how high. Or perhaps Obama says don't jump, don't build up your land, don't build in your capital, and we say how deep a hole should we crawl into. I don't see this ending well, unless we somehow: 1. Take back the Torah from the doddering old fools who make a travesty of it, and 2. Find political leaders with the backbone to defy the movers and shakers who were never very comfortable with the idea of strong Jews in a strong state.

Courts should not interfere - really?

2010-06-17T11:20:00.003-04:00

Elements in the Israeli Ashkenazi haredi community have been resisting integration of Ashkenazi and Sefaradi students in their girls' schools. They claim that the integrated schools do not meet their religious standards; their real fear seems to be that their daughters might be exposed to Sefaradi customs that are strange to Ashkenazim but well within halakhic norms, such as eating kitniyot on Pesah. The Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the girls must attend the integrated schools. According to Arutz Sheva, some parents are prepared to go to jail rather than send their daughters to ethnically integrated (but still haredi) schools. Rabbi Zalman Melamed, Chief Rabbi of Beit El, called on people to attend a haredi-sponsored mass rally supporting the parents in their defiance of the Court. As he says, they should "protest the intervention of the Supreme Court in educational matters." Huh? That is precisely the Court's job. Ever heard of Brown vs Board of Education?

Terror Apologists Come To Brooklyn

2010-06-16T12:32:00.004-04:00

A coalition of left-wing and pro-terror groups has invited three "survivors" of the Israeli "flotilla massacre" to speak in a Brooklyn church on Atlantic Avenue this Thursday, June 17, at 7:00 P.M. Click here. A columnist in the New York Post called for a hold on their visa applications pending a background check, and not allowing them into the country if they have any ties with terror groups. While such a hold would be welcome, it is not likely to happen. What I would like to know is why nobody in the Jewish community alerted the public to this in time to organize a counterdemonstration. The anti-Israel crowd sees our non-response to their events as a sign of weakness; click here. When I was in college a development like this would have been answered with flyers all over the place and word-of-mouth advertising and these leftists and Arabs would have been welcomed by hundreds of spirited Jewish activists wearing shirts with pro-Israel messages, waving Israeli flags and chanting slogans. This is not a call for violence (unless "other people" decide to get physical), just a plea for a peaceful show of strength to show our adversaries and the media that we remain steadfast in our commitment to Israel and its inherent right to defend itself.

There are always counterdemonstrations by Arabs, leftists and their Jewish lapdog traitors at the annual Salute to Israel parade and at demonstrations of support for Israel. I say turnabout is fair play.

Defining Deviancy Down and Segregated Buses

2010-06-11T13:38:00.009-04:00

A while ago I posted a piece decrying the diminution in standards of English spelling, grammar and usage in written material intended for public consumption. A piece dramatically illustrating this appeared in a Jewish-oriented magazine that made its way to my door recently. That it also appears to excuse if not outright justify gender segregation on public buses compounds the embarrassment. That glaring errors escaped both the author and her editors adds tragedy to embarrassment - and hillul Hashem if the piece found its way to non-Jews. Here is the essay: read it and weep.

Here are the errors that I caught in a cursory reading, and I am not a professional copy editor:

1. "When To Use common Sense And Derech Eretz." If every other word in the title was capitalized, "common" should also have been capitalized.
2. "Once, after I paid my fair and took a seat,. . . ." Try, "paid my fare. . ."
3. "Only me and the driver. . . " should be "Only I and the driver. . ." The first person pronoun is the subject of the sentence. An English speaker might get away with this in informal conversation, but not in writing for publication.
4. "He asked me. . . if I would possibly, in a very polite manner, move to the back of the van. . . " As the sentence is structured, the author was asked to be polite as she moved to the back. I suspect that the author meant to say that the man, whom she had previously characterized as well spoken, asked politely. She should have written, "he asked me in a very polite manner to move to the back."
5. "I have no idea why this man would have the nerve to ask. . .an older American woman to the back of the bus. . ." A verb would add clarity - ". . .to move to the back of the bus."
6. "For those of you whom have traveled. . . . " Again, we have subject-object confusion. She should have written, "for those of you who have traveled." It is common to see this transposition the other way around; who instead of whom. Perhaps in thirty years the object pronoun whom will have become obsolete (yes, language is an evolving entity), but it is highly unlikely that "whom" will replace "who."
7. ". . .who were asked too many times to please leave there seats . . . . " It's "leave their seats." Please.

There are other instances of awkward sentence structure that make it difficult to decipher the author's point. All of this appeared both in the written article and in the online version.

To my chagrin, deviancy has been defined down not only in the finer points of English but in the substance of the article. What has been unacceptable - and illegal - for some fifty years is becoming the accepted norm. The controversy over segregated buses has been going on in our community for several years, and whenever I read about it my mind conjures up one name: Rosa Parks. A black woman, she boarded a bus in Alabama in the 1950s and sat in the front. The driver asked her to move to the back, as the law then required, so a white person could sit in the front. She courageously refused, sparking the bus boycott led by Martin Luther King. The rest is history. For over 50 years, buses in America may not discriminate on the basis of race and other "protected classes" including sex. I read postings on other blogs by attorneys to the effect that sex discrimination on public buses is "illegal, period." Neither tzniut (sexual modesty) nor any other consideration justifies it. It might pass in a private vehicle taking people from Point A to Point B, but certainly not in a bus that stops on public streets to pick up and discharge fare-paying members of the public. And if the bus is engaged in interstate commerce, for instance a bus traveling from Brooklyn to Monsey by way of New Jersey, sex discrimination becomes a federal offense. Israel is a different case, since it is not subject to American jurisdiction. However, American immigrants bring American values, including basic equality and human rights, that preclude women being beaten or spat upon when they refuse to move to the back of the bus. This has happened more than once, at the hands of supposedly "religious" men.
The author says she has no idea why that man asked her to move to the back of the bus. I submit that he took the author for a pushover, and unfortunately he was right. Stop making excuses for behavior that, like tearing pages out of biology books, is onerous and odious. We need Jewish Rosa Parkses to look such men straight in the eye and refuse to move. If the driver or others attempt to enforce illegal segregation, the women must be adamant in their refusal and then file the appropriate complaints with the New York City Human Rights Commission and the equivalents in other jurisdictions. It is 2010, not 1950. Get with the program.

If you can't beat 'em, spoof 'em

2010-06-06T19:42:00.005-04:00

And if you can beat 'em, spoof 'em anyway. . . .

We con the world. . . .
We'll make them all believe that the Hamas is Momma Theresa. . . .

Pot. Kettle. Black

2010-06-04T16:49:00.003-04:00

Israel evacuates Gaza and hands over everything they built over nearly four decades to its enemies, hoping for peace. Instead, it gets daily rockets, deliberately aimed at civilians, from the "piece" of Jewish land it foolishly handed over (now with 20/20 hindsight we all know that Zvi Yehuda Kook was right). Israel imposes a naval blockade to interdict weapons intended for Hamas, the terrorist masters of Gaza. A flotilla of boats organized by a Turkish group with ties to terrorists including Al Qaeda, and with the full support of the Turkish government, attempts to run the blockade. They call themselves "peace activists" attempting to deliver "humanitarian aid," and somehow Israel thinks it's dealing with disciples of Martin Luther King. A small lightly armed naval commando force is sent to interdict the boats. They rappel from a helicopter into what turns out to be a lynch mob armed with crowbars, clubs and knives. After a heroic struggle in which several commandos are wounded and at least one flung overboard, the Israelis gain control. Nine enemy lives are lost. An orgy of condemnation, made in and directed by Ankara, comes Israel's way. Never mind that the blockade is fully in accord with the international laws of war and anybody attempting to run it should know that he is putting his life on the line, just like the Confederate blockade runners in the American Civil War. Never mind that Israel, true to form, took great pains to use minimal force and minimize enemy casualties. Never mind that Israel warned the flotilla several times and invited the boats to dock in Ashdod, where the cargo would be inspected and genuine humanitarian aid would be trucked overland to Gaza. Never mind that there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza; food, medicine and such are trucked in every day from Israel and Egypt, and indeed were trucked in even during the worst of Operation Cast Lead. Never mind that some of the "peace activists" had prepared Al Qaeda-style "martyrdom tapes" before the operation and had declared their intention beforehand to become "shahids" - martyrs in jihad. Israel is at fault. Israel always is at fault.

Isrealis attacked by "peace activists"

There is a sea change in the Middle East, as sweeping as the one over three decades ago when the Shah of Iran fell - and an America that was serious about its global responsibilities would never have allowed that debacle to occur. Turkey is abandoning the legacy of Ataturk, architect of the modern Turkish state who threw in Turkey's lot with the West and Western secularism. It is becoming an Islamist state with ambitions of becoming the dominant power in the region as it was before World War I. Here is New York Post columnist Ralph Peter's take on the situation. This is the Turkey that never owned up to its genocide against the Armenians, the Turkey that oppresses its Kurdish minority, the Turkey that imprisons and tortures human rights activists, and the Turkey that occupied one-third of the independent nation of Cyprus, sent in thousands of Turkish settlers and set up its own puppet state, the "Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus," recognized by no other nation on earth. This has been going on since 1974. The United Nations of course is chiming in, that confabulation of tyrants and dictators responsible for untold suffering and bloodshed. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

Next time (and there almost certainly will be a next time - an outfit from Ireland is organizing a flotilla as I write, of course with support from Turkey) Israel should have better intelligence and know with whom it is dealing. Nonviolent demonstrators can be subdued with paintball rifles. Armed terrorists must be met with overwhelming force that will maximize the enemy's losses and minimize Israel's own. Finally, there are murmurings that Turkey intends to send naval vessels to escort a second flotilla. If it does, it will have unambiguously shown all concerned whose side it is on. This should not surprise us; in the Middle East nations change sides in a conflict the way we change our underwear. Israel and the United States must take notice and act accordingly.

Salute to Israel

2010-06-01T19:05:00.008-04:00

Last Sunday was the annual Salute to Israel Parade in New York. Jewish students and others marched up Fifth Avenue amid song, dance, floats and general rejoicing. Forgotten for a moment were all Israel's troubles and all the infighting within the Jewish community here, as we came together k'ish ehad b'lev ehad (well, almost) to celebrate Israel's 62nd birthday.

Friends of the Israel Defense Forces

Israel to the Rescue - Showcasing humanitarian aid provided by Israel to disaster victims the world over

Hang 'em high - The usual traitors from Neturei Karta were there along with their Arab and leftist camp followers.

I have been at this parade in various capacities almost since its inception. While in high school, I marched either with my school or with Bnei Akiva. In the 1970s the parade was arranged by the American Zionist Youth Foundation, and I was among the college and graduate students serving as volunteer marshals. Later on the American Zionist Youth Foundation dropped its sponsorship in a spat over participation by Beth Simchat Torah, New York's gay and lesbian synagogue. That synagogue remains excluded after Orthodox groups threatened to withdraw if Beth Simchat Torah was there, and sponsorship of the parade passed to an ad hoc "Israel Tribute Committee." After decades of amateurism including groups stepping off hours after their scheduled time, the committee last year hired a professional "event organizer," and everything went off without a hitch. This year the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) took over the parade, and again it was professionally run. I kind of miss the spontaneity of its student-run days, but in today's security and budget climate "fashionably late" is no longer viable. I would like to see Beth Simchat Torah somehow included, perhaps among the other Reform synagogues without being identified as gay and lesbian. We Orthodox always marched with all kinds of avaryanim (transgressors) and never "checked tzitzit;" why should gay Jews be an exception?
May we all live and be well, and may next year's parade be even grander.

It's baaaaaaack!

2010-05-23T21:36:00.006-04:00

As people familiar with Brooklyn may know, in 1965 a bust of the late President John F. Kennedy, mounted on a marble block, was placed in the Grand Army Plaza section at the northern end of Prospect Park. It was inscribed with the President's name, dates and the famous quote: Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country. It became a place of pilgrimage for "people of a certain age," sort of a surrogate grave for those of us who could not get to the real one at Arlington. On May 29, the President's birthday, and November 22, his yahrzeit, people would visit the monument to pray, leave cards and flowers and light candles. I would pass the monument quite often running, and I would always stop to say a few Psalms, standing off to one side so it would not appear as if I was, God forbid, praying to a statue. Over the years the monument was defaced with grafitti, some of it obscene. It was not designed to be vandal-proof (remember, it was put up in 1965 when no one would think of defacing a memorial to a President) and cleaning it would have damaged the inscription. The sight of the monument in its desecrated state was heartbreaking, but I kept saying tehilim when I passed by, and I remember leaving a card shortly after 9/11. Early in this decade the bust and marble block were removed when the entire Grand Army Plaza underwent a major renovation. The renovation was completed, a brand new grafitti-proof pedestal was put in place, but the bust was not returned. Four years ago I wrote a letter to the Prospect Park Alliance (a public-private partnership that manages the Park for the city) inquiring about the monument, and received a response to the effect that a new mounting scheme was necessary and needed approval from the city's art commission among other bureaucratic hurdles. In New York such things can take forever, and I wondered if I would see the bust again before I was old and grey. Then last week I was running through the Park, and lo and behold there was the bust, beautifully mounted on the "new" (by now four years old) pedestal. Incredulous, I ran up, circled the monument, examined the inscriptions (the name, dates and quote were there, but not the name of the Brooklyn Borough President that was on the original), recited a couple of Psalms and shed a tear or two. Several days later I returned with my camera and took the photograph that you see here.

