Much Ado About Nothing

 

 

   The title of this Shakespeare play actually sounds better in Hebrew than in English: Rov Mehuma Al Lo Me’uma (רוב מהומה על לא מאומה), and it summarizes the latest rabbinical “scandal” eagerly reported in a New York Times “expose” and just as eagerly picked up by The Jewish Week.  It was reported that Jonathan Rosenblatt, the rabbi of long standing at Riverdale Jewish Center, a prominent Orthodox synagogue in the Bronx, had played squash and racquetball with young male congregants, then showered with them naked (that’s how men usually shower) and sat with them in a sauna or steam room, naked or wrapped in a robe (as men usually are when they use saunas and steam rooms).  This had gone on for decades and reporters at both publications had known about it for decades, but did not report it until now because only now was one person man enough to speak for attribution.  Plenty of others were ready to bad-mouth the rabbi, but only behind a veil of anonymity.

 

   Among the words used to describe Rabbi Rosenblatt’s conduct are “disturbing,” “inappropriate,” “unusual,” and words of that ilk.  Never “illegal” or “criminal.”  By all accounts there was no sexual touching or other sexual misconduct, as occurred in other well-publicized sex scandals involving rabbis.  The New York Times article itself states that “parsing [the rabbi’s conduct] is an exercise in ambiguity.”  If so, and given Rabbi Rosenblatt’s stature, are we not required to be דן לכף זכות, to give the rabbi the benefit of the doubt?

 

  Up until the middle of the 19^th century it was unusual for any observant Jew to play organized sports.  Then Jewish consciousness began to be raised by the Zionist movement and men such as Max Nordau.  Young Jewish men, first secular and then observant, began seeing their bodies and minds as an integrated whole, each feeding off the other.  Orthodox rabbis, however, remained the black-suited, black-hatted purveyors of scholarship and dared not step out of that realm, except maybe to escort congregants to Soviet Jewry demonstrations or Salute to Israel (now Celebrate Israel) parades.  Rabbi Rosenblatt, it seems, was the first to think and act outside of that box, and more power to him.  Several years ago the chief rabbi of Warsaw was attacked and beaten by anti-Semitic Polish hoodlums.  Just imagine if he had been able to give those goons a proper rabbinical butt whooping.  It would have been a tremendous kiddush Hashem, a veritable earthquake, with aftershocks rippling with his muscles through the length and breadth of Poland.  No more would the few Jews left in Poland be seen as easy marks.

 

   One of the anonymous complaints concerned the rabbi lingering in a post-workout shower with the boys and young men with whom he was bonding; there was no rush.  Why should there have been a rush?  Were they expecting a trainload of Jews arriving and having to use the shower?  A shower after a hard fulfilling workout may be routine for others who take their physicality for granted, but for us it is a mystical experience of supernal joy.  That’s water coming out of those shower heads, not gas.  We draw water with joy from the wells of salvation (see Is. 12:3).  Take as long as you want.  Sing, whoop and holler if you feel like it.  Savor the experience as you would good wine.  I remember running races in the summer heat and makeshift showers would be set up along the course.  I’d pump my fist in the air, run through and shout “l’chaim” – to life.  Who needs drugs when you can get high on pure Jewish joy?  It is said that at the entrance to the gas chamber at Auschwitz hung a sign reading  זה השער לה' צדיקים יבאו בו  - This is the gate of the Lord; the righteous shall enter it (Ps. 118:20).  Perhaps the showers of gyms at yeshivot and Jewish community centers should have signs reading יבואו בו זה השער לגאולה חזקים – This is the gate of redemption; the strong shall enter it.  I remember taking showers in school after gym or swimming, naked with my classmates in full view of one another, and thinking nothing of it.  I don’t remember if the teachers showered with us, but if they had it would have been no big deal.

 

   The person who apparently was leading the charge against Rabbi Rosenblatt is female and, not surprisingly, knows nothing about male bonding and male fellowship.   She does not understand why the rabbi “didn’t get”  his alleged judgment error.  Actually, it is she that “doesn’t get it.”  We men need to be with one another where females are absent, to be “out with the boys.”   Time was when construction workers, longshoremen (those brawny fellows who unloaded ships before modern containerization) and such working in Lower Manhattan would, after a hard day’s work, repair to McSorley’s Ale House and enjoy some salty man talk in one another’s company over a pint or two.  No more.  Since 1970 McSorley’s must, per court order, be open to women.  In Russia, Eastern Europe and Turkey the steam bath (and in Scandinavia the sauna) filled the role of McSorley’s.  Jewish men coming here from that part of the world brought the “shvitz” culture with them, and passed it on to their progeny.  So here we have an Orthodox rabbi who worked out with boys and young men, then showered and spent time in the steam room or sauna with them, discussing matters of faith and philosophy in a relaxed atmosphere where they could let their guard down.  Why would any man or boy get uptight over it?  Mothers did, and that is understandable.  Among other functions, these male-only get-togethers removed boys, if only temporarily, from the influence of their overbearing Jewish mothers, taking them out of the world of women and into the world of men.  That can be traumatic for women who can’t let go of their little darlings, but for their sons it is liberating and healthy.

 

   To be sure, there were minor errors in judgment.  Most of them stem from not adhering to a fundamental part of the masculine mystique in America, dating from the Old West, that exhorts us to never say behind a man’s back what you would not say to his face.  Interestingly, this echoes a saying of one of the European ba’alei mussar of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries: Don’t talk about people; talk to them.  In Israel men are expected to “talk dugri,” i.e. direct and to the point.  Some of the young men were uncomfortable with the rabbi’s style, or so they told reporters years or decades later.  With the passage of time, memory can play tricks, but it is perfectly reasonable that some people would be uncomfortable.  In modern societies (but it would seem not in the primitive ones that renowned anthropologist  Margaret Mead visited) puberty and adolescence is characterized by a great deal of Sturm und Drang.  Young people are prone to read into situations what is not necessarily there.  What one person experiences as a glance, or even thinks nothing of, can be experienced by someone else as gawking.  When I was in high school, a male biology teacher once remarked to a classmate, “those biceps [mine] are unreal.”  Having been lifting weights for several years,  I took it as a compliment, large biceps still being unusual in American yeshiva boys in the 1960s.  Given the anxieties teenage boys experience about their sexuality, anxieties not addressed by the limudei kodesh teachers (only one specific act is Biblically prohibited), some other boy might have experienced the same remark as “creepy.”  The boys and young men who were uncomfortable with nudity in the shower and/or steam room should have simply told the rabbi.  Alternatively, they could have asked him if this was appropriate behavior for a rabbi, perhaps citing sources if they could.  It could have opened the door to some interesting and healthy conversation.  One student recalled getting sick in yeshiva and being driven home by the rabbi, with pleasant conversation in the car.  When they arrived at the student’s home (the parents were not present), the rabbi suggested the boy might be more comfortable if he changed into a bathrobe.  This was not far-fetched; yeshiva clothes can be distinctly uncomfortable, especially when one is not feeling well to begin with.  The boy did not want to change, and told the rabbi.  According to the boy’s recollection, the rabbi stayed in the student’s house (is there any yihud issue between two males?) and persisted in trying to get the boy to change.  With 20/20 hindsight I understand and sympathize with the boy feeling put in an awkward spot.  Some of the people involved were so put off that they chose another synagogue to attend.  This too is nothing out of the ordinary; in any community where there is a choice of synagogues congregants come and congregants go.  Leaving is the best solution when a personality clash between congregant and rabbi is so deep that remaining together becomes untenable.  Others, however, benefited a good deal from those encounters and are appalled that the rabbi, to their way of thinking, became the object of a malicious smear campaign (lashon ha-ra) years later.  Students in Yeshiva University kept coming, of their own volition, to do rabbinic internships with him even when the university stopped sending students his way due to complaints, some of which were justified.  The power relationships between rabbi and intern could create the appearance that the scantily clad shvitz sessions were necessary for the intern’s career advancement.  Similar situations could occur between professors and undergraduate or graduate students at a secular university; today professors assiduously avoid any interaction that can give any such appearance.

