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.

Don't be fools - vaccinate your children

 

משוט בארץ ומהתהלך בה. . . .    

From flitting about the earth and traversing it (Job 1:7). . .

 

http://acsh.org/2015/04/rfk-jr-equates-vaccinations-to-a-holocaust-yes-he-went-there


The American Council on Science and Health, a watchdog group that ferrets out junk science and overhyped claims in the media and in the utterances and writings of public figures, released a report recently about a speech by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at a public screening of an antivaccine film.  The ACSH report states as follows: 

 

Well-known vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. attended the Sacramento screening of anti-vaccine “documentary” Trace Amounts on Tuesday and gave a speech to the audience, and as expected, it was filled with dangerous and unscientific misinformation. In light of the upcoming hearing for California Senate Bill 277, which eliminates the personal belief exemption for vaccines, RFK Jr. told the audience that public health officials and policy-makers can’t be trusted.

“They can put anything they want in that vaccine and they have no accountability for it,” he reportedly told the crowd. “[Children] get the shot, that night they have a fever of a hundred and three, they go to sleep, and three months later their brain is gone. This is a holocaust, what this is doing to our country.” Kennedy left the stage to a standing ovation.

“Trace Amounts” tells the story of filmmaker Eric Gladen, who believes he suffered mercury poisoning from thimerosal after receiving a tetanus vaccine in 2004. RFK Jr. has long been spewing out misinformation regarding thimerosal, a mercury-containing preservative that was used in vaccines up until 2001. Although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Institute of Medicine have all determined that thimerosal is safe, it was removed from vaccines (with the exception of some flu shots) as a precautionary measure due to backlash by misguided parents and the anti-vaccine hysteria fomented by advocacy groups and dangerous demagogues like RFK Jr.

Yet he and his followers are still vehemently against vaccines, even though this preservative that was determined safe was removed from childhood vaccines almost 15 years ago. In response, Sen. Richard Pan, D-Sacramento, a pediatrician, and author of SB 277, called Kennedy’s continued activism deceitful. “I think it is dangerous that he is spreading misinformation about something that’s very important for public health,” he said. “Autism rates have continued to rise even though we are not using thimerosal in vaccines for children. We still haven’t figured out exactly what causes autism. We do know it’s not vaccines.”

Despite the facts, “Trace Amounts” and RFK Jr. are unfortunately still making an impact on the vaccine “debate.” Kennedy has credited the documentary with helping to stall Oregon’s mandatory vaccine bill. And although RFK Jr. has no scientific credentials, people continue to listen to him because of his name. 


This is astounding and infuriating, in part because the son of our martyred Senator stated that the alleged damage done to children by vaccines amounted to a holocaust (in fairness to him, the "h" was not capitalized).  The real Holocaust snuffed out the lives of one and a half million Jewish children and their future progeny to the end of time.  Today the Orthodox community seems to be experiencing more than its share of outbreaks of totally preventable childhood diseases like measles and mumps. Rumors fly thick and fast through Jewish media whose editorial staffs are, to put it mildly, not well versed in science, that vaccines are dangerous and cause autism.  Many haredim seldom if ever avail themselves of secular media that might disabuse them of that notion.  Most of the hysteria originates with a report in a medical journal supposedly documenting a link between vaccines and autism.  That report has since been thoroughly discredited and retracted from the journal.  Such retractions rarely happen, but here it turns out that the authors of the discredited report were in cahoots with lawyers who were ready to sue vaccine manufacturers  for millions; the authors presumably were to share in the proceeds (yes, scientists, physicians and lawyers can have a taavah [unwholesome craving] for money).  Of course, many children are vaccinated, some children contract autism (we don’t know why) and the two sets have a small intersection, but that is to be expected.  It does not prove that the two are in any way related.

  We do know that our present situation of most children living to have their own is unprecedented in human history.  The normal human condition was for childhood mortality to be horrendously high.  Some of our siddurim contain selihot l’tahaluei yeladim, penitential prayers to be recited during an epidemic of a children’s disease.  I cannot recall those prayers ever being recited in our community or in any American Jewish community.  But I have visited old Jewish cemeteries in New York and have seen large sections containing little tiny gravestones for little tiny children.  Most of these children doubtless died of childhood diseases that have since, praise God, been conquered by vaccines.  I might add that those vaccines were developed by people, many of them Jewish, who attended college and studied science.  Some of those gravestones are in the process of sinking into the ground; the parents of the deceased were too poor to pay for perpetual care and are long since gone.

