Category Archives: Jewish Thought

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

Leaf Bag Lesson

An aroma all but absent these days but deeply evocative of childhood to many of us who grew up before pollution laws is the bouquet of burning leaves. Back in the day, we would rake the dry debris of autumn into a pile or put it into a metal trash can (remember those?) and set the leaves aflame. The resultant smoke, at least at somewhat of a distance, was a seasonal perfume, an olfactory hint that the snow days weren’t far off.

Today we put what we’ve raked into very large double-reinforced paper “lawn bags” and leave them for the recycling pickup. (I don’t imagine they put the leaves back on trees, but surely something worthwhile is done with them.)

A few weeks ago, while I was doing the final leaf-raking of the year, the lawn bag I was filling provided me some timely spiritual direction.

I needed the chizuk, and for a reason not unrelated to how distant a memory the scent of burning leaves is, to how many years have elapsed since it would regularly waft through the autumn air.

Having several months ago passed the 60-year life-mark (the “new 40,” as I prefer to imagine it), I find myself among the population I casually regarded for so much of my life as “old.” I still like to think of myself as a young adult, and am always happy when, at a simchah, I’m seated with people much younger than I. I prefer to converse about the sort of things un-old people talk about, not my contemporaries’ various aches, pains and medical conditions. (Though, of course, if anyone demonstrates the slightest interest, I am happy to share details of my own.)

One danger of passing the half-century mark and then some is the enticing thought that it’s time to “settle down” and rest on one’s laurels – or, if one doesn’t really have any laurels, to rest at least on one’s easy chair. That is to say, to imagine that the season of personal growth and development is in one’s past, and that the present and the future are limited to “maintenance,” not only of our physical health but our spiritual states as well. The baalei mussar, however, famously warn us that there’s no spiritual standing still in life, no neutral gear as we climb the hill of our personal histories. Take your figurative foot off the accelerator, they caution, and be prepared to drift downward.

A Midrash (Koheles Rabbah 1:3) speaks of the various stages of life, comparing a baby to a king and an aged person to a monkey. Every parent understands the royalty comparison – we wait on our newborns, happily but often exhaustedly, hand and foot; high chairs are thrones and the will of the little one (in most cases) must be done.

What’s with the monkey, though? Explains the Kotzker, zt”l: An ape… apes. That is to say, he imitates what he sees. Visit a zoo and engage one of the simian prisoners. Slowly raise your hand; as likely as not, he’ll do the same. Lift your leg; he’ll follow suit.

When people grow old, explains the Kotzker, they all too often come to just imitate… themselves, or, better, their younger versions. They just keep on keeping on, with their lives mere mirror reflections of their earlier days. They daven the same, they study Torah the same, they observe Shabbos and Yomtov the same, they interact with others the same way.

Whereas once, in youth, striving for higher levels of sensitivity to tefillah, Torah, Shabbos, Yomtov and interpersonal relations was a given. As we grow older, unfortunately, it is all too often a forgotten. Yet, we do well to recognize that “ohd yenuvun biseivah” isn’t just a brachah; it’s a mandate.

It’s not easy to maintain growth after a few decades of adult life. Like objects moving closer to the speed of light, where the faster they go, the more energy they need to increase speed, it takes greater effort as we age to avoid complacency, to not become lazy about life.

Such thoughts were bouncing around in the back of my head as I raked the leaves. And then I noticed the apparent motto of the “home-improvement center” where I had purchased my lawn bags, inscribed in large letters on the side of the bag. It seemed to be speaking to me; halevai I should take it to heart.

It read: “Never Stop Improving.”

Candles and Candor

A non-Orthodox writer recently reached out to ask if I would participate in a panel discussion about Chanukah. The other panelists would be non-Orthodox clergy

While I cherish every opportunity to interact with Jews who live different lives from my own, I had to decline the invitation, as I have had to do on other similar occasions. I explained that my policy with regard to such kind and appreciated invitations is a sort of passive “civil-disobedience” statement of principle, “intended as an alternative to shouting from the rooftops that we don’t accept any model of ‘multiple Judaisms.’ So, instead, [I] opt to not do anything that might send a subtle or subliminal message to the contrary.”

“Sorry,” I added, “Really. But I do deeply appreciate your reaching out on this.”

The extender of the invitation, Abby Pogrebin, was a guest in the Shafran sukkah this past Chol Hamoed. Both my wife and I were impressed with both her good will and her desire to learn more about traditional Jewish life and beliefs. In fact, she is currently writing a series of articles for the secular Jewish paper the Forward on her experiences observing (in both the word’s senses) all the Jewish holidays and fast days over the course of a year.