 

   The entire matter seems to have been resolved to most everybody’s satisfaction.  The rabbi will be staying out the few years remaining on his contract.  This resolution was reached after a frank exchange between rabbi and congregants, accompanied according to press reports by self-flagellation on the part of the rabbi that I think was unnecessary given that few if any people came to any serious harm.  I fail to see any hillul Hashem here, nor any reason for the rabbi to feel broken. We all recall positive and negative interactions with authority figures in our lives, interactions as inevitable as they are universal.  If there is anybody among us who never committed errors in judgment, he or she may cast a stone.  The rest of us mortals live in glass houses.

 

 

 



Tish'a B'Av

 

    Tomorrow we will have plenty to mourn; the failings that led to the Hurban nearly 2000 years ago are still with us, impeding the completion of the geula. 

 

   First, more of the financial skullduggery for which “frum” Jews (God, save us from such frumkeit) have become (in)famous.  One Rabbi Ya’akov Weingarten, who lives in my neighborhood of Midwood, allegedly set up charities with solicitation material made to resemble that of real charities that collect for Magen David Adom, Zaka and similar outfits.  But this operator allegedly converted most of the money to his personal use.  The Attorney General of New York brought civil charges; criminal ones might follow.  So now we have to be extra judicious about where our tzedaka dollars go.  I have long ago stopped opening my door to the ubiquitous door-to-door schnorrers that plague my neighborhood; for all I know they could be armed robbers wearing kapotas; stranger things have happened.  Now when I get letters purportedly from well-known charities I will have to make sure of the address, or locate the websites of the legitimate charities and donate online.  Another tactic is to look the charity up on Charity Navigator; a four-star rating means that the charity is well-run (fund raising costs and overhead under control) and everything is on the up-and-up – what we used to take for granted if a charity was run by observant Jews.  Unfortunately, Charity Navigator does not rate all faith-based charities, both because its own resources are limited and because the charities might not be required to file the usual forms with the federal government.  It would also be useful if New York State would require all charities operating in the state to post their financial statements on a website maintained by the Attorney General’s office, instead of our having to request these statements by snail mail.  But that will require fixing Albany, which probably won’t happen in our lifetimes.

 

   Last week another sex abuse scandal surfaced, this time at Modern Orthodoxy’s premier institution Yeshiva University, specifically the boys’ high school that it runs.  The case will be difficult to pursue, since the statute of limitations expired long ago and the plaintiffs (allegedly abused students, now in middle age) have the burden of proof.  If the case ever reaches a jury, it will need more than “he-said-she-said” to find for the plaintiffs.  I wish I could say that Orthodox institutions should be above such sordidness, but the yetzer hara is universal.  More upsetting is the now-familiar cover-up; instead of taking measures to protect its students, Yeshiva University circled the wagons to protect its finances.  The cover-up goes all the way to Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm, the chancellor who recently retired.  And there’s a deeper problem.  The victims were not little kids, as in the case of Yehuda Kolko and other well-publicized pedophiles, but high school students well past puberty.  The problem thus is not pedophilia (operationally defined as a sexual attraction to pre-pubescent children) but homosexuality.  Would these students not have been victimized if their abusers had been able to be openly gay, have relationships with gay adults and remain in our community?  That could be the subject not only of another post but of a whole book.

 

   And in Israel, the haredim (aka khnyocks) are up to their old tricks.  Now their target is Women of the Wall, a group of women who go to the kotel every Rosh Hodesh and daven, wearing tallitot and tefilin and reading from a Sefer Torah.  Their actions appear to be within halakha, since none other than Bruriah, wife of the Tanna Rabbi Meir, and perhaps Rashi’s daughters, wore tefilin.  Several contemporary halakhic authorities permit women to read from a Sefer Torah in women-only prayer groups, e.g. Women of the Wall.  Nevertheless, it is difficult to defend these women; they seem less interested in enhancing their spirituality than in calling attention to themselves and scandalizing others praying at the kotel. If their intention is to scandalize and offend, the haredim consistently take the bait.  Hooligans, male and female, throw objects at them, spit at them and shout epithets such as “Nazi” and “Reform Jew,” as if the latter was a curse.  Calling our political opponents Nazis is an insult to Holocaust survivors and to the memory of six million dead, who were not all religiously observant despite what some haredi propaganda would have us believe.  And “Reform Jew?”  My thesis adviser a”h was a Reform Jew, a serious and committed one.  I could have trusted him with uncounted money.  I wish I could say the same about some so-called frum Jews (see above) who stoop to every low-down trick in the book as long as it gets them cash.  These rascals possess the outer trappings of frumkeit but if one is not frum inside then the outer trappings are not worth a dime.  They confirm all the negative stereotypes about Jews and money, echo the Jews against whom Isaiah inveighs in the haftara for Shabbat Hazon, and make me ashamed to call myself an Orthodox Jew.

 

   So we have plenty to work on in the coming year.  When people can point to an observant Jew and say, “That is how I want to live,” we will be a lot closer to Tisha B’Av being transformed into a Yom Tov in the rebuilt Beit Hamikdash.

 

 

Birds of a feather flock together

It seems the Iranians are also steamed up about the Internet, and their rantings sound eerily like those of the haredim.  Click on this link:
http://news.yahoo.com/iran-swipe-brings-angry-reply-184348436.html


                                            Iran swipe at Web brings angry reply

     Iran greets outcry over Web squeeze with fresh promises for Tehran-centric cyberworld

Associated Press -

FILE- In this Monday, Feb. 13, 2012 file photo, Iranian women use computers at an Internet cafe in central Tehran. Iran’s cyber monitors often tout …more their efforts to fight the West’s 'soft war' of influence through the web, but trying to ban Google’s popular Gmail may have gone too far with complaints coming even from email-starved parliament members. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi, File)

TEHRAN (AP) -- Iran's cyber monitors often tout their fight against the West's "soft war" of influence through the Web, but trying to block Google's popular Gmail appeared to be a swipe too far.

