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.

 

 

 



Point - Counterpoint

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



Click here.



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





It's the real thing!

In Memoriam: Rabbi Meir Kahane

Real Torah vs Fake Toyrah

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

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

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

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

Reflections on Yom Ha-shoah and Yom Ha-atzmaut

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

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

Hag Sameah

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

My Birthday

June 30 was my 57th birthday and humanity got a present. As I do on most birthdays, I ran down to the New York Blood Center in Brooklyn and donated a pint of blood. Blood is always needed in this city, and in summer it is in particularly short supply. As medical technology advances more is needed. Despite the efforts of medical scientists, no substitute for blood exists. If the right type is not available, surgery might have to be cancelled or, God forbid, patients might die. I will never know who benefited from my pint of blood, and they (today's technology allows blood to be fractionated into several components and given to several different people) will never know me. That is exactly how I want it, and the Rambam considers that the highest level of tzedaka.
The whole process takes about an hour of your time. Your blood pressure and hemoglobin will be tested to make sure you are able to spare the blood - and possibly to alert you to health problems. The discomfort is no greater than a pinprick; it should be the worst discomfort you ever feel. I donate several times a year, usually at Yeshivah of Flatbush. Blood drives are held all over town; if your workplace does not sponsor one it can arrange a drive by contacting the Blood Center (affiliated with the American Red Cross). It is a practical way to thank God for your robust good health.
Lo ta'amod al dam rei'ekha.

Israel Parade

Last week I attended New York's annual Salute to Israel Parade, as I have almost every year since 1967. It went off without a hitch and the weather was perfect. Last year some groups stepped off two hours late and marchers and spectators alike were annoyed with the delays. This time the organizers hired a professional "event manager" and everything was on time - no mean feat for a Jewish function!

My first time at the parade was with Yeshivah of Flatbush as a student, in the tense atmosphere immediately preceding the Six Day War. In the following years I would march with either Yeshivah of Flatbush or Bnei Akiva. Then I marshalled for a few years when the parade was put on by the American Zionist Youth Foundation. Now an "old man," I watch from the sidelines.

As they have for the past several years, the idiotic traitors of Neturei Karta picketed the parade along with their Arab masters and assorted leftists.

"Black" bastards giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

Can't you vomit?

Luckily for her and the Neturei Karta traitors, they were protected by a phalanx of New York City police.

The thousands of happy marchers paid little heed to these haters. This year being the centennial of Tel Aviv, many schools marched with banners heralding that milestone, and many floats celebrated it.

"Tel Aviv Green and Clean"

They say the Conservative and Reform movements are dying. Someone forgot to tell these high-spirited kids from Solomon Schechter of Bergen County. Many contingents from the Conservative Solomon Schechter schools marched with pride.

My son's alma mater was one of the few Brooklyn yeshivot participating.

To those who question our spirit, our perseverance and our commitment to Israel:

SEE YOU NEXT YEAR!

Doomsday Canceled

Doomsday they called it. The day the New York City Transit Authority (NYCTA), bedeviled by a large budget shortfall due to the recession, was set to impose draconian fare raises and service cuts. Back to the 1970s and 80s, when service was spotty, derailments and breakdowns were the order of the day and riders deserted the system - and the city - in droves. Was there no institutional memory at City Hall and Albany? Albany, because NYCTA had long since been made a subsidiary of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA, no relation to the yeshiva), a state agency, in response to a previous budget crisis. The city, especially working stiffs like us, the majority of New Yorkers who do not own cars, was gripped with a sense of impending woe. The fat-cat bureaucrats, who more likely get to work in chauffeured limousines than on the subway, were determined to seal New York's doom for a generation. Against them were arrayed the poor shnooks: the Working Families Party, the Straphangers Campaign, Transportation Alternatives, and similar ragtag advocacy groups. The odds seemed insurmountable, but we triumphed over insurmountable odds before; was it not the month of Iyar? The Internet is free, and emails soon went out to us ordinary folks with phone numbers to call, addresses for email and snail mail, rallies to attend in New York and Albany. My state senator, Carl Kruger, was among the "Fab Six" who were blocking legislation in Albany that would rescue the MTA. The rescue, as nobody tried to hide, would have been at the expense of automobile drivers. Automobiles carrying only their drivers are the least efficient and most environmentally irresponsible way of commuting to work, and making driving a bit more expensive would accomplish a social good transcending the Robin Hood strategy. But - automobile drivers are more likely than subway commuters to have scads of campaign cash. Carl Kruger is a good senator with a strong record of cutting red tape for ordinary Brooklynites. He is also too smart a man not to know on which side his bread is buttered. There are more public transportation riders than automobile commuters in his district, as there are in the City as a whole. And so it was not without some trepidation that I placed a phone call to his office. I got a staffer, and told her that if doomsday happens because Senator Kruger blocked the relief bill, I would hold him accountable at the polls and so would many like me in the district. I also called the office of Congressman Anthony Wiener, whose staffer tried to cut me off by referring me to the state politicians. I reminded her that the federal government has a bottomless pool of bailout money for banks and bankers, and it was time for them to bail out ordinary people. She promised me to relay my views to Mr. Wiener. I don't know if she ever did, but federal assistance proved unnecessary. At the last minute Albany came through. We had exerted enough pressure on the fat cats to make them see that we may not have loads of money but we do vote, and our votes are not for sale. We are aware, we are involved, and we will not take abuse silently. The bailout provides for a reasonable fare increase that will not take effect until June 28. We are by no means out of the woods; the relief is a two-year stopgap and we still need a "Joseph strategy" to save money in good times for bad. But New York has a shot at remaining the greatest city on earth. And we learned again what one of my teachers at Yeshivah of Flatbush taught us: l'olam lo l'hitya'esh. Never give up. If you give up on something you lose it even if it's found. You can fight City Hall. And you can win.

