Shout It Out

   We just finished the roller coaster ride of joy and sorrow that is the counting of the Omer.  During that time we read Parshat B’hukotai (Lev. 26:3 – 27: 34) with its promises of abundant blessings if we are faithful to the Torah and dire warnings of terrible curses if we are not.  In 1945, as World War II was drawing to a close and German concentration camps were being liberated by the British and Americans (the ones further east were liberated by the Soviets), this section was read wherever possible.  The next year, with all of Europe liberated, many Jewish ex-inmates were housed in Displaced Person (DP) camps, where they were provided with food, medical care and housing fit for human habitation and, we all hoped, enabled to start new lives elsewhere.  It was a time of joy and hope; as Jews we refused to wallow in victimhood.  Men and women met and married; babies were born.  A new edition of the Vilna Talmud was published.  Religious services were held, and about a year after liberation Parshat B’hukotai was read again.  Traditionally, the reader reads the curses sotto voce, in a soft voice, indicating their extreme unpleasantness.  But this time, as I learned in the Zionist youth movement Bnei Akiva, the reader shouted the curses out.  When asked why he departed from the custom, the reader answered that all the curses that he read were fulfilled during the war, and now he shouted them out as a challenge to God.  As You brought about the curses, now fulfill the second part.  Bring on the blessings.  אל תפל דבר מכל אשר דברת.  Let not one word fail from all that You have spoken (cf. Esther 6:10).  And three years later, almost to the day, the State of Israel came into being and fulfilled the blessings beyond our wildest dreams.  Our land and people were restored to their former greatness and then some, agriculturally and militarily.  More Torah is being studied there than ever before in our history:  כי מציון תצא  תורה – out of Zion shall come forth Torah (Is. 2:3).  Israel is the start-up nation where all manner of new hi-tech inventions are innovated, and from there they emanate as blessings to all humanity in medicine, agriculture and almost every other field of human endeavor (cf. Gen. 12: 2-3).  May our state, the work of God from the beginning, grow from strength to strength and culminate in the building of the third Beit Mikdash (Holy Temple in Jerusalem) and the finalization of the ge’ula (Redemption)  speedily and in our time.

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.

 

 

 



In Flanders Fields

In Flanders Fields
by John McCrae, May 1915

 

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Some (I would hope many) of us have seen this poem, written in 1915 by a Canadian soldier in the First World War.  It appears in many newspapers on Memorial Day, along with the ads for all the store sales.  Today people wish one another a Happy Memorial Day.  Happy?  We were a richer country when Memorial Day was Decoration Day, a solemn day of reflection on the high cost of our freedom as Americans, and not an excuse for a shopping spree and the “unofficial start of summer.”  When this was written the United States had not yet entered the war.  We were Johnny-Come-Latelies in both world wars, which would almost certainly have ended sooner and been less costly in blood and treasure if we had entered together with the British and Canadians.  My parents were not yet born, and their parents were still in Eastern Europe.  “Between the crosses, row on row”?  It wasn’t only crosses.  Jewish blood was spilled on every American battlefield since the Revolution, but until very recently America was overwhelmingly Christian.  There were relatively few Jews in America, and fewer still in Canada.  In those days before refrigeration, fallen soldiers were buried near where they fell, but Jewish ones would almost certainly have been buried in Jewish cemeteries.  Hence the crosses, row on row.
 