Complaints piled up — even from email-starved parliament members — and forced authorities Sunday to double down on their promises to create a parallel Web universe with Tehran as its center.

The strong backlash and the unspecific pledges for an Iran-centric Internet alternative to the Silicon Valley powers and others highlight the two sides of the Islamic Republic's ongoing battles with the Web. It's spurred another technological mobilization that fits neatly into Iran's self-crafted image as the Muslim world's showcase for science, including sending satellites into orbit, claiming advances in cloning and stem cell research and facing down the West over its nuclear program.

But there also are the hard realities of trying to reinvent the Web. Iran's highly educated and widely tech-savvy population is unlikely to warm quickly to potential clunky homegrown browsers or email services. And then there's the potential political and economic fallout of trying to close the tap on familiar sites such as Gmail.

"Some problems have emerged through the blocking of Gmail," Hussein Garrousi, a member of a parliamentary committee on industry, was quoted Sunday by the independent Aftab-e Yazd daily. What he apparently meant was that many lawmakers were angry and missing their emails.

He said that parliament would summon the minister of telecommunications for questioning if the ministry did not lift the Gmail ban, which was imposed last week in respond to clips on Google-owned YouTube of a film mocking the Prophet Muhammad that set off deadly protests across the Islamic world.

Even many newspapers close to the government complained over the email disruptions. On Saturday, the Asr-e Ertebat weekly reported that Iranians had paid a total of $4.5 million to purchase proxy services to reach blocked sites, including Facebook and YouTube, over the past month.

Iranian authorities — perhaps recognizing the risks at hand — decided against taking a symbolic twin shot at Google and cut access to the Web browser in a country with 32 million Internet users among a population of 75 million, according to official statistics.

That would rank online Iran among the world's top 20 in terms of sheer numbers of users, and equivalent to some European countries in per capita Web use at more than 40 percent, according to the private monitoring group Internet World Stats. The World Bank, however, puts Iran's Internet link rate at just 21 percent last year. The U.S. is among the world's highest at more than 75 percent. Iran's deputy telecoms minister, Ali Hakim Javadi, told reporters that Iranian authorities were considering lifting the Gmail ban. But he also used the opportunity to again promise development of Iran's domestic alternatives: the Fakhr ("Pride") search engine and the Fajr ("Dawn") email, Aftab-e Yazd reported. When reporters noted the quality of Gmail services, Javadi quipped: "If there is Mercedes Benz on the street, that doesn't mean everyone drives a Mercedes." Iran's clerical establishment has long signaled its intent to get citizens off of the international Internet — which they say promotes Western values — and onto a "national" and "clean" domestic network. Earlier this year, Iran's police chief, Esmail Ahmadi Moghadam, called Google an "instrument of espionage" rather than a search engine. But it is unclear whether Iran has the technical capacity to follow through on its ambitious plans, or is willing to risk the economic damage and the social shock waves. The Internet has steadily become part of Iran's fabric since the first Farsi-language sites developed a decade ago by Canadian-Iranian blogger Hossein Derakshan, who is considered one of the founders of Iran's social media community. Derakshan, however, was detained in 2008 and sentenced to nearly 20 years in prison two years later as the battles heated up between liberals seeking open access to the Web and authorities trying to erect their own version of China's "Great Firewall," the name given to Beijing's extensive filtering and censorship of the Internet.

Sites such as Twitter and Facebook were pillars of the street revolts after the disputed 2009 re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The powerful Revolutionary Guard responded by recruiting and training its own cyber force to patrol the Web and, later, try to defend against virus attacks on nuclear and other sites that Iran has blamed on the West and its allies. Some Web security experts also have raised the possibility of Iranian hackers being behind some recent high-profile computer attacks, such as disruptions at Saudi Arabia's state oil giant Saudi Aramco and Qatari natural gas producer RasGas earlier this month. Iran has denied any links. In a video message for Iranian new year in March, President Barack Obama denounced what he called the "electronic curtain" that keeps ordinary Iranians from reaching out to Americans and the West.

A few weeks later, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ordered the creation of an Internet oversight agency that included top military, security and political figures in the country's boldest attempt yet to control the Internet. The panel is headed by Ahmadinejad and includes powerful figures in the security establishment such as the intelligence chief and the commander of the Revolutionary Guard.

It's not Iran's first attempt to hold off what hardliners call a Western "cultural invasion." The so-called Barbie wars have gone on for more than a decade with periodic raids to confiscate the iconic American dolls from toy stores. Iran also introduced its own dolls — twins Dara and Sara — designed to promote traditional values with modest clothing and pro-family values, but it hasn't significantly dented the demand for Barbie dolls. ___

Murphy reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

It will be remembered that certain haredi elements, notably Neturei Karta, make buddy-buddy with the Amalekim of Teheran who seek to destroy us.  Perhaps the haredim will invite a contingent of Iranians to their next confabulation at Citi Field.  Or maybe it won't be necessary.  I have a message for them:  Take your bans, your broadsides and your filters and hop a plane to Iran.  American planes don't go there?  I'm sure you can get connections by way of Cairo or Damascus.  Or maybe take a plane to Uman, Lizhensk or any of the stinkholes of Eastern Europe that your parents and grandparents came crawling out of and recreate your pre-Holocaust world of insularity, ignorance and weakness, physical and mental.  To the Rabbinical Council of America: Quit looking over your right shoulder and grow yourselves a pair.  Defend intellectual freedom whenever and by whomever it is under attack.

   Iran, Communist China and the Orthodox crazies can keep their narrow world view.  We want no part of it.  We march confidently forward, backs straight and shoulders square, to meet the approaching ge'ula.  May it go to completion swiftly in our time.

 

Orthodox Tumult Over the Internet

    In the past two months the Orthodox community in New York went “meshuga” [crazy] over the Internet.  The usual suspects had been busy for a number of years manufacturing a problem not unlike the problem they manufactured over television when it was introduced in the 1950s.  Posters went up in Jewish neighborhoods, signed by a slew of prominent haredi rabbis (we still called them khnyocks) warning us of the terrible dangers of television and forbidding the presence of the new medium in our homes.  Even today on occasion those posters go up, and rabbis attempt to purge Orthodox homes of television.  Some families possess “closet TVs,” that are hidden away when haredi guests or, worse, spies for yeshivot which the children attend, visit.  Some yeshivot to this day threaten to expel children whose homes contain a TV.