The President's birthday is on Shabbat this year, so I will not be able to visit. I remember when he was in the White House children, myself included, sent him birthday cards. I hope there will be fresh flowers at the monument, as well as at the grave at Arlington.

May the President's memory be an inspiration for generations to come, as his service to the nation was to mine.

Hodesh Ziv - The Month of Brightness

2010-05-10T08:40:00.006-04:00

In Sefer Melakhim (Kings 6:1,37) the second Biblical month, known to us as Iyar (the names of Jewish months are post-exilic and of Babylonian provenance), is characterized as Hodesh Ziv - the month of brightness. The commentators advance several explanations. One that sticks in my mind is that the winter's cold is gone but we do not yet suffer from summer's stifling heat. I handle summer's heat just fine, thank you very much. I acclimatized instantly to last week's 80-degree heat but this week, with temperatures unseasonably cool, I had to break out the space heater. I have to chuckle at the commentators' struggles. Praise God, we do not need a perush (commentary) to tell us why Iyar is a month of brightness. It is obvious to all who have eyes to see - and there are none so blind as those who do not. Iyar is the month when we resumed our sovereignty, reclaimed our manhood and, nineteen years later, regained control over the whole of our eternal capital, Jerusalem.

Tomorrow, 28 Iyar, is Yom Yerushalayim, when we celebrate the reunification of our capital. As with the Berlin Wall 22 years later, the wall through the heart of the Holy City came down in a flash, and Jews and Arabs from either side mingled freely with unbounded joy. Who did not thrill to Mota Gur's voice crackling over the radio: Har Habayit b'yadeinu. The Temple Mount (literally "Mountain of the House") is in our hands. Later on I became aware of a soldier in Sinai who heard it over the radio, and with a poker face asked a comrade, "I heard about some house mountain that is in our hands; do you have any idea where it is?", and the comrade shouted, "What! Jerusalem! Ask who captured it!" Ever since, people of all faiths have been able to worship at their holy places. For nineteen years the Jordanians, in violation of the armistice they signed, did not allow Jews to visit the kotel or any other site in "their" part of the city, and even ripped up gravestones on Har Hazeitim for stables and latrines.

After the liberation of Jerusalem, Golda Meir forthrightly announced to the world that its future was not negotiable. Subsequent Israeli governments, whatever their policies regarding "the territories," hewed to that stand on Jerusalem, that it is the eternal, indivisible capital of Israel, until the disaster known as Oslo 1 in 1993. Jerusalem was on the chopping block along with everything else, and make no mistake, the Arabs will not be satisfied with anything less than the whole enchilada. Now a supposedly right-wing Prime Minister, and let's not forget he is the man who gave away 80% of Hevron, kowtows to President Obama and freezes construction of Jewish homes in the capital of the Jewish state. According to a report on Arutz Sheva, American inspectors are traipsing around Israel's capital and reporting to Obama's envoy George Mitchell on violations of Obama's diktat. Who will have the guts to stand up and tell Obama that Israel is not an American colony, nor is it the 51st state. We will build anywhere in Jerusalem, and indeed throughout Israel, that we wish. And if that puts Israelis in conflict with certain segments of the Orthodox commun ity in America, as it does when Jerusalemites decide to build a sports stadium in their city, so be it. Besides being the ir hakodesh, Jerusalem, praise God, is a living breathing city in a way that few would have even imagined a century ago.

It has become customary on Yom Yerushalayim to hold a rikudegalim, where throngs of people dance through the streets of the Old City singing and carrying Israeli flags. Unfortunately, rikudegalim has become an occasion for gratuitous offense toward the city's Arab residents, such as noisily pounding on their doors. Leaders in our community have asked dancers to refrain from such behavior tomorrow, and I hope and pray that they will. Yerushalayim is the City of Peace, and we should live in peace with anyone willing to live in peace with us.

We daven Ma'ariv tonight with the Yom Tov niggun, and end hashkivenu with hapores sukkat shalom aleinu. . . v'al Yerushalayim, as on Yom Tov. Tomorrow morning we say the long psukei d'zimra as on Hoshana Rabbah, and the complete Hallel. After the shir shel yom, I always add Monday's psalm, "gadol Hashem umehullal me'od b'ir elokeinu har kodsho." May it be God's will that next year we will dance the flags on to the Har Habayit, right up to the rebuilt Beit Hamikdash.

High Time for a Joint

2010-05-07T13:44:00.004-04:00

No, this is not a plug for NORML.

Last month (somehow it does't seem so long ago), we commemmorated Yom Ha-shoah. About the same time, the Armenians commemmorate their own genocide at the hands of Turkey in 1915, where an estimated two million Armenians were murdered. Unlike Germany, the present government of Turkey never owned up to the crimes of the Ottoman sultanate that it overthrew, and never attempted to make amends. To this day the official Turkish line is that they were merely putting down a rebellion.

Anybody who visits Jerusalem and walks to the kotel through the Armenian Quarter (the long way, not through the shuq) sees maps and posters on Armenian shops detailing the crime against humanity. It was in many ways a dress rehearsal for the Shoah. Hitler ym"sh said as much in Mein Kampf: The world let the Turks get away with killing millions of innocent civilians in an attempt to get rid of a competing culture (Armenia was the first nation to adopt Christianity while Turks are overwhemingly Muslim and, until Ataturk secularized the country, militantly so) and will likewise allow him to get rid of the Jews. "Who remembers the Armenian massacres?" he asked rhetorically. The Turks gave Hitler a green light to perpetrate the Shoah.

I always wondered why, since we and the Armenians commemmorate our respective tragedies at the same time of year, we do not hold joint commemmorations. Of course, such events would have to be secular. We cannot participate in Christian prayer, nor should Christians be expected to listen to El Malei Rahamim; perhaps a reading of appropriate Psalms in English would be acceptable. Such a gathering could be addressed by Jewish and Armenian scholars (Armenian survivors are all gone and Jewish ones are increasingly hard to find) who would remind us how genocide is an ongoing scourge (cf. Bosnia and Rwanda) and how the Armenian genocide provided a historical backdrop and cover for the Shoah. To the best of my knowledge, such a joint observance never occurred. The government of Israel would not have encouraged such an event, if it did not actually discourage it. It was interested in forging a pragmatic alliance with Turkey, a powerful Muslim-majority but secular state. Several years ago, when Hebrew University in Jerusalem attempted to hold a scholarly gathering on the subject, inviting both Jewish and Armenian scholars of genocide, the government exerted heavy pressure on the university to cancel the event. To the university's eternal discredit, it complied. If something similar had happened here in the United States, with the government pressuring a university to cancel an academic conference for political considerations, the entire American academic community would rise as one - k'ish ehad b'lev ehad - to resist the government.

It now appears that the government of Israel is receiving its just deserts for subordinating truth to politics. The alliance between Israel and Turkey has taken quite a beating. An Islamist government that would have Ataturk turning over in his grave cancelled long-standing security cooperation with Israel and is tilting heavily toward the Arab and Muslim states on Turkey's eastern border - Syria, Iraq and Iran. Perhaps now is the time for truth to out. A joint commemmoration, held in the United States, of the Shoah and the Armenian genocide, would not need (and indeed never needed) the approval of Israel's government, and given the present situation between Israel and Turkey, the government might well look the other way and not voice any objections.
We are the "generation after." We came of age in the 1960s and '70s, amidst great political turmoil and cultural upheaval. When we were convinced that something was right, we cared not at all that we would be antagonizing our own government. We wielded the power of truth and justice against the greatest evil empire of our time - the Soviet Union - and won. It is high time that we took a stand for truth alongside victims of the same inhumanity that murdered a third of our own people.

Reflections on Yom Ha-shoah and Yom Ha-atzmaut

2010-04-22T13:36:00.009-04:00

This year I was privileged to be on the committee that arranged the purchase and erection of a brass plaque memorializing the Holocaust on the wall in the lobby of my synagogue, Kingsway Jewish Center. We held a solemn ceremony on Sunday 27 Nisan to dedicate the plaque. Grandchildren and great-grandchildren of survivors filed into the sanctuary with lighted yahrzeit candles and placed them on a table in the front, and a child survivor (just about the only survivors still with us were children at the time) who is now a prominent educator at Ramaz spoke to us. The event was uplifting in a bittersweet way but for one incident that marred it. At the collation following the ceremony, our Congressman Anthony Wiener came uninvited and addressed us, as he addresses many similar gatherings where he is invited. As some might know, the Congressman, a Jew, is engaged to be married to a young Muslim woman. Knowing that this would generate negativity, we decided not to invite him but he showed up anyway and was allowed to address us. Instead of showing an elected official the respect to which his position entitles him, one congregant who shall go nameless confronted him on his personal life and Congressman Wiener took it personally and reacted accordingly, challenging the congregant to come up close and "say it to my face," when in fact he did say it to his face, maybe twenty feet away in front of a roomful of people. In the end Mr. Wiener's security people removed him for his own safety before he completed his address. There was plenty of blame to go around for this fiasco. The congregant who initiated the confrontation should have known better. Intermarriage is unfortunately a makkat medina, a nationwide epidemic. About half of all Jewish marriages in the United States are to non-Jews. It has long been an unwritten rule in American politics that a candidate's personal life is off limits. The congregant was and is at liberty to vote against Mr. Wiener, to persuade others to vote against him, and even to run against him should he seek reelection this fall. As for Mr. Wiener, he should have known that there might be a negative reaction at an Orthodox congregation owing to his personal circumstance and stayed away from a gathering to which he was not invited. Having made an appearance and experienced precisely the sort of negativity we feared, he acted like a twelve-year-old. One would think that an experienced politician would have a thicker skin. Instead of issuing what reasonable men might regard as a challenge to fight, look the fellow in the eye and tell him that his choice of a mate is "none of your business." So an inspiring Yom Ha-shoah gathering ended in embarrassment to our congregation and, arguably, hillul Hashem.

That evening I attended the Yom Ha-shoah commemoration at my alma mater, Yeshivah of Flatbush, as I do every year. We heard from Deborah Steiner-Van Rooyen, author of Dove on a Barbed Wire, about her search for and discovery of her cousin and lost family. And the following Monday evening I attended the Yom Ha'atzma'ut celebration at Yeshivah of Flatbush. These gatherings never lost their power to touch my heart and soul, but I'm noticing an unsettling phenomenon as the years go by. These gatherings used to be held in the high school auditorium, which was packed to the rafters. Standing room only. They had to open up the Bet Midrash across the hall and set up a sound system to accommodate the overflow. Now there are plenty of empty seats in the high school auditorium on Yom Ha-shoah, while the Yom Ha-atzma'ut celebration is held in the much smaller Bet Midrash in the elementary school building, and still there are empty seats. It seems to confirm what recent studies purportedly show, that young Jewish people today feel unconnected to Israel and Judaism. Not disconnected, not critical, but unconnected. They just don't care. Israel has no significance for them, good or bad. Judaism is something they can take or leave, and many are leaving. Perhaps this is just a function of Brooklyn becoming thoroughly ferkhnyocked and the khnyocks both here and in Israel being divorced from anything having to do with the state, its symbols (you seldom see the blue-and-white flag in haredi neighborhoods) and its commemmorations. As we read in the Passover Haggada, ilu haya sham, lo haya nig'al. They were there, they witnessed what we witnessed, but they are not affected by it, one way or the other. But my peregrinations on the planet convince me otherwise. As a teacher in New York City's public schools, I remember when every high school in a Jewish area offered Hebrew, culminating in a Regents examination that satisfied the foreign language requirement. Jewish students in the public high schools may not have been particularly religiously observant (though prior to the 1960s many were) but they felt a cultural connection to the Jewish people and wanted to learn its language. No more. Hebrew in the public schools is now a rarity, and the Regents exams are not posted online as other exams are, so that the questions can be reused. The Histadrut Ivrith of America was once a vibrant organization promoting Hebrew culture through the newspaper Hadoar and the monthly magazine Lamishpaha, where I had several items published. Early this decade both publications folded and the Histadrut Ivrith itself ceased to exist. The people who benefited from it - mostly students and growing families on budgets - lacked the financial resources to keep it afloat and the people with the money couldn't care less. The Birnbaum Siddur and Mahzorim, edited to conform to modern Hebrew grammar and with mistakes in "traditional" siddurim corrected, is difficult if not impossible to obtain, and its publisher, Hebrew Publishing Company, seems to have disappeared.
I wish I could end on a more cheerful note, but I just don't see where this is going to end in anything but disaster for Jewish life in America.

Hag Sameah

2010-04-19T16:31:00.003-04:00

Wishing all my readers a joyous Yom Ha'atzmaut. If you're in Brooklyn come to Yeshivah of Flatbush at 919 East 10 Street for a proper Ma'ariv with Hallel led by my principal emeritus Rabbi David Eliach. It will be followed by an Israeli cafe night for a nominal contribution.
Never mind the people knocking us. We've been kicking butt since 1948 and we'll continue to kick butt til Mashiach comes. Obama & Co. only think they're in charge. We know who really is. Click here.