Truth be told, both my grandfathers fought in the Austro-Hungarian army, i.e. on the wrong side.  The same was true of the grandfathers of many if not most of my generation of American Jews.  My mother’s father was brought here as a prisoner of war, and my father’s parents came here fleeing the Nazis in the 1930s.  Our grandfathers’ having borne arms against America was not something we talked about much, even in the safety of yeshiva.  We were not proud of it.  For those who attended public school, talking about it would have certainly landed Jewish kids in a few fistfights.  But time, they say, heals all wounds and from nearly a century’s distance we can see a reflection of both the tragedy of galut (exile) and the greatness of America.  Up to and including the First World War, Jewish soldiers fought on both sides.  There is an account from either the First World War or the Franco-Prussian War of a Jewish soldier stabbing an enemy soldier with a bayonet (a lot of the killing was still up close and personal) and hearing him cry out “Shema Yisrael.”  The Jew who did the stabbing is said to have spent the rest of his life in a mental institution.  But here in America something happened that could not possibly happen anywhere else.  When my maternal grandfather refused repatriation to Hungary after the war and took the oath of citizenship, and when my paternal grandfather took his oath, they were accepted as Americans in every sense.  They started businesses, rebuilt their lives, married and, on my mother’s side, had American born children who looked and acted American and spoke English without a trace of an accent.  For this country was founded not on blood and iron but on an idea, rooted in our Tanakh (what Christians call the Old Testament), that all men are equal, before God and before the law.  People can come here and leave the Old World’s broils behind.  In my first year of teaching I had a Greek student whose best friend was a Turk.  A Turk!  Greeks and Turks were mortal enemies at each other’s throats for centuries.  My student laughed when she told me this.  Only in America!  And one of my best students ever was an Arab from Ramallah.  This great American idea was radical when America was founded; every dollar bill carries the Great Seal on which is inscribed “Novus Ordo Seclorum,” a new order of the world.  Every coin carries the inscription “E Pluribus Unum,” from many, one.  But our new order is still not universally adored. In every generation people rise against us to eradicate us, not only to kill us physically but to exterminate the idea on which we stake the very existence of this country.  Early in the past century it was the Nazis, then the Communists.  Now the enemy is Islamism.  Islamofascists don’t hate tall buildings, or they would have destroyed the world’s tallest building in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.  They don’t hate marathons; there are plenty of those in their own benighted lands.  Islamofascists hate America.  For as long as America remains a beacon of hope and freedom for the world, they will never be able to march the world back to the seventh century.
 

And so we must once again take up our forebears’ quarrel with the foe, grab from their hands the torch of freedom and hold it high.  We dare not break faith with the heroes who made the ultimate sacrifice, and who now sleep in Flanders Fields.

 

 

 

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.

Misery Loves Company

   In Hebrew, there is a saying: Tzarat rabim hatzi nehama, literally “The suffering of many is half a comfort.”  A rough English equivalent would be, “Misery loves company.”  I received two reminders that many of the troubles in the Orthodox Jewish community featured on my blog reflect deep rooted problems in the general society. 

   A month and a half ago, the New York Times Magazine published a story about a simmering sex abuse scandal at Horace Mann School in The Bronx, one of the country’s most exclusive and prestigious private schools.  As usual in such cases, once one victim found the courage to come forward, a veritable flood of similar stories surfaced, some recent enough to make criminal prosecution possible.  Before the dust settled, at least one student and one faculty member committed suicide.  One of the culprits was none other than Johannes Somary, a music teacher at the school and a maestro in the grand European tradition on the outside.  I own at least one disc of a classical concert he conducted.  Learning of his crimes was, l’havdil, like learning about Rav Moshe Feinstein advising teachers to tear pages out of biology books (Igrot Moshe Yoreh De’ah 3:73).  He was allowed to continue teaching at the school until he retired at the age of 67.  He subsequently died of natural causes, never having had to answer to the law.

                                                              Horace Mann School

   An even more publicized scandal took place at Penn State University, home of the Nittany Lions football team and their legendary coach Joe Paterno.   A low-level employee of the football program observed inappropriate conduct between an assistant coach and a ten-year-old boy and, at the risk of his job, came forward.  Things moved rather quickly.  After some initial stonewalling, the assistant coach was fired, and then convicted of multiple crimes involving children.  Joe Paterno, who died of lung cancer soon after the story broke, had his name tarnished forever for his lack of leadership. 

