Category Archives: Israel

The Devil’s In The Daydreams

One would be forgiven, especially were one an optimist, for imagining that recent reports of the government of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s donation of $400,000 to a Teheran Jewish hospital might signal something positive about Iran’s current leadership. With Purim within sight, the idea of good news coming out of Persia is an enticing one.

Our theoretical optimist would also likely have been gratified by the words of the hospital’s director, Dr. Ciamak Morsadegh, who said the Iranian leader “is showing that we [Jews], as a religious minority, are part of this country, too.”

But the Iranian leader’s smiles, largesse and (to flashback several months) Rosh Hashana good wishes to the world’s Jews were lopsidedly outweighed by another recent report, this one provided by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

(MEMRI, the single most valuable news source for happenings in the Arab and Muslim worlds, does not profess or evidence any political stance; it simply translates and makes available speeches, media reports and other information, positive and negative alike, that aren’t otherwise accessible to the English-reading public.)

The report included a video clip and transcript of a broadcast aired on Iran television’s Channel 1 on February 6. It is remarkable.

The video consists of a simulation – not quite up to the latest Hollywood special effects standards but which might hold its own against a 1980s disaster film – of Iranian planes and missiles attacking civilian and military targets in Israel.

Footage of ostensible missile-equipped “unmanned aerial vehicles,” or drones, in flight are accompanied by voice-over comments like “Iranian UAVs entering stealth mode in order to evade enemy radar” and “Iranian UAVs passing over the Iron Dome systems of Tel Aviv and Haifa.”

The planes are shown bombing target after target (bulls-eyes all, of course): Tel Aviv, Ben Gurion Airport, Israeli “missile bases in Jericho,” an Israeli Defense Ministry “emergency meeting,” the Dimona nuclear reactor and Haifa’s airport and refineries. Missiles streak forth, spectacular explosions ensue and, presumably, large numbers of people are incinerated. Actual news footage is interspersed here and there from what seem to be terrorist attacks in Israel, with wounded people staggering about and emergency personnel frantically trying to help.

Nor is America spared in the Iranian blood-lust fantasy. Attacks on the mainland aren’t portrayed – the producers apparently wished to keep things within the realm of believability – but an American aircraft carrier stood in for the country.

“The USS Abraham Lincoln” is shown in the Straits of Hormuz and its commander is sternly warned by an Iranian official by radio.

“Commander of Abraham Lincoln, Navy,” he intones. “You have entered the Islamic Republic of Iran’s marine borders. Immediately leave this zone. I say again: Immediately leave this zone. Otherwise, we will have to defend our territory.”

After which Iranian missiles are fired, and the American ship is destroyed in a succession of fireballs.

It’s all primitive and risible propaganda, to be sure, intended for internal Iranian consumption. But what does it say, in the end, about the Rouhani regime if that is what it feeds the country’s populace, if it is seeking to prepare them not for détente but for war?

The current “Geneva Agreement” between Iran and six world powers, including the U.S., consists of a short-term freeze of crucial portions of Iran’s nuclear program and its daily monitoring by international inspectors, in exchange for decreased economic sanctions; and it is intended as a time-buyer as the countries work toward forging a permanent agreement.

No one can know whether that strategy will bear fruit in the long term. But what the world powers need to know, even as they pursue diplomatic solutions to the threat that is Iran, is that they are dealing with a government that may occasionally present a reasonable face but whose internal fantasies are dark and destructive, a leadership whose sociable smiles are belied by its devilish daydreams

A snake can seem to smile, too, and can even, with skill, be rendered docile, at least for a time. But it’s always necessary to remember that, however quiescent and cooperative the creature might seem, it’s still, in the end, a snake.

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The Road to Heil

If ever there were a question to inspire ambivalence it might be whether the current push in Israel to outlaw the word “Nazi” and Holocaust-era German symbols is a good idea.

On the one hand, the word and symbols are often used these days to score political points, to just insult someone with whom the user disagrees or in the ostensible service of humor. Placards of Yitzchak Rabin’s image in a Nazi uniform were brandished in demonstrations before his assassination; and, more recently, religious Jewish children were dressed in concentration camp garb to protest government budget cuts. A long-into-reruns popular American television show included a character, the irascible owner of a food stand, who nom de tv was “the soup Nazi.” Talk about trivialization.

