Heard on the Web

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

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/does-gop-religious-retreat-103526580--election.html

  It seems that, in a magazine interview, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) refused to commit himself on whether the earth is several billion years old or several thousand.  He received an indirect rebuke from, of all people, noted televangelist Pat Robertson, who warned that "if you fight science, you are going to lose your children."
   It is advice many haredi rabbis would do well to heed.

Congressman: Evolution a lie from the pit of hell

Read this and weep:

http://news.yahoo.com/congressman-calls-evolution-lie-pit-hell-175514039.html?bcmt_s=m#ugccmt-container

   Embryology and the Big Bang Theory too.  This guy is a medical doctor.  Probably one who whips out a prescription for penicillin whenever somebody walks in with the sniffles, thereby creating armies of penicillin-resistant bacteria.  It's Evolution 101, doc.

   Evolution is a lie.  The earth is no more than  9000 years old.  Yeah right, and the moon is made of green cheese, and R. Elyashiv and R. Moshe Feinstein were authorities on science.  Really now, these people have a right to spout whatever nonsense they wish, but do we have to listen, let alone give them the U.S. House of Representatives as a soapbox?

   I don't know which is scarier, that Rep. Broun sits on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology or that his views have a large following in our community.  Small wonder that so many young people are opting out of our community.

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.

Leap Day

On the civil calendar, today's date, February 29, comes once in four years. Those years are always Summer Olympics and, in the United States, presidential election years. The day and the calendar have an interesting history, and one that is marginally relevant to Jewish ritual. The ancients noted that the solar year does not consist of a whole number of days; 365 is too few and 366 too many. They estimated the true year to consist of 365.25 days, and intercalated a leap day every four years to synchronize the calendar with the actual motion of the earth around the sun. They also believed that the sun revolved around the earth, and when that was proven false in the sixteenth century a few gedolim of the time announced that the new heliocentric model was heretical. Plus ca change, plus la meme chose (see also here). This intercalation became known as the Julian Calendar, promulgated by Julius Caesar, and was used throughout the Christian world until the sixteenth century. The problem was that the period of earth's rotation is not exactly 365-1/4 days. The year was too long by several minutes, leading to an error of a day roughly every century-and-a-third. Astronomers observed that the solstices and equinoxes were occurring earlier than they used to, and farmers noted that the agricultural seasons - planting, harvest, sheep-shearing and the like - were falling behind. Already in the eighth century, the Venerable Bede, an English monk, calculated the error and proposed a solution, but nothing was done until 1582, when Pope Gregory XII promulgated the calendar that bears his name. All Catholic countries immediately adopted the new calendar, but it spread more slowly in Protestant countries including England and its American colonies, where it was adopted in 1752. Thus, dates prior to that are designated "Old Style" and followed by the "New Style" equivalent. George Washington, for instance, was born on February 11, Old Style or February 22, New Style. Russia did not adopt the Gregorian Calendar until after the Bolshevik Revolution, and it is now in use throughout the world, at least for commercial and business purposes. Most Eastern Orthodox churches still use the Julian calendar, so Orthodox Christmas, for example, comes on Janurary 6 on the Gregorian calendar. Besides advancing the date by eleven days (in 1752), the calendar mandates that century years (those that end with two zeros) are not leap years even though they are divisible by four, unless they are divisible by 400. Thus, as most of us remember, 2000 was a leap year. As we do not remember, 1800 and 1900 were not. The upcoming century year, 2100, will not be a leap year. Most of us, and most of our children, will not be around then. However, children born in the coming decades, our grandchildren and great-grandchildren, will be. Given the attentiveness of most of our children to math, especially in yeshivot, I expect schools to have a tough time teaching children why 2100 is not a leap year.
The Jewish calendar was promulgated by Hillel II in the fourth century C.E., when the Byzantines (Christian Romans) ruled Eretz Yisrael, which they had been calling Palestine for three centuries. The Byzantines were still on the Julian Calendar. The date we begin to say tal umatar was fixed as 60 days after the autumnal equinox, so it fell out of sync as the autumnal equinox did. In the 20th and 21st centuries the date was December 4 or, in years before a civil leap year, December 5. After 2100 it will be December 5 or 6, unless a reestablished Sanhedrin rules otherwise.
The Jewish calendar has a similar problem. It is a bit too long and Pesah, which needs to be in "the month of spring," is slowly drifting toward summer. This is beginning to be noticeable in some Jewish leap years when the first day of Pesah is more than a month after the spring equinox, and/or the last day of Pesah is May 1. A number of solutions have been proposed. One is a return to observational determination of Rosh Hodesh and leap years; the Karaites still do this. To me this is not practical, since housewives (sorry, homemakers) need to know more than a month in advance, when Pesah comes and business people and calendar printers need to know the civil dates of Jewish holidays several years in advance. Any solution will require a Sanhedrin to promulgate; may we soon have the unity necessary to reestablish the Sanhedrin and fix what is broken.