Ms. Pogrebin recently produced her Chanukah-themed entry in the series and, with remarkable candor, reported that her research has led her to the understanding that Chanukah is really about the victory of Jews faithful to the Jewish religious heritage over those who were willing to jettison it.

“I know it’s too simplistic to say the Maccabees stand in for the observant, and the rest of us for the Hellenized,” she writes. “But implicit in so many rabbinic Hanukkah teachings is that we’re in danger of losing our compass, losing our difference – abandoning the text and traditions that make us Jews.”

Then she continues in a personal vein: “And that sense of alarm makes me look harder at where I fall on the spectrum before Hanukkah begins this year.”

Ms. Pogrebin goes on to quote Jewish writer Arthur Kurzweil as maintaining that Chanukah “is about Jewish intolerance in the best sense of the word” – that is to say, intolerance of assimilation to the larger culture.

He adds an analogy: “Baseball has four bases. You can invent a game with five bases; maybe it’s even a better game. But it’s not baseball.” Judaism, he explains, “is not whatever you want it to be.”

She goes on to note that it was hard for her “not to see the echoes of Maccabee-Hellenist tension this very month,” citing her failure to enlist traditionally Orthodox participants in a panel discussion she was moderating, the one to which she invited me. Having requested, and received, my permission to do so, she then quoted my response to her invitation.

Of course she finds reassuring voices, like that of Conservative rabbi Rachel Ain, who tells her “I wear tefillin every morning. They’re black and what all the men wear. I find it so powerful. I also wear a kippah, but it’s a beaded kippah and I have a tallit that was made for me – it’s green and purple and blue – and it’s very feminine and very halachic… Hellenizing? I say it’s innovating.”

But Ms. Pogrebin is a tenacious reporter, and cannot ignore the other, more Jewishly grounded, testimonies she received.

And it personally pains her. In words like Mr. Kurzweil’s and mine, she hears an echo of “countless voices in the observant world who would likely dismiss my level of Judaism as perilously assimilated.” And she is, understandably, distressed by that thought.

“Hanukkah,” she realizes, “celebrates those who refused to blend in.”

“Where,” therefore, she wonders, “does that leave those of us who, to one degree or another, already have?”

To my lights, Ms. Pogrebin is too hard on herself. She’s no Hellenist. She may be entangled with the larger culture in which she lives – so are, to one or another degree, all too many observant Jews. But she doesn’t reject the Jewish religious tradition, as did the Hellenists of old. In fact, she has embarked on a quest to better understand our mesorah, and seems rightly suspicious of the blandishments of those who proffer “innovations” to Jewish religious praxis.

Observance, to be sure, is central to Yiddishkeit. But a heartfelt undertaking by someone who wasn’t raised to be Torah-observant to learn more about observance, is hardly the enterprise of a Hellenist. It’s the hallmark, I’d say, of a Jew.

Unknown Unknowns

Should you ever find yourself in an ornate, high-ceilinged room with a military-uniformed classical string ensemble segueing from a flawless rendition of a Bach concerto to an equally impressive (if less inspiring) version of “I Have a Little Dreidel,” it can only mean one thing: you’re at a White House Chanukah party.

I know, because during the George W. Bush administration, on behalf of Agudath Israel, I attended several of the yearly gatherings, which brought together assorted Jewish personalities, politicians and organizational representatives. One of the times when my wife didn’t accompany me, a major supporter of Agudath Israel was my guest.

I discovered then (aside from the fact that nothing compares to home-made potato latkes) that Mr. Bush is a mentch.

As we stood in the long line for the ritual photo-op with the president and first lady, my guest asked me if I minded if he alone stood next to the first couple for the photo. Having already garnered the souvenir before (along with a presidential seal paper hand-towel from the White House restroom, now hanging on our own bathroom wall), I didn’t. And so, when it was our turn, I stepped back to allow my guest to pose unaccompanied with the First Couple. Mr. Bush motioned to me with a broad smile to join the photo. I explained that I wanted my guest alone to be in the picture.

The president allowed the photographer to snap the photo but then, breaking assembly line photo op etiquette, insisted that a second photo be taken with me in it. “Why shouldn’t you get a turn?” Mr. Bush asked. I was a little embarrassed but, of course, heeded the Commander in Chief’s order.