Babies’ graves at Union Field Cemetery on the Brooklyn-Queens border

 

  

  Before my granddaughter was born, my daughter told me to get a “T-Dap” shot; pertussis (aka whooping cough) was making a comeback and the vaccine we received as children loses its effectiveness as we grow older.  This was not optional; either I got the shot or I would not be allowed anywhere near the baby.  I got the shot – a very minor inconvenience for my granddaughter’s and other babies’ well being.  Since then, I had my blood tested for antibodies for measles, mumps and rubella.  I still have adequate antibodies against all three and will not need boosters.  I do not want to see tragic sights like the one in this picture in newer Jewish cemeteries and there is an easy way to avoid it: EVERY CHILD MUST BE VACCINATED AGAINST CHILDHOOD DISEASES AS PER PROTOCOLS OF PUBLIC HEALTH AUTHORITIES.

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Barukh Dayan Emet

Rita Levi-Montalcini, the noted neurobiologist who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for her groundbreaking discoveries at a time when it was unusual for women to have careers in science, passed away at her home in Rome Sunday at the age of 103.  She achieved so much despite persecution in her native Italy on account of her Jewishness.  Thank God for this remarkable woman who did so much to make the world a better place.  May there be more like her.

http://news.yahoo.com/nobel-scientist-rita-levi-montalcini-dies-rome-154440935.html#ugccmt-container
 

Congressman: Evolution a lie from the pit of hell

Read this and weep:

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

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

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

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

Orthodox Tumult Over the Internet

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

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

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

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

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

Twiblings

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

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

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

Mah Nishtanah? Is Israel another Iran?

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

When in the course of Jewish events. . . .

When in the Course of Jewish events it becomes necessary for one group of Jews to dissolve the Torah bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the Jews of earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of us Torah-observant Jews; and such is now the necessity which constrains us to alter our former Systems of Government. The history of the present haredi establishment is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over us Jews. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid Torah world.



They have sought to annul our rights as Western men and women and citizens of democratic countries to read and study what we wish, and to enjoy music and the creative arts, rights inestimable to us and formidable to tyrants only, by banning books and concerts and harassing authors, artists and performers.

They have usurped our parental authority with respect to children in yeshivot by punishing them for dress, conduct and association, including with the opposite sex, off school premises and outside school hours. Our sons, and especially daughters, live in unremitting fear of being followed around and reported on by yeshiva spies.

They have created and nurtured a culture of parasitism, encouraging able-bodied young men to sit in yeshiva indefinitely and live off the labor of others, including elderly parents and in-laws, and forcing on such young men the shame and indignity of accepting assistance that Western enlightened governments provide for those unable to provide for themselves. They have denigrated and devalued secular studies that might give young men the means to earn a livelihood and provide for their families in manly fashion. They have told our daughters in front of their classmates that they are second rate because we, their fathers, work and provide for our families. They have discouraged in their yeshivot all forms of physical exercise that might endow our young men with manly health and vigor, opting instead for sedentary living, unhealthful diet and the resulting chronic weakness and sickness. They have forbidden our young men to fulfill their duty to defend our country against the merciless Arab savages whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions. In sum, they have endeavored to turn the order of nature upside down, extolling the weak, effeminate and parasitical over the strong, upright and manly. To us, Purim comes but once a year.

They have systematically deprived our young of any opportunity to meet in a wholesome environment, resulting in an unprecedented shiddukh crisis.

They have allowed teachers and administrators in their yeshivot to abuse our children sexually in the most heinous and abominable fashion, discouraging victims from reporting these crimes to the lawful constituted authorities and allowing the criminals to continue in employment.

They have led the charge to deprive gay citizens of their basic human rights, rights denied us Jews in the stinkholes of Eastern Europe where they remain culturally rooted. They have embarrassed us all with their gratuitous hatred and bigotry.

They have subordinated the kashrut certification process to their insatiable lust for money and power, having ordered shopkeepers to remove from their shelves products certified by none other than R. Moshe Soloveichik. The Soloveichik name speaks for itself, but those who ordered the removal, causing grievous personal anguish and financial loss to innocent shopkeepers struggling to make a living, wanted their cronies cut in on the action. They have also withheld certification from establishments whose food is kosher, in order to enforce an ambience that meets with their approval but that would make it impossible for such establishments to operate profitably. These and other sordid episodes have fed the public's cynicism with regard to kosher supervision.