   But these people are much more worked up over the internet than they ever were over television.  The internet is portrayed as a Trojan horse that will sneak foreign ideas into our camp and irreparably contaminate it.  The rabbis making that argument usually do not use the term “Trojan horse” since they never studied Greek mythology and don’t know a Trojan horse from that other “Trojan,” or how the two are related.  A while ago they formed a group called “Va’ad ha-kehillot l’tohar ha-mahane” (Conference of Communities for the Purity of the Camp) to combat the perceived dangers of the Internet.  As with television two generations ago, some communities attempted to forbid Jewish families from owning computers, certainly computers that were hooked up to the internet.  The big stick they would wield was a threat to expel their children from yeshiva.  But the internet proved too essential to ban.  Today few people can make a living or keep up in their fields without it.  For instance, scientists can now, with a few clicks of a mouse, access material for which I had to spend hours in the library searching the Biological Abstracts 30 years ago when I was researching my doctoral thesis.  Physicians store their patients’ medical records electronically, on their office computers, thereby reducing the likelihood of catastrophic medical errors.  Questions about a diagnosis?  Search a website to review what is known.  Since the internet has become a necessity for almost all of us in just one generation, the rabbis decided to devise ways to keep people, especially children, from accessing “inappropriate material.”   Of course, and contrary to what these rabbis would wish, we are not a monolithic community and we differ widely on what constitutes “inappropriate material.”  Some in the haredi community are experts in information technology (IT), which they could not have studied without access to the internet.  They would devise “internet filters,” that would keep the forbidden material out of our homes.  The Va’ad rented Citi Field, the stadium in Queens where the New York Mets play baseball, for a mass communal rally resembling a revival meeting, where various “gedolim” would address the crowd on the terrible dangers presented by the internet.  God knows how much money that could have been used for urgent communal necessities like paying yeshiva teachers on time and educating children about the dangers of sexual abuse, was squandered for this meeting.  They did fill the stadium, in part by coercing parents of yeshiva children to purchase tickets for the whole “mishpoche” [family], at least the men and boys.  If anything good came out of this rally, it was that some of these children were seeing a stadium for the first time.  As it turned out, the rally was long on fear-mongering and short on practical “solutions.”  Those would be offered community by community.  Midwood (haredim still insist on calling Midwood “Flatbush,” though they wouldn’t set foot in most of Flatbush for fear of their black shadows) had its own rally in an Aguda synagogue not far from where I live.

   I have a confession to make here.  My family was one of the last in Midwood to get a computer and get wired to the internet.  We tend to lag behind in adopting technology; we were one of the last to get a color TV and we didn’t have a VCR until it was about to be replaced by DVD.   A relative of mine, at the time married to a haredi man,  asked me if I had a computer.  I replied in the affirmative.  Do you have the internet?  Again, yes, of course.  I would not deprive my children of such a powerful research tool and place them at a competitive disadvantage relative to their peers both now and later in life.  She couldn’t believe her ears.  The internet was so dangerous; do you know what your children can see with it?  I had an idea – the kind of stuff we used to access in magazines like Playboy secreted in our rooms or even under the floorboards of yeshiva bathrooms.  Adolescents have a healthy curiosity about such things, always have, always will.  Maybe the Rambam’s Moreh Nevukhim, for which our kids might be zokhe to be expelled from yeshiva.  Really now, the internet is merely a tool.  A very powerful one to be sure, which, like any tool, can be misused and abused.  Matches are used by arsonists to start fires.  I don’t see anyone trying to ban matches.  We just do our best to catch and prosecute arsonists, and accept some arson as the cost of being able to use fire constructively (one of the developments that set our ancestors on the path to becoming human, but what would haredi rabbis know about that).  And by the time I acquired the tool in the mid-1990s, technology was available to prevent most of the “arson.”  AOL parental controls were more than adequate.  If anything, they were too strict.  All filtering suffers from the trade-off of blocking good   material along with bad.  How do you block "sex" without blocking "sexually transmitted diseases, how do you block "breast" without blocking "breast cancer," and so forth.  I had to ask AOL  to unblock The History Channel so that my son could use it for a school project.  The sky did not fall, and, praise God, both my children turned out fine, thank you.

   The rally in the Aguda synagogue reportedly (I did not attend it, or the one in Citi Field) featured all sorts of filtering technology, as well as spyware that allows parents to monitor their children’s every keystroke if they so desire.  I preferred to trust my children’s judgment and respect their privacy, telling them to close the browser if they see anything that makes them feel uncomfortable and assuring them that if they needed my advice I was always available.  Most of our kids are a lot more tech-savvy than we are; why challenge them to a cyberwar that most of us cannot possibly win?  Another, more pernicious twist was a filter for which a third party had the password and we would not, and spyware that sent all our online activity to a third party.  Supposedly we were more likely to stay on the straight and narrow if someone we knew was privy to our keystrokes.  Well, I have news for them.  I am a dyed-in-the-wool, liberty-or-death American.  I am also an adult, and I refuse to be treated like a child by Aguda rabbis and their camp followers.  My home is my castle.  The world’s knowledge is welcome inside.  Haredi threats and tyranny are not.

   Actually, as soon as I became aware of the anti-Slifkin posters going up, the blinders came off.  It’s been a while since I gave a rat’s ass about Aguda and its Mo’etzet Gedolei Torah.  Slifkingate, you see, is not going away.