   What do we learn from this?  First, not to be incredulous that such things can happen, in the best schools with the best and brightest teachers, coaches and students.  The yetzer hara [evil impulse] doesn’t discriminate, and pedophiles gravitate to occupations where they have access to victims.  One obvious such occupation is teaching, and good teachers suffer from the actions of the perverts in whose shadow they work.  No more being alone in a room with a student (of either sex) for after-school tutoring.  Second, for all that hazal did not know much about modern science, they were more insightful into human nature than most of us are.  They did not pretend there was no such thing as a yetzer hara, and prescribed modest dress for females, no casual touching of other men’s wives and so forth.  Third, incidents of sexual abuse cannot be handled internally within the institution.  The instinct of an institution, secular or religious, is to circle the wagons and protect the brand.  Only the authorities (police and prosecutors) have the legal authority and the technical know-how to conduct a proper forensic investigation and collect evidence that will stand up in court.  Since time is of the essence, don’t even ask a rabbi for permission (the Aguda got it wrong as usual).  Go to the police, go directly to the police, do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars.

   The second reminder I received concerns the anti-intellectual, and in particular the anti-science mindset that infects the Orthodox community.  The same mindset. less pronounced, infects American society in general and prevents many public school teachers from teaching evolution and climate change as they should be taught.  Newsflash: Evolution is the sun around which all of biology revolves.  There is no controversy about this in the scientific community.  Likewise, there is a broad consensus in the scientific community that climate change is both real and anthropogenic, i.e. we are causing most of it.  But you’d never know it from following much of the popular press, conservative websites such as Townhall and, incredibly, many candidates for President of the United States.  The National Center for Science Education, a group that monitors the teaching of evolution and climate change throughout the country, pointed me in its weekly newsletter to a book, “Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America,” by Shawn Lawrence Otto, Rodale Press, 2011.  It is at the same time enlightening and depressing.  The author indicts scientists for taking public money but communicating only among themselves, not bothering to explain to the public what they do and why they do it.  The result is that communicating science is left to science writers who often are not trained scientists themselves.  I might add that too many science teachers majored in education where, from personal experience, I know that they learned next to nothing, and do not hold an undergraduate, let alone an advanced degree, in the subject they teach.  Our children, whose world will be increasingly dominated by science and technology, thus grow up scientifically illiterate and unable to compete with students from other countries.  Then, when scientific theories seemingly contradict their comforting religious belief systems, rational discussion is foreclosed (you can’t argue with God) and we must rely on the courts to keep science in science class and religion out (see also Berkman, Michael and Eric Plutzer; “Evolution, Creationism and the Battle to Control America’s Classrooms,” Cambridge University Press, 2010).  Relying on the courts leaves us complacent, but the other side does not take defeat lightly.  They keep introducing bills that they hope will pass muster, and eventually they will attempt to amend the Constitution to enshrine their own backwardness.   This cannot end well unless trained scientists engage the public and get involved in politics at all levels.  And it shows us Orthodox Jews that no matter how hard we try to wall ourselves off, we are part of the general society and we fail to engage with it at our peril.

A Parsha Thought - Unintended Consequences

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

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

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

Amalek Comes to Itamar

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



Click here (WARNING: NOT FOR THE SQUEAMISH)



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

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

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

Itamar residents celebrate their wedding in Shekhem

Taking Yes for an Answer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

V'Nahafokh Hu

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

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

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

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

Hag Kasher V'sameah.

A Tale of Two Levi Yitzhaks

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

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

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

Simple Rules for Happiness

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

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

חכמה בגויים - תאמין

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

Man proposes. . . .