But there’s another hand, too, at least to many minds: Outlawing speech is not something to undertake lightly. And just where does one draw the line between speech that’s just impolite or crude, and speech that is so depraved as to merit being criminalized? Forbidding the shouting of “fire!” in a crowded theater is understandably worthy of penalization; calling someone a soup Nazi, well, somewhat less so.

And then there is the question of whether criminalizing even clearly outrageous use of words like “Nazi” would in fact in the end help curb the misuse of the metaphor, or, perhaps, empower it, making it even more enticing to those who seek to shock, not enlighten.

The sponsor of the Israeli bill, the Yisrael Beitenu party’s Shimon Ohayon, said that “We want to prevent disrespect of the Holocaust,” and contends that “we have too many freedoms.” Free speech advocates, as might be expected, do not agree. (To their credit, though, they seem to have avoided comparing the proposed legislation with the Nuremberg laws.)

The pending bill would impose a fine of 100,000 shekels (nearly $29,000) and six months in jail for anybody using the word or symbols of the Third Reich in a “wrong or inappropriate way.”

Whatever one feels about the wisdom of the legislation, though, what exactly will define “inappropriate”? Oy, there’s the rub.

Is likening Iran’s nuclear ambitions to the designs Nazi Germany had on the world in the 1930s inappropriate? Most of us would say it’s no stretch at all. Dov Hanin, however, a member of an Arab party in the Knesset, feels otherwise, and has suggested that, had the pending law been enacted a year or two ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would deserve jail for having compared former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hitler.

And what about people who, as has happened in the U.S., falsely accuse a community – say, the charedi one – or one of its organizations of being part of a sordid conspiracy to enable the harming of children? Would it be inappropriate, in light of such a law, to compare the accusers to Nazi propagandists who insinuated that Jews as a group killed Christian children for their blood? There is certainly a difference between the two propagandas; the contemporary accusers don’t seek (one hopes) to kill their fellow Jews. Is it a difference, though, that makes a difference?

I recently dared to write an essay that suggested that the animus some Orthodox Jews display toward President Obama is misconceived, and unjustified in light of the facts. Most of the responses I received were positive ones; there are many observant Jews, it seems, who have harbored that realization quietly and who were happy to see it actually expressed in a public medium.

Then there were responses that took issue with my point, and pointed out things – some of them loosely pertinent to Israel, many of them in entirely unrelated realms – that the writers felt justified their anti-Obama attitudes. Even though I was unmoved by the arguments, that’s fine. People don’t see things, or have to see things, the same way.

But then there were the crazed reactions, among them that of a gentleman who posted his take on a blog. I had begun my piece with an anecdote about a Mi Sheberach prayer made for President Obama; the blog-poster, clever fellow that (he thinks) he is, attempted to show how wrongheaded that was – by suggesting a parallel prayer being made in a German synagogue in 1938 on behalf of… you guessed it, Adolf Hitler. The rest of his piece was similarly unhinged, reaching far and wide to change the subject, preaching the talk-show tropes of Benghazi and Obamacare, and berating me for my criticism of “Open Orthodoxy.”

In the end, I remain of two minds regarding the proposed Israeli law. I fully understand the desire to enact such legislation, and recognize the bill’s sponsors’ good intentions; yet part of me feels that things would best be left alone.

For two reasons: First, because legislating civility is likely a futile endeavor. And, second, because, all said and done, the wild misapplication of words like “Nazi” and “Hitler” ultimately says something only about the person who misuses them.

Obama and the (Orthodox) Jews

(The article below appeared in Haaretz on January 6. It is shared here with that paper’s permission.)

The gabbai at the shul I usually attend on Shabbos is something of a comedian. When I was recently called to the Torah, he offered the traditional “Mi Sheberach” and added a blessing for “ha-president” – which he quickly qualified by adding: “Not Obama – the president of the shul.”

I interjected “yes, Obama.” Nearby congregants gasped.

They shouldn’t have. The Mishneh teaches us that Jews should pray for the government, as governments are what prevent people from acting on their worst instincts. For many years, every American Orthodox synagogue included a special prayer for the president and vice president, a practice that, for some reason, has fallen into disuse.

But beyond the Jewish obligation to express hakaras hatov, “acknowledgement of the good,” to the leaders of their lands, I believe that the current occupant of the White House well deserves our special good will.

That is not, I know, the common stance in the Orthodox world. I have been puzzling over that fact for five years.