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.

Rav Shmuel Kaminetzky at Kingsway

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.

Not in Our Name - Gay Bashing and Orthodox Rabbis

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.

A Parsha Thought - Yiftah in His Generation

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.

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

Sarah Palin and the role of government in a free society

Emes Ve-Emuna has a discussion of Sarah Palin's candidacy for Vice President and her being a role model for morality among political leaders. This is a rare case where I disagree with most of what Rabbi Harry Maryles (the author of that blog) is saying. If I understand him correctly, he is advocating governmental action to enforce moral norms that I do not believe should concern the government in a free society. Since my comments are too lengthy for the comment section there, I am posting them here and referencing them there.

This is a rare instance where I must disagree with most of what R. Maryles wrote. First, besmirching the memory of President Kennedy . John F. Kennedy kept our country and the rest of the free world free when the Communists were hell-bent on destroying our way of life. We were blessed to have a man of his vision and courage in the White House, and to the best of my recollection, unlike Bill Clinton, he never charged his private sins to his public credit card. We did not know of his sexual indiscretions until well after his murder.

I believe in separation of church and state almost as a secular religion. Justice Frankfurter once said that we have staked the very existence of this country on the proposition that keeping religion separate from the state is best for religion and best for the state. It was the unique genius of our founding fathers, many of whom experienced persecution at the hands of the established Church of England. It is not the function of government to regulate how adults (as opposed to children in school) dress or what they watch on TV or see in theaters, or indeed whether they should own TVs or go to theaters. That is the individual's business, and his or hers alone, as long as it does not physically harm others. The only harm I suffer from women's immodest dress is in becoming jaded; visual stimuli that should be sexually arousing no longer are. I do not believe that this "harm" is sufficient to justify state action. I know that my summer running outfits offend some people; some people have said as much. But as long as no one is harmed, the police power of the state may not be brought to bear, as it is in unhappy lands like Saudi Arabia. Once we start down that slippery slope, it is but a small step to banning books that are out of harmony with the prevailing official ideology.

I intend to vote for John McCain, despite his being 72 years old and not in the best of health. If God takes him from us before four years are up, Sarah Palin must be ready to step into the Presidency. She has about as much experience in foreign affairs as Barack Obama, maybe less. She will be the leader not only of our country but of the entire free world, and she does not know the difference between science and belief. If she has her way, students in science classrooms will be taught a hash (kil'ayim) that does violence to both. This does not augur well for our global competitiveness. Finally, call me sexist but at this juncture in our history I do not think we can afford a woman President. We are in a war to the death with an implacable enemy who will stop at nothing to destroy us. Waging such a war requires a ruthlessness and cold-heartedness that I do not believe most women have. True, there are Golda Meirs and Joans of Arc, but they are few and far between, and Sarah Palin does not impress me as being one of them. The same testosterone that makes an alpha male fearless in battle also impels him to spread his sperm far and wide; see Our Inner Ape by Frans de Waal (2006). Hence the sexual indiscretions that so often typify powerful men - and if the men are not Jewish and their paramours not married, it is doubtful whether such indiscretions are in any way assur. To err is human, to forgive divine.

Of course, all this is water over the dam, and in the absence of an option to vote for McCain and Biden we have to make the best of what we have. May McCain win and may God preserve him.

More craziness about evolution

If your intellectual peregrinations are confined to the Orthodox community, you would think that evolution is somehow controversial, and doubt exists over whether it happened - and is happening! Here is something I posted to the Jewish Press last week (link):

No controversy over evolution

Date 11:08, 08-24, 08

To the Editor:

I have little to add to the incisive responses of Yaakov Mayerhoff and Avi Goldstein in last week's issue to the attacks on evolutionary theory that appeared the week before. However, the headline makes it appear that evolutionary theory is somehow controversial. There is no controversy in the scientific community over evolution. It is supported by mountains of evidence and is as firmly established as electromagnetism, quantum mechanics or any other theory in science. Evolution is a fact. It occurred. All living species including our own are products of descent with modification. Rav Hirsch's hypothetical situation of evolution being ultimately vindicated is now reality, and the Orthodox establishment needs to deal with it.