From reading the papers and hearing the news accounts, one gets the impression that we are living in a time of great anxiety regarding the future of Israel. In fact, anxiety has surrounded the State since its inception, with the possible exception of the time immediately following the Six Day War in 1967. When the British were about to leave in 1948, and the surrounding Arab armies were gearing up for war, all the experts advised against declaring independence. There was no way, they said, that the tiny state-to-be could hold out against such overwhelming force. At the insistence of David Ben-Gurion, who would become the State’s first prime minster, independence was declared. As predicted, seven Arab states declared war the following day and invaded the new State of Israel. Again, the experts advised withdrawing to a tight defense line along the coast between Tel-Aviv and Haifa. There was no hope, they said, of the joke of a state granted by the United Nations partition plan prevailing. They were right about the partition borders being a bad joke. They were right about the plans of our enemies, but God and Ben-Gurion had other plans. Every town, every settlement was to be defended. Not only did the State prevail; it expanded. The Etzion Bloc and the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem were lost for nineteen years, but Israel fought its enemies to an armistice on all fronts, an armistice that held for nineteen years while Israel grew economically and absorbed the Jews expelled from Arab countries with little but the clothes on their backs – no sixty-year refugee problem there.

Now the experts are at it again. From the United Nations, Europe, Russia, and President Obama's administration, the voices are unanimous. Israel must negotiate with terrorists irrevocably committed to its destruction. A "two-state solution" is inevitable. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton assures the Arab world that the United States will energetically promote a two-state solution. This is the same Clinton who kissed Mrs. Yassir Arafat after the latter had accused Israel of deliberately infecting Arab children with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). Not a word of protest from Mrs. Clinton. The same administration proposes nearly a billion dollars in aid to rebuild Gaza, never mind that the money will go, like all money given to Hamas or the Palestinian Authority, into the pockets of corrupt officials or to bankroll terror attacks.

It should not surprise us that the nations of the world are ready to install a terror state on Israel's border. They foolishly think that by throwing Israel to the wolves they will save themselves. Sacrifice the Little Satan and the terrorists will turn away from the Great Satan. But even among Israelis there is an air of resignation and inevitability. Foreign Minister-designate Avigdor Lieberman of the nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party supports a "Palestinian" State and, incredibly, is prepared to trade Arab-populated land in pre-1967 Israel to such a state in "exchange" for Israeli settlements beyond the "Green Line."

There is one ray of light illuminating the darkness. Purim (14 Adar) is the yahrzeit of Ha-rav Zvi Yehuda Hakohen Kook זצ''ל, son of the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi, Avraham Yitzhak Hakohen Kook. Shortly after I came back from Israel in 1974, I saw a wall poster in Boro Park (!) written by him. It was headed, in big bold Hebrew letters, "Lo taguru," – Do not be afraid. Having graduated Yeshivah of Flatbush, where all Jewish subjects are taught in Hebrew, I drank its contents in thirstily and had no trouble understanding it. The Rav's son proclaimed that none of the "territories" may be given away. Not a grain of sand. Not because it would be strategically foolish, though it would be. Not because our enemies would interpret any "concession" as a sign of weakness and act accordingly, though they would. Eretz Yisrael is God's land and it is assur – forbidden by the Torah – to give any of it to Gentiles once it comes into our possession. We were to proclaim that message to other Jews and to the world – urbi et orbi – unapologetically and without fear. I later learned that the Lubavitcher Rebbe זצ''ל said much the same thing to anyone who would listen. Later still, after studying the philosophy of Rav Kook on my own, I learned of the drasha given by R. Zvi Yehuda on Yom Ha-atzmaut of 5727 (1967), where he lamented the Israeli people's resignation to the loss of so much of Eretz Yisrael. Only three weeks later that drasha would be looked back on in wonder, for on the day after the hag the run-up to the Six Day War began. The Arabs had their plans – drive the Jews into the sea. The world had its plans – sit back and leave Israel to its fate. The entire Jewish world was fearful; Israel would be outmanned and outgunned, as always. But God had His plans. On that day, when the enemies of the Jews had hoped to defeat them, it was turned around, and the Jews defeated their enemies – whenever I read the Megilla and come to that pasuk, I think of 26 Iyar 5727, the first of those fateful days. Wars are supposed to take years; the one in which the United States is currently engaged has been dragging on for eight. This war took all of six days. Mi shama ka-zot – who ever heard of anything like it? When it was over, Israel had quadrupled in size and Hevron, Shekhem, Yeriho, all the places whose absence from the State R. Zvi Yehuda lamented, were in Jewish hands for the first time in 2000 years. The world stood dumbfounded. The Jews had light, joy, gladness and honor – until one faithless government after another squandered what should have been the run-up to the final ge'ula.

