Category Archives: issues of morality or ethics

We’re Not Kidnappers

A piece I wrote for a Forward blog, in reaction to a mother’s lament over her newly-Orthodox daughter’s described rejection of her parents can be read here.

Private Matters

It comes as something of a revelation to many to confront the Rambam’s treatment of kiddush Hashem, or “sanctification of Hashem’s name” for the first time. One definition of the concept in Hilchos Yesodei HaTorah, 5:10 – perhaps its most essential one, has nothing to do with readiness to give up one’s life or to act in a way that presents a good image of a Jew to others.

To be sure, that the Torah commands us to be willing to perish rather than violate certain commandments (or any commandment – even custom – in certain circumstances) is well-known to most Jews with a modicum of Jewish knowledge. And the understanding that living an upstanding life, exemplifying honesty and sterling demeanor, is also a form of kiddush Hashem is likewise widely recognized. The Gemara in Yoma (86a) famously describes various amora’im’s examples of such projection of Jewish personal values, labeling them kiddushei Hashem.

What is surprising is the Rambam’s statement that kiddush Hashem is something that can be accomplished as well entirely in private. In fact, particularly in private.

“Anyone who violates, willingly, without any coercion, any of the precepts of the Torah…” reads the Rambam’s psak, “has profaned the name of Hashem…”

“And likewise,” the halachah continues, “anyone who refrains from a sin, or performs a mitzvah, not because of any this-worldly concern, nor threat, nor fear, nor the seeking of honor, but only because of the Creator, praised be He, has sanctified the name [of Hashem].”

It would seem that the core of kiddush Hashem isn’t an act’s effect on others, which it needn’t have, but rather the fact that it has been freely chosen, out of pure, selfless devotion to the Creator. Dying al kiddush Hashem, in other words, is but a manifestation of such selflessness. But it is selfless devotion to the Divine that itself truly defines kiddush Hashem.

Elsewhere (Peirush Mishnayos, last commentary in Makkos), the Rambam writes that such performance of any mitzvah, or refraining from any sin, out of pure selflessness and desire to do Hashem’s will is the key to Olam Haba. “It is of the fundamental beliefs in the Torah that when a person fulfills a mitzvah… fittingly and properly, and does not join with that performance any ulterior motivation… but for its own sake, with love… he has merited eternal life [Olam Haba].”

The Rambam there presents that idea to be what Rabbi Chananya ben Akashya meant in his famous Mishnaic dictum about Hashem’s gifting us with many mitzvos as a means of affording afford us merits.

It’s not easy, of course, to do something purely out of altruistic, Hashem-focused motive. We do myriad mitzvos daily, but their very daily-ness allows them to easily be muddled by habit. There are tefillos recited but with scant thought about their meaning, brachos recited as mumbled formulae, tefillin that we sometimes notice suddenly on our arms and heads, with meager memory of having consciously donned them. Even “Lisheim Yichud”s – intended to focus our attention on what we’re doing – are themselves relegated to rote.

We are, moreover, constantly subject to the pressure of our peers – the knowledge that it just won’t do to eat at that restaurant with the less-than-ideal hechsher, or to miss a tefilla b’tzibbur or regular shiur. And even in the relative privacy of our homes, well, we want our spouses and children to think well of us, no?

But when those moments of potential pure choices appear, when decisions to act, or to not act, are unaffected by rote and impervious to considerations of honor or other’s expectations, they are gold mines of potential kiddush Hashem.

That our contemporary world offers us such moments was the message of Rav Avrohom Schorr in his Motzoei Shabbos message at this past year’s Agudath Israel national convention. He noted an irony: modern technology presents us with challenges that are, by very virtue of their ease and privacy, free from influences like fear or honor. The only motivation we have to stand up to and overcome such challenges is yiras Shomayim, our freely chosen and sincere choice to accept Hashem’s will.

Rabbi Schorr asked the large gathering to consider why Hashem has given us such challenges, which did not confront any Jewish generation until our own. The answer, he said, is clear: “Because He wants to bring about the time of nisgadalti viniskadhashti”; He wants to offer us the opportunity to accomplish kiddush shem Shamayim.

It’s in our hands in a way it has never been in any other ones, ever.