A registered Republican since I could vote, I shared in the skepticism and concern that swept the pro-Israel community and a good part of the American populace when Mr. Obama appeared on the scene. His ascendance to prominence was so sudden, his record so sparse, his connection to a rabid preacher so troubling, what reason for optimism, really, was there?

We expected that, if elected, he would prove anti-Israel, a global isolationist, lax on national security. His wife, we were warned, was the second coming of Angela Davis. John McCain got our votes, hands down.

But when the worst actually happened and the Obamas moved into the White house, the anticipated bad news, well, never came.

Mere months into his first term, the new president dared to address the Arab world in Cairo and stated clearly that America’s “strong bond” with Israel is “unbreakable,” and that the Jewish “aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.” He firmly denounced Holocaust denial and anti-Semitic stereotyping, the mother’s milk of much of the Arab sphere, and condemned anyone who would threaten Israel’s destruction.

I was surprised and heartened. But strangely, the reaction in many Orthodox circles was to focus not on Mr. Obama’s blunt and courageous words but on his reassurance that the U.S. is not at war with Islam (are we?), his endorsement of a two-state solution for the Israel/Palestinian conflict (the declared American position over several administrations) and his very invocation of the Holocaust as the root of Israel’s establishment (as if he should have offered his audience Torah verses). I was flummoxed by the refusal to give the man any credit, and reminded of Rodney Dangerfield’s mother-in-law’s supposed reaction when, having given him two neckties and seeing him wearing one of them, sneered “What’s the matter? You don’t like the other one?”

Then came Obama’s withdrawal from the Durban Conference, his rejection of the Goldstone report, his refusal to participate in joint military exercises with Turkey unless Israel was included, his pushing of Iron Dome, his relentless pursuit of terrorists (and authorization for killing Anwal al-Awlaki, outraging the American left), his statement before the UN General Assembly that “Israel is a sovereign state and the historic homeland of the Jewish people,” his threat in September, 2011 of severe consequences if Egyptian authorities didn’t act to protect Israeli embassy guards besieged by a mob, which they did, his successful focus on neutralizing Osama bin Laden, and more.

And yet, much of the Orthodox community, including dear friends and most of the Orthodox media, seemed to see only danger in Mr. Obama (and his wife, whose malevolent designs, it turned out, were on childhood obesity). They parsed his every utterance with the determination of a JFK-conspiracy buff examining the Zapruder film, for new “evidence” of their pre-existent conclusion. His uneasiness with Prime Minister Netanyahu (shared by a good piece of the Israeli citizenship, as it happens, and fueled in Mr. Obama’s circumstance by the Israeli’s unwarranted and insolent lecturing of the American in the spring of 2011) was seen as a rejection of Israel, which clearly was not, and has been proven not to be, the case. His every appointee (like mortal threats Chuck Hagel, Susan Rice and Hannah Rosenthal) was mindlessly rumored to be a stealth bomb aimed at Israel.

And more recently, instead of admitting that Mr. Obama’s dogged commitment to an international boycott of Iran brought its malevolent leaders to the negotiating table, many have pilloried the president for his judgment that the best path toward defanging Iran lies in allowing the mullahs to save some face rather than pushing them into a corner and risking a new terrorism campaign born of desperation.

When I occasionally wrote about President Obama’s record, it was heartening to glean from some readers’ (private) reactions that I was not alone in my puzzlement over so many Orthodox Jews’ fear and anger about Mr. Obama. It wasn’t likely a silent majority, but even a silent minority was reassuring.

Some suggested that the animus against the president was, at its core, racist. I don’t believe that. Others claimed that Mr. Obama’s social-issues liberalism irredeemably damned him in the eyes of social conservatives, a group to which most Orthodox Jews (myself included) belong.

But I think the answer is more simple. We humans don’t like to admit that we were wrong.

Not exactly a high Jewish ideal, that.

Not like hakaras hatov.

© Haaretz 2014

Where Are The Red Carpets?

The letter below appears in today’s New York Times

To the Editor:

I’m neither an “Israel right or wrong” person nor a supporter of what has come to be called “the Palestinian cause.” But one question keeps coming back to me when I read about objections to decisions by Jewish campus groups not to invite speakers hostile to Israel: Where is the push for Arab campus groups to roll out their red carpets to unabashed defenders of the Jewish state?

(Rabbi) AVI SHAFRAN
New York, Dec. 30, 2013

The writer is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.

The Peril of Pluralism

The following essay was published earlier this week, under a different title, by Haaretz. It is posted here with that paper’s permission.