Mr. Bush’s mentchlichkeit has been on more public display many times, most recently, during a Fox News interview. The interviewer reminded Mr. Bush of his 2007 warning that withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq could be disastrous, and asked if he had criticism of President Obama for doing precisely that two years later.

“I’m not going to second-guess our president,” Mr. Bush said. “I understand how tough the job is. And to have a former president, you know, bloviating and second-guessing is, I don’t think, good for the presidency or the country.”

Mr. Bush wasn’t just being perfunctorily polite. Having “been there,” he knows that there are factors that go into a presidential decision to which the citizenry is blissfully oblivious – and that, in the end good outcomes can only be hoped for, not prophesied.

A decision Mr. Bush made during his tenure was to authorize the secret creation of the Stuxnet computer virus, designed to infect and wreak havoc on Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities. When Mr. Bush left office, President Obama accelerated the clandestine program, ordering increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems at the Natanz plant.

In 2010, the plant was hit by a new version of the worm, widely regarded as having been designed by American and Israel cyber experts working together, and then another one after that. Nearly 1,000 Iranian uranium-purifying centrifuges were disabled. The virus continued to hamper other Iranian facilities through the end of 2012

During that same period, many media were brimming with indignation over Mr. Obama’s not having yet visited Israel as president; trumpeting charges that cooperation between Israel and the U.S. was at its lowest point in decades; bubbling with outrage over Mr. Obama’s opposition to Israeli construction in the West Bank; and castigating the president for mentioning Israel’s 1967 borders as a starting point (“with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established…”) for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

And yet, behind the scenes, unknown and unsuspected by all the righteously irate, Mr. Obama was pursuing a joint program with Israel to undermine the Iranian threat to her security.

Ex-President Bush is both wise enough and modest enough to know that even those who once sat in the Oval Office are not privy to all that’s happening at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Kal v’chomer, the rest of us.

Predictably, though, in anticipation of news about a nuclear development deal with Iran, or of an extension of negotiations (this is being written before the deal-deadline), the usual suspects are cleaning their BB guns, ready to take their potshots at the president. But the wiser among us do well to remind ourselves that we don’t know all there is to know, to not “bloviate and second-guess” the current president. We could learn a little wisdom and humility from the forty-third.

Only One Path to One Jewish People

In Haaretz, Reform Rabbi Eric H, Yoffie, past president of the Union for Reform Judaism, conceded the main point of a recent piece I wrote for that paper – that there cannot be an American-style church-state divide in Israel. He takes issue, though, with my claim, which he labels “outrageous,” that the haredi community seeks only to preserve the religious status quo ante established at the founding of the Jewish state. Much has changed, he argues, demographically since then.

I did not, however, assert that demographics haven’t changed, a self-evident falsehood. The status quo ante I cited is the legal/social agreement reached between David Ben-Gurion and the haredi community (Agudath Israel at its head) shortly before the state’s birth (along with other norms put in place shortly thereafter).

Yes, as Rabbi Yoffie points out, Ben-Gurion probably couldn’t know that the haredi community would grow to the point where it represents a sizable portion of the Israeli populace; and Israel’s first Prime Minister indeed likely hoped for a Hertzlian “Jewish culture rooted in atheism, socialism, and Biblical teachings.” And yes, that didn’t happen. (Whether Ben-Gurion’s spirit presently is perturbed or pleased by the current state of affairs is unknown.) But the fact remains that all the clashes between “progressive” forces in Israel and the state’s haredi community have seen the former agitating for change, and the latter trying to maintain the balance struck at Israel’s birth.

Rabbi Yoffie is welcome to assert that changed demographics argue for a change in the status quo ante. But he must admit that abandoning the modus vivendi of decades is what he, not the haredi community, wants to effect.

Intriguingly, Rabbi Yoffie himself explains that there has always been an assumption “that the nature of Israel’s Jewish character would evolve over time.” Well, yes. Israel’s populace and hence religious identity have become more haredi. What seems to bother the rabbi is that the particulars of the evolution have yielded a different result from the one he would have wished for.

Yet – and this was precisely my point – despite the great growth of the haredi community, it has not sought to in any way change the agreed-upon understandings that, for instance, full-time Torah-students be deferred from military service, that public prayers at the Western Wall be conducted according to long-standing Jewish tradition (a norm established, of course, in 1967, not 1948) and that a halacha-respecting official rabbinate determine issues of Jewish personal status.