Israel at a Crossroads

Shalom from Deerfield Beach, Florida. I'm visiting my mom; she's holding her own, thank God. The weather's gorgeous. I can run in my summer clothing. If I lived here all year I wouldn't have to be on antidepressants. But I'd still be angry as hell over what's going on in Israel. When we speak of Israel at a crossroads and facing an existential threat, we usually refer to outside military threats. We have enough of those, but now we have an existential threat from within. This is nothing new either; 2000 years ago instead of coming together to fight the Romans we fought one another and played right into the Romans' hands.
Today's threat from within is centered in Beit Shemesh and certain neighborhoods (Jewish, not Arab) in Jerusalem. Certain Jewish fanatics who call themselves Sikrikim, after the ultra-Zealots in Roman times who carried short knives (Sicarii) concealed in their cloaks (talk about cloak-and-dagger) took it on themselves to curse, spit and throw objects at little girls leaving a religious Zionist school in Beit Shemesh. They say the girls are not dressed modestly; they are, but not to the standards of the Sikrikim. And if they weren't, would that give anybody the right to physically and verbally assault them? Not in any free country. The fanatics moved to Beit Shemesh from Jerusalem when the latter became too crowded and /or too expensive. Beit Shemesh was already populated mostly by English-speaking immigrants of a more Zionist bent, Americans who bring American values when they make aliya, but that doesn't stop the "religious" hooligans from doing in Beit Shemesh what they did in Me'ah She'arim. They also try to enforce gender segregation on public buses and make men and women walk on opposite sides of public streets. The situation is such that the United States State Department issued a formal advisory that American citizens shouldn't visit "ultra-Orthodox" neighborhoods in "immodest dress." The advisory does not define what constitutes immodest dress; I suppose one can ask the eight-year-old girl who was spat upon and called a whore. How's that for a hillul Hashem? Now the police promised to arrest anyone harassing schoolchildren and the situation is quiet, but how long will that last?
True to form, the larger haredi community tries to pass this latest outrage off as the act of an irresponsible lunatic fringe. That may be true, but the silence from the "responsible" haredi Rabbinic leadership is deafening. Not a peep out of them. Imagine if the Aurbachs, Elyashivs, Kanievskies, et. al. were to go to Beit Shemesh and escort those girls to and from school. That would show the Sikrikim and everybody else that the assaults and invective against Jewish children are anti-Torah and will not be tolerated. Imagine if wall posters went up in all the affected areas that anybody engaged in such despicable behavior should be ostracized, boycotted, refused kibbudim in synagogues and such. Those greybeards were quick enough to put up posters condemning Rabbi Slifkin.
And whatever happened to men's obligation to protect women? The mothers of the assaulted children went to the media and let the outrages be known. Where were their fathers and brothers? If any strong healthy men would have given the fanatics what-for, that would have been the end of it. Those leeches and bloodsuckers are brave enough to beat up women and children, but when it comes to defending the country from its enemies, nobody's home. When it comes to honest work to support their families, ditto.
Israelis must decide, before too many suns set, what kind of a country they wish to have. Do they want a liberal democracy like the United States or do they want a theocratic stink hole like Iran? Do they want to be part of the open world or the closed world? Ben Gurion in his day chose loud and clear. Israel would be part of the open world, and all Israelis except for a handful of religious nuts agreed. Now the nuts are numerous enough to reopen the question. If we choose a theocratic stink hole, we cannot expect the unstinting and bipartisan support of Congress to the tune of millions of dollars when the United States is running a monumental deficit. Will the U.S. support a country where its female Secretary of State might theoretically be told to sit in the back of the bus? I think not.
I also think that a majority of Israelis will still throw in their lot with democracy and the West. What is needed is for the Religious Zionist community to loudly and clearly reject the haredi authority figures and make common cause with the secularists to keep Israel democratic and free. Then we will have a secular-and -Religious-Zionist majority in the Knesset. Draft exemptions for haredim will be sharply curtailed, as will subsidies for yeshivot that teach sedition and for able-bodied men who choose not to work. The police will enforce the law without fear, favor or corruption, and lunatic fringes will be relegated to the fringe, as they should be.

Hanukkah - A missed opportunity and seized opportunities

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.

Salute to Israel

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.

Runs With the Sun

Several years ago I took an education course in Brooklyn College with the goal of impoving my teaching skills. The professor had each of us pick an "Indian name" on the model of "Dances with Wolves" and explain it to the class. The exercise made me "think outside the box": not all cultures make us prisoners of the names our parents pick for us. Not that I ever had a problem with my Hebrew name, but many of us, girls in particular, are saddled with Yiddish names we would just as soon be rid of. Many such girls, upon reaching adulthood, adopt a Hebrew name. They often encounter opprobrium from the community, and might even experience halakhic problems when documents such as a ketubah or, God forbid, a get, which require the person's name, need to be drawn up. Several Native American cultures require boys about the time of puberty to go off alone on a "vision quest" or journey of self-discovery, and return with the name by which he would thenceforth be known.

I picked as my Indian name, "Runs With the Sun." I explained to the class how I love the feel of the sun on my strong shoulders when I run in summertime, how John Denver's song "Sunshine on My Shoulders Makes Me Happy" resonates powerfully with me. Unlike most runners, I acclimatize to heat easily. The sunshine and the sweat it induces put me in touch with my physical self, a part of my being long neglected in our culture. I feel connected with an earlier time in our history, when we were strong and vital, when we were not ashamed of working in the fields (ve'asafta deganekha), when we were "normal." In these topsy-turvy times men are encouraged to "get in touch with their feminine side." Not me. We've been doing that for far too long. Running with the sun, I am in touch with my essential, robust maleness, and that is when I feel closest to God. And when I finish running and take a shower, well, ha-meivin yavin.







I am RUNS WITH THE SUN - At the Staten Island Half Marathon in 2007













I am reminded of that classroom exercise today because we recited Birkat Ha-hama, the Blessing of the Sun, recited every 28 years. Once in a generation we have the opportunity to thank God for the wonderful gift He gave us in that yellow orb, that medium size star somewhere on the fringes of a mediocre galaxy. How it is just the right distance from earth for life, and ultimately humankind, to flourish. How its light is mostly in that middle portion of the electromagnetic spectrum to be captured by plants and transformed into energy that I can use to make me feel so powerful and energetic. The shorter wavelengths are so energetic that they destroy DNA; the longer ones lack sufficient energy to be used in photosynthesis. Of course, it works the other way around too; living things evolved to make use of the resources that are available. Those of a mystical bent will rhapsodize about the sun being in the exact position it was when God "hung it in the sky" at the beginning of time. There's nothing wrong with mysticism as long as it doesn't ask us to deny observable reality; Rav Kook was a mystic. But this dyed-in-the-wool scientist was always put off by mystical speculation. I prefer to find God in what I can explain, not in what I cannot.