Dem Dry Bones

2010-04-04T14:50:00.003-04:00

Yesterday being Shabbat Hol Ha-moed Pesah, we read the famous prophecy from Ezekiel about the dry bones. That haftara always has a powerful emotional pull on me, with its climactic ending, "I am Hashem; I have spoken and I have performed," more than hinting at the events that we will commemmorate in the upcoming month of Iyar. I used it as the theme for a shirt in which I ran the New York City Half Marathon.
The prophecy is also the inspiration for a well-known Negro spiritual.

Allow me to tweak the song a little (I believe it's in the public domain):

Dem bones dem bones gonna walk around

Dem bones dem bones gonna run around

Dem bones dem bones gonna fly around. . . .

"Disconnect dem bones dem dry bones. . . .?" Never! They - we - shall go from strength to strength until the final ge'ula, quickly and in our time.

V'Nahafokh Hu

2010-03-29T11:48:00.004-04:00

And it was reversed. . . .(Esther 9:1)

No, this is not a leftover Purim shpiel. We are about to celebrate Pesah, zman heruteinu, the season of our freedom. Those of us who daven Nusakh Sefarad will recite Hallel tonight and tomorrow night. I never heard a good explanation of why we say Hallel at night specifically on Pesah, and certainly why Nusakh Sefarad says it and Nusakh Ashkenaz not. So let me venture an explanation at least of the first question. The miracle of Pesah occurred at night. "And it came to pass at midnight, that Hashem struck every firstborn in Egypt. . . ." Rashi comments that Moshe told Pharaoh that the plague would strike about midnight, so that if the Egyptian astronomers erred in the calculation of midnight they would not be able to claim that the plague did not happen as Moshe said it would and therefore it was not Hashem's doing. But the plague actually occurred at the stroke of midnight, as the Jews were eating the sheep, which the Egyptians worshiped as a deity. We are also told that even the firstborn of males were struck down, and in a place as licentious as ancient Egypt only God could know their identity. Thus there could be no room for doubt that the plague was God's doing, and that His people were safe and secure as destruction was abroad in the land in the middle of the night.

Bayamim ha-hem bazman ha-zeh. As it was then, so it is now. We now have, praise God, another holiday when we will recite Hallel at night, a holiday that is also zman heruteinu, Yom Ha'atzmaut. And here too, the miracle occurred at night, for at the stroke of midnight of May 14-15, 1948, 6 Iyar 5708, the Union Jack came down for the last time and the Jewish people assumed among the peoples of the earth the sovereignty to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle it, but which it had not exercised since Hasmonean times in the first century B.C.E. That's right, the Sixth of Iyar. That fateful midnight occurred on Shabbat that year, and to prevent desecration of Shabbat the secular, socialist provisional government that had nothing but contempt for everything holy decided to jump the gun and declare the state on Friday afternoon, against the advice of the Americans and all the experts who were telling us that it was not the right time, and that the state, if declared, could not possibly survive. Hence, Yom Ha'atzmaut is celebrated on the Fifth of Iyar, except when the celebration or that of Yom Hazikaron the previous day might engender Sabbath desecration. Such will be the case this year, when to forestall preparations on Shabbat for Yom Hazikaron on Sunday, Yom Hazikaron will be commemmorated on Monday, with Yom Ha'atzmaut on Tuesday, the Sixth of Iyar, when the state actually came into being. I learned this from a booklet sent several years ago my Yeshivat Merkaz Harav.

On the second night of Pesah we begin counting Sefirat ha-Omer, the seven-week period beginning with Pesah and building up to Shavu'ot. Most of us will observe the sefirah, or part of it, as a period of semi-mourning for the disaster that befell us in 135 C.E. when the Roman legions brutally crushed our last hope for independence. Rabbi Akiva and his students figured prominently in that hope, since Rabbi Akiva supported Bar Kokhba's revolt against Rome, and sent his students to fight in Bar Kokhba's army. It is no accident that the Religious Zionist youth movement is named for Rabbi Akiva. And now, here we are with our flag flying proudly over our country, an army that kicks butt, the best flyboys on earth, an economy that is the envy of the Middle East, a flourishing democracy unique in that region, and where are the ancient Romans? Sefirat Ha'omer, before it became a time of mourning, was an occasion for intense joy. It was harvest season, bracketed by the bringing of the omer of barley on 16 Nissan and the two loaves of wheat bread seven weeks later. And now the fertility of our soil, lost during nineteen centuries of foreign occupation, given up on by one commission after another of foreign rulers, was restored as soon as Eretz Yisrael was watered again with Jewish sweat. For this we are to mourn? What is happening here is the reverse of what happens to an avel on Shabbat. Shiva is suspended, the avel dresses for Shabbat and goes to synagogue, publicly he is not showing any signs of mourning, but inwardly he grieves for his departed relative as a mourner. Today's sefirah occasions outward signs of mourning while inside we experience the joy of freedom, of our soil's fertility, of renewed physical strength as we labor on the land and bring forth its fruits.
May we soon see this process of ge'ulah come to its glorious conclusion with the bringing of the Omer and the two loaves of bread amid joyous celebration.

Hag Kasher V'sameah.

Barukh Dayan Emet - Henry Wittenberg

2010-03-11T22:07:00.005-05:00

Henry Wittenberg, noted Hall of Fame wrestler and coach, passed away Tuesday at the age of 91. He represented the United States in the Olympic Games of 1948 and 1952, bringing home gold and silver respectively. He had a career as a New York City police officer, retiring in 1954. He coached Yeshiva University's wrestling team as well as that of his alma mater, City College of New York. He also coached the United States national team and the United States Maccabiah team.

Obituary in New York Times

Wittenberg was one of the first successful wrestlers to lift weights. The practice had been discouraged in the erroneous belief that it would make athletes "muscle-bound."

יהי זכרו ברוך

Nonconformity. . . .

2010-03-04T08:57:00.003-05:00

Or "A warning to the parents of my children's prospective spouses :). . . ."

Adapted from Dr. Frederick Perls, and seen on posters all over the U.S.A. when I was growing up in the 1960s and '70s:

I do my thing and you do yours. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations and you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you and I am I, and if by chance our children find each other, it's beautiful.

CRC to certify Trojan Lifestyles

2010-02-28T02:06:00.005-05:00

Shushan News Service 14 Adar 5770:

The Central Rabbinical Congress (CRC), Satmar's kosher certifying agency, announced a deal with Trojan, the world's leading manufacturer of condoms, to certify its renowned "Lifestyles" product line. Grand Rabbi Joel Tattlebum announced the deal in front of his United Talmudical Academy in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, flanked by Rabbi Avremel Reichman. When asked how the fervently Orthodox Satmar sect can certify condoms to be used in illicit trysts, Reichman replied that Satmar's unique Torah lifestyle would be enhanced by Lifestyles condoms. "CRC is also roshei tyevos for Chemical Rubber Company, so our kosher symbol on Trojan's rubbers is a shiddukh made in heaven. Now when our teachers need to screw a shaina maidl, they won't have to worry about giving her diarrhea." "We don't have shaina maidls in our schools, only shyna mydls," Rabbi Tattlebum corrected. "And she has to be a 36; a man's neshama can only have an aliya screwing a lamed-vovnik."

When Rabbi Yoodle the Poodle Kolko, formerly of Yeshiva Torah Temeiah, was asked for his reaction to the new development, he remarked, "Our large families are long on shvantz and short on gelt. Dental bills are breaking us. Now when we want a lollipop we can wrap it in a CRC-endorsed Trojan condom, suck all day and not worry about cavities."

People gathered at the scene began clamoring for the new kosher cerified condoms, and had to be turned away. In a romantic touch, the new Trojans are to debut in Paris. "But we hope to have ample supplies in Brooklyn's boys' yeshivas and mikvas in time for the Rosh Hashanah blow jobs. Just look for the logo on the package. We wouldn't want our pure and holy boys corrupted by condoms that are not certified kosher l'mehadrin by CRC."

A Happy Purim to all and to all a good night.

Mah Nishtanah? Is Israel another Iran?

2010-02-26T15:55:00.004-05:00

The chief scientist of Israel's Ministry of Education, Dr. Gavriel Avital, questioned the validity of the theory of evolution, and the reality of climate change, and seemingly opened the door for Israeli high school students to be taught pseudoscientific nonsense instead of or alongside mainstream science. The story appeared in Ha'aretz and Ynet, and was picked up by the National Center for Science Education, a watchdog group defending the teaching of evolution of which I am a member. The Education Minister, Gideon Saar, said on taking office that he wants to reverse the decline in Israeli students' performance in science and math. But the "chief scientist" that he appointed is not even a scientist but an engineer from the Technion with no background in science education, and it shows. Engineers apply the findings of science to improve our lives; as a rule they are not involved in the creation or dissemination of new knowledge. Practicing physicians, as opposed to physicians engaged in research, are thus engineers more than scientists, and indeed many Orthodox physicians deny evolution, mostly out of ignorance. Dr. Avital would perpetuate that ignorance in Israeli schoolchildren as well.
Here in the United States there was a celebrated "Monkey Trial" in 1925 where a teacher was tried for teaching evolution in defiance of a Tennessee law prohibiting it. It seems that we retry that case every decade or so, the latest iteration occurring in Dover, Pennsylvania in 2005. Israel does not need to import this dark side of American history. It does not need to throw itself back into the Dark Ages and to make itself a laughingstock throughout the world. It has enough bad press as it is, most of it undeserved, and the intellectual opinion leaders on American campuses are already biased against it. This imbecility will only make a bad situation worse. Why should America support Israel's struggle with the nuclear ambitions of Iran when both states are benighted theocratic cesspools, they will ask. What is the difference?
Thankfully, there is a difference. Israel is a democracy, and as seen in an editorial in Ha'aretz, there already is a grounswell of opposition in the scientific community and the Israeli secular public to Avital's policy. The editorial, in fact, calls for Saar to let him go. I hope he does. Free speech and a free press are the bulwarks of an enlightened society against just this sort of obscurantism.
I wish this whole affair was a premature Purim shpiel, but unfortunately it is not. We don't know how the story will play out, but we can keep following it and make our opinions known. Israel will NOT turn into a theocratic cesspool as long as I have anything to do with it.

Just Blame the Unions

2010-02-05T14:04:00.006-05:00

As much as I admire the New York Post for its courageous and politically incorrect editoral stand on the existential threat to our nation from militant Islam, I am sick to death of its bashing municipal unions in general and teachers and their unions in particular. (Full Disclosure: I teach in the New York City public schools and am a member of the United Federation of Teachers, the union that represents New York City public school teachers.) To read the Post, the city's unions are the new Jews. There is no ill or misfortune affecting the city that its unions are not responsible for. Transit fares about to rise? Never mind the waste and inefficiency in the system. Forget that its top executives get to work in chauffeured limousines, although their workplace is eminently accessible by subway. Just blame the hard-working transit workers and Transport Workers Union Local 100, which represents them. Health care a mess? Never mind the city closing hospitals in the face of an aging population in need of health care more than ever. It's the ridiculously underpaid health care workers and the unions which represent them. Children don't learn? Must be the lazy and incompetent teachers and the UFT, that all-powerful teachers' union that owns and operates the legislature in Albany. Sounds like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion?

Sometimes I wonder if the Post's columnists and editorial writers read their own paper. Take some short blurbs in yesterday's paper and read between the lines. It is not uncommon for teachers in New York City to have side jobs and even side businesses. Such teachers must hew to stringent conflict-of-interest regulations. If not for moonlighting public school teachers, many yeshivot would have a tough time getting qualified secular teachers. A teacher who is also a licensed attorney with a priviate law practice is quite unusual, but not unheard-of. It appears that one such teacher, Alan Rosenfeld, has been languishing in a teacher reassignment center, commonly known as a "rubber room," since 2001. Teachers brought up on disciplinary charges are sent to rubber rooms while they await adjudication of their cases before arbitrators. Unless they are accused of crimes they draw full pay and benefits. According to columnist Andrea Peyser, this poor soul was accused of "leering at the rear ends of junior-high girls." No inappropriate touching, mind you. Nothng like what goes on in yeshivot all over the city. Just "leering." Well, would you want a teacher who spent the whole period writing on and talking to the board? We're supposed to interact with our students. That includes looking at them. What's the difference between looking and leering? That depends on who you ask. The same columnist incredulously states that the accused teacher was "cleared to teach." Ms. Peyser, that's what disciplinary hearings are for. Teachers have unions to protect them from being fired on some administrator's whim. We are entitled to due process. Charges have to be substantiated. That's what disciplinary hearings are for. If the administration fails to substantiate the charges at a hearing, the teacher is cleared to teach. A letter to the editor has the same teacher doing more than looking or "leering." He made "sexist comments" to students. Remember Lawrence Summers? The president of Harvard University? He was forced out for suggesting that there might possibly be biological differences between men and women that affect their aptitude for math and science. Politically incorrect statements should not be a firing offense, and this teacher was cleared to teach after a hearing. A news story in the same issue tells how Kenneth Feinberg, President Obama's executive-pay czar, is looking at ways to streamline the process of getting rid of bad teachers. Buried in the story we find the person that engaged him - none other than Randi Weingarten, ex-president of the UFT and now the head of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the national teacher's union. Well, well. I thought that teachers' unions were interested only in protecting the jobs of bad teachers. The same story accuses poor Mr. Rosenfeld of making "sexual advances" at students. Leering, sexist comments, sexual advances. . . . Columnists, editorial writers and people who write letters to the editor usually do not have to substantiate their charges. Neither do bloggers. Fortunately for the principles this nation was founded on, administrators seeking to fire public school teachers do.