So, lo taguru. Do not be afraid. President Obama, Secretary Clinton, the United States, the autocrats in the Kremkin, the Arab oil barons, - what they say does not matter. They only think they're in charge. We are to heed the One who really is in charge. Shine the light of R. Zvi Yehuda Kook first on our own people, then on the world. Let it chase away the darkness. There is no occupation. Eretz Yisrael – all of it – is ours. Irrevocably ours. Not by the generosity of the nations but from the Hand of God. You do not occupy your own territory. You do not annex your own territory. You settle it, build it and make it flourish. The world's two-state solution is really a three-state solution. There already is a "Palestinian" state. It's called Jordan and it sits on 80% of mandatory Palestine. Golda Meir was right; there is room for only one state between the river and the sea, and that state is the Jewish State of Israel. If the Arabs there wish to be citizens of Jordan, that can be worked out. If they want to rename Jordan Palestine, we won't stand in their way. If America wants to pour a billion dollars down a rat hole, let it pour the money on AIG and Citigroup. But Eretz Yisrael is not up for sale, barter or exchange. It is ours and ours forever. We have the Word of God on it, and we can take that to the bank. The banks have been lending money lately on a whole lot less.

Of wars, white papers and science education

Today in 1923 the British mandate over "Palestine," under the auspices of the League of Nations, officially came into force (source: Britannica Online). Incorporating the Balfour Declaration, it obligated Britain to establish in Palestine a national home for the Jewish people. Jews in "Palestine" and elsewhere entertained high hopes that a Jewish state would soon become a reality. The Arabs of Eretz Israel had other ideas, and their rioting soon prompted the British to issue a White Paper severely restricting Jewish immigration to Eretz Israel, even as the Nazis were making the Jews' position in Europe increasingly untenable. The British, of course, were fighting the Nazis and the Jews of Eretz Israel (the hilonim [secularists] at any rate) had no intention of sitting on their hands while the Jews of Europe were being slaughtered. They joined the British army in droves (thereby gaining valuable experience for the War of Independence that would be fought later), vowing to "fight the war as if there was no White Paper and fight the White Paper as if there was no war."
Today we American Jews are in a somewhat similar situation politically. For the first time, I find myself a "one-issue voter" and I gather I am not alone. It's not the economy, stupid. It's the war. I intend to vote for John McCain, because he strikes me as the candidate most likely to prosecute the war against Islamic fascism to victory and thereby keep us safe. Indeed, only he seems to understand that we are fighting not two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, but one war on, for the time being, two fronts. The enemy is the Islamic Mafia, whose various subgroups are forever at one another's throats but united in their determination to destroy the Little Satan, Israel, and the Great Satan, the U.S.A. However, his prospective Vice President, Gov. Sarah Palin, is a Christian conservative who has expressed support for teaching a pseudoscience called "Intelligent Design" in biology classrooms as science. Like many of her ilk, she is ignorant of science and her policy would perpetuate that ignorance in the next generation. But McCain's victory, and even Palin's accession to the Presidency should the 72-year-old McCain not live out his full term, would not be a new departure. President Bush also expressed support for teaching "Intelliget Design," at least before a federal court found it merely religion in disguise and therefore unconstitutional to teach. I voted for President Bush in 2004, bucking my own union. When the President came out in favor of teaching pseudoscience in science classes, I sent the following letter to John Marburger, the President's science advisor:

As a high school biology teacher with a doctorate in the subject, I am outraged by the President's recent statement endorsing the teaching of the pseudoscientific concept of "intelligent design" in science classes. You have gone on record stating correctly that the theory of evolution is the cornerstone of modern biology and that intelligent design is not a scientific concept. It is your job to set the President straight before he makes a fool of himself and a laughingstock of our country. As for me, if I am ever required to teach astrology, flat-earth, geocentrism, intelligent design or any such nonsense as science I will not do so. Fire me if you will (I and my union will fight vigorously); my academic integrity and the standards of my profession are more important than any job.