Yom Ha'atzmaut 5769

Last week I spent the evening and morning of Yom Ha'atzmaut as I usually do, at my alma mater, Yeshivah of Flatbush. Before Ma'ariv a teacher spoke about the significance of the day. He cited Rav Kook, who taught that the first war waged by the Jews in the conquest of Eretz Yisrael was against Sihon Melekh Heshbon. If we had put our faith in rational calculations - heshbon - we would not have won, not then and not now (see earlier post). A hazan (cantor) who also graduated the Yeshivah led us in Ma'ariv, including Hallel and the conclusion modeled after the end of Yom Kippur, as prescribed by the Israeli Rabbanut. After tfila we had an "Israeli cafe night" that was, if anything, too successful in that there were too many people for the available space. Much money was raised for Todah L'Tzahal.
The following morning tfila again followed the Rabbanut's prescription, including Hallel and the haftara for the last day of Pesah read with ta'amim but without a brakha. A festive breakfast followed, a tradition at Flatbush that I first saw as a student in 1967 (see earlier post), the twentieth anniversary of the state. 41 years later, all but one of my teachers have either retired or passed on. The students, and in some cases their parents, were not even born when I was a student there. Nevertheless, they would pull me into their dancing circles and I was able to keep up. Sometimes one kid would link arms with me for a two-person whirl. I am still able to feel the joy of Yom Ha'atzmaut as only a strong, healthy man can.
In the afternoon I suited up in a home-made sleeveless shirt with "HAPPY BIRTHDAY" and the Israeli flag across the chest and "61 YEARS YOUNG" on the back and ran through Brooklyn's Cobble Hill neighborhood and Atlantic Avenue. This is traditionally the borough's Arab stronghold, though like most neighborhoods in New York it has become considerably homogenized. I sometimes run there "out of uniform" during my lunch breaks at work, and I see Arabic-looking people going in and out of mosques, Arabic bookstores and the like. One might wonder why I would go out of my way to do something some might consider provocative, even looking for trouble. I certainly had no need to assert my right as an American to walk in any neighborhood in America; nobody was contesting that right. We learn the answer from Hannukah, like Yom Ha'atzmaut a time set aside to thank God for restoring Jewish independence through the victory of "the [relatively] weak over the strong, the few over the many." It is not enough to light Hannukah candles on the kitchen table as we do with Shabbat candles, though that is what we do in times of mortal danger, God forbid. We have to light them in a window facing outward, when people passing by can see. Pirsumei nisa is not preaching to the choir; it has to be "in your face," projecting outward to precisely those who would make themselves our adversaries. But on another level, our adversaries too benefit from the miracle. The ge'ula is not only for us; it's for the whole world, urbi et orbi. Emanations from our reborn state spread out and envelop the world in new strategies for arid-zone agriculture, new medical discoveries, new computer tech, the list goes on and on, as in the time of the Beit Ha-mikdash, where it is said that if the Romans had only known of the blessings they were getting from it they would have posted guards around it day and night.
I met up with a volunteer from Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy group for non-motorized (bicycling, walking, running) transport, doing a survey of traffic violations. He asked me where I got the shirt and we exchanged Hag Sameah salutes. And, barukh Hashem, I came to absolutely no harm. Nobody did anything, nobody said anything. It was as if God cast a spell on the Arabs and kept them in their homes (see Bereshit 35:5). I am reminded of what happened and did not happen over twenty years ago, when my newborn daughter developed a serious infection and for a while things were touch-and-go. She was in Long Island College Hospital, in Cobble Hill. It was summertime, and I ran to the hospital to be with my wife and daughter. The run took me down Atlantic Avenue, which was more Arabic then than it is today. I don't remember if I was wearing my Israeli flag shirt, but I wore my kippa proudly on my head, which at the time had enough hair to hold it on with a couple of bobby pins. I might have collected a dirty look or two, but nobody touched a hair of my head. And when I reached the hospital I turned to God: Okay, I conquered my fear and ran down Atlantic Avenue to show these people how You are giving Your people health and strength (Tehilim 29:11). Now You conquer whatever is bugging You and give me a healthy child. And He did.