It is telling that in the same issue, Chronicles of Crises informs us of an Orthodox man who left both his family and Jewish observance. I do not know why this particular man left the fold, but he is not the only one. Nobody appreciates being lied to or played for stupid. When products of our system go out into the world, acquire some knowledge and discover that their parents, yeshiva teachers and rabbis have been lying to him and playing him for stupid for twelve years, many are tempted to chuck the whole kit and caboodle. Unlike my generation that remembers a time when Orthodoxy was normal, young people today see only a disconnect between what they are given to believe is normative Orthodox hashkafa on the one hand and objective reality on the other. They would rather live in the real world than in an Orthodox Fantasyland. Who can blame them?

Sincerely,
Zev Stern, Ph.D.

Quick - gotta ban it!

This from a bodybuilding site about a bodybuilder with a decidedly Jewish name - Joshua Katz:

I lifted my first weight when I was 13 years old. My cousins who were practicing physical therapists at the time gave me the book "GETTING STRONGER" by Bill Pearl. This turned out to be the most pivotal and life changing gift I have ever received. I proceeded by lifting weights and following the diagrams in that book religiously (for lack of a better word). While other kids my age were playing soccer and baseball and any manner of other sports, I was in my basement lifting weights and training like a bodybuilder.The rush I got from that type of training hooked me and has never let me go. I got so muscular from lifting in my basement for 2 full years that I outgrew the equipment that I had. I asked my parents if I could join a gym and they took me to the local Powerhouse Gym in Freehold, New Jersey; they signed the papers for me and the rest is history. I entered my first bodybuilding contest at the age of 19, the 1995 Gold's Gym Classic held in Lakewood, NJ [emphasis mine] . I took the overall teenage title and took second in the novice lightweight class. A year later I competed in the same contest as an Open Men's Lightweight and took second place.

Huh? How can the Kotlers and Salomons blithely ignore such a toeiva in their own backyard? Such a breach in the wall of our holy Torah? Boys will be led into the path of sin. Girls may actally turn their heads and look at the athletes walking down the street. They might even fantasize about going to a concert with them. Oy vey! There's no time to waste. Get out the kol korei pen and write the usual imrecatory screed. Can't let the mitzva become hametz.

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

More stupidity from Lakewood

An interesting article appears in the Chronicles of Crisis column in this week's Jewish Press. In short, several families with young children were visiting their grandparents in Lakewood. The basement of the house was rented out to a kollel family, also with young children. The fire in the basement stove went out on Shabbat and the "man" of the house refused to turn off the gas. Soon enough the people upstairs started smelling gas and becoming sick. After finding nothing upstairs, one of the visitors, child in tow, came downstairs to investigate. It didn't take long to find the problem, and the visitor instructed his child to turn off the stove, which was not burning, under the disdainful eyes of the kollel "man."

The people who run Lakewood outdo themselves in stupidity and rish'ut every day. It doesn't matter how many blatt they memorized; they're still a bunch of imbeciles. Are they so busy banning books that they don't teach their talmidim the basics of survival? That man was worse than a hasid shoteh! The people in that house, according to the article, were becoming nauseous and getting headaches. Classic symptoms of gas poisoning. Continuously streaming gas displaces oxygen, dumbass! And any source of ignition might well have ignited a conflagration in which any or all of the occupants of that house, including young children, could have died, not to mention the firefighters who would have responded. They don't work hard enough, you see, they need extra business from yeshiva people who are supposed to have brains. Haven't the Kotlers and Salomons, with all their "learning," stumbled on an obscure concept called "pikuah nefesh?" It would serve that "man" right to be arrested for child endangerment and to have his children taken away.

Finally, why did the visitor instruct his child to turn off the stove? I learned that in cases of pikuah nefesh one does not ask a child or a Gentile to do the work, but does it himself. Even the gadol ha-dor, if present, must do the job himself to impress on the community the importance of setting Shabbat restrictions aside when human life is in danger. I would have brought my child downstairs, turned off the stove myself, opened the windows and told my child in a loud voice, making sure the "man" of the house hears, that when life is in danger you correct the situation first and ask questions later.