So, if McCain is elected, and certainly if Palin becomes President, we science educators will have our work cut out for us. Even as we support the President's conduct of the war, we will vigorously fight him or her on injecting religion into science class and we will uphold our academic and professional intgegrity. Fight the war as if there was no White Paper and fight the White Paper as if there was no war.

I wish all my readers a ktiva v'hatima tova. May we see only good in the coming year.

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.

You were shown to know

In last week's Parsha (Va'ethanan), in the part that is also read on Tish'a B'Av (the first paragraph of which I read in a low voice when I'm the ba'al korei), Moshe Rabbeinu is addressing the people for the last time, reviewing the events of the last 40 years. He utters a famous phrase that we read at the Hakafot on Simhat Torah, and that Sefaradim recite every Shabbat when the Sefer Torah is taken out of the Aron Kodesh: Ata horeita lada'at ki Hashem hu ha-Elokim ein od milvado. You were shown to know that Hashem is God and there is none beside Him. The Avot were told, and had to believe in Hashem's promises for their descendants, but those Moshe Rabbeinu was addressing were shown, and therefore knew. Some were children and teenagers in Egypt, and experienced God's intervention in human affairs first hand with Yetzi'at Mitzraim, at a very impressionable time of life (see also previous post). Even those born in the wilderness saw first hand the manna, the traveling well, the clothes that were neither outworn nor outgrown, the feet whose soles remained baby smooth despite constant walking.

Much ink is spilled over the need to believe in God and in His omnipotence, even when we are not given much reason to believe, and we have plenty of what appears to be evidence to the contrary. Throughout Inquisitions, pogroms and the Holocaust Jews have believed, even though it would have been so much easier, and seemingly more sensible, to give up on being Jewish. I am reminded of a story I heard about a religious Jew in a concentration camp. Hanukkah was approaching and he scrounged and saved bits of margarine day by day, so that when Hanukkah came he would have enough to light one Hanukkah light. Hanukkah - the holiday when we celebrate Jewish sovereignty and freedom to be Jews - in the pit of hell. And this Jew was concerned about lighting the candle. He believed - even though he had every reason in the world not to. (As an aside, had he asked a halakhic question of a poseq about whether to save the margarine, the answer would almost certainly have been no. When you're starving in a concentration camp and you can get a bit of something edible, you have to eat it and not burn it.) Three years later - the State of Israel was re-established and the significance of Hanukkah becomes crystal clear. No need to believe. Ata horeita lada'at. We were shown. We know.

In 1967 Israel was surrounded by enemies armed to the teeth, poised to drive it and its Jews into the sea. We were all afraid, and the religious were praying and fasting. Then came the smashing victory, the destruction of our enemies and the liberation of Yerushalayim. No need to believe that Hashem was with us. We were shown, and we knew. Hashem was in charge, and nothing in the world happened independently of Him. And what effect did all that have on us, after the initial euphoria abated? We still agonize over whether to wear our kippot to work or to job interviews, sometimes even whether to wear them on the street. People are incredulous when they hear that I wear my kippa in the public school classroom where I teach. Too many Orthodox colleagues do not wear it. Israel suffers a high profile terrorist attack, and Christian pilgrims still visit but Jewish tourists stay away. Israel's leaders fall all over themselves appeasing bloody terrorist murderers, as if God was not in the picture. A downturn in the business cycle (capitalism, to paraphrase Winston Churcill, being the worst economic system on earth except for all the others) and we all go into a panic, as if no one was in charge. Ata horeita lada'at. We were shown. So why the anxiety? Why the defeatism? Are we ever going to learn to take yes for an answer?