Now a word of advice from a veteran teacher. This may be news to you, but teachers are not plaster saints. They are human. Some of us are healthy, in shape and able to function without benefit of little blue pills. Many of our female students deliberately dress provocatively, and when they do so we look. How can it be otherwise? Are we made out of stone? Many of our educational woes would disappear if only parents would be parents and not pals. If you don't want your daughter's teachers to leer at her rear end, do not send her to school dressed in a manner that calls attention to her rear end, or to any other body part that may be leered at. Let her instead call attention to her brains and her achievements.

Tragedy in Haiti - Idiocy in Brooklyn

2010-02-03T08:49:00.005-05:00

In an earlier post I stated that Orthodox figures hadn't yet blamed the earthquake in Haiti on our sins. It had to happen and now it did. Rabbi Yehuda Levin, in a video conference and press release carried on the Christian Newswire, stated that homosexuality is partly responsible for the earthquake. Homosexuality here in the U.S.A. mind you, and particularly in the American military, not homosexuality in Haiti, or even voodoo in Haiti. Why homosexuality in America would cause an earthquake in Haiti and kill 200,000 Haitians, while San Francisco, that mecca of sodomites, was spared, he doesn't clue us in. Nor does he tell us that homosexual soldiers serve openly in Israel's military, as they do in many countries all over the world, and Zahal's effectiveness as a fighting force apparently has not been degraded.
Why homosexuality, and not lashon hara, stealing from the government, laxity in kashrut, ad infinitum? Simple. Homosexuality happens to be Yehuda Levin's pet peeve, and has been for some 30 years. He has been spewing vicious, vitriolic hatred of homosexuals for at least that long. Not just hatred of a specific act that the Torah labels toeivah [abomination], as it labels dishonesty in business, but hatred of people. People who to all accounts have little or no control over their sexual proclivities. Even as a candidate for public office, he spewed his vitriol from every soapbox he can stand on, and it is telling that the only soapbox available to him now was of non-Jewish provenance. One wonders how many Haitian-Americans were listening to his rant, or became aware of it later on, and how they reacted to the news that God killed their loved ones to punish others for some real or imagined sins. If I was Haitian I'd be sorely tempted to take a swing at the good rabbi - beard, black hat and all.
Rabbi Levin has a synagogue not far from where I live. He calls it Mevakshei Hashem, Seekers of God. I have news for him; God is not to be found in hatred and bigotry.

Hat Tip: Failed Messiah

Whites-only basketball?

2010-01-26T13:36:00.004-05:00

Honest folks, I couldn't make this stuff up if I wanted to.

http://chronicle.augusta.com/stories/2010/01/19/nba_563760.shtml

This is coming out of Augusta, Georgia. If I'm not mistaken, that town is (or, I hope, was) home to a whites-only golf club. Some imbecile came up with an idea for a whites-only basketball league. It would be open only to natural-born American citizens, no talented Irishmen or Brits need apply. And they would have to have two Caucasian parents. It will feature "fundamental basketball, which [white people] like." Not "street-ball," as played by "people of color." And the imbecile says the proposal is not racist. Well, I wonder if I would qualify. My skin is rather light, but my father wasn't white enough for the brownshirted thugs that prowled the streets of Vienna between the wars, nor were I and my friends white enough for the Irish and Italian ruffians that cruised our neighborhood in the '60s. That's why we took up martial arts. I kind of doubt if a racially exclusive basketball league would even be legal. Remember the Civil Rights Act of 1964? People of good will of every conceivable skin tone fought long and hard for that one. But let's assume it is legal, and let's take this buffoonery at face value. Fundamental basketball? I suppose by that they mean that below-the-rim, boring game (even if it was dominated by Jewish players) that passed for hoops before African-Americans took over the game. No seven-footers slamming it through the hole. The kind of hoops that you might see today in a good WNBA game. No, thanks. I like my high-flying slam-dunking hard-hitting roundball. I even like to see the elbows flying, especially when they belong to Shaquille O'Neal.

Houston, you're having a problem. Your superstar's face just bumped into my elbow.

Guns in the locker room? It's against the law, so let the law deal with it. Obscene gestures and crotch-grabbing? That's what fines and suspensions are for. The game has deteriorated enough with all those wimpy East Europeans David Stern brought in. Don't you dare take away my high-spirited above-the-rim roundball! By the way, we have some good streetball on West 4th Street here in New York every summer. No charge for admission. Try it; you might like it.

Shining a light in Haiti

2010-01-21T08:35:00.002-05:00

Amid the devastation in Haiti following the massive earthquake there, an improbable story of light and hope emerges. Within a day of the quake, while rich countries much closer to the scene were first gearing up to respond, Israeli teams were on their way to Haiti. They quickly set up a state-of-the-art field hospital in tents in an abandoned soccer field, with x-ray machines, ventilators, the whole nine yards, and went to work delivering care that no others on the scene were prepared to do. The media that usually delight in bashing Israel, are fairly gushing with praise. CNN did a report that went viral all over the internet:

A woman gave birth to a boy in the hospital, and out of gratitude she named him Israel. There were few if any Israelis among the victims. They are doing this because, well, that's just what Israelis do. One of the doctors quoted hazal that a person who saves one life is as if he saved a whole world. I don't think he was particularly "religious." The Kiddush Hashem unfolding is marvelous; the whole world marvels at it. Sooner or later the world will forget and go back to Israel bashing as usual, but the survivors in Haiti are likely to remember who responded to their need with talk and who with action. And even if they don't, there is a seeing eye and a hearing ear, and all is being recorded in an archive more enduring and more consequential than CNN or the New York Times. Finally, this scene gives both our enemies and defeatists among us something to ponder: Where Israel is concerned if you don't believe in miracles you're not a realist.

Tragedy in Haiti

2010-01-17T17:46:00.008-05:00

In a chilling reminder of the awesomeness and randomness of the forces of nature, an earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale flattened Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, seemingly in the blink of an eye. Simulating the effects of a nuclear explosion (but without the concommitant radiation), buildings collapsed, trapping their occupants in the rubble. Tens, if not hundreds of thousands, are estimated to have been killed. More will be pulled out with lifelong serious injuries. It will take the Haitian economy, already the poorest in the Western Hemisphere, years to recover. Relief is reaching victims slowly since the airport is relatively serviceable but roads are impassable.

The last time the world was visited with a natural catastrophe of such magnitude was 2004, when a tsunami struck Southeast Asia and the eastern coast of Africa, killing an estimated quarter million people. At the time, we heard idiotic statements from a few Orthodox rabbis to the effect that the tragedy was a warning to Jews to correct their behavior, in ways congruent with the particular rabbi's pet peeve. What mind-boggling hutzpa, what low value placed on the lives of Gentiles - a quarter million snuffed out to send a veiled message to us! Thankfully, we have not heard such stupidity from our naked emperors (yet), though such murmurings are surfacing in fundamentalist Christian circles. When faced with unimaginable horror, a common reaction is to ask mystical questions: Why would God do such a thing? What is the meaning of it all? As a scientist I say that these are not wise questions to ask (see Eccles. 7:10). There is no deep spiritual significance here, at least none discernible to us mortals. Tectonic plates bump into one another, blind to us humans. If they collide on land, buildings collapse. If at sea, gigantic waves are set in motion that sweep all before them when they strike land. All of this has been happening since the formation of our planet - long, long before our species made its belated entrance on the world stage. We are brought face to face with our utter insignificance: Who are we that God should even care about us (Ps. 8:5)? And yet He does. He made us in His image and entrusted the planet into our care. Why did He make a world where earthquakes and tsunamis happen without regard to us, where children get leukemia, where all sorts of bad things happen to good people? We don't know. הנסתרת לה' אלקינו והנגלת לנו ולבנינו עד עולם לעשות את כל דברי התורה הזאת. The hidden things belong to our Eternal God; the revealed are ours and our children's forever, to do all that this Torah commands us (Deut. 29:28). Why God does what He does is hidden; God is infinite and our grasp of creation is finite. Our obligations are revealed and clear to us. We are bidden to master the world (Gen. 1:28). The "why" may be hidden but the "how" is not. Discover how nature works, and how we can bend it to our will. How can we predict tsunamis and warn people in their path? How can we build buildings to withstand an earthquake? How can we prevent and cure disease? Torah frees us from pagan superstition; instead of the arbitrary whims of competing gods and goddesses we have a world of natural law that we can hope to comprehend.

We are also bidden להדבק במידותיו, to imitate God as it were and reflect His love and care onto all of humanity (Isaiah 58: 6-7). And I must say that Jews of all ideologies and shades of observance have risen beautifully to the occasion. The Israelis of necessity have become the world's experts at digging people out of the rubble of collapsed buildings; their disasters are, for the most part, not natural but man-made. Israeli military units are on the scene, as is a contingent of Zaka volunteers. We are hearing a few heartwarming accounts of people being pulled alive from the rubble, but for thousands more it is too late. It seems that every Jewish organization provides us a chance to donate money online, so much so that the government is warning us to be wary of the scam artists that come out of the woodwork in times like these. In general, do not respond to email requests for money, even if they look genuine and appear to be from organizations you belong to. Scam artists are expert website counterfeiters. Open a new browser, navigate to the address of an outfit that you know to be trustworthy, and proceed from there. The Orthodox Union is collecting money and funneling it to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), which has a presence on the ground in Haiti. This will, unfortunately, be an ongoing project owing to the magnitude of the disaster and Haiti's inability to care for itself even in relatively good times.

Don't be tempted to say that all this is far away from us and not our concern; it is in our backyard and stability there is very much in our interest. And karma is a hard taskmaster. We are not immune to the blind forces of nature. Israel is subject to earthquake and drought. Closer to home, Westchester and Rockland counties in New York sit astride an earthquake fault as, of course, does all of California. Long Island is long overdue for a major hurricane. Fear of God, if nothing else, should prompt us to do whatever we can to alleviate this horrific human suffering. And if we think we can live with a nuclear Iran and/or terrorists with suitcase nukes, imagine a good many Port-au-Princes at the same time.

The way we would have God care for us is the way we must care for the least of His children.

Let's Fight to Win!

2010-01-08T14:28:00.006-05:00

According to today's screaming headline in the New York Post, even Obama connected the dots. Fanatics are out to kill us. And they draw their inspiration from Islam, at least that crazy brand of Islam that the Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the ruling clique in Saudi Arabia adhere to. Better a year late than never, I guess. A fanatic Muslim two weeks ago tried to detonate a bomb smuggled in his underwear aboard a plane about to land in Detroit. Only a lucky combination of a malfunction in the bomb and some quick action by heroic passengers saved the plane. The President's clueless Homeland Security chief crowed that the system worked. Sure. The man was on a watch list for potential terrorists. His own father had informed the American embassy in his native Nigeria that he was radicalized and bore watching. He was traveling alone on a transatlantic flight, with no luggage, with a one-way ticket paid for in cash, and nobody was suspicious. He was allowed onto the plane without so much as a search. And the solutions bandied about? Full body scanners and such. This when a lady with a titanium rod in her hip didn't even trip the metal detectors, and neither did a reporter with a titanium chain openly displayed on her person.

Our enemies are nothing if not patient, persistent and clever. We will not win this war by playing defense. We have to get on the attack, and do a few things that are politically incorrect but might get the job done. As usual, the Post's columnist Ralph Peters is right on the money. Our self-imposed rules of engagement in Afghanistan are playing into the hands of our enemies. We have to give our commanders the authority to call in air strikes even if the Taliban's human shields will come to harm. We should do whatever we must to extract information from captured terrorists, never mind Geneva Conventions (they're for uniformed soldiers in a regular army), never mind Constitutional rights (they're for American citizens). We won World War 2 because we were willing to kill numerous German and Japanes civilians in the process. If that war had been fought by Obama's lawyers, the bad guys would have won and we would not be here. Our boys' lives are worth more than those of the enemy. That is the brutal calculus of war, and if you don't have the stomach for it then you shouldn't be President, you shouldn't be in charge of internal security, and you shouldn't watch the television news.

And now for Pakistan. It's an open secret that elements of Pakistan's military and intelligence communities are in league with our enemies. So let's stop coddling them. If we have to go into Pakistan to pursue the Taliban, then do it and never mind tipping off their government so it can tip off the people being pursued. And Saudi Arabia. It's an open secret that they build madrassas all over the Muslim world to export their perverted religion and mold fresh terrorists to die for Allah. Stop coddling them. Either they stop bankrolling terrorists or we send in the Marines to take over the oil wells and bring about regime change we can believe in.