They have allowed women seeking gittin to be held up for ransom and blackmail by their husbands, and have accorded those husbands all the honors and privileges due members in good standing of our communities, despite seruvim issued against them by recognized batei din.

They have endeavored, through violence and threats of violence, to reduce our women to slaves and chattel, as they are reduced in benighted Muslim lands but as we, citizens of enlightened Western societies, deem insufferable. Self-appointed "tznius police" set fire to clothing stores whose wares do not meet with their approval. They throw bleach at and otherwise physically attack women walking on public thoroughfares when their dress is not up to the goons' standards. They force women to sit in the back of public buses; those who dare refuse are beaten up and publicly humiliated. Shopkeepers are told to maintain separate hours for male and female patrons, and told that they might end up dead if they don't comply. They have defaced pictures of a female candidate for Prime Minister on lawfully placed campaign posters. These criminals and hoodlums cynically manipulate a corrupt political system to ensure that they are not called to account for their crimes.

They, a bunch of unelected petty tyrants, have sponsored an atmosphere of disrespect and comtempt for duly elected and lawfully constituted secular authorities. By their silence, and sometimes worse, they have made it permissible and even praiseworthy to lie, cheat and steal from the government, as long as they are not caught. They relate to our enlightened governments as if they were the Tsarist tyrants who singled us out for persecution. But they are not bashful about accepting aid from those same governments so they can maintain their parasitic lifestyle.


In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Jewish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their gedolim to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement in democratic societies. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, to be stood with when they are right and vigorously opposed when they are wrong .

We, therefore, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of our Torah communities, solemnly publish and declare, That these communities are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent agents, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to Agudat Yisrael and its Moatzot Gedolei Torah, in the United States, Israel and throughout the world, and that all religious connection between our communities and said Moatzot and their ideological confreres, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent agents, they have full Power to choose their own authority figures, establish schools for the training of our young as committed Jews and proud citizens of free societies and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent agents may of right do. — And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

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.

Gam Zu L'Tova (This too is for the good) – 2

Seemingly overnight, we find ourselves in the throes of the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression. AIG, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch – how have the mighty fallen? Foreclosures abound, as do bankruptcies. Gasoline prices through the roof – along with all commodities that depend on gasoline, or jet fuel, to get to us.

I am not directly affected by the price of gasoline since I never owned a car. When you can get to work by train in half an hour, who needs the hassles of a car? As a runner, I do a lot of my getting around on foot, and I see the streets the way automobile drivers do not. And what I see is many more bicycles on the street. A newly sympathetic city administration, goaded by the advocacy group Transportation Alternatives, is painting bicycle lanes on neighborhood streets, despite complaints from automobile drivers. Some of those lanes are even physically separated from automobile traffic. This is a welcome development that augurs well for the health of the city. Unless you live in a cave, you know that we have an "epidemic of obesity." Orthodox Jews seem to have more than their share, and the sight of pregnant men in shul is becoming more and more repulsive as time goes by. I put the phrase in quotes because it is not a true epidemic the way physicians and scientists usually define the word. You don't catch it like the common cold or cancer. Obesity and its dreadful sequelae, hypertension, diabetes and such, is almost always the results of a lifestyle choice. And its not so much that we eat too much, the weight loss industry notwithstanding. The problem is we move too little. Sorry folks, evolution occurred and our species is genetically programmed for a high caloric throughput – eat a lot and burn a lot. Enter all the modern conveniences that make housework easy (sorry ladies – your great-grandmothers had it much harder than you), the automobile, and computers and video games replacing outdoor play, continue to eat the way we're programmed to do, and the equation goes out of balance. Keep at it and you get fat. Stay fat and you get clogged arteries in your penis. Viva Viagra – until the arteries in your heart get clogged and you go on nitrates, or your heart simply can't supply enough oxygen for sex or anything else you enjoy. If you're lucky you can get Type 2 diabetes, go blind and have your legs amputated. And we are seeing Type 2 diabetes, hypertension (high blood pressure) and hyperlipidemia (elevated cholesterol) in children as young as ten. A well-known pediatrician in the Orthodox neighborhood of Borough Park has been known to give patients prescriptions that read "play basketball." But too many yeshivot are indifferent or even hostile to physical activity. Their students are encouraged to sit at a desk all day and get fat - like their teachers. All of us need to move more, and parents should be urging their children to move more. If we really care about our children's health, we will do more than urge. We will refuse to drive our kids to school and let them walk a mile or so instead, or ride a bicycle.