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)

About the Neandertals

I just came across a very interesting article in the current issue of American Scientist about what might have caused the Neandertals (aka Neanderthals) to become extinct and modern men to take over. Click here. I know Megaupload is a pain but it's free and the article is too big to incorporate here. Note how the evolutionary time scale as well as evolution itself is treated matter-of-factly with no apologetics. There is no controversy in the scientific community about evolution having occurred. Yeshivot that don't teach it are leaving students unprepared for the introductory biology course in college, where the professors will also be very matter-of-fact.

Thanksgiving

I think I wrote on another blog that I'd have a post about Thanksgiving, but I got busy, so sorry it's late.
When I was growing up we all celebrated Thanksgiving and took it for granted. All of a sudden it's a subject of controversy, with many haredim saying it's not kosher. Not kosher to thank God for the blessings we enjoy in this country? Crazy. But we should be accustomed to haredi craziness by now. It comes down to whether or not we American Jews consider ourselves Americans. Jews in Poland, Lithuania, Russia and the other hellholes of Eastern Europe did not consider themselves Poles, Lithuanians, Russians and so forth, and neither did the Gentiles in those countries. Often they were not even literate in the languages of the countries they had been living in for centuries. Indeed, the Yeshiva of Volozhin closed down rather than teach students Russian, i.e. teach the Russian language, not teach Torah in Russian. That is the mindset that the detractors of Thanksgiving are acting upon. And it is not our mindset. We consider ourselves Americans in every sense. And so do our Gentile neighbors. We pay taxes, serve on juries, vote in American elections and so forth. American Jews served proudly in uniform in all of America's wars; the Holocaust museum in Battery Park in Manhattan contains an exhibit dedicated to American Jews who fought in World War II (one of them was my father a"h). In fact, when Asser Levy and his group of 23 first settled in New Amsterdam, the Dutch authorities proposed a special tax in lieu of guard duty. Asser Levy basically told them to take their tax and shove it; the Jews would do guard duty along with everybody else. And so they did. So yes, I do celebrate Thanksgiving, without apologies. And I eat turkey, in accordance with the majority opinion that it is kosher (al ha-rishonim anu mitzta'arim. . . .).
But we've been taking too much for granted. Recent events in Jewish life make me give some thought to what we have to be thankful for, so let me list a few:
1. No policeman will ever come to my door to search for banned books. I am free to read and study whatever I wish.
2. Short of indecent exposure, no "religious police" will ever arrest me for the way I am dressed. I am free to run in America's streets and parks in short pants and a sleeveless top (yup, Jews have muscles, get used to it). If my daughter chooses to go out wearing pants, that is her business and not that of the cops (yeshiva spies are another matter, but that's another tale).
3. Our women will not be pushed into a burning building because they are not sufficiently veiled, as was the case in Saudi Arabia a few years back.
4. Anybody can sit anywhere he or she pleases on a public bus.
5. Anybody who takes it on himself to set fire to a store or pour bleach on a woman's clothing can expect to be arrested, prosecuted and sent to prison.
6. We have the courage to stand up for our rights and freedoms, and even when we make aliya, we bring American values. Hence, we will not sit still for the shenanigans of those who would impose their medieval shtetl mentality on the rest of us.

I hope all of you had a happy Thanksgiving and I wish you a happy (and non-controversial?) Hanukkah.

A Time for Courage

“In a place where there are no men, try to be a man.” – Avot 2:5

Recent events in our community have shown a total failure of leadership, especially among haredim but affecting others as well. People whom we have revered as gedolei Torah have proven to be either incompetent fools or truly evil men. The trickle of disturbing indicators of something amiss has become a torrent that we ignore at our peril and that of our children, who are increasingly alienated and giving up on being observant Jews.

The trouble began with an aversion to modernity. Secular education is frowned upon. Specific areas of knowledge that gedolim deem incompatible with our faith are shut out of our universe. For me as a biologist this is particularly galling, since the central unifying concept of my discipline, the theory of evolution, is on the verboten list, as is study of sexual reproduction. Books on the subject have been banned as heretical by old greybeards who often have not even read the books because they do not read or understand English. The late Rav Moshe Feinstein issued a psak (legal decision) in 1969 directing yeshiva administrators to tear pages dealing with evolution out of textbooks (Igrot Moshe Yoreh De’ah 73:3). This practice cheats students out of a quality education and makes it impossible for intellectually honest, ethical teachers to teach biology at those institutions. But if you were not a scientist or an academic insisting on your intellectual freedom, you were not affected – until now.