Greed Is Gross

The carnival of carnage that seems a constant in the Islamic world proceeded tragically apace last week, with a suicide bombing at a gathering in Ibb, Yemen to commemorate Islam’s founder’s birthday. At least 23 people were killed; an Al Qaeda affiliate is the suspected culprit.

Then, over in Afghanistan, at least 26 people attending a wedding party were killed, and 45 wounded, when a rocket struck a house during a firefight between government forces and Taliban insurgents

But what might rank as the week’s most senseless loss of life took place in a non-Islamic land, China. At least 35 people were killed and 43 injured during a stampede in an area of Shanghai where tens of thousands had gathered to celebrate the advent of a new calendar year

The cause of that disaster is unclear, but it was reported that shortly before the crowd had grown restless, people in a nearby building had dropped green pieces of paper that looked like American $100 bills.

Now, there’s an awful metaphor for our covetous times. The pursuit of money is nothing new, of course. It has been the engine powering many a civilization, and the rot destroying many a human life. And while it’s easy to decry the venality and greed of the worst that Wall St. and Hollywood have to offer, it’s considerably harder to check our own individual inclinations to grab what green we can.

It’s a silly inclination, of course. Not only can money buy only stuff, not happiness, but a believing Jew should have well absorbed the truism that his financial status is, in the end, a function of what is decreed for him by Hashem at the start of each Jewish year. To pursue money, then, for the sake of, well, pursuing money, to exert oneself in a quest to have more than one needs, is just to court expenses that one wouldn’t otherwise have.

Still and all, mindless greed somehow seeps into countless lives, even Jewish ones, even Jewishly educated ones. Lavan, after all, is in our family tree.

Yet possessions are valuable things.

Yaakov Avinu, we all know, recrossed Nachal Yabok in order to retrieve small jars inadvertently left behind. “From here we see,” Chazal explain, “that the possessions of the righteous are as dear to them as their bodies.”

That comment, of course, does not mean to counsel greed or miserliness; Yaakov, after all, is the man of emes, the forefather who embodies the ideal of “truth” or honesty. It is meant to teach us something deeply Jewish, that possessions have worth. And that is because they can be utilized for truly meaningful things. A dollar can be converted not only into a euro but into a mitzvah.

It can buy a soft drink or a packet of aspirin or part of a New York subway fare. But it can also buy a thirsty friend a drink, or a get-well card for someone ailing, or part of the fare for the ride to the hospital to deliver it in person. It can be put into the pushke or given as a reward to a child who has done something reward-worthy.

Possessions are tools, in their essence morally neutral. Put to a holy purpose, though, they are sublime. And so, the Torah teaches, valuing a small jar can be a sign not of avarice but of wisdom.

It’s unfortunate – no, dreadful – that some of us seem only to remember the importance of valuing money but forgotten the reason for its value. Greed – all the more so when it leads to less than honest expression – is the very antithesis of the example set by the Jewish forefather associated with emes. The righteous, continue Chazal in their statement about Yaakov’s retrieval of the small jars, “do not extend their hands toward theft.” Truly Jewish-minded Jews see money not as an end justified by any means but as a means that can lead to a holy end.

And if it’s only the end that matters, as it should, the means cannot be of any inherent importance. Means can take many forms. A wealthy person can, as many do, use his financial resources to help others and support Torah. But the financially unendowed are at no disadvantage. They simply resort to what other wealths they may have, their time, their intellects, their talents.

And so should we find ourselves with dollars, actual ones, raining down upon us, the Jewish thing to do would be to perhaps hold out our hands, but to stand perfectly, happily still.

Letter to the New York Times Book Review

A slightly edited version of the letter below appears in the January 4 edition of the NYT Book Review.

Editor:

In reviewing “Living the Secular Life,” Susan Jacoby misunderstands the argument of those who maintain that the idea that there can be “good without God” is absurd.

The question isn’t whether an atheist can live an ethical life; of course she can. And believers can do profoundly unethical things. But an atheist has no reason to choose an ethical life. “Good deed” or “bad deed” can have no more true meaning for him than good weather and bad weather; right and wrong, no more import than right and left. If we are mere evolved apes, even if evolution has bequeathed us a gut feeling that an ethical life is preferred, we have no more compelling reason to embrace that evolutionary artifact than we are to capitulate to others, like overeating in times of plenty. If dieting isn’t immoral, neither is ignoring the small voice telling us that whacking our neighbor on the head and stealing his dog is wrong.