A ritual performed once in a generation inevitably engenders stock taking. Where was I 28 years ago? What have I accomplished in the intervening time? Where do I hope to be 28 years from now? Has our community gotten stronger or weaker? What do the next 28 years hold in store? Last time we recited Birkat Ha-hama, in 1981, Ronald Reagan had just assumed the Presidency. We were experiencing hard times economically, but Reagan assured us that things will be better; he talked of Morning in America. There was no Internet, no personal computers, we typed everything from letters to doctoral theses on electric typewriters and either covered up our mistakes with unsightly white fluid or retyped the whole page. The Cold War was raging; half of Europe was held in slavery to the Soviet Union, and Soviet Jews were not allowed to leave the country (neither was anybody else). Nuclear holocaust topped our list of fears. Reagan called the Soviet Union what it was: an evil empire. He was derided by the liberal press and the "intelligentsia," but calling a spade a spade was the first step in dealing with it. He dedicated his presidency to winning the Cold War, and when he left office the evil empire was teetering. A year later the Berlin Wall would come tumbling down and Eastern Europe would be free. Two years later the Soviet Union itself collapsed. I had gotten married two years prior, in 1979, my children had not been born yet, and I had yet to purchase the home where I now live. I was still working on my Ph.D. in biology. Giants like R. Moshe Feinstein, R. Zvi Yehuda Kook and the Lubavitcher Rebbe were still with us. R. Slifkin was a baby, but "his" ideas were so mainstream that no one bothered writing about them. We did not have all the craziness that plagues our community today. My running times were at their peak and the highlight of my year was the New York City Marathon, when I would tour the five boroughs in a singlet with the Israeli flag across the chest. 28 years and two knee surgeries later, my running times are nowhere near what they used to be. I have to be grateful that, to my doctors' surprise, I am able to run at all. In the community, all sorts of lawlessness run rampant; the thinking seems to be that it's okay to lie, cheat and steal as long as you don't get caught. Young men who work and earn an honest living are Grade B on the marriage market. Relative birth rates over a generation resulted in the haredi lunatic fringe taking over the community and pushing the rest of us to the fringe. An anti-intellectual and anti-scientific mindset became the norm. The community seems to be following senile "leaders" over a precipice, not knowing or caring that their present lifestyle is unsustainable.
What will the future be? Next time we gather for Birkat Ha-hama will be 5797, or 2037 on the civil calendar. Holocaust survivors will have all died out, as will World War II veterans. Germany and Eastern Europe will no longer have living perpetrators; will that change how we view those countries? What new inventions will transform the lives of our children and grandchildren, as computers and the Internet transformed ours? Will I be able to gather with others for the ritual at all? I will be 84 years old if I live that long. Will I be institutionalized, unable to care for myself, eating what others want me to eat, lying in my own filth until others decide to clean me? As a teenager, I saw my father caring for his father who had Alzheimer's disease, and I knew in the marrow of my bones that that kind of life is not for me. I long ago stopped asking for long life when we bentsch Rosh Hodesh, having seen long life turn into a curse. My peregrinations on the planet lead me to believe that many others share that view, though not as much in the frum community. Will science come up with replacements for cartilage and synovial fluid so that we don't lose mobility? Will it come up with a way to stop the loss of muscle mass so we can get old without getting weak? Will my children, now 23 and 26, be married with children of their own, or will they find their fulfillment elsewhere? Will we as a community pull back from the cliff in time, or dwindle into an Amish-like existence, irrelevant to the rest of society and with most of our young dropping out? Will there be a strong "normal" Orthodox or Conservative movement for them to drop into, or will they simply be lost to Judaism? Or will Mashiach have come and redeemed us and the world?

I wish all my readers a happy and kosher Pesah.

Take your shoe off, Rabbi Khrushchev

Shortly after the Slifkin ban came out, well-known haredi Rabbis Aharon Schechter, Matisyahu Salomon and Aharon Feldman were invited to address a Modern Orthodox gathering in Teaneck, New Jersey. The idea was to promote healthy dialogue between haredim and people like us. Unfortunately but predictably, the opposite occurred. R. Salomon had signed on to the original ban, and the other two endorsed it later on. Not surprisingly the question of the relation of Torah to science came up, and R. Schechter, a Rosh Yeshiva at Chaim Berlin, was asked to answer. A video of his answer recently came to light, and it casts a bad light on the kind of thinking emanating from Schechter and his ilk.
The rabbi opines that "it is not our assignment to know bri'at ha-olam [brias ha-oylim to him; suspect anybody whose holam is a Yiddish kvetch]. Wrong. We are told v'khivshuha; we have to master the world. To master the world we have to understand it, and that includes understanding its history and the history of its life. He tells us that we may not make new interpretations of Torah, and implies that Slifkin did so without mentioning Slifkin's name. Wrong on both counts. Torah advances, and always has, because people developed new interpretations of old texts; American Constitutional law advances in much the same way. But Slifkin did not come up with any hiddushim, as he himself states. He provides ample citations of luminaries such as the Rambam, Rav Avraham ben ha-Rambam, Rav Shimshon Rafael Hirsch and Rav Kook. If Rav Schechter wishes to trash all of them that is his prerogative, but he ought to be man enough to say so.
The content of Rav Schechter's presentation is not new and hardly worth my notice here. But it gets worse. Rav Schechter indulges in what is familiar to me from my days at left-liberal Columbia University. When logic fails, increase the decibel count and the histrionics. At about 4:22 into the video, he amplifies the above quote by amplifying his voice to a scream and pounding his fist on the table. People of a certain age will remember Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the late unlamented Soviet Union, taking his shoe off and pounding the table with it while addressing the United Nations General Assembly. The leftists at Columbia were following precedent, and so does Rabbi Schechter.
Rabbi Schechter and his ilk are not interested in dialogue with those who choose not to inhabit their Fantasyland. He says so in the same video. If you have a problem with such matters, "too bad for you." And if our best and brightest leave Jewish observance, too bad I suppose. Such things don't bother the likes of Rabbi Schechter. But they do bother us. Rabbi Schechter says he is not obligated to think about such questions. That's fine, but we are not obligated to accept his authority. Enough deferring to that gerontocracy of evil. We have our own authority figures, every bit as good as theirs, and we have to help them find their voices (see my previous post). If Rabbi Schechter and Company want a schism, they will get one - and the onus will be on them.

Hat tip: Emes Ve'emuna

The ghost of summers past

So here we are in my favorite time of year - summer! Long days to enjoy the outdoors. No need to bundle up. Just bask in God's own heat, brought to you free of charge courtesy of the sun. Wherever you go children are playing. On the courts at West 4 Street and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan you always see teenagers engaged in spirited games of basketball. They haven't learned yet to pamper themselves and stay inside with the air conditioner going full blast. Being in my fifties, I sometimes think back on the summers we enjoyed a generation ago. And the key word was "enjoyed." There was a lot less uptightness then than now. Summer was a time to let our hair down. We would walk around and play ball in short pants, and listen to baseball games on "transistor radios" that operated on boxy nine-volt batteries. Air conditioning was still a luxury that only the wealthy could afford, and few of us were wealthy, so we boys stripped down at home to short pants and sleeveless undershirts. We had fans going (a whole lot cheaper to run than air conditioners, and more comfortable too) and windows wide open to let in the breezes. We'd sprinkle ourselves with baby powder (it absorbs sweat), and above all we drank like fish. The women (and I'm writing about Orthodox people here) actually wore sleeveless dresses; they called them "shifts." We boys went to shul and to Bnei Akiva meetings without jackets or ties. To be sure, there was a minority dressed in heavy black clothing, but they were few in number. We called them khnyocks (can anybody tell me the origin of that Yiddish word?) and they didn't dare tell us what to do. And - imagine this - we went mixed swimming at public beaches! My father a"h would close his store Sundays in July and August and, weather permitting, we packed a picnic lunch and went as a family to Manhattan Beach. Other Orthodox families were also there, without a trace of guilt or self-consciousness. I don't know what the books say, but I do remember the praxis. As we got older, Bnei Akiva boys and girls would go on outings to the beach. We met one another. We talked. Physical attraction led to deeper attraction, and no one ever heard of a "shidduch crisis." The incidence of out-of-wedlock pregnancy and venereal disease in our community was as close to zero as such things ever get, which is a good indication that there was little if any illicit (i.e. premarital) sex going on.