Those of us who believe that the Torah, both its written text and accompanying Oral Law, were bequeathed by G-d to our Jewish ancestors at Sinai, and that its commandments and prohibitions remain incumbent on Jews to this day, obviously hope that Jewish movements lacking those beliefs remain marginal forces in Israel.

But that’s a hope born of the perspective of a particular belief-system (albeit the conviction of all Jews’ ancestors until two centuries ago). Leaving such blatant subjectivity aside, though, would the growth of non-Orthodox Jewish theologies be a boon or a bane to Israeli society qua society?

The answer may lie in the example of the United States, where the Reform and Conservative movements, as well as less popular groups like Reconstructionism and Humanistic Judaism, had and have free rein to lay claim to Jewish authenticity. And here in the American diaspora, the results of the Jewish Pluralism experiment? Decidedly binal.

On the one hand, Jews who, for whatever reason, choose not to embrace the demands of a traditional (in this context, Orthodox) Jewish life have less demanding options for maintaining a Jewish identity. They have access to clergy who are not only sensitive and caring (as all clergy should be) but who don’t regard traditional Jewish observance as necessary for meaningful Jewish life, and who can guide them through times of personal challenges, happy occasions and, G-d forbid, sad ones.

The downside of the American “let a hundred Jewish flowers bloom” approach, though, is that there is no longer a single American Jewish community.

That is because the non-Orthodox Jewish movements, whether they are unconcerned with halacha (e.g. Reform, et al.) or view it as pliable (i.e. Conservative), have happily converted countless non-Jews and (less happily, to be sure, but readily all the same) issued countless divorces. (The Reform movement’s acceptance as Jews of children born to non-Jewish mothers but Jewish fathers has complicated matters even more.)

The problem is that Orthodox Jews, out of conviction, cannot recognize the validity of such status-changes that don’t meet the halachic bar. And so, there are thousands of American non-Jews who believe they are Jews, and unknown numbers of children born to women in second marriages whose first marriages have not, in the eyes of halacha, been dissolved, children who are severely limited in whom they may halachically marry.

As a result, whereas once upon a time (and it wasn’t long ago), an Orthodox young man or woman could see a similar-minded but different-backgrounded member of the opposite sex as a potential life-partner on the exclusive evidence of a claim of Jewish identity, that is no longer the case. A child or grandchild of non-Orthodox Jews may have the halachic status of a non-Jew or be the product of an illicit remarriage.

(I was personally involved, more than 30 years ago, in the case of a young observant Orthodox woman who discovered that her maternal grandmother had been a Reform convert, rendering the young woman halachically non-Jewish. She was able to undergo a halachic conversion. But countless others are not aware of their status and, even if they were, would not necessarily be willing to meet the necessary conversion requirements.)

And so, in America, not only must non-Orthodox Jews be regarded by Orthodox Jews as possibly (and, increasingly, likely) non-Jewish, but Reform converts (whose conversions do not meet Conservative standards) are similarly not Jewish in the Conservative casting of “halacha.” And as to the human repercussions of non-halachic divorces… well, imagine a young newly Orthodox man suddenly discovering that his beloved is halachically forbidden to him in marriage

At present, the Israeli Jewish community suffers no such balkanization. There is, to be sure, much disagreement within the Israeli Jewish family; but the fights are all family fights. Anyone presenting as a Jew is regarded as a relative, no matter his or her perspective.

That is the result of what is often derided as the “Orthodox monopoly” over “personal status” issues like conversion and divorce. A less charged description, though, might be “single standard.”

No less a non-traditional Jew than David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, understood the need for such a standard. He wrote in 1947 that multiple definitions of “Jew” would court “G-d forbid, the splitting of the House of Israel into two.” The number may have changed, but not the validity of his concern. And the fact has now been borne out by the American experiment: multiple Jewish standards yield multiple “Jewish peoples.”

Standards may chafe, but they are part of every country’s life. Even here in the pluralistic West, we have “monopolies” like a Food and Drug Administration and a Federal Reserve Board. A Jewish state requires a Jewish standard for issues of defining Jewishness.

Until fairly recently, the “highest common denominator” standard has always been halacha – “Orthodoxy.” At present in Israel, it still is. But should the pluralism push there make inroads, what would result – even from a disinterested, strictly sociological perspective –would be nothing short of Jewish societal disaster.