And back to airport security. It is clear that focusing only on what is taken on an aircraft will not keep us safe. At least as important is who gets aboard the plane. It's not about racial profiling. The "shoe bomber," Richard Reid, was a Briton with a Western physical appearance and a British name. The Christmas bomber did have a Muslim name (Muslims come in all shapes, sizes and colors), but was not Middle Eastern and did not have a Middle Eastern skin tone. Racial profiling would not have caught either. It's about people profiling. The Israelis got it right. If you exhibit a certain pattern of behavior (the Israelis rightly do not divulge the whole pattern), then you arouse suspicion, are taken out of line for a private search. Ben-Gurion airport is among the world's safest. Their system would not have allowed Mr. Abdulmutallab to board the plane. As another Post columnist wrote, it's time to take a page out of their book.

It's time to go on offense. Throw our weight around, kill the bad guys and never mind the assorted leftists, liberals and terror apologists crying foul.

Do it the French way

2009-12-31T13:14:00.003-05:00

Every December observant Jews who function in the larger society face a dilemma. We live among and work with Gentiles, and wish to give gifts to some of them. I feel funny giving them Christmas presents when I do not celebrate the holiday. Generally, I am not very enamored of the French - effete, emasculated characters whose butts we American cowboys saved twice in the last century and who show little gratitude. But they have a wise solution to the December gift-giving quandary. When they had a revolution in 1789, the new regime followed our lead and separated church and state. A good thing too, since countless good Frenchmen and women were slaughtered or driven out of France in wars of religion. As Justice Frankfurter said, keeping religion separate from the state is best for religion and best for the state. The French even experimented with a new calendar to replace the Gregorian church calendar. That experiment failed; the Gregorian calendar whose year begins tomorrow conquered the world because it is the most accurate calendar devised to date, including the Jewish calendar which has Pesah slowly creeping into summer, against the Torah's mandate that it be celebrated in spring. In France only children get Christmas presents; adults exchange gifts at the New Year. The New Year is thoroughly secular; how many Christians know that its origin is their savior's brit milah? All Americans, ourselves included, use the Gregorian calendar in business and even socially (When is Pesah this year? March 30). I gave my Gentile neighbors a New Year gift yesterday and they were gracious, probably realizing how awkward it would be for me to have given it a week earlier. If you look hard enough, you can find secular New Year cards in stores; they feature pretty snowmen instead of the red-and-green glitz. Or use the blank cards we all get from charities to which we contribute anyway.

This will probably be my last post in 2009, so I wish my readers a happy, healthy, safe and prosperous New Year.

Imagine. . . .

2009-12-27T00:31:00.006-05:00

Imagine all the people living life in peace. . . . .John Lennon

On December 8, 1980 John Lennon of Beatles fame was shot and killed in front of his apartment building in Manhattan. His widow Yoko Ono endowed Strawberry Fields, a patch of serenity in Central Park named for one of Lennon’s songs. Every year on December 8, people gather in Strawberry Fields for an impromptu “healing circle.” Many bring guitars and play Lennon’s songs. The rest listen, reflect and perhaps light a candle. One year I stumbled upon the gathering, having gone to Central Park for another purpose. This year I had the time and deliberately went there. Most of my generation of Americans remembers Lennon’s song Imagine, where he beautifully expresses our hope that all of humanity would learn to stop fighting one another and simply get along. John F. Kennedy expressed that hope in his campaign speeches. I remember reading an op-ed in the Jewish Press knocking the song and its writer as utopian. Well, utopian it is, but so what? Is it any more utopian than our hope for Mashiach? Where would we be if we couldn’t imagine a world better than the one we have? Would we strive to make a better world, a world free of racism, poverty, disease and other scourges? Indeed, while many scientific discoveries come about by serendipity (looking for one thing and finding something else even better), others came about because scientists imagined something new and better, then set about creating it. They imagined a world without polio and developed vaccines that eradicated the disease, imagined a world without unwanted children and came up with The Pill.

Imagine a world where two strong, healthy men could get together and, without forbidden sexual contact, make strong, healthy boys. Or the analogous situation for women. Most of the technological dots are already in place, but nobody seems to be connecting them. If it ever becomes reality, would there be any rationale for a secular society not to allow same-sex marriage? What about all the halakhic problems such an arrangement would engender? Must we wait until such problems are upon us before we start thinking about them?

Now imagine a world where Jews and Arabs in Israel put aside a century of enmity and live together in peace. Pipe dream? Yes, unless young Jews and Arabs make it a reality. And the place to start is Jerusalem. There is no separation barrier there. That came down in 1967. Anybody can walk from one part of the city to the other. Imagine five Jewish teenagers dribbling a basketball into the Arab part of town, finding a court with a game going, and challenging the winners as kids do the world over. Presto - human contact. You can't hate and play basketball at the same time. In their commingled sweat they will discover their common humanity and how wonderful it is to be young, strong and full of life. Hey, it worked in Crown Heights.

Holding on to Judea and Samaria as I believe we must (click here) with its large hostile Arab population that is not about to pack up and leave will require imaginative, outside-the-box thinking. An example of such thinking is the Elon Plan, which posits only one Palestinian state, the one that already exists and that sits on 80% of mandatory Palestine. It is called Jordan. The Arabs of Judea and Samaria would be citizens of Jordan living in Israeli territory. They will carry Jordanian passports and their children will go to Jordanian schools that will fly the Jordanian flag on Israeli territory. The guiding principle is known as extraterritoriality. It was never tried before on such a grand scale. But America's founding fathers knew well that they were setting up a form of government - a republic - that had not been tried since Roman times and that failed then. The rest, as they say, is history. Extraterritoriality can work if both sides are determined to make it work, and one of its pillars must be regular and frequent sporting contact between Israeli and Arab schoolchildren. One thing is certain. If the past 60-plus years is any guide, peace will not come down like manna from heaven. It will not come from governments. But people-to-people contact might just make it grow from the ground up.

As Robert F. Kennedy said, "Some see things as they are and say why; I dream things that never were and say why not."

Meah Shearim in Brooklyn?

2009-12-10T14:35:00.007-05:00

You better watch out
If you're liberty's guy
Better raise a shout
I'm telling you why
Tyranny is coming to town. . . .

It seems like the same goons who think they own the streets in Jerusalem think they own Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg too, and the city is playing into their hands in a cynical ploy for a powerful voting bloc. After the usual approval process, the city painted a bicycle lane along Bedford Avenue in the Hasidic area of Williamsburg. It appears that Bedford Avenue is a prime route for bicycle commuters seeking to access the bicycle path across the Williamsburg Bridge. Demarcated bike lanes protect cyclists from onrushing automobile traffic, a major cause of bicycle and pedestrian fatalities. The downside is less space for automobiles. I don't drive or ride a bicycle. I get around on foot (running and walking) and by public transportation (bus and subway), so I am probably the closest thing you will find to an impartial observer. The city has been moving for some years in the direction of more environmentally responsible transportation. Automobiles contribute to air pollution from carbon monoxide and particulates, though much less now than in years past. They use massive quantities of increasingly scarce fossil fuels whose burning contributes to climate change. Simply put, a car occupied by only the driver is the most irresponsible, wasteful and inefficient way of getting from Point A to Point B. Bicycles do not burn fossil fuels at all, hence do not pollute the air. They use human muscle power, and thus contribute to not only a greener New York but a healthier one (see my previous post). Thus, the city is right to encourage bicycles at the expense of automobiles.

When a bike lane is painted on a street, even after a lengthy approval process where everybody has a chance to be heard, people are unhappy and they gripe. I saw that when a bike lane was painted on Bedford Avenue in my own neighborhood of Midwood. In a short while people get accustomed to the bike lane, and even come to like the new reality of more healthy people and fewer cars. But that has not happened in Williamsburg. There the gripes persist, and recently the city, admittedly to curry favor with a large voting bloc (probably the only one left in New York) erased the bike lane. Bicycle activists responded by clandestinely repainting the lane, and two of their number were arrested and charged with criminal mischief.

Urban guerrillas repaint the bike lane - Nonviolent direct action is
a time-honored American method of effecting social change.

The complaints of the Hasidim center around two alleged problems:
1. Cyclists create a safety hazard for children going to and from school. Granted, Hasidim have more children than most New Yorkers, and they go to school earlier and come home later, meaning when it is dark outside in wintertime. However, the safety hazard is mostly from automobiles and not from cyclists. Bicycles are inherently safer since they travel more slowly and can stop on a dime. And the automobiles are driven largely by Hasidim whose reckless, devil-may-care driving is legendary. As in so many other areas of life, these people seem to think that the traffic laws are mere suggestions, to be flouted whenever convenient. Kent Avenue, a block or two west of Bedford, is a case in point. Hasidim claim that a dedicated bike lane exists on Kent Avenue and therefore the one on Bedford is superfluous. Well, this is how the Hasidim treat the lane on Kent Avenue:

That's right; they park right across it. The bike lane exists to provide free parking for their catering halls, and the police don't do a thing about it. Nor is this a matter of Hasidim vs modern New Yorkers. Baruch Herzfeld, a modern Orthodox Jew, set up a "bicycle gemah" to help Hasidim who want to ride bicycles but aren't quite up to buying one yet. He is now in Copenhagen to confront Mayor Bloomberg on the issue at the climate conference.

He reports that quite a number of Hasidim actually want the bike lane, but they won't appear on camera or give their names. I wonder why.

Some cyclists do ride recklessly and ignore the traffic laws, perhaps out of ignorance of the fact that they are considered traffic and must stop at red lights, go the right way on one-way streets and so forth. Periodic enforcement blitzes would be in order, until cyclists know the law and act accordingly.

2. Women ride their bicycles in "immodest dress," meaning exposed elbows and knees and their own uncovered hair. This is too much for their sexually repressed men to handle. They might actually see females that aren't covered from head to toe, and who knows what will happen to their pure unsullied souls then. But I guess it's okay for those men to molest young boys in yeshiva and at the mikva. Well, guess what - bike lane or not, bicycles have a right to use the streets, and they will use the streets. The only difference will be that without the lane there will be more conflict between automobiles and bicycles, therefore more injuries and deaths. And, newsflash - American streets are public thoroughfares. Anybody of any persuasion may walk, run or ride a bicycle on them, dressed as he or she pleases. And we will walk, run and ride our bicycles dressed as we please. If our dress causes Hasidic men eye strain, ain't that too bad? If we allow these people to impose their will on the rest of us, what's next? Gender-segregated public buses? Men and women forced to walk on opposite sides of the sidewalk?

Enough is enough. These religious obscurantists must be given to understand that they do not have ba'alut (ownership) over any street, and we will not allow them to turn our country or any part of it into Talibanland. Accordingly, a protest ride will start at the foot of Williamsburg Bridge this Sunday, December 13, at 2:00 P.M. to culminate with a rally at Bedford Avenue and Wallabout Street at about 3:00. Cyclists and sympathetic pedestrians are invited. Dress for the weather.

Hasidim - A word of advice. You can't beat us, so you might as well join us. You don't like the sight of attractive women dressed the way American women dress? Well, we don't like the sight of ugly, repulsive men with fat bellies. It makes us want to puke. Get a bike from Mr. Herzfeld's gemah and get on it. Get yourselves a pair of running shoes and use the bodies God gave you to use. You'd be surprised at the goodwill you will generate. I am appalled at the ill will you generate right now; just look at the comments in the articles I linked to and the cross-references there. Get out there and move. You will be happier and healthier.

Let freedom ring.

Remember Pearl Harbor

2009-12-07T17:17:00.004-05:00

Today is Pearl Harbor Day. 68 years ago Japan carried out a sneak attack on our Pacific fleet and all but destroyed it while their diplomats were still negotiating with ours in Washington. Our intelligence community and military brass were caught napping. Thousands of servicemen lost their lives. America's isolationists and Nazi sympathizers were finally shut up and the country entered World War II, which had already been raging for over two years. At first, victory was far from certain. The sneak attack was followed by the Bataan Death March. Japan's brutal maltreatment of the conquered Chinese and of Korean women (Japan occupied Korea in 1910 and did not leave until its defeat in 1945) are matters of record. So much for Japan's vaunted code of honorable warfare. Unlike Germany, Japan has yet to own up to its crimes and make amends. At first, victory was far from certain. The tide did not begin to turn until the Battle of Midway a year later.

Victory took a dreadful toll of blood and treasure. If we had to fight the war today, who knows if this hedonistic generation would have persevered. Our president just spoke to the nation, committing thousands of brave men and women to battle and not daring to use words like "win" and "victory" or tell us what victory would consist of.

Let's remember Pearl Harbor and the brave men and women who fought and died there as we face our current foe. Let's never forget that freedom is not free, and never will be until Mashiach comes.

Pearl Harbor during the attack

JFK and America's talking asses

2009-11-22T15:01:00.007-05:00

In the 46 years since President John F. Kennedy's murder on this date, revisionist history has taken to besmirching his memory and debunking his accomplishments. They call him an inveterate Cold Warrior, fixated on the evils of Communism. Well, that is precisely what made him great. He wasn't wearing blinders or rose colored glasses. Communism was the primary source of evil in the world during his presidency, and he acted accordingly. He stood up to the Soviets in West Berlin, Cuba and all over the world. Even when he botched badly, as in the Bay of Pigs, he "failed while daring greatly," to borrow a phrase from my other Presidential hero, Teddy Roosevelt. Think of the kind of world we would be living in if he had allowed the Communists to have their way.