This aversion to education translates itself of late into a culture of parasitism and an allergy to work. Men are encouraged to spend a lifetime in full time Torah study, while women assume the burden of supporting the family. What was once a non-negotiable requirement and even a cliché – How do you propose to support my daughter? – is now a black mark in the marriage market. Older men who should be contemplating retirement are expected to work until they drop to support able-bodied but parasitic sons-in-law in full time learning. The result, predictably, is an epidemic of poverty and reliance on professional schnorrers. Not a thought is given to how that culture can be sustained once the older generation dies and the new generation of men who refuse to work for a living – and who cannot hold down a decent job because they don’t have a decent education – have to marry off their own children.

We have allowed the medievalists to impose their will on the rest of us in myriad ways, each being trivial but the totality stretching the limits of our tolerance. For instance, people are made to feel self-conscious if they go out dressed like Americans – nothing particularly risqué, just a T-shirt and jeans. Athletics for young women (and, increasingly, young men) are looked askance at, never mind that there is a positive mitzvah to take care of one’s health and you would be hard put to find a physician who would agree that sitting over books for most of the waking day is healthy. We are unable to sit next to our wives at a Bar Mitzvah, wedding or similar social function. We cannot sit next to our wives – or dates – at Jewish music concerts and similar performances. Indeed, our young men and women are deprived of any opportunity to meet one another in a wholesome environment and to date American style, without the permission of a matchmaker, and then we complain about a “shiddukh crisis.” All these things were common practice among American Orthodox Jews up until recently; only in the last generation have we allowed people to the right of us with a different world-view to make us feel inferior and adopt practices that are alien to our way of thinking.

We have accepted all this, however reluctantly, because it was seen as coming from men who forgot more Torah than most of us will ever know. But now the situation has gotten totally out of hand, and those same “Torah giants” allow the evil to infect us. When I was growing up there were embarrassing incidents when prominent Orthodox Jews were convicted, and sometimes sent to prison, for a gamut of white collar crimes. Violent crime was the province of “other people.” Not any more. A practice has developed in Israel where public buses are segregated by gender, with men in front and women in back. Israeli women have been beaten up by “religious” Jews (they only look religious) for refusing to move to the back of the bus. An American oleh who opened a pizza shop in Ramat Bet Shemesh was attacked violently because he allowed boys and girls to sit together. When he complained to a rabbi in the community, he was told that if he didn’t comply he “might end up dead.” Is this a rabbi or a mafia don? The beleaguered businessman closed his shop and reopened in a more normal part of town. There were instances where self-appointed “tznius patrols” set fire to stores selling clothing that did not meet with their approval, and poured bleach on the clothing of women when it did not meet their standards. Certain rabbis, with the apparent backing of their gedolim, try to enforce separate hours for men and women at doctors’ offices, and sometimes men and women are compelled to walk on opposite sides of the street. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that elements of the haredi community would be happy to see Israel transformed into a benighted theocratic hellhole like Iran.

Even so, normal people like us were not affected as long as we stayed out of haredi neighborhoods and did not ride Israeli public buses frequented by the hooligans. Now, however, a development is taking place that threatens our legitimacy as Jews in good standing. A conference was recently held in America, sponsored by an outfit calling itself “Eternal Jewish Family,” and attended by an assortment of haredi and modern Rabbinic leaders. Ostensibly, the conference was called to standardize procedures for Orthodox conversions in America and Israel, so that conversions performed in America would be recognized by the haredi-controlled Israeli Rabbanut. This, in itself, is a laudable goal. However, one of the speakers was a certain Rabbi Eisenstein, supposedly a right hand man for Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv, the revered Israeli Rosh Yeshiva and a man in his 90s. He stated from the podium, in the name of Rav Elyashiv, that anybody who believes the universe to be greater than 5768 years old is a kofer ba’iqqar, a major heretic, and therefore unqualified to serve as a dayyan (Rabbinic judge) and perform conversions. Nobody walked out, nobody raised an objection, there was no meha’ah (protest) of any kind, despite the fact that many attendees were members of the modern Rabbinical Council of America (RCA) and their legitimacy as rabbis, and the legitimacy of their congregants as kosher Jews, was being called into question. For if a rabbi is unqualified to be a dayyan, he also cannot be a witness and cannot arrange a get, or Jewish divorce. According to Rabbi Eisenstein (and Rav Elyashiv?), conversions, and presumably gittin, performed by these “heretics” are retroactively invalid. The implications of such a statement, and of its going unchallenged by our “modern” rabbis, cannot be overstated. In a few generations we will all, according to Rabbi Eisenstein and his ilk, be mamzerim, illegitimate, and unable to marry within the Jewish fold.