Defining History Down

Under siege by some of his countrymen for seeming to have acknowledged the Holocaust, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani tried to walk that Chihuahua back at a forum this week sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Asia Society. Asked to clearly state his stand on the issue, he chose to condemn “crimes by the Nazis during World War II [including the killing of] a group of Jewish people.”

Another “defining down” of historical fact also recently appeared, this one emanating from a more respectable source, the New York Times, in a video on its website. The background clip accompanied a print report about Jews who ascend the Har Habayis, or Temple Mount, thereby passively challenging the Muslim authorities to whom Israel has ceded oversight of the ancient Jewish holy site. Those overseers forbid Jews from praying openly there; some of the Jewish visitors, apparently, dare to do so silently.

The second of the two holy Jewish national temples that stood on the mount for centuries, of course, was destroyed by the Romans in 70 C.E. It was more than 600 years later, after the Islamic empire spread to the Holy Land, that a small mosque was erected there. An earthquake destroyed the mosque, and a second one was subsequently built on the spot, although it met the same fate shortly thereafter. In 1035, the grandiose mosque currently occupying the Temple site was built, and thus far survives.

The Times article itself, as it happens, hinted at something that deserved more prominence in the piece, namely that the most respected Jewish rabbinic authorities have forbidden all Jews, in no uncertain terms, from ascending the Mount, both for halachic reasons and to not give the mosque’s overseers and other Muslims any excuse to engage in violence. Charedi Jews are often the focus of news reports from Israel. In an article presented to millions that speaks of religious Jews doing something that some regard as politically provocative, it would have been proper to point out that the Jews at issue are decidedly not charedim, and that the latter disapprove of their actions.

But what was truly disconcerting was the narration of the Times’ video expanding on the article. It referred to the Har Habayis as the place “that Jews call the Temple Mount…” and that “Jews widely believe was the site of the Temples.” Italics, of course, mine.

Such subtle casting of long-accepted historical fact as mere popular Jewish belief is of a sort with the subtle devaluation of “Judaism’s holiest site” the Old Gray Lady has perpetrated in the past – like when it bestowed that honor to the Western Wall rather than to the Temple Mount that lies behind it.

Fact: Objective students of history – of all ethnicities – see no reason to not accept the Bible’s account that, approximately nine centuries before the beginning of the Common Era and nearly 1500 years before Mohammed’s grandmother was born, King Solomon built the first of the two Holy Jewish Temples on that Jerusalem site. And that sacrificial offerings, as the Talmud and Roman sources alike recount, were brought on the altar there on behalf of both Jews and non-Jewish visitors.

That that history derives mostly from Jewish texts and Jewish tradition is no deficiency. The meticulous preservation of history is the nuclear strong force of Judaism, and is what has preserved the Jewish nation for millennia. Jews the world over just celebrated, on Sukkos, the collective memory of their ancestors’ Divine protection after the exodus from Egypt; that exodus itself is mentioned hundreds of times each year by every observant Jew in prayers and rites.

He or she recalls the ancient Jewish Temple too, every single day of the year, in each of the silent prayers – recited facing the Temple Mount – that are the backbone of Jewish religious life.

On holidays, moreover, the special Mussaf prayer includes a lengthy bemoaning of the Temples’ destructions.

The words “Jerusalem” and its synonym “Zion,” the city whose holiness derives from that of the Temple Mount, passed my lips at least ten times this morning. Before breakfast.

And that repast was followed by the grace after meals, which includes an entreaty of G-d to rebuild Jerusalem – meaning the Temple.

That rebuilding, to be sure, isn’t a call to human physical force. The Third Holy Temple will be built by the hand not of man but of G-d, the object of our entreaty. That is likewise evident in the passive form of our prayer elsewhere: “May it be Your will that the Temple be [re]built.” But that collective Jewish prayer will be prayed – our spiritual contribution – until its fulfillment.

In the meanwhile, however much mullahs or media may seek to distort inconvenient historical facts, people devoted to truth will continue to know better. They will know that, just over 60 years ago, millions of Jews were murdered by the Nazis and their friends. And that, over 2000 years ago, a Holy Jewish Temple stood on the hill that still carries its name.

Al Jazeera And The Jews

Even as Al Jazeera America – the new offshoot of the Qatar-based news organization – was making its broadcast debut recently on cable carriers in the United States, its parent organization back on the Arabian peninsula featured a commentary by former Muslim Brotherhood official Gamal Nassar, in which he claimed that the Egyptian military (and currently political) leader Abdel Fattah Al Sisi is a Jew. He didn’t mean it as a compliment.