Riding a bicycle to and from work or school goes a long way to restoring the balance. The energy for movement comes from food instead of fossil fuels. You're burning what you're eating, maybe a little more, and the fat comes off and stays off. The economic downturn is making us do what we all should be doing anyway – get around on our own steam. And we will all be happier and healthier for it.

Do the Right Thing

The Association of Orthodox Jewish Teachers of New York City Public Schools (AOJT) sponsors an annual "Do the Right Thing" essay contest for students. Sometimes they write about moral dilemmas that they or someone they learned about faced and, in their opinion, resolved honorably. Sometimes they write about moral dilemmas where they think they chose wrongly, and what they learned from the experience.
I faced such a problem several years ago in the course of teaching in a public high school in Brooklyn. A Gentile colleague of mine complained that we Jews are clannish and care only about our own. In particular, Hatzalah, the Jewish volunteer ambulance corps that is active in every Jewish neighborhood in the metropolitan area, was "only for their own" and did not reach out to other residents of the neighborhoods where they operate. One day I was in the room that doubled as a general office and teachers' lounge; due to construction a large part of the building including the teachers' lounge was unavailable. A fellow teacher, Gentile but not the one complaining about clannish Jews, suddenly experienced trouble breathing. Her situation rapidly went from bad to worse, and somebody called out, "Call 911!" The new state of the art telephone system that had just been installed could not reach 911. Knowing that the system could reach seven-digit local numbers (at that time we didn't have to dial 1+ an area code for local numbers), I asked for the phone, dialed Hatzalah's number and explained the situation. As soon as I hung up the phone I literally ran outside to guide Hatzalah to the room where the emergency was unfolding. After several minutes of no response, I ran back to the room to find Hatzalah there; they had entered through another entrance. Their volunteers cared for my colleague with their usual consummate professionalism and did not utter a word about the patient not being Jewish. Thank God, my colleague made a full recovery. After they left and the situation calmed down, my principal and the assistant principal for security entered the room, gleaned the gist of what transpired, and asked me in front of my colleagues, "Who gave you authority to make the call?" I told them that I took moral authority since 911 was unreachable and medical help was urgently needed, watching a colleague die was not an option and I would do the same thing 100 times over if necessary. They hemmed and hawed, apparently pissed that I made the administration look bad, but no disciplinary action was brought aganst me for my "unauthorized call." During my next class, a student who heard about what happened told me that it was very nice of me to make the call. I made a dismissive gesture with my hand and said, "eh, what else could I have done?" I did not tell the students that the real heroes of this piece were the Hatzalah volunteers, who did not hesitate to march into a neighborhood that every Jewish mother tells her children not to set foot in, lest black bogeymen jump on them and eat them up.
The same day or perhaps several days later another colleague asked me for Hatzalah's number. I hesitated for a second, knowing that Hatzalah is supported by voluntary contributions raised within our community, does not have the resources to care for everybody in New York City and therefore does not normally advertise its number outside our community. Nevertheless, Hatzalah's reputation spread far and wide; they're there almost before you hang up the phone, often faster than the Fire Department's EMTs. I did give my colleague the number. Shortly thereafter, the colleague passed away at the age of 52 from complications of diabetes, a common cause of premature death among African Americans. I was profoundly relieved that I did not withhold the number as I was tempted to do; whether or not it would have made a difference, his death would have been on my conscience for as long as I lived.

With several years of hindsight, I have no doubt that I did the right thing both in calling Hatzalah and incurring the displeasure of my bosses and in giving out the telephone number, possibly making racists in our community unhappy.

Hat tip: Wolfish Musings

Evolution 101

This paragraph is taken from an article on sustainability that appeared in last Sunday’s New York Times magazine:


The first story is about MRSM [Methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus], the very scary antibiotic-resistant strain of Staphylococcus bacteria that is now killing more Americans each year than AIDS — 100,000 infections leading to 19,000 deaths in 2005, according to estimates in The Journal of the American Medical Association. For years now, drug-resistant staph infections have been a problem in hospitals, where the heavy use of antibiotics can create resistant strains of bacteria. It’s Evolution 101: the drugs kill off all but the tiny handful of microbes that, by dint of a chance mutation, possess genes allowing them to withstand the onslaught; these hardy survivors then get to work building a drug-resistant superrace.