I watched a 60 Minutes episode several years ago about a historian whose name I forgot dredging up dirt about the President that had been concealed from the public when he was in office. Behind the facade of a youthful and vigorous leader was a man gravely ill with Addison's Disease (adrenal insuffiency) and in constant pain from a bad back. We knew about the bad back when he was President. We did not know that he constantly took amphetamines to mask the pain that dogged him constantly. When I heard all that I wanted to slug the television and shout, "Bil'am Ha-Rasha!" Bil'am came to curse the Jews and in spite of himself ended up blessing them. This talking ass came to debunk the legend of President Kennedy and instead magnified it. We always thought that the President acquired a bad back as a result of his heroic exploits on the PT109 in World War II, where he towed a badly wounded comrade to safety after their boat was rammed and sunk by a Japanese destroyer. Now we know that John F. Kennedy did what he did on the PT109 with a bad back that he had since childhood. If he wanted to, he could have sat out the war with a desk job, or perhaps even dodged service entirely with a 4-F medical exemption, but that is not what Kennedys do. He did full duty, and even returned to active duty after aggravating his back on the PT109. The pills he was addicted to were standard treatment for his condition at the time, and helped conceal the gravity of his illness from potential enemies. True, he would probably not have been able to conceal his illness from the public with today's media coverage, but that says more about the media than about the President. In the early '60s the media for the most part still put country first, before sensationalism and journalistic coups. That the nature of the President's illness was successfully kept from the Soviets was certainly worth its being kept from us.

Then there is the matter of President Kennedy's widely publicized extramarital affairs, also wisely kept from the public during his presidency. If I had a dollar for every man who had extramarital affairs, I would be a very wealthy man. And if sainthood were a requirement for public office, nobody that we should want in office would qualify. We don't want a Mother Teresa in the White House; we need someone willing to get down and dirty with unsavory characters who seek our harm. There is reason to believe that powerful men are genetically programmed to seek multiple sexual partners and thereby spread their genes; see Our Inner Ape, by Frans De Waal. The wonder is that, sick as he was, he was capable of sexual activity altogether. When I think of the courage and steadfastness with which he guided the ship of state, I am more than willing to forgive him his sexual peccadillos.

The talking asses will continue digging up dirt and throwing it at better men than they. That is all they are good for. I thank God every day that we had John F. Kennedy in the White House for the thousand days we had him, and I wish we had a leader like him as we confront another implacable enemy hell-bent on destroying us and our way of life.

Settlements - An Obstacle to Piece

2009-11-03T12:12:00.005-05:00

Broaden the space of your tents and stretch the curtains of your dwellings, spare not, lengthen your cords and strengthen your poles. For you shall expand left and right, and your seed will possess nations and inhabit waste places. . .(Isaiah 54:2,3)

This passage is read as the haftara for Parshat Ki-Teze, the fifth of the seven haftarot of consolation between Tisha B'Av and Rosh Hashanah. It is also the haftara for Parshat Noah. It is alluded to in one of the piyyutim recited on Hoshanna Rabbah before we beat the arava. Since the Six Day War, the message has been unmistakably clear. The Prophet is speaking to us. The ge'ula is unfolding before us, and we are called to possess and inhabit the waste places that had once been ours, and to make them flourish once again. And since the Six Day War, dedicated hatutzim (just about the only ones left!) under the influence of Rav Tzvi Yehuda Kook zt"l have done exactly that. Settlements have sprung up all over Yehuda v'Shomron on land that belongs to us even if the rest of the world says otherwise. American Presidents have repeated the same litany since the Six Day War: the settlements are illegal and an obstacle to peace. Since Oslo, American Presidents have maintained that the land involved shoud become a "Palestinian" state. Never mind that for nineteen years when the Arabs held the land there was never any talk of a "Palestinian" state, nor indeed of a Palestinian people. The land was held by the Palestinian state that already exists, namely Jordan, but Jordan's sovereignty over it was recognized by only two nations on earth: Great Britain and Pakistan. The Arabs' intentions were and are crystal clear, except to the deliberately self-blinded: destroy Israel. If they can't destroy it all at once, they would destroy it piece by piece. Whatever concessions they can wring out of us with the help of a craven American administration they would take, and use it to prepare for the next round. There never was a peace process, only a "piece process" - one piece of Israel to our enemies followed by another and another. The settlements create facts on the ground that are difficult to erase, as a faithless Israeli government learned in 2005 in Gaza. The settlements came down but at a cost to Israeli cohesion and soldiers' morale that future governments should be loath to repeat. And what did we get for it? Daily rocket fire on Sderot and as far north as Ashkelon. A piece process indeed! The settlements are quite legal by God's law, and "an obstacle to piece."

But what about the soldiers who will have to fight to defend them? Do we want more boys coming home in caskets? Of course not, but even worse would be the peace of the grave. Since before the founding of the State we made a value judgment that it is better to go down fighting than to go down not fighting. Actually, this is a value judgment that men have made from time immemorial. We are primates, and primates are territorial animals; sorry folks, nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. We defend what is ours. On December 8, 1941 young American men, enraged by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, queued up to join the Army. Imagine if Americans then had regarded peace as the highest priority, and not unleashed our full power on Japan and Germany. Think back to 1861, and imagine if Abraham Lincoln had listened to the "anything for peace" counsels, and there were many, and allowed the South to go its way. America would have been spared a long and bloody war with frightful losses. But it would not have become a superpower, able to stand up to the Nazis and the Communists, and the world would be a different, and much worse, place. Those of us who would walk away from Eretz Yisrael are infected by two millenia of deterritorialization, also known as galut, as well as by decades of secularist claptrap questioning whether the land is really ours. Or perhaps they had their manhood sucked away by two generations of feminist propaganda. We've been told for as long as I can remember to be "sensitive," to "get in touch with our feminine side," that machismo is bad, that we're all suffering from a fictitious malady called "testosterone poisoning," ad nauseam. We're even made to feel guilty for thanking God we're men. So now we're sold on the idea that nothing at all is worth fighting for. We won't stand up to the schoolyard bully, the mugger on the street, or the Arab enemies who will never accept an Israel of any shape or size.

Many good and decent Jews, religious and secular, disagree with the above, including the writer of a blog I regularly read and with whom I generally agree. How should we relate to them? I have heard them characterized in the vilest of terms, quite unbecoming people who should know how to conduct a mahloket l'shem shamayim (argument for the sake of Heaven). Our ba'alei plugta (ideological opponents) must be treated with the utmost respect. Words like "traitor" have no place in the discourse; traitors are motivated by personal gain, while our opponents genuinely believe they are acting in the best interests of Israel and the Jewish people. The boycott by a Knesset member of the special session in memory of the late Yitzhak Rabin is exactly what is not needed. Even when the opposition calls us warmongers and such, we should not respond in kind. The argument must always be ad rem (to the thing), never ad hominem (to the person). As I learned as a child from Rabbi Chaim Yachnes, even when somebody's pshat is totally wrong, always attack the pshat, never the person. I am certain that Rav Kook and his son would not have it any other way.

Plus ca change. . . .

2009-10-14T15:36:00.003-04:00

The following was forwarded to me by email. It is originally from a powerful Maccabi weightlifter who visited Austria, the new enlightened post-Nazi Austria.

WHILE IN VIENNA, KARYN AND I WENT LOOKING FOR A GIFT FOR ALAN.
WE THOUGH A ARMY SURPLUS STORE WOULD DO NICELY.
ALAN COLLECTS OLD ARMY STUFF.
THE STORE WAS CLOSED, 3 HOUR LUNCH BREAK.
WE LOOKED THROUGH THE WINDOW.
IN AUSTRIA, I EXPECTED TO SEE NAZI THINGS.
NAZI ARM BANDS, SWASTIKAS, NAZI FLAGS,
I EXPECTED THIS.
I DIDN'T EXPECT TO SEE THINGS STOLEN FROM TEMPLES.
YODS, TORAH FACE PLATES, YELLOW STARS, ARM BANDS FROM DIFFERENT CONCENTRATION CAMPS...
WHEN I TOLD KARYN WHAT THESE THINGS WERE, SHE WAS VERY UPSET...
I WAS VERY ANGRY.
WE WALKED AWAY.
WE SEPARATED AND WERE TO SUPPOSED TO MEET JAN FOR LUNCH.
I WENT FOR A WALK TO CLEAR MY HEAD BUT STARTED TO HAVE A ANXIETY ATTACK INSTEAD.
[this is hard to write]
I FOUND A PHARMACY AND SPELLED OUT XANEX.
I COULD BARELY SPEAK AT THIS POINT.
I TOOK A LOT OF LITTLE PILLS TO TRY TO CALM DOWN.
I CALLED ABE AND BETTY WEINTRAUB BACK HOME TO ASK WHAT TO DO.
I WAS READY TO MAX OUT EVERY CREDIT CARD I HAD.
THEY BOTH TOLD ME THAT WOULD ONLY MAKE THE MARKET FOR SUCH THINGS TO PROSPER.
AND NOT TO GIVE THEM A DIME.
TO TRY TO CALM DOWN...ME, CALM DOWN, RIGHT.
I STILL DON'T KNOW IF THEY WERE RIGHT.
i'm starting to lose it again just remembering this nightmare.
I MET KARYN AND JAN, KARYN KNEW ME BETTER BACK THEN.
THEY LOOKED AT ME AND SAID WE SHOULD GO FOR A DRINK.
I HAD ONE DRINK.
I TOLD THEM I WAS GOING BACK TO THE STORE.
KARYN LOOKED ME RIGHT IN THE EYE AND ASKED ME IF I WAS GOING TO GET ARRESTED?
IN A LOW VOICE I ANSWERED - I DON'T KNOW...I WAS STARTING TO TREMBLE, TO LOSE IT AGAIN.
I WALKED BACK TO THE STORE NOT REALLY KNOWING WHAT WOULD HAPPEN.
I WIPED MY FACE.
i could never tell this story face to face. i'm getting upset now because i still don't know if i did the right thing.
I WALKED IN THE SMALL STORE AND LOOKED AROUND AT EVERYTHING.
I DIDN'T WANT THE OWNER TO KNOW I WAS JEWISH.
FINALLY I ASKED HIM WHAT THE "SILVER POINTY THING" WAS AND HOW MUCH WAS IT.
HE TOLD ME IT WAS A ANTIQUE BABY RATTLE [IT WAS A YOD] AND WAS 350 EURO.
I CONTINUED TO LOOK AROUND AND SAW AN VERY OLD TORAH FACE PLATE.
HE SAW ME LOOKING AT IT AND TOLD ME IT WAS 800 EURO.
HE THEN TOLD ME THE "RATTLE" WAS REALLY USED TO READ JEWISH SCROLLS.
I TOLD HIM I KNEW EXACTLY WHAT IS WAS.
NOW HE KNEW I WAS WAS JEWISH.
WITH MY BACK TO HIM, I ASKED WHY THESE THINGS WERE SO EXPENSIVE.
JEWISH PEOPLE BUY THEM TO RESCUE THEM, OTHERS BUY THEM FOR THEIR HISTORY.
i remember this as if it was this morning.
HE ASKED ME WHAT I WOULD BE WILLING TO PAY.
MY JAW TIGHTENED, I CLOSED MY FISTS AND TURNED TO HIM.
I BACKED HIM TO THE WALL, INCHES FROM HIS FACE.
I ANGRILY RAISED MY VOICE AND ASKED HIM HOW MUCH HE WOULD PAY FOR A RELIGIOUS ITEMS STOLEN FROM A RANSACKED CHURCH?
I DON'T WANT ANY TROUBLE!!! HE SAID RAISEING HIS OPEN HANDS.
YOU ALREADY GOT TROUBLE!
I WAS LOSING MY MIND!
I WAS SWEATING, MY HEART WAS POUNDING!
A 265 LB. BOMB ABOUT TO BLOW!
READY TO POUND HIM AS HARD AND AS LONG AS I COULD...
EVERY MUSCLE WAS TIGHT, HE HAD NO PLACE TO GET AWAY.
I KNEW IF I THREW ONE PUNCH, I WOULD HAVE THROWN ONE HUNDRED.
I WOULD HAVE BROKEN HIS FACE, HANDS, KNEES AND FEET.
IF HE SURVIVED I WOULD MAKE SURE HE WAS IN PAIN FOR THE REST OF HIS LIFE.

I NEVER WAS, NOR HAVE I BEEN SINCE, THAT CLOSE TO WANTING TO CRIPPLE SOMEONE WITH MY BARE HANDS.
I NEVER EVEN THOUGHT OF A WEAPON, ONLY MY JEWISH HANDS WOULD DO.

THE LOOK FEAR IN HIS EYES, HIS FACE TURNING PALE, HIS BODY SHAKING LIKE A LEAF, WAS JUST ENOUGH TO SLOW ME DOWN.
I THOUGHT OF WHAT KARYN SAID, ARE YOU GOING TO GET ARRESTED?

AN AMERICAN AND A JEW IN AUSTRIA...THIS IS NOT A GOOD IDEA.
I WALKED OUT OF THE STORE.