Mr. Nassar cited an Algerian newspaper (“All the slander that’s fit to sling”?) to the effect that Mr. Al Sisi’s uncle was “a member of the Jewish Haganah organization” and that the nephew “is implementing a Zionist plan to divide Egypt.”

The Al Jazeera commentator helpfully added that “Whoever reads The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the writings of [the Jews], including those who were writing in the U.S., realizes that this plot was premeditated.”

Maybe it’s not fair to visit the sins of the father – Al Jazeera in Arabia – so to speak, onto the son – Al Jazeera America. The latter organization claims to be “a completely different channel from… all of the other channels in the Al Jazeera Media Network” and has its “own board and advisory board.” And the American operation asserts that it will be delivering “unbiased, fact-based and in-depth journalism,” which, if true, will become apparent in time. But, with the baggage of its family name’s reputation, “AJAM”’s battle will be uphill.

As it happens, not long ago, in my capacity as Agudath Israel’s public affairs director, I was contacted by a reporter for Al Jazeera – the original, Qatar operation. He worked for its English-language version, which is no longer accessible in the US, and was helping produce a television segment for the network, about the religious-secular divide in Israel.

I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to become involved, even as a mere resource, with an Arab-centered, less-than-sympathetic-to-Israel operation. A good friend of mine who also deals with media advised me to demur. But I decided to interact with the reporter (who turned out to be very friendly, and Jewish, to boot) all the same, and offered him some background information about the topic he wouldn’t likely glean from most Jewish media, and some suggestions for whom he might wish to feature as guests on the segment.

A few weeks later, he sent me a link to a recording of the program, which I watched carefully. The guests included a religious Israeli politician and an American proponent of dismantling the rabbinate and creating a more “democratic” state that didn’t favor Orthodox Judaism.

The segment, I had to admit, was excellent. Both sides made their cases, of course, but the moderator was outstanding, asking informed, probing questions not only of the politician but of the activist too, and letting her guests know when they didn’t address what had been asked. Another journalist on the program was monitoring personal media in real time, and the tweets and postings she shared with the audience were balanced, representing both sides of each issue.

Afterward, I sat back and pondered the contrast between mainstream Jewish media’s reportage of Jewish religious issues and what I had witnessed on Al Jazeera’s program. When it comes to things like the segment’s subject, many media, including some major Jewish media, are transparently biased against Jewish Orthodoxy. That’s not surprising, as most journalists, as a Pew poll several years back revealed, are less than sympathetic to religion. And most Jewish journalists are non-Orthodox Jews with, by their profession, an interest in the Jewish community; hence they bring some personal baggage to their keyboards. Al Jazeera, however, lacks any dog in the race, and so it addressed the subject in a refreshingly objective way.

That it did so recalled to me something I had said before an audience of my own, at the 92^nd St. Y a few months ago. In an offhand comment that drew some gasps (and, surprisingly, some applause), I asserted that the reporters most qualified to write for Jewish newspapers are non-Jews. They, I explained, are less likely to be burdened by preconceptions or guided, even subconsciously, by agendas.

I know Al Jazeera – the parent, that is – well enough to not expect it to report objectively on Israel. It doesn’t expend the effort to see beyond the Jewish state’s real or imagined warts, to its human face. Nor would I expect it to feature – although it should – opinion pieces defending Israel against the libels regularly hurled at her by much of the Arab world.

But, optimist that I am, I wonder whether Al Jazeera America, which aims to focus mainly on American news, might prove itself, at least in the realm of reportage on Jewish religious issues, to be a breath of unpolluted air. Time will tell.

How disturbing, though, to have to be looking to an Arab news network for balance in Jewish issues.

Black Peril, White Knights

A lengthy piece in the New Republic asserts – or, more accurately, hopes – that “an unlikely alliance between Orthodox and progressive women will save Israel from fundamentalism.” The latter word, of course, is intended to refer to traditional Orthodox Judaism.

Heavy on anecdotes about charedi crazies harassing sympathetic women, the piece, titled “The Feminists of Zion,” details how demographic changes in Israel have brought the decades-old peaceful co-existence of secular and charedi Jews to something of a head. The “once-tiny minority” of charedim “now comprises more than 10% of the population,” it informs. And it warns that “as their numbers have increased, so has their sway over political and civil life.”