Only a psychopath, Ms. Jacoby contends, could disagree with the Golden Rule. The evidence presented by the large number of people convicted each year of thievery, assault, murder and rape (not to mention the even larger number of litigants in most civil lawsuits) would seem to argue otherwise. No, being willing to do unto others what one would not want done to himself isn’t a sign of psychopathy. It is a part of human nature. And only the conviction that there is an Ultimate Arbiter of right and wrong, and that we are created in the image of that God, can give us pause when we consider expressing the darker facets of our natures.

Rabbi Avi Shafran

New York, NY

Punditry With Prudence

“According to you,” a reader wrote me privately about a recent column that appeared in this space, “we can’t make any conclusions, because of the unknowns.”

The column, titled “Unknown Unknowns,” pointed out how, particularly in political affairs (like the current American administration’s relationship with Israel) we don’t always have the whole picture. I noted as an example, how, at the very same time that many Jewish media were attacking President Obama for his ostensible hostility toward Israel, the president was determinedly working hand in glove with Israel in a secret cyber-project to undermine the Iranian nuclear program. As pundits huffed and puffed, Stuxnet was silently destroying centrifuges.

The reader was chagrined that I, as he read it, was counseling a moratorium on commentary about all political affairs. I wrote back to explain that no, I didn’t mean that at all. We can, and even should, express our concerns openly in the free country in which we’re privileged to live. But we must do so with reason and civility (maybe even fairness), not the sort of ranting that passes for dialectic on talk radio these days. I meant only (and perhaps should have written more clearly) that a degree of modesty when voicing our assumptions and opinions is in order, and is all too often in absentia.

Serendipitously, shortly after I wrote the piece, a bit of news arrived that well illustrated its point.

Back at the start of 2013, when Chuck Hagel was nominated to serve as Secretary of Defense, the reaction from various corners, including some in our community, ranged from deeply suspicious to apoplectic. Several artless statements Mr. Hagel had made were fanned into four-alarm fires; taken in the worst possible way, they were waved around as evidence of the man’s disdain for Israel. (That his nomination was made by the man in the White House made things, to the alarmists, even more distressing.

Elliott Abrams labelled Mr. Hagel an anti-Semite. Abe Foxman insinuated that the nominee believed that the “the Jewish lobby controls foreign policy.” Charles Krauthammer blasted the new Defense Secretary for “pernicious blindness” when it came to Israel. Magazines, newspapers and pundits in our own community readily hopped on the berating-bandwagon – and looked with pity (at best) upon those of us who, weighing the evidence objectively, just couldn’t work up a good panic.

Fast-forward to several weeks ago, when Mr. Hagel’s retirement was announced. Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon, who had no reason to say anything at all about the transition, took the initiative to describe Mr. Hagel as a “true friend of Israel” whose “dedication to ensuring Israel’s security has been unwavering.”

“It is a real shame Hagel is leaving – he was great with us,” another Israeli official told Israeli reporter Barak Ravid. Reporter Udi Sagal wrote that Hagel’s departure is “is bad news for Israel,” citing Hagel’s close personal relationship with Israel’s Defense Ministry.

The Jerusalem Post, no slouch when it comes to Israel’s security concerns, editorialized that Mr. Hagel “proved to be highly supportive of Israel” and imagined (likely unrealistically) that “some of the organizations that originally attacked Hagel quite viciously must now be embarrassed by their behavior.”

At least one erstwhile critic, Mr. Foxman, to his credit, seemed to come around to the realization that his fears had proven unfounded. “Secretary Hagel’s energetic stewardship of America’s commitment to Israel’s security in a dangerous region,” he said, “has been vital.”

“His hands-on engagement,” the ADL leader added, “to ensure that our ally Israel can live in safety and security and maintain its rightful place in the community of nations will have a lasting impact.”