And now, some 40 years later? I'm a fit, strong, lean athlete barukh Hashem, and I tolerate the heat just fine, thank you. I have no need for artificial cooling, other than what fans provide. Fat is an insulator; it traps heat. Fat people shipwrecked in cold water are more likely to survive than similarly situated lean people, because they are less likely to become hypothermic. I go to shul without a jacket, except when I know that the air conditioner will be set too high. And if I get cold, I get up and leave. Bad enough I'm cold in winter; I refuse to be cold in summer (see my previous post). I sprinkle myself with baby powder on hot mornings, I drink like a fish and I run around in short pants and a sleeveless top. Once in a while a khnyock will give me the hairy eyeball; I couldn't care less. And I hear people complaining. Mostly fat people; what do they expect? I bring a thermometer to shul on Shabbat, and sometimes the temperature hovers around 70 degrees. What with electricity so expensive, all the guidebooks are telling us to set the thermostat no lower than 78, but our buildings still run the air conditioner as if electricity was free. On Shavu'ot my shul made a Yizkor appeal for the summer upkeep of the shul, i.e. for running the air conditioner. My Yizkor contribution went elsewhere.
Ah, summer. The heat, the sun, the fun. I only wish that it could last forever.

We were slaves. . .

One of the beautiful things about being American is different groups being able to enjoy one another's culture and learn from their positive aspects. African-Americans deliberately drew on our Torah for encouragement in their struggle against slavery and, later, against Jim Crow. And Jewish musicians, Subliminal in particular comes to mind, draw upon hip-hop to express their love of Israel and defiance of the evil forces seeking its destruction.

There is a rich trove of narratives handed down by successive generations of African-American slaves and later committed to writing (sounds like our gemara?). Many of these tales are included in the anthology "To Be A Slave" that is used in New York's public schools. When my sister was waiting several years for her get (!), she and her children would come to me for the sedarim and I could not rush through the Haggada as I am often tempted to do when we do not have "guests." I selected several slave narratives from that book and had each of the children read one. One of those narratives spoke of how each slave had a quota of cotton to pick, and would be beaten if he failed to meet it. When I first read that it hit me like - like a ton of bricks. Doing my best to keep a poker face, I asked the child whom I asked to read the narrative if it reminded him of anything. I got a blank look and a negative answer. Going around the table, I got the same look and the same answer. I had to explain to the kids (all three of my nephews and my niece were going to haredi yeshivot, but my children's yeshivot were no better) about the quota of bricks that Parshat Shemot tells us had to be made by each Jewish slave, and the whippings if the quota was not met.

Let us keep this in mind whenever racist thoughs enter our heads and whenever we are tempted to let racist words escape our lips. It is at the core of our belief system (see Parshat Lekh-lekha) that we did not end up in Egypt by happenstance. We were sent there for a purpose; it was all planned out centuries in advance, if not before the creation of the world. Time and again we are told to observe various mitzvot bein adam la-havero "because you were slaves [or strangers] in Egypt." It never ceases to amaze me that Jews in the ante-bellum South fought for the Confederacy - how did they keep a straight face when they sat their children down and repeated the age-old formula beginning with the four Hebrew words for "We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt?" It was no coincidence that Jewish Americans were in the forefront of the struggle against Jim Crow half a century ago (as I tell my students, I'm old enough to remember Martin Luther King but a mite too young to have been a freedom rider). And when people say that Jewish Americans live like WASPs and vote like Puerto Ricans I take it as a compliment: it confirms that we are being true to our calling.

Hag Kasher V'sameah.

The Day the Music Died

It appears that the ban-this-ban-that cancer so prevalent in Israeli haredi circles has spread here. A music concert, typical of what has been common in our community at least since I was in college, was scheduled to take place in New York’s Madison Square Garden Sunday March 9. Last week wall posters in Hebrew went up in Boro Park excoriating the concert as contrary to Torah values and likely to lead to impermissible mingling of the sexes (despite separate seating, which was not a fixture when I was growing up), and calling on the public to boycott the concert and not hire the performers for future functions unless they backed out. At least one copy of the poster appeared on a lamppost in Midwood, where I was able to read it. To the authors’ credit, the Hebrew was quite good; perhaps the practice of spending a year in Israel after high school is doing some haredim some good. The signers of the ban included the usual suspects, including many who signed a ban on a similar music concert in Israel and who signed the infamous Slifkin book ban. Not surprisingly, the main performer backed out under intense pressure, and the concert was canceled.
Speculation on the real reasons for the ban is flying thick and fast. There seems to be a fringe group that holds that almost all music is forbidden since the destruction of the Beit Ha-mikdash. A group of Jews living at the time of the second hurban, known as Aveilei Zion, actually sought to forbid eating meat and drinking wine. If God is not to eat sacrificial meat and drink the wine of libations (zevah u’nesakhim) as it were, then neither should we. The camp of R. Yohanan ben Zakkai countered that it should then be forbidden to drink water, since nissukh ha-mayyim, the pouring of water on the Altar on Sukkot, was also discontinued. The hurban was not to engender prohibitions on all the sensual pleasures that nature and nature’s God intended for human beings to enjoy. Needless to say, mainstream halakha is not like Aveilei Tziyon. Some contend that the lead performer, Lipa Schmeltzer, who is also a comedian, had made unacceptable jokes about some highly placed rabbis. If that is the reason, some highly placed rabbis need to get themselves a sense of humor. Some say that the style of music lends itself to anti-Torah thoughts or behavior. Since the specific “anti-Torah behavior” cited in the posters is mingling of the sexes, may I remind those people that we are not in Anatevka any more, thank God. Remember Tevya, on being informed by one of his daughters that she had found her own match without a shadkhan, exclaiming, “Where do you think you are, in Moscow, in Paris, in America?” Well, yes sir, we are in America and I for one am glad of it. Boys and girls will meet, fall in love, get married and make babies, and there is nothing anti-Torah about that; it is the first mitzvah. What do our “Torah authorities” think will happen when you systematically deprive young Jewish people of any chance to meet in a wholesome environment? Two things:1. A shiddukh crisis – ‘nuff said. 2. Young Jewish people will meet in an unwholesome environment conducive to all kinds of real, not imagined, aveirot. That boys and girls will meet and eventually make babies is what nature and nature’s God intended.
Some contend that the style of music, supposedly copied from secular music, is objectionable. R. Shimshon Refael Hirsch, R. Kook and others encouraged us to appreciate and enjoy what is beautiful in the secular culture – להכניס מיפיפותו של יפת לאהלי שם. Back in the ‘70s I took a girl to the opera; we now have, thank God, two wonderful children. And today I sometimes listen to – rap music! It would be difficult to imagine a more objectionable genre of music than rap, with its glorification of violence and disrespect of women. But music is a window on the soul, and I teach inner-city African-American teenagers. I need to listen to their music to get a feel for where they are coming from and, with God’s help, be able to reach them (see the book Skullcaps and Swithblades, by Dr. David Lazerson). So I will listen to rap music and, if ghettoized “gedolim” disapprove, why that’s just tough. And guess what? Good rap music does exist! I listened to a piece from Shaquille O’Neal that made me take a good hard look at how I was functioning as a father. Thanks Shaq, I needed that!