That sway has resulted in things like “an increase in modesty signs on public boulevards and gender-segregated sidewalks in Haredi neighborhoods,” not to mention “gender-separated office hours in government-funded medical clinics and de facto gender segregation on publicly subsidized buses,” among other affronts.

In 19^th century America, there was much anxiety about the “Yellow Peril,” the pernicious effect that Chinese immigrants were imagined to have on the culture of the union. During the Second World War, the phrase was applied to Japanese Americans (iceberg, Goldberg, what difference does it make?…). The New Republic writers, Haaretz’s Allison Kaplan Sommer and Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick, seem to perceive what they might call (although they don’t) a Black Peril in Israel. And the White Knight on the horizon who might vanquish the monster is the Jewish state’s “fighting feminist spirit.”

That spirit, the writers say, is championed by the Israeli Reform movement (and its legal arm, the Israel Religious Action Center, or IRAC) and by “modern-Orthodox” women in Israel who are fed up with charedim. One group of such Orthodox feminists, Kolech, the article notes, has begun to work with IRAC on “a host of issues.”

The “highest profile example of the renewed fighting feminist spirit in Israel,” the writers assert, may be “the stunning success this year of Women of the Wall,” (WOW), the group of feminists that has made a point of gathering monthly at the Western Wall, or Kotel Maaravi, to hold vocal services while wearing religious garb and items traditionally worn by men, which offends the charedi men and women who regularly pray at the site around the clock.

Mss. Sommer and Lithwick, hopelessly hopeful, posit the possibility that “the rising tide of feminist activism… will ultimately engage Haredi women as well.” Evidence for the unlikelihood of such cross-cultural contagiousness, however, lies no farther than the Kotel plaza itself.

For the past several Jewish Rosh Chodesh, or “new month,” morning prayer services, when WOW holds its untraditional services, the group and its supporters were outnumbered on the order of 1:100 by charedi women, young and old, who quietly prayed in a passive but striking assertion of their own convictions, those of the millennia-old Jewish religious tradition. (Unsurprisingly, the media, dutifully summoned by WOW’s leaders to boost its public profile among non-Orthodox American Jews, focused on handfuls of idiotic, inexcusable and uncouth young men who jeered and even threw things at the successful provocateurs.)

The many thousands of women quietly praying at the Wall, while they made no sound, spoke loudly. About who truly cares about the Kotel and the Holy Temple that once stood on its other side, and about true empowerment of women. They know the inestimable value of their roles as wives and mothers and future mothers, as teachers of their children and of other Jews, as women like those at the time of the exodus from Egypt, the “righteous women” in whose merit, the Talmud teaches, the Jewish People were able to leave the land of their enslavement.

So yes, as the article states, there is indeed a challenge to Jewish “fundamentalism” – the Judaism of the ages – in Israel these days. The challengers are the American movement called Reform and its small but militant Israeli counterpart, comprised of American immigrants and a smattering of “progressive” native women. And the challengers have indeed made some headway in Israel’s secular courts, and will likely make further gains as they file new lawsuits against charedim and their practices.

What is lost on many observers, though, is the fact that Israel’s charedim seek only to maintain their fealty to the Jewish religious tradition that, in the end, is the heritage of all Jews. They have made no moves to change the religious status quo that has been in effect in Israel since its inception. The lawsuits and public campaigns have all been initiated by IRAC and its allies.

And so, while Israel’s secular courts, perhaps with subconscious envy of (or conscious aiming at) American-style religion/state separation, may well look favorably on the demands of the self-styled White Knights, one thing is certain: those “progressives” are the antagonists here.

And by mischaracterizing charedim as intent on trying to change other Israelis’ lives, by painting religious Jews as a sinister, growing Black Peril that must be arrested before it is too late, the modern-day crusaders miss a terrible irony: They are engaging in the very same sort of vilification that has been, at times similarly successfully, employed over centuries by enemies of all Jews.

Musing: Two NYT Articles about Israel Say it All

Two recent articles in the New York Times conveyed as informative a picture of Palestinians and Israel as might be imagined. One, on August 4, profiled the “culture of conflict” nurtured by West Bank Palestinians, focusing on Arab teenagers’ delight in throwing large stones at Israel soldiers and Jewish residents of nearby communities, and younger boys’ games imitating their elders’ activities.

“Children have hobbies,” one teen, Muhammad, is quoted as explaining, “and my hobby is throwing stones.”

When a 17-year-old, arrested for his stone-throwing, was released in June after 16 months in prison, the article reports, “he was welcomed like a war hero with flags and fireworks, women in wedding finery lining the streets to cheer his motorcade.”