Those things, according to Rabbi Yoffie, constitute a religious “coercive… religious monopoly.” Unlike England, he explains, where “legal recognition” is assured not only for the Church of England but for “other religious faiths,” in Israel, Reform and Conservative conversions and marriages are not recognized by the state Rabbinate.

What Rabbi Yoffie overlooks is that, as Ben-Gurion himself said in 1947, a multitude of “Judaisms” in a state that aspires to be a Jewish one is a recipe for disaster. Were there several standards for, say, conversion, then what would emerge in short order would be several “Jewish peoples” in the land.

Israel, too, of course, offers “legal recognition” to “other religious faiths.” Presumably, though, the Reform movement isn’t interested in registering as a new religion. If, however, there is to be only one Jewish people in Israel, there needs to be only one Jewish standard there. And, to be meaningful, it must be the “highest common denominator” whose decisions can be (if begrudgingly to some) accepted by all Jews

Ben-Gurion realized that fact, and it is recognized today, too, not only by Israel’s haredi and national religious communities but by the large number of “traditional” Jewish Israelis, who, while not strictly observant, understand and accept that halacha defines Judaism.

“Follow the path of Herzl,” admonishes Rabbi Yoffie. What alone can preserve the unity of the Jewish people in Israel, though, is the path of Moses.

When I Drifted Off the Path

A piece I wrote for the Forward about my short-lived disillusionment with Judaism when I was 12 years old can be read at:

http://forward.com/articles/209618/when-i-drifted-off-the-path/

Sefer Torah Abuse

We rend our garments if a sefer Torah is, chalilah, desecrated. If one should fall to the ground, it is customary for those present to undertake to fast that day. I don’t know what the proper reaction is to seeing a sefer Torah employed as a prop in the service of a social cause, but a recent such exploitation made my heart hurt.

The exploiters, for their part, were jubilant. Members of the feminist group “Women of the Wall,” they had obtained a sefer Torah small enough to smuggle into the Kosel Maaravi plaza, where they proceeded to hold a “bat-mitzvah” ceremony, complete with a woman reading from the Torah and the 12-year-old reciting birchas haTorah.

“Today we made history for women @ Kotel,” the group announced on social media. “We must recreate this victory each month with great opposition.”

The latter phrase may have been incoherent, but the sentiment was clear. By flouting the Jewish mesorah (and current Kosel regulations) and by evading the Israeli police, the intrepid women had, at least in their own minds, scored points for their team.

For more than three decades, the Kotel has been a place – perhaps the only one in the world – where Jews of all affiliations and persuasions have regularly prayed side by side. What has allowed for that minor miracle has been the maintenance of a standard at the holy site that all Jews can abide.

Last year, to maintain that uniqueness, Women of the Wall was assigned an area in front of part of the Kosel, Robinson’s Arch (or Ezras Yisrael), for their “non-traditional” services. But the feminist group’s leader, Anat Hoffman, blithely dismissed that equally holy area as a “sunbathing deck.” With its recent incursion into the main Kosel plaza, the group has made it clear that it has no interest in avoiding offense, but rather, on the contrary, is committed to being “in the face” of the vast majority of regular visitors to the Kosel for tefillah, whom it views as the enemy.

Part of the recent verbal victory dance was performed by Women of the Wall’s Executive Director, Lesley Sachs, who seized upon the fact that the small scroll, which she said was 200 years old, had likely been written to avoid its seizure by enemies of Jews. “This time,” she explained, it was used to avoid “Jews imposing restrictions on Jews.” That would be the Rav of the Kosel, Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz, and those who, like him, wish for the standards of Jewish tradition to mediate public services at the Kosel.

It wasn’t only the sefer Torah that was conscripted for the cause. So was the bat-mitzvah girl.

The daughter of an immigrant from Russia, she was one of four whose images appeared in recent bus ads in Yerushalayim that were part of Women of the Wall’s campaign to hold such ceremonies at the Kosel. The Hebrew text of one, featuring a young girl in a tallis and holding a Torah, read: “Mom, I too want a bat mitzvah at the Kotel.”

After the celebration, the honoree shared that, amid the merriment, she had become “very emotional” at the Torah-reading, and “just had a lot of fun.” As, from all appearances, did her minders.

Predictably, the mainstream media were full of praise for the successful subterfuge, and the cause in which it was committed. Among the effervescent expressions was a piece by Lexi Erdheim, a rabbinic student at a Reform institution and a “Women of the Wall Intern.”