THIS SHORT STORY TOOK ME WELL OVER AN HOUR TO WRITE. I HAD TO STOP SEVERAL TIMES.

PEOPLE TELL ME IT WAS A LONG TIME AGO. I SHOULD LET IT GO.

WE WENT TO A STREET FAIR THE DAY WE WERE LEAVING.
THERE WERE OLD BLACK AND WHITE PHOTO'S FOR SALE.
GIANT SWASTIKA'S PAINTED PROUDLY ON BUILDINGS.
I ASKED WHAT THEY WERE.
THE OLD MAN SAID:

BETTER TIMES...

SOME PEOPLE SAY I HAVE CHIP ON MY SHOULDER.

WHEN ISRAEL PAINT STORE DID THEIR SIDEWALKS OVER, SOMEONE CARVED A SWASTIKA IN THE CEMENT.
J. ISRAEL WAS THE ORIGINAL OWNER THREE OWNERS AGO.

IN 1972 MY UNCLE SLIM TOOK ME TO A FLATBUSH TEMPLE ON YOM KIPPOR.
THE ARABS JUST ATTACKED ON THE HOLIEST DAY OF THE JEWISH YEAR.
THE RABBI, NO MIKE, HAD A BOOMING VOICE.
HE SAID, AND I QUOTE:

SHAME ON YOU,
SHAME ON YOU ALL YOU JEWS WITH YOUR PORSCHE'S AND MERCEDES BUILT ON THE BLOOD OF YOUR PEOPLE!
YOU CAN NEVER FORGET!
NOR CAN YOU LET OTHERS FORGET!
I'LL KEEP MY CHIP, THANKYOU VERY MUCH.

I'M SORRY, BUT YOU ASKED...

MARK
REMEMBER THIS NEXT TIME YOU OR YOURS GOES CAR SHOPPING.
YOU WHAT HAPPENED IN AUSTRIA... [Ad kan leshono - end quote]

Note how the Austrian trafficker in stolen Jewish property went pale and shook as soon as he was confronted with a Jew who didn't fit his stereotype of the weak and frightened ghetto Jew. Perhaps this weightlifter should have proceeded to give the shopkeeper a taste of the Jewish fist.

This brings back memories of what my father a"h told me of growing up in Vienna in the 1920s and '30s, before Hitler came to power. The streets were teeming with brownshirted Nazi thugs who regularly harassed and beat Jews on the street. Mind you, these Jews were not the despised ostjuden with their beards, strange dress, foreign language and outlandish mannerisms. These were acculturated Jews who considered themselves Austrians, dressed like Austrians and spoke German like Austrians. Many even fought for Austria in World War I. My father a"h was an amateur boxer and gave the brownshirts a taste of Jewish strength. Who knows how things might have turned out differently if there had been more like him.

Mary Travers: R.I.P.

2009-09-18T11:39:00.003-04:00

Two days ago Mary Travers, the female part of the popular folk music group Peter Paul and Mary, passed away from leukemia at the age of 72. Any American growing up in the 1960s and '70s grew up with their music. Music has a unique ability to cut through the protective walls we build around ourselves and to touch our souls. The songs of this particular group embodied the countercultural protest movement of the time. In particular, Blowin' in the Wind and If I Had a Hammer became anthems of the civil rights movement, sung at the March on Washington in 1963. One summer before the Verrazano Bridge was built I went to day camp. We would ride the ferry from the camp in Staten Island back to Brooklyn, and we would have to wait at the terminal for the boat to arrive. While we were waiting the bus would reverberate with If I Had a Hammer.

I didn't (and don't) agree with all of PP&M's political views, but I was fully signed on to the civil rights movement as soon as I became aware of what it was about. I like to believe that had I been a few years older I would have marched in Selma or been a freedom rider. Thank God we in New York had no overt Jim Crow laws that I can remember, but there were unwritten, unspoken restrictions on where black people could live, what occupations they could pursue and so forth. That kind of apartheid is the Lord's abomination, and for we who suffered under Hitler to tolerate it here at home is doubly abominable.

At this time of year we experience heightened awareness of the brevity and fragility of human life. We think of those who were positive influences in our lives who have since passed on, and we have reached an age where more and more of those people are no longer with us. It is for those of us whose souls were touched by Mary Travers's music to continue to propagate her message of love, brotherhood and intolerance for injustice and inhumanity.

If I had a bell
I'd ring it in the morning
I'd ring it in the evening
All over this land
I'd ring out danger
I'd ring out a warning. . . .

Sounds familiar? Good.

Wishing all my readers a ktiva va-hatima tova. May you have a year of happiness, health and God's blessings.

Civilization vs Barbarism

2009-09-11T16:50:00.003-04:00

Civilization vs Barbarism: That is the titanic struggle in which we are engaged. Eight years ago today Islamic barbarians crashed planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing some 3000 innocent people. We've gotten accustomed to soft living and too many of us take the blessings of liberty for granted and are unwilling to fight for our freedom. A free people unwilling to fight for their freedom is sure to lose it. Watch this video for a preview of what can happen to us, God forbid, if we don't stand up to those who would take our freedom away. If you think that the barbarians no longer have evil designs against us, watch The Third Jihad. And bear in mind that some Jews in Israel would be happy with a state like what exists in Iran and Afghanistan under the Taliban.

Review my previous posts for 9/11 anniversaries. Tomorrow is the Jewish Yahrzeit, always 23 Elul, exactly one week before Rosh Hashanah. Think of the good people who were murdered by the devil-worshipers, and of the good people who fell in battle for our way of life, and who are coming home severely wounded. When you get solicitations from the Jewish War Veterans, Disabled American Veterans and similar groups, don't throw them away. We remain free because of the people they help.

And if you want to see the Twin Towers rise again, visit http://www.teamtwintowers.org/ and http://www.twintowersalliance.com/ .

Living Strong: The Best Revenge

2009-08-29T22:38:00.004-04:00

Two weeks ago I ran the New York City Half Marathon, consisting of one loop around Central Park, then south on Seventh Avenue to the storied 42nd Street, west to the West Side Highway and south to a festive finish at Battery Park, in the shadow of New York's Holocaust Museum. Since we assemble at the start when it is still dark, I packed my tallit and tefilin in the bag that was transported to the finish by the volunteers of United Parcel Service, to be used after I finish. I ran the race in a shirt that I custom made for the purpose, not as difficult a task as it sounds.

The picture, which I first saw in the movie Night and Fog, shows bodies bulldozed into a mass grave at Bergen-Belsen.

Below the picture is the verse from Yehezkel, read on Shabbat

Hol Ha-Moed Pesah: SHALL THESE BONES LIVE? The answer, God's answer to our generation, was on the back of the shirt - the flag of Israel. This nevuah (prophecy) became the basis of a Negro spiritual that, sadly, too few of us ever heard of. Praise God we live in a country where cross-fertlization of cultures is possible, but it can only happen if we don't shut ourselves off from the world. As I heard from somebody long ago, if you build walls instead of bridges don't complain when you find yourself alone on the other side.

After finishing the race and claiming my bag, I left the festivities and made my way to the museum. I davened in a secluded alcove with benches, and then entered the museum itself. Ever since the museum opened, I would make a running pilgrimage in summer wearing a shirt with the Israeli flag on it. When I run the NYC Half (you have to be picked in a lottery to get in) I combine my visit with the race, visiting the museum in the sweaty glow of Jewish strength, with my race number still attached to my shirt, the irony not lost on me or, I hope, on other visitors who knew survivors with numbers tattooed on their arms. The museum consists of a permanent core and, since an additional wing was built, special temporary exhibits. One time I learned about the agricultural colony at Sosua in the Dominican Republic, the only country in the Western Hemisphere that welcomed Jewish refugees from Hitler. This time I had the privilege of viewing an exhibit on Jewish university professors who escaped from Germany and found positions in historically black colleges in the southern United States. Having known what it is to be a pariah and to experience persecution, those scholars formed a unique bond with their black students in the Jim Crow South. I then visited the core exhibit, making my usual stops at the Sifrei Torah that sit open in glass cases. The scrolls, as I learned from a museum educator who spoke at my shul several years ago, are pasul, damaged beyond repair and unfit for public reading, and therefore it is halakhically permissible to leave them open in that manner. Just the same, I am bothered by the idea of leaving an open Sefer Torah in a glass case to be gawked at. The Nazis intended to do just that and exhibit those scrolls in a "museum of an extinct race" in Prague. I therefore make a point of stopping at each one and reading a few verses with the traditional tune, dressed not for shul in a jacket and long pants, but davka as a Jewish athlete in the glory of summer, in short pants and a sleeveless top, my strong Jewish muscles out there for all the world to see. Extinct race, huh? That is my answer, and my own personal thumb in Hitler's eye. I am 57 years old and my running times are nowhere near what they used to be. I don't know for how long I will be able to run this race or make this pilgrimage, but I don't plan on going gently into the good night.

The Man in the Arena - The Strenuous Life

2009-08-17T21:41:00.019-04:00

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Some might recognize this quote as coming from President Roosevelt. No, not FDR. The "other" President Roosevelt, Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt, 26th President. The quote, which I use to decorate my classroom, is from a speech delivered at the Sorbonne in Paris a year after he left office in 1909. I am not ashamed to say that among my heroes are several Gentiles, and Teddy Roosevelt is one of them. I mentioned him at least once before in this blog. The President's life was an inspiration for my own. In particular, he had been a sickly boy like me, with a keen intellect and wide-ranging interests. His father told him in substance that he had the mind to be whatever he wanted to be, but to make the most of it he would have to make the body. He set up a gym in the back of his house (this was the late 19th century, before health clubs became ubiquitous) and the young Teddy Roosevelt made the body. He transformed himself into a robust young man, and at the age of 39, during the Spanish American War, resigned as Secretary of the Navy to personally lead the Rough Riders in the charge up San Juan Hill.

The Rough Riders

I did not learn until recently that Teddy Roosevelt lived most of his adult life not far from here, on a large estate that he named Sagamore Hill near Oyster Bay in Nassau County, that his estate is now administered by the National Park Service as a National Historic Site and that he is buried not far from his estate. As a child I visited FDR's estate in Hyde Park with my parents, and last week I visited Sagamore Hill by myself. Thanks to Google Maps I was able to ascertain that the trip was possible without a car, and to plan out my route in advance. I took the Long Island Railroad to Oyster Bay and ran about a mile and a half to the gravesite. I could have taken a taxi from the train station, but that would have been cheating, like riding the cable car to the top of Masada. To truly experience the meaning of Sagamore Hill or Masada, you have to challenge yourself physically with a demanding run, bike ride, hike or climb.

Citizens of Oyster Bay are justly proud of Teddy Roosevelt having called their town home. A bust of the President stands beside a war memorial at the town hall.

On the way to the cemetery, you pass Oyster Bay High School, beautifully landscaped like a college campus. Oyster Bay is a wealthy community, and students there cannot help but see that the community takes their education seriously. It is all a matter of values.

The grave is located at the top of a hill, and you reach it by climbing 26 steps, Roosevelt having been the 26th President. The grave itself is enclosed by a fence to prevent the stone from being damaged by repeated touching; you might have noticed that the massive Herodian stones of the kotel are worn smooth up to the height of a tall man by centuries of rubbing and kissing.

I found a couple of people visiting; it is gratifying to know that 90 years after his death people still revere his memory enough to visit the simple grave. After they left I recited a couple of Psalms and wrote a small kvittel (note), which I inserted through the fence into the grass on the other side. Then I left the cemetery and ran another mile and a half, mostly uphill, to Sagamore Hill itself.

The day was hot and muggy. I had prepared for the run by drinking a 20-ounce bottle of Powerade, which I purchased at the beachfront park near the train station. The concession stand was staffed by high school or college aged kids. Could it be that they have responsible parents, who teach them the difference between "I need" and "I want?" What they need, their parents provide. What they merely want, they have to work for. When I reached the entrance to the estate, I was drenched with sweat. I didn't mind. The hard effort was part of my communion with Teddy Roosevelt, who extolled The Strenuous Life and did not seek ease and comfort.

At the visitors' center I was amused by a sign warning that Teddy Roosevelt's house was not air conditioned and the indoor temperature was in the 80s. The house had fans whirring and providing all the cooling I needed; I would have felt cold if it had been air conditioned. Alas, the furnishings dating from the President's lifetime disagree. They are deteriorating due to summer heat and humidity, and next year the house will be air conditioned, with a new technology that will not detract from the architecture. Teddy Roosevelt was an avid hunter and conservationist; the two often go together. The house is decorated throughout with rugs made out of skins of animals he hunted, with the heads still attached in the style of the time (warning to the squeamish). Indoor plumbing was a rarity when the house was built, and you can see the pull-chain toilet.

I visited the museum, housed in another building that was air conditioned. Here are some photos of the exhibits:

The Man in the Arena

Political considerations delayed Teddy
Roosevelt's Medal of Honor for nearly a
century after the action for which he
earned it.

Teddy Roosevelt assumed the Presidency in 1901, following the assassination of President William McKinley. Sixty-two years later, Lyndon B. Johnson would become President in the same way. May we be spared such tragedies in the future.