The second Times piece, the next day, described how, in its headline’s words, “Doctors in Israel Quietly Tend to Syria’s Wounded.”

Most Syrian patients “come here unconscious with head injuries,” said Dr. Masad Barhoum, the director general of one of the hospitals, the Western Galilee Hospital in Nahariya. “They wake up after a few days or whenever and hear a strange language and see strange people,” he continued. “If they can talk, the first question is, ‘Where am I?’ ”

“I am sure,” he added “there is an initial shock when they hear they are in Israel.”

A 13-year-old girl, who had required complex surgery, was interviewed “sitting up in bed in a pink Pooh Bear T-shirt.” Her aunt, who had managed to locate her and was happy with the treatment her niece had received, told the reporter that they hoped to return to Syria later this week.

“Asked what she will say when she goes back home, the aunt replied: ‘I won’t say that I was in Israel. It is forbidden to be here, and I am afraid of the reactions’.”

The two pieces, taken together, really say it all.

Addendum

A correspondent had some complaints about my essay below “Meet Cindy,” and since the points he raised are important ones, I am sharing my slightly edited responses to him here.

He quoted the following paragraph from my essay:

“And a country that calls itself the Jewish one, it can well be argued, has a special responsibility to underwrite the portion of its populace that is willfully destitute because of its dedication to perpetuating classical Judaism.”

And then commented:

The charedi community is not willfully destitute because of its dedication to perpetuating classical Judaism. In classical Judaism – both in sources in the Gemara and Rishonim, and in actual Jewish history – people worked to support their families. Following the directives of Chazal, people raised their children with the skills, the desire and the motivation to work for a living. There was no system of mass kollel.

The charedi community is not willfully destitute because of its dedication to perpetuating classical Judaism. It is willfully destitute because of its dedication to perverting classical Judaism.

My response:

Classical Judaism is, above all, hewing to the interpretation/application of the Torah’s timeless principles to each generation and place’s situation and needs. The dorshov of each dor vi’dor [spiritual leaders of each generation] are the arbiters of what is required of us in each era of our history.

I may personally be (and am, in fact) a Hirschian in outlook, and be as puzzled as you at the seeming shunning of what seems to me to be healthy development for Klal Yisrael in Eretz Yisrael. But even Rav Hirsch, in his day, recognized that his school model in Germany could not be “exported” to Eretz Yisrael. To ascertain when we are correct and when we are not is what we have Gedolim [recognized spiritual leaders] for.

In the end, whatever my natural personal view, my emunas chachamim [trust in the judgment of the wise] trumps it. When there is a consensus of the greatest and most recognized Gedolim that a certain departure from the historic norm (and the historical uniquenesses of our times are many), I don’t second-guess them, because I believe that Hashem’s will is that I follow the decisions of the judges “in my day.”

My correspondent then asserted that my analogy between charedim and my fictional creation Cindy was flawed. He wrote:

1. Cindi is raising her children to be productive citizens, not to also require welfare.

2. Motherhood is something valued by everyone. Being charedi is not. (It’s not being a religious Jew that we’re discussing – plenty of people who work are also religious Jews.)

3. Cindi is presumably appreciative for the aid. She’s not part of a movement that disparages the government, refuses to serve in the army even in times of great national danger, and refuses to display any gratitude to those who defend her and those who financially support her.

4. Cindi’s situation is unplanned, unwanted, and she hopes to get out of it one day.

My response:

1) Perhaps she is, perhaps she isn’t. But if she isn’t, should we feel differently about her? And if so, should we see ourselves as responsible public policy makers or as social engineers? You may well disagree with my feeling that how Cindy raises her children should not matter, and I respect your point of view on that, but I reject it.

2) My essay wasn’t an attempt to convince a reader that the charedi way is right or wrong. It was intended only to, through a thought experiment, help him/her to better relate to how charedim feel.

3) Most charedim do not disparage the government (at least not any more than non-charedim or secular Israelis). Their avoidance of military service is for principled religious reasons, not as some sort of eye-poking (and they contribute – at least to those of us who consider Torah-study to be protective of Klal Yisrael – much to the security of the state).

And I explicitly wrote that charedim need to be makir tov [have and express gratitude to the state for what it provides them].

4) That is a valid difference. Whether it makes a difference is another matter. I don’t think it does.

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Reflections on Jews, Judaism, Media and Life