We must not remain silent in the face of such an outrage. The RCA must stop looking over its right shoulder for validation (see my earlier post). They and we do not need validation from these crazies. But courage is not the RCA’s strong suit. For instance, while they issued a statement affirming that Torah and evolution are compatible, they did not protest the banning of Rabbi Slifkin’s books by a who’s who of haredi rabbinic authority in Israel. Such a failure by our authority figures to stand up for intellectual liberty emboldens the crazies who would march us back to the Dark Ages. Thus emboldened, the crazies, bullies that they are, commit further outrages. If the RCA is too timid to step up to the plate and assert our legitimacy and the viability of our hashkafot within Torah Judaism, then the amkha, we ordinary folk, must step up. So here goes. I never signed on to Agudat Yisrael so I am not bound in any way by their Moetzet Gedolei Torah, either here or in Israel. Their gedolim are not mine. I look elsewhere for guidance. And I will say what the RCA is afraid to say. The emperors have no clothes. They are either fools or knaves – tipshim or resha’im. If they do not know about the hooliganism, the economic parasitism, the out-of-control halakhic pronouncements, being carried out in their communities, where people hang on their every word, then they are tipshim (or senile, no fault of theirs). If they know and condone the shenanigans with their silence, then they are resha’im. In either case, they are unfit to lead. It has been said in their defense that many of them are old, weak and manipulated by others such as Rabbi Eisenstein, who sign their names to posters and who speak in their name without their knowledge or approval. If so, then we must challenge them to publish their pronouncements in their handwriting, and announce the same in their own voices, recorded on videotape and posted on You Tube or a similar medium, so that their authenticity is beyond question. If any of them are reading this, consider yourselves challenged. If the authority of gedolim is being usurped by their “handlers,” i.e. the Eisensteins, then the Israeli secular authorities should consider filing criminal charges against said handlers. If indeed Rav Elyashiv and his fellow gedolim are of the opinion that RCA-type rabbanim who live in the 21st century are pasul, then we must publicly repudiate their leadership. We must then set up, if we have not already done so, a computerized registry of all marriages, divorces and conversions acceptable to us performed anywhere in the world including Israel. If the crazies consider us mamzerim, so be it; we do not need their recognition except in Israel, where the Rabbanut controls marriage and divorce. Eventually Israeli secularists will be thoroughly fed up with the crazies, and we will join forces with them to take back control of the Rabbanut. Then the computerized registry will become an official government registry, and the crazies will be relegated to the fringe, living in their own comfy cozy Fantasyland, perhaps a tourist attraction, but otherwise as irrelevant to the rest of society as the Pennsylvania Dutch.

I know not the course others may take, but I will not sit idly by as the religion I was born into, raised in and love is hijacked by medieval crazies, just as Islam, once a great world civilization, was hijacked by its crazies.

Rabbi Slifkin in the Jewish Press

Rabbi Slifkin has a front-page essay in this week's Jewish Press concerning mythical animals in Harry Potter and similar creatures in Torah sources; click here. In today's climate, it took courage for the newspaper to publish it. Thirty years ago such thoughts would have been so mainstream as not to be newsworthy. As the century turns, some of our "Torah leaders" would resolutely march us back to the Dark Ages. For the rest of us there is Rabbi Slifkin - and the distinguished rishonim and aharonim that he cites. As usual, Rabbi Slifkin's work is cogent and well thought out. However, the last section is difficult for me. He states that the idea of Hazal not being infallible on secular matters (since they were relying on the science of their time) is upsetting to some Jews and those Jews are not the target audience and should not read the material. Why should that idea be so upsetting? We are not Catholics who believe in the infallibility of the Pope. Hazal were flesh-and-blood human beings, and could be mistaken about science - and about Torah as well! It is called "he'elem davar" and the Torah itself prescribes special korbanot for it in Lev. Ch. 4.