Yes, we can wax critical of political leaders. But before we call them Israel-haters (and certainly Jew-haters), before we dump gobs of cynicism on their heads, or accuse them of flouting the law or the Constitution (when no court has rendered any such judgment), or pronounce them traitorous or stupid or evil, we need to pause, take a deep breath, remember a few things. That there are at least two reasonable perspectives on most issues. That there are things we can’t know with certitude. And that, as Shlomo HaMelech observed and taught, “the words of the wise are heard” only when expressed “in calm” (Koheles 9:17).

The state of Israel, and Klal Yisrael, have all too many all too real enemies in today’s world. We really don’t do ourselves any favor imagining, or, chalilah, creating, new ones.

Strong and Subtle Slanders

The New York Jewish Week was understandably unhappy at the comparison that a respected Modern Orthodox rabbi seemed to make between the paper and the rabid Nazi tabloid Der Stürmer, which, from1923 until 1945, incited Germans with lurid fictions about Jews.

Rabbi Steven Pruzansky, spiritual leader of Congregation B’nai Yeshurun, the largest Orthodox synagogue in Teaneck, NJ, recently stepped down from the Beit Din of Bergen County he led for seven years, mainly, he wrote, because of “the negativity associated today with conversion, and the cynicism and distrust fostered by so many…towards the rabbinate.”

Rabbi Pruzansky, a member of the executive committee of the Rabbinical Council of America, was also critical of a decision made by that latter organization to appoint a new conversion committee that will include several non-rabbinical members in addition to five rabbis. He expressed concern that the new committee may “water down the standards” for conversion and potentially lead to a return to “the old days of quickie conversions with little commitment.”

When the Jewish Week contacted him to elaborate, he declined to speak to its reporter, asserting that the paper is “one of the leading publications in the world of Orthodox-bashing and rabbi-bashing.” And then he referenced Der Stürmer as another paper “that dealt a lot with Jews,” drolly adding that the latter periodical is “bad company to be in.”

The Jewish Week editorialized that the invocation of the Nazi publication was “outrageous,” leading Rabbi Pruzansky to subsequently write that he intended “no comparison” between the two publications, and that he “certainly regret[s] if [the Jewish Week] misconstrued my comment and anyone offended took offense…”

Whether the Jewish Week has accepted that apology isn’t known to me. But one hopes that the paper’s umbrage won’t obscure what it was that so exasperated a genteel, intelligent Modern Orthodox rabbi that he would invoke, however rashly, a noxiously anti-Semitic tabloid.

The Jewish Week, after all, has never featured lurid fabrications about Orthodox Jews killing children to drink their blood, or offered gross caricatures of bearded, hook-nosed, slobbering rabbis in its pages.

But if the paper’s editor and reporters are interested in turning an insult into a learning moment, they might pause to consider the fact that subtle innuendo and generalizations can be even more powerful than gross, horrific fabrications.

Contemporary counterparts to Der Stürmer are rife in some Arab and Muslim sites (the word used in both its old and newer meanings). And there are surely hateful simpletons who, as many Germans did during the Holocaust, accept the risible slanders against Jews those evil media serve up. But don’t we all recognize that a greater danger may be posed by mannerly and reasoned “critiques” of Jews (or Israel, as a stand-in) that more subtly communicate slanders?

The Jewish Week cannot, unfortunately, so easily huff away charges of that sort of more delicate, oblique defamation.

It is a paper, after all, that, while it harbors some fine, unbiased columnists in its stable, has evidenced an inordinate amount of negative “reportage” about Orthodox Jews, largely charedim, and their institutions; and even seems to have assigned a reporter the beat of real or imagined scandals in the Orthodox community. A reporter, it might be noted, who wrote a book that portrays communities like those in Borough Park and Williamsburg as small-minded, constricting, suffocating environments, and has characterized Orthodoxy, in the eyes of Jews she admires, as having “become little more than social control.”

The paper’s pages have included an assertion that “Some Orthodox label secular Jews Amalek”; a report about violent nationalist extremists in Israel that featured a large photograph of Har HaBayis in the background and a looming, ominous silhouette of a charedi man’s head in the foreground; a blatantly false assertion that a major charedi group “is opposed to… background check legislation” for Jewish schools. It has, moreover, repeatedly portrayed a decidedly non-Orthodox Jewish congregation as Orthodox (in order to promote certain “innovations” as halachically acceptable).