Ms. Erdheim wrote that she “could only imagine” the “overwhelming sense of pride and accomplishment” felt by those who had been fighting for years to obtain “women’s right to free prayer at the Kotel,” and who were finally able to “witness a young girl chant from a sefer torah.”

But she injected a note of reservation, too, since, “despite this momentous occasion, the battle is not over.” Still and all, she wrote, she was, “reminded of a quote from Pirkei Avot: ‘You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it’.”

Another mishnah in Pirkei Avos, though, is more fitting for the occasion of a sefer Torah employed as a PR prop. It was cited well before Ms. Erdheim’s piece appeared, by Leah Aharoni, a co-founder of the mesorah-respecting group “Women For the Wall”: “Rabbi Tzaddok would say… ‘Do not make the Torah a crown to magnify yourself with, or a spade with which to dig’.”

Moral Climate Change

My pre-Sukkos column about the furious, quasi-religious zeal of some environmental alarmists apparently generated some… well, furious, quasi-religious zeal.

In an editorial, the New Jersey Jewish Standard’s managing editor mocked my contention that the Creator is ultimately in charge of the universe He created; and the editor of the New Jersey Jewish News invoked the celebrated atheist Richard Dawkins to berate me for my skepticism about scientific predictions. (What’s with Jersey? Has climate change done a number on its journalists’ equanimity?)

In my column, just to recall, I described my unease with the rage I heard at a large climate change rally, noted that the climate has changed in the past and, yes, contended that, in the end, the Creator is in charge, and our own charge is, above all, to heed His Torah.

I did not, though, call into question the reality of climate change, or in any way disparage measures aimed at trying to curb it. I readily stated that “we do well to explore alternate energy sources and pollute less.” But my sin, alas, was too great to bear.

In addition to the two papers’ public proclamations of my heresy, several Jewish individuals wrote me privately. One cited a Midrash in Koheles Rabba (7:13), to buttress his faith in the threat global warming poses to the world and in our mandate to address it. The source, I discovered, is invoked by a host of Jewish environmentalist groups, and reads:

“When HaKodosh Boruch Hu created Adam Harishon, he took him and showed him all the trees of Gan Eden. And He said to him ‘Look at My works, how beautiful and praiseworthy they are. All that I created I created for you. Be consciously careful not to act destructively and destroy My world. Because if you do act destructively, there is no one to set things straight after you’.”

The Midrash is held aloft by those groups as a paean to “Tikkun Olam,” as their members like to characterize social or environmental activism. Hashem, in other words, is commanding Adam to do no harm to the earth – and his descendants, presumably, to oppose strip-mining, fracking and the Keystone XL pipeline.

One website trumpeting the Midrash includes “Suggested Discussion Questions” like: “What does this text teach us about the earth?” “What is our responsibility to the environment?” “What is G-d’s responsibility to the environment?”

The Midrash, however, is in reality not concerned with any such real or imagined insults to the earth. The destruction of the world that Hashem is charging Adam to avoid is that which can result from his sins – the clear meaning of the phrase “act destructively,” as the Midrash’s continuation makes clear. It is famously invoked by the Ramchal to that precise effect in the first perek of Mesillas Yesharim.

Destroying resources for no good reason is forbidden by the Torah. But there are elements of the ultra-environmentalist agenda that go far beyond avoiding unnecessary wastage. And the attempt to put a “classical Jewish” veneer on the entire enterprise of “green politics” by misappropriating Torah texts to support the belief that human beings are physically destroying the world Hashem has created for us is deeply objectionable.

Judaism is a faith system. To some, so is environmentalism. But they are not the same faith.

Yes, I believe that the climate is changing. I believe, too, that there will be negative effects of the same (although likely some positive ones too). I believe that it’s plausible, if not certain, that human activity contributes to global warming, and plausible as well, though far from certain, that human beings can arrest or reverse the changing climate.

But I do believe – and this belief is b’emunah shleimah – that, pace Dawkins and company, Hashem is in charge. And that, in the end, humanity’s moral and ethical actions, not its climate conferences and multi-national treaties, fine efforts though they may be, will ultimately determine our fate.

That is, as it happens, a rather timely thought, considering that just this past Shabbos, Jews the world over heard a public reading about a cataclysmic climate change. It happened in Noach’s time. And it was caused, of course, not by strip-mining but by sin, something no stranger to our own day.

How deeply ironic that a fundamental Jewish truth – that human beings affect the world most powerfully by their moral and ethical climates, their mitzvos and, challilah, their aveiros – is utter anathema to some periodicals that proudly include the word “Jewish” in their names.