Where do we go from here? Do we allow the ban-signers, and remember they are a Who’s Who of haredi Torah authority in this country and their ban is but the latest, and certainly not the last, of a long train of abuses and usurpations, to impose on us a joyless Taliban-like existence? If you think we have a dropout problem now, well you ain’t seen nothing yet. I too would have dropped out of such an Orthodoxy. We should rather encourage the talented among us to continue performing – when God gives you a talent you’re supposed to use it, remember? If certain authority figures rooted in a bygone world disapprove, well, we are adults and we do not need their approval. And as long as we are cutting the umbilical cord, we might as well have what we had when I was growing up – mixed seating! Take a date there, or perhaps meet a girl or boy there. Make a point of attending such events – a concert is scheduled for the Sunday after Purim at the Armory at W. 168 Street in Manhattan, sponsored by the National Council of Young Israel and the Jerusalem Reclamation Project, separate seating available - so the tyrants will not be able to deprive the performers of their livelihood. Engage them at our private smahot, which will also have mixed seating for those who so desire. In short, let’s be normal again!

Hat tip: Emes Ve'emuna

A Time for Courage 2

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings – Wm. Shakespeare


How many yeshiva high school students would recognize this quote or be able to place it in its historical context? Not many, especially among the boys. This was the topic of a recent lecture delivered in Brooklyn by Prof. Yitzchok Levine, a math professor at Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. Secular studies are denigrated by rebbeim in yeshivot, and this attitude trickles down to the students when it is not taught to them outright. Nor is this a new phenomenon. Some 25 years ago I was tutoring in remedial math workshops at Brooklyn College, where I did my graduate work. The college still had an open admissions policy and many students needed to be brought up to specs. I expected that public school graduates would be unable to do basic math, but I also encountered yeshiva high school graduates who could not add, subtract, multiply or divide. We’re talking fourth grade arithmetic here. In my naiveté, I became angry at the students, when my anger would have been better directed at their rebbeim and yeshiva administrators. When I asked students how it was possible for them to be so lacking in basic skills, one replied that, since a high school diploma was needed to earn a living and the yeshiva could not deny its students the possibility of earning a living, it doled out diplomas regardless of achievement or lack of it. Note that 25 years ago yeshivot still expected their male graduates to eventually earn a living; nowadays that is not necessarily the case. Somehow it escaped the notice of the rashei (resha'ei?) yeshivot that a worthless piece of paper masquerading as a high school diploma would not enable graduates to compete in the job market, and would cause hillul Hashem into the bargain.
According to Prof. Levine, the problem has gotten worse, much worse. Yeshivot no longer even concede the necessity of their male graduates earning a living and supporting their families; they will marry rich girls who will support them while they sit and learn “Torah.” And I suppose that those girls will have their babies in the office and care for them there. The attitude to secular learning has “progressed” from indifference to outright hostility. Rebbeim are telling students to skip secular classes when they can get away with it. If that is “Torah,” then we should go to the mountain and give it back. But of course it is not Torah; it is merely the gospel according to our naked emperors, aka gedolim, and their fawning lapdogs in the rabbinic establishment and yeshiva administrations. Prof. Levine professes that he does not know what the solution is. Of course he does not know – he is part of the problem! In the Q and A following his presentation, the first question asked (itself a sad commentary on the state of knowledge among adults in the community) was “How would you handle evolution?” Prof. Levine replied that he would teach it, since it is required on standardized tests and students need to be prepared for college, but then he would tell the students that it is against the Torah. This is coming from a college professor! He needs to take his own medicine, and also to read Rabbi Slifkin’s Challenge of Creation.
As Prof. Levine stated, many haredi parents admit in private that there is a problem but say nothing in public for fear of repercussions, such as shiddukhim being ruined or children being kicked out of yeshivot. There, dear Brutus, is the problem, and there lies the solution. It’s called C-O-U-R-A-G-E. Parents have to bite the bullet and publicly demand quality education for their children. And if their children are expelled, what of it? A yeshiva that expels a boy because his parents demand that the hanhala provide what the parents are paying a fortune for in tuition is a yeshiva that parents should not want their children to be in. A ruined shiddukh? So what? A prospective spouse who would call off the marriage (or allow his/her parents to call it off – what a wimp!) because the in-laws are zealous for a sibling’s education is someone that one should not want one’s child to marry! If the parents do not get satisfaction from the yeshiva administration, then they must organize as a community and establish yeshivot whose administrators are living in today’s world and not in a world that has long since ceased to exist. My alma mater, Yeshivah of Flatbush, could serve as a model. Its administration is independent of outside “authorities” and accountable instead to its parents and alumni. Hebrew (studied in Hebrew!) and secular studies are interspersed throughout the day. Students do not begin their secular studies stressed out from a full day of Hebrew and without the energy they need to excel, nor are they encouraged to regard either as more important than the other. God wrote both books, Torah and secular knowledge, and both need to be mastered. Secular teachers, for the most part, teach full time in the yeshiva. Yeshiva students deserve better than stressed out moonlighting public school teachers – and public school students deserve better than teachers who bolt as soon as the final bell rings in order to get to a second job.
Parents, when putting down roots in a neighborhood, should ascertain not only the quality of the yeshivot but that of the public schools. Good public schools anchor and stabilize a neighborhood, and keep yeshivot honest. Administrators who neglect the school’s secular curriculum should have to fear that parents will remove their children, and their money, and place the children in the local public school. Not that parents should actually do that except as a last resort, but when fighting a cold war perceptions often count for more than realities. We never contemplated actually firing off all those missiles at the Russians, since that would have meant the end of the world as we know it, but it was necessary to have the Russians believe that we just might.
Many yeshiva parents know that their children are being shortchanged. Sooner or later (sooner, judging from the off-the-derekh phenomenon) the brighter children will recognize that they were lied to by their yeshiva teachers and cheated out of the quality education that is their birthright. They might then throw out the baby with the bath water, not only repudiating the naked emperors that failed them every step of the way, but abandoning Torah observance entirely – going to the mountain and giving it back. Courageous action by us, parents and interested adults in the community, can avert such a tragic outcome and restore sanity to Orthodox Jewish life.

(Hat tip: Brooklyn Wolf)