There is also the disturbing but telling fact that, despite the abundance of top-notch writers in the contemporary traditional Orthodox world today and the unparalleled growth of the Orthodox community, the Jewish Week, which claims to represent the gamut of the Jewish world, does not feature, and never has featured, any charedi columnist.

So, rather than sleep tightly after taking its righteous offense at an intemperate comment, the Jewish Week’s editor and staff might do well to stay up a bit longer, to wonder at what evoked the rash comment, and to do some serious introspection.

An edited version of the above appeared this week in Hamodia

Musing: Michael Savage, Watch Out!

“Obama, May [G-d] Curse You… We Will Trample On Your Head With Our Feet, You Infidel, You Tyrant!”

Syrian “child preacher” Abu Ja’far, in a recorded “street sermon” widely circulated on the Internet.

Kid’s got a bright future in talk radio.

“Personal Torah”

A recent announcement by a respected Conservative rabbi has been trumpeted widely as evidence of his heroism. My take is somewhat different, and was published, to the periodical’s credit, by the Forward. You can read it here.

Malignancies

There’s nothing remotely funny, of course, about rabid Islamists beheading innocent Westerners they have kidnapped (or their fellow Muslims, for that matter).

Yet, there is something bizarrely droll about the characterization of such slaughter, and in particular its filming and the dissemination of the resultant videos, as a “recruitment tool.” According to experts like Peter Neumann, who directs a center for the study of political violence in London, that is the videos’ goal, based on past successes in attracting new recruits.

What I found almost humorous was the unthinkability (to put it mildly) of any group of normal human beings seeking adherents by murdering people on camera. Can you imagine the Mormon Church cutting off the heads of gentiles (its name for non-Mormons) in order to attract worshippers? The Republican party, to entice independents? The Rotary Club, to garner new members? The local Jewish Federation, to lure donors? You get the droll.

And then the all-too-serious question presents itself: What does it say about a cause that it attracts people by means of the gleeful shedding of innocent blood? And a corollary: What does it say about the people so attracted?

It is fashionable to seek to “understand” forces and individuals who do malevolent things, to put the acts into a “context” that makes them if not justifiable, at least comprehensible. There are times, though, what seems to be evil is, in fact, just evil, pure and simple. Like our times.

Likewise fashionable these days are attempts to characterize the Islamic State movement, against which President Obama has effectively declared war (explaining that “There can be no reasoning – no negotiation – with this brand of evil”), and other Islamist hordes as not warranting a determined response by the civilized global community.

For all the odiousness of the groups’ means, the geopolitical fashionistas (hesitant Europeans and American isolationists alike) argue, such militants don’t threaten us directly. ISIS’s goal, in particular, is only to establish a Muslim caliphate in Eastern lands, not to harm the West. We have no camel in such races, they protest, no business involving our country in disputes that, in the end, are between this version of Islam and that version of Islam (and those, and those other ones too).

Intriguingly, though, current events have served up a compelling metaphor here.

For there is another deadly world crisis out there, likewise far away; (for the most part) and the larger world is determined, rightly, to deal with it. No one counsels ignoring it for its distance.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says the number of Ebola cases in West Africa is increasing, and has asked UN member states to donate $1 billion to tackle the epidemic. President Obama announced that the United States will send troops, material to build field hospitals, additional health care workers and medical supplies to the tune of $75 million. The World Bank is promising $200 million to deal with the crisis. The World Health Organization has pledged $100 million. Britain is delivering a field hospital to the area. $181 million has been promised from the European Union and $50 million from the Gates Foundation.

Ebola, which results in uncontrolled internal and external bleeding and easily spreads itself around, is evil. Yes, yes, the virus is morally innocent, just doing what its DNA compels it to do. But from the perspective of thinking, feeling human beings who affirm life as an invaluable gift, the disease is a scourge, something to be fought and driven into submission, ideally eradicated. Even though it is “way over there,” doesn’t threaten most of us directly and, historically, has asserted itself only on the African continent.