It is indeed Evolution 101, and it has tremendous implications for how physicians, including Orthodox ones, practice medicine. Not too long ago you walked into a doctor’s office with the sniffles and walked out with a prescription for penicillin, never mind that the sniffles are usually caused by viruses, against which penicillin and other antibiotics do not work. Many pediatricians in particular still practice that way, prescribing drugs that they know will not help their patients but will act as a sedative for their mothers. One must wonder how intelligent physicians did not anticipate that prescribing powerful antibiotics with such wild abandon would cause problems. I would hazard a guess that most physicians trained before the 1960s did not study evolution, since most high schools steered clear of it for religious and political reasons. A practicing physician, as opposed to one engaged in research, is more of an engineer than a scientist. He is engaged not in the acquisition of new knowledge but in applying existing knowledge to solve human problems. He need not accept evolution to make use of knowledge developed by scientists using that theory. But when a physician, driven not by good science but by bad religion, denies the central unifying concept of the science that informs his practice, he is reinforced in his reluctance to modify his practice in light of knowledge consistent with that concept. This brings me to an advertisement in the Jewish Press many years ago, when my children still used a pediatrician. It was signed by several well-known pediatricians in my community, including the one who treated my children, who shall go nameless. The ad stated in essence that its signers studied the theory of evolution, found it to be nonsense, and therefore their patients, who presumably attended yeshivot, need not study it. A scientist invites others to replicate his work and improve upon it. He does not tell others, “I studied this so you shouldn’t.” I would not have used that pediatrician if I had not believed him to be technically competent, but seeing his name on that advertisement caused me to lose respect for him as a scientist. Would a physician so contemptuous of the science that enables his profession to advance be receptive to those advances? This soon became a moot point for me and my wife; we stopped using that pediatrician when he stopped accepting our insurance. But that ad stands as a warning for today’s Orthodox community with its increasingly anti-scientific mindset. Steer clear of physicians who are actively hostile to the science on which modern medicine depends. In today's sad times, that might mean, "Steer clear of most Orthodox physicians."

That it may be well with you. . . .

We are now in the midst of reading the last charge of Moshe Rabbeinu to the Jewish people. Part of it is a repetition of the Ten Commandments with some more-or-less significant differences. I will focus on the fifth, and throw out a challenge to the medical profession.
Honor your father and your mother as Hashem your God commanded you, that your life may be lengthened and that it may be well with you, on the land that Hashem your God is giving you [if your parents tell you not to go to Israel, go anyway]. The original version, given 40 years earlier, does not include the phrase "and that it may be well with you." What happened? Everybody (except two individuals) over the age of 20 was condemned to die in the midbar (wilderness) after the sin of the meraglim, the spies that Moshe Rabbeinu sent and who came back with a demoralizing report. While there were many awesome miracles in the midbar, (see my earlier post), cancellation of the natural aging process was not one of them. Perhaps it did not take place in Egypt since the men were worked to death by the Egyptians. Now, 40 years later and on the verge of beginning to live a normal life, people were visibly getting old. We all know what that means: losing mobility, losing muscle mass and becoming physically weak, losing the ability to feed oneself, dress oneself, toilet oneself, losing, losing, losing. . . . Indeed, these are precisely the duties that one is halakhically obligated to do for one's parents when they become old (Yoreh Dei'ah Ch. 240). Intelligent people must have been asking what good long life is if you are not well. And now it's gotten much worse. Our life spans bli ayin hara are longer than ever, but quality has not kept up. We still become dependent, and economic and social realities are such that our children cannot care for us even if they want to. We end up warehoused in old folks' homes and cared for by strangers (and if we live long enough to contract Alzheimer's disease, our own children might as well be strangers). Simple arikhut yamim turned into a curse. Here's where the medical community comes in. They conquered pneumonia (once called the old man's friend) and all sorts of infectious diseases that used to carry us off before we turned into total physical and mental wrecks. Now they have to find a way to replace cartilage and synovial fluid so our joints continue to function and we can maintain the active life that keeps our cardiovascular systems and our brains healthy. Find a way to maintain the size and strength of our muscles so that we can continue performing the activities of daily living that we take for granted. In short, let it be well with us so that long life may once again be a blessing.