"We love all the seasons. . . ."

I am decidedly partial to summer.

A sign posted on the grounds by the National Park Service warns visitors of the dangers of heat exhaustion. I made sure to drink plenty of water before the three-mile run back to the railroad station. Then I filled up again with a bottle of Powerade. If you're in shape, acclimatized and pace yourself appropriately, you can stay out of danger. San Juan Hill was not air conditioned.

Sagamore Hill is an inexpensive and enjoyable destination. I got a lot out of the trip, and I recommend it to any athlete who admires Teddy Roosevelt as I do, and who is not afraid to challenge himself and to embrace the strenuous life.

A Tale of Two Levi Yitzhaks

2009-08-14T15:47:00.003-04:00

Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev - The famous "defense attorney for Israel" who lived in the 18th century and might have been an ancestor of the Lubavitcher Rebbe זצ''ל , whose father bore the same name. One of many stories about him is set on Erev Pesah. He is said to have disguised himself as a merchant, visited a diamond smuggler in the morning and negotiated a deal for the purchase of diamonds. In the afternoon he disguised himself as a beggar and knocked on the door of one Jewish house after another. When the door opened the rabbi would stick his hand out and ask for a piece of bread. The response was always the same: Bread? Have you gone mad? It's afternoon on Erev Pesah and I'm supposed to have bread? After a while, Levi Yitzhak exclaimed: God, look at your children! The Tsar has an army. The Tsar has police. The Tsar has a border patrol. The Tsar says you can't bring diamonds into the country. I can get all the diamonds I want. You have no army, no police, no border patrol. All you have is a few words in your Torah: No hametz in the house after noon on Erev Pesah. Comes the appointed time - and not a crumb can be found in any Jewish home. Does a people like that not deserve to be redeemed?

Levi Yitzhak Rosenbaum - Early 21st century America. Arrested for trafficking in human kidneys, buying them from desperately poor Israelis for $10,000 apiece and flipping them to desperately sick Americans for $160,000. Allegedly caught on tape boasting that he had been doing this for ten years. Causes unparalleled shame and embarrassment to observant Jews and massive hillul Hashem.

The first Levi Yitzhak lived in a culture of poverty and anti-Semitic persecution. The second lives in the wealthiest Jewish community ever, where the law protects our religious practice and we are equal to anyone else in the country. Could it be that for all the material success and religious freedom we have here, our values and priorities are all screwed up?

I hope it wasn't. . . .

2009-08-01T23:41:00.003-04:00

Breaking news from MSNBC (also reported on WINS radio):
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32252124/ns/world_news/

A gunman apparently shot up a support group for gay teenagers in Tel Aviv, killing three and injuring eleven. Details are very sketchy. The police are convinced it was a criminal attack, not a terror attack. An eyewitness says it was a premeditated hate crime, but how would he know the attacker's motives and whether or not it was premeditated? The gunman escaped and is being sought. Other witnesses said the gunman was dressed all in black.

As soon as I heard the report on the radio, which did not mention how the alleged gunman was dressed, I thought to myself, "I hope this wasn't a religious nut." It wouldn't be the first time a religious nut attacked gays in Israel; several years ago there was a stabbing at a gay parade in Jerusalem. Now, who else would be dressed all in black? Please, no, don't let it be. We have enough troubles already.

When rabbis become criminals

2009-07-29T16:40:00.005-04:00

Every day it seems we hear of prominent rabbis and others in our community arrested for serious crimes - tax fraud, money laundering, drug trafficking and so on. It happens so often that we've become inured to the massive Hillul Hashem involved. Even so, last week's news was over the top. Solomon "Shtick Dreck" Dwek, a bigwig in the Syrian community, was caught in an alleged 50 million dollar bad check scheme, and was "flipped" by the FBI to become a cooperating witness. Posing as a criminal with tainted money to be laundered, he exposed massive criminality reaching to the top of our communal structure, up to and including trafficking in human organs. The timing of the story - two days before Shabbat Hazon, is excruciatingly apropos. I don't want to repeat what was already said ad nauseam on other blogs, and I hope that what I say here actually adds something.

We've been told to look into ourselves, that all of us have failings that have to be corrected. True enough. But what transpired last week is not a simple matter of individuals giving in to their yetzer hara, which we all do on occasion. For one thing, these were not mere individuals. They are among the most highly placed in the community; one of them was the Chief Rabbi of the Syrian community in Brooklyn. Nor can such conduct be excused because the money went to communal institutions. Institutions that can only exist on criminal money do not deserve to exist. And why was the fabulously wealthy Syrian community most deeply involved - do they have to turn to crime to support their mosdot? Nor was this a spur-of-the-moment surrender to a yetzer hara, like eating a candy bar that didn't have a proper hekhsher, something these rabbis would not have dreamed of doing. We're talking about a massive criminal enterprise, worthy of the Mafia, that has apparently been going on for years. Anybody can go to Atlantic City on occasion and shoot craps, but a professional dice player, i.e. someone who makes a living playing dice (mesahek b'kubiya) is disqualified from testifying in a Jewish court (pasul l'edut). We've been told to go to minyan more often. That completely misses the point of the haftara we read. God does not want our minyanim. He has no use for our ritual observance when we pervert justice and make cheating and stealing a way of life. How in blazes have we sunk so low? Look into ourselves, sure, but it has nothing to do with going to minyan. We have to look into our dealings with others, and with the government. If we are employees, do we chat on the phone on company time? If we are employers, are we late with our workers' wages (hint, hint, yeshiva administrators)? If we are tenants, are we late with the rent? If we are landlords, do we skimp on essential services? Complying with the law is the bare minimum here; we are expected to go lifnim meshurat ha-din. If our buildings are not warm enough in winter for our grandmothers, then they aren't warm enough for anybody else's. Do we give up our seats on the train for older people, of any race, color or creed, even when we're tired? Ever notice how trains and buses in New York have signs saying "Won't you please give this seat to the elderly and disabled?," while those evil Zionist Egged buses in Israel, where women are beaten for refusing to move to the back of the bus, post the pasuk "Mipne seiva takum?" And I'm using the first person plural because I'm guilty too. Are our yeshivot teaching our children in no uncertain terms that it is absolutely assur to cheat and steal from anybody, Jew or Gentile, or from the government? Do we tolerate rabbis who tell us that it's okay to defraud the government as long as you're clever enough not to get caught? Guess what - the goyim aren't as stupid as you think they are. Not American goyim. And certainly not American goyim (and Jews, who are thoroughly disgusted with what they see "religious" Jews doing) who work for the FBI and the IRS. You confirm all the tired old stereotypes about the greedy money-grubbing Jews. Mr. Dwek is not the only "shtick dreck" in this whole sorry mess.

In the absence of prophecy, God communicates to us through Torah and nature. He hasn't had much success with Torah, and it looks like he might be trying nature instead. God sometimes "gives mussar" in the form of unusual natural phenomena, e.g. the plague of hail in Egypt and rain out of season in Israel (see the haftara for Korah). We in New York have been experiencing unheard-of weather these last few days. The sun shines brightly, and in a matter of minutes a dark cloud appears and lets loose with a heavy downpour - with the sun still shining! I don't mean sunshowers - light rain from a cumulus cloud in the midst of bright sunshine. Those are common, and running through them is among the simple pleasures that make summer my favorite time of year. What we've been having are torrentrial downpours, complete with lightning that nearly killed a man a stone's throw from where I live in Brooklyn, all while the sun is shining! This might be normal in Florida, but it's unheard-of in Brooklyn. Is there a message here? The world exists, in some unprovable and metaphysical sense, so that God's people can observe His Torah. When supposed "men of religion" make a mockery of Torah on a grand scale, the world loses its reason for being, and God returns it to tohu va-vohu, primeval chaos and confusion.

Glimmers of recognition are starting to appear. Haredi yeshivot have made a virtue of neglecting secular studies, to the point where young haredi men (men more than women, who are expected to support their husbands in learning) cannot get jobs because they lack basic communication and computational skills. And when people cannot get honest jobs they sometimes turn to crime. That is nothing new. Hazal told us long ago that a man who does not teach his son a useful occupation teaches him to steal. The question is will the community wake up in time, and will they be able and willing to correct the problem once they do? I am not optimistic.

Guest Editorial from National Council of Young Israel

2009-07-24T12:55:00.003-04:00

Young Israel (and the Zionist Organization of America) were conspicuously absent from President Obama's photo-op with "Jewish leaders" to promote the repartition of Jerusalem. May we merit more leaders with the courage of the leadership of Young Israel, more Prime Ministers with the pluck of Menachem Begin and more Rashei Yeshiva with the guts of Zvi Yehuda Kook.

http://via.readerimpact.com/v/161/ff4a8232d5fff5abccbe07c5a2d8d84ccdf9a9775c612788

We would like to share with you a piece by Ambassador (ret.) Yehuda Avner, who served under five Prime Ministers. He writes in his forthcoming book (summer 2010), The Prime Ministers – An Intimate Portrait of Leaders of Israel: -- As we approach Tisha B'Av, let us remember Menachem Begin's courage
"At the very end of [Prime Minister Begin's] successful Camp David talks with Jimmy Carter and Anwar Sadat in 1978, literally minutes before the signing ceremony, the American president had approached [Begin] with "Just one final formal item." Sadat, said the president, was asking that Begin put his signature to a simple letter committing him to place Jerusalem on the negotiating table of the final peace accord.
"I refused to accept the letter, let alone sign it," rumbled Begin. "'If I forgot thee O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning,' said [Begin] to the president of the United States of America, 'and may my tongue cleave to my mouth.'"
"Admonishment of the British foreign secretary, [Lord Carrington], telling him in almost so many words to mind his own business, and… saying [Carrington] should open his Bible 'and read the First Book of Kings, chapter two, verse eleven, where you will find that King David moved his capital from Hebron, where he had reigned for seven years, to Jerusalem where he ruled for another thirty-three years, and this at a time [3,000 years ago] when the civilized world had never heard of London.'”
"[Addressing US Jewish leaders]: 'Jerusalem is an epic. It is the wellspring of a civilization. Without Jerusalem's civilization the spiritual history of the world would be stagnant. To us Jerusalem is family. Has anyone ever heard of a daughter or a son of a Saladin ever fasting each year in memory of ancient Jerusalem's anguish? Not a one! Has anybody ever heard of a son of a Crusader who breaks a glass at his wedding ceremony in memory of ancient Jerusalem's torment? Not a one! How could you have heard, when throughout its three thousand year-long history Jerusalem has been capital to no one but to the Jews. So it was. So it is. And so it shall ever be.'"
Shabbat Shalom

Simple Rules for Happiness

2009-07-19T02:23:00.005-04:00

I found this on the bulletin board of a Roman Catholic Church that I passed on a run:

Click on the picture for a high-resolution version that will make the bulletin board legible.

חכמה בגויים - תאמין

There is wisdom among the nations - though I suspect this bit of wisdom was gleaned from our sources.

Stonewall means fight!

2009-07-10T16:34:00.004-04:00

For New Yorkers and most Americans of a certain age who aren't living in a cave, the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village represents the struggle of gay Americans for basic human rights other Americans have long taken for granted. It all began 40 years ago in June. Gay Americans, even in a sophisticated and cosmopolitan place like New York City, lived closeted lives of constant fear. They got together in gay bars that were connected with organized crime and were constantly raided by police, who would rough up and arrest patrons. The Stonewall was one such bar, and was routinely raided one evening in late June 1969, only this time it would not be routine. The patrons decided they had had enough. They resisted, sparking three nights of confrontations between young gay men and the police. I'm deliberately not calling them riots, because they were very mild compared to the racial rioting that was tearing American cities apart in the late '60s. One thing led to another, and here we are today.

I recently ran by the Stonewall Inn. For me it represents a piece of my city's history and a piece of Americana. You don't have to be gay to appreciate the universal struggle for human rights. It resonates with me as an American and more so as a Jew because of our history of being denied the most basic human rights in unhappy lands of persecution. When one man's rights are taken away, all men are diminished. I'm not talking about changing the definition of marriage now - though who would have dreamed 40 years ago that we as a country would be debating that today? I'm talking about the right to live anywhere one can afford, to hold a job whose duties one can perform, to be served in a place of public accommodation, and the like. I'm talking about the right not to have to live a lie - whether that means going to the company picnic with a kippa on one's head or with one's gay partner (or both - click here!). Above all, I am talking about the right to walk the streets in safety, without fear of being set upon and beaten because some thugs perceive you, rightly or wrongly, as gay, black, Jewish or whatever. Both gays and Orthodox Jews suffered from a stereotype as sissies (or, to quote R. Meir Kahane hy"d, patsies) who can be physically attacked and beaten with impunity. Many of my friends were beaten on the street growing up identifiably Jewish in the '60s, though praise God that changed in the aftermath of the Six Day War. And it did not change because of the goodness of thugs' hearts. It changed because the Israeli army and air force showed the world another image of the Jew, that of a strong Jew able and willing to stand up for himself. And that is what Stonewall did for gays. One Matthew Shepard is one too many. And the solution for gays is the same as it was for us Jews - an ability and willingness to teach hoodlums a lesson with Jewish or gay fists.