Millions of people in Africa are threatened by Ebola, and it is not easily contained. It thrives on ignorance (like that of villagers who have killed health workers, believing they are the cause of the disease) and attacks not only those who contract it casually but but exemplary human beings (like such health workers) as well.

Is not the biological scourge we all know must be routed a stunning counterpart to the sociopathic one that produces its own rivers of blood?

Comparing people to a disease has, understandably, become anathema in civil discourse. But such rhetoric is offensive because it is employed imprecisely or carelessly. Sometimes, though, it is an apt metaphor. Like when applied to groups that exult in slaughter of human beings, that seek to spread and whose recruitment tools include mugging behind masks for the cameras before cheerfully slitting throats.

Stubborn Spirit

The birthday cake was ablaze with 105 candles, and many among the scores of people present at the Czech embassy in London this past spring for the party would not have been there – or anywhere – had it not been for the man in whose honor they had gathered.

Nicholas Winton, who remains in full possession of his faculties, including his sense of humor, saved the lives of 669 children, mostly Jewish, during the months before the Second World War broke out in 1939. There are an estimated 6000 people, many of those children, now grown, along with their own descendants, who are alive today because of his efforts, which went unrecognized for decades.

Born in 1909 in West Hampstead, England, Mr. Winton was baptized as a member of the Anglican Church and became a successful stockbroker. He lived a carefree life until December 1938, when a friend, Martin Blake, asked him to forgo a ski vacation and visit him in Czechoslovakia, where Mr. Blake had traveled in his capacity as an associate of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, a group that was providing assistance to refugees created by the German annexation of the Sudetenland regions of the country. Together, the two men visited refugee camps filled to capacity with Jews and political opponents of the Nazis.

Mr. Winton was moved by the refugees’ plight. Knowing, too, about the violence that had been unleashed against the Jewish community in Germany and Austria during the Kristallnacht riots a mere month earlier, he resolved to do for children from Sudetenland what British Jewish agencies were doing to rescue German and Austrian Jewish children.

Audaciously (and illegally) “borrowing” the name of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, he began taking applications from parents, first at a hotel room and then from an office in central Prague. Thousands lined up to try to save their children’s lives.

(When an interviewer recently remarked to Mr. Winton that his actions “required quite a bit of ingenuity,” the interviewee responded, “No, it just required a printing press to get the notepaper printed.” And asked about travel documents he had forged and the “bit of blackmail” that he had employed to save children, Winton, seemingly amused, just replied, “It worked. That’s the main thing.”)

Returning to London, Mr. Winton raised money to fund the children transports, including funds demanded by the British government to bankroll the children’s eventual departure from Britain; and he found foster homes for the refugee children.

The first transport organized by Mr. Winton left Prague by plane for London on March 14, 1939, the day before the Germans occupied the Czech lands. After the Germans established a Protectorate in the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia, Winton organized seven further transports that departed by rail out of Prague and across Germany to the Atlantic Coast, then traveled by ship across the English Channel to Britain. At the train station in London, British foster parents waited to collect the children. The last trainload of children left Prague on August 2, 1939, and the rescue activities ceased when Germany invaded Poland and Britain declared war on Germany at the beginning of September 1939

During the war, Mr. Winton volunteered for an ambulance unit for the Red Cross, then trained pilots for the Royal Air Force. He married, raised a family and earned a comfortable living. For 50 years, his rescue efforts remained virtually unknown until 1988, when his wife found a scrapbook from 1939 with all the children’s photos and names. (Asked why he kept his secret so long, he explained, “I didn’t really keep it secret, I just didn’t talk about it.”)

Once his story got out, Mr. Winton received a letter of thanks from the late former Israeli president Ezer Weizman, was made an honorary citizen of Prague and, in 2002, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his service to humanity. His recent projects include providing help to the mentally handicapped people and building homes for the elderly.

It would be easy to place Nicholas Winton’s story securely in the “Righteous Gentiles” file, along with the accounts of other non-Jews who proved themselves exemplars of humanity. But his life, as it happens, is not that simple. It may speak less to the greatness of chassidei umos ha’olam and more to the pinteleh Yid.

For the bittersweet fact is that Nicholas Winton was born Nicholas Wertheimer, and was baptized and raised Christian on the decision of his parents, assimilated German Jews.