Category Archives: Jewish Thought

Unpublished Heroes

I think it’s time I came clean regarding my doubts about Judaism, about everything I was taught by my parents and rabbaim in yeshiva. How can we be sure that the Torah was really given to my ancestors at Sinai? Are its laws really eternal? Is halacha really G-d’s will? Are Jews in fact a special people? And are Orthodox Jews true examples of what a Jew should be?

I came across some very compelling literature that called traditional Jewish beliefs into question, and was disturbed by what I had read, and so I read more, and did a good amount of serious thinking and research.

As to Orthodox Jews themselves, yes, most seem to be fine people, but there have also always been “characters” – people with strange fixations or behavior patterns. And then there are Jews proven or rumored to be… not so nice.

The thought that the “outside” world might provide a more rarified and thoughtful community was an enticing one. And so I began to entertain doubts about Jewish beliefs, my religious identity and my community.

I was 14.

To my relief now, many decades later, there was no Internet then to intensify my confusion, and no examples of people who had abandoned Jewish beliefs and observance and written best-sellers about the fact. I had no opportunity at the time to capitalize on my doubts and gripes with a memoir that would garner me the media spotlight, interviews and royalties. Though I had what to tell, like how my second grade rebbe would rap my fingers hard with a ruler when I misbehaved. I would have had to have been truthful and admit that he didn’t do it in anger, and that I felt he loved me dearly throughout. But I could have racked that up to Stockholm Syndrome.

Lacking the commercial incentives, though, allowed me to take my time, do some critical thinking and research, and give Judaism a chance. I engaged my doubts with information, and was blessed to have parents who gave me space, who didn’t try to overly control my reading, dress or activities; and with rabbaim who didn’t consider any question off-limits.

And so I found answers to all the questions I had. As a result, even though I was raised in an Orthodox home, I consider myself “Orthodox-by-choice,” someone who made a conscious decision to accept the Torah, and the mission it bequeaths all Jews.

What reminds me of my intellectually tumultuous days is the spate of “I Escaped Orthodoxy and Lived!” memoirs that have appeared in recent years, practically a cottage industry. The autobiographies are celebrated and hyped for their anger and outrage, and an “enlightened” world considers their authors to be heroes.

Please don’t misunderstand. I don’t mean to disparage the true experiences of others, or to discount the special challenges some may have faced, especially in very insular and rigid communities. But there is much that is deeply suspect in some of the literary accounts. In one case, a writer was revealed to have entirely fabricated a terrible crime, a murder-mutilation of which there is no police record. Needless to say, that employment of creativity calls the rest of the writer’s impossible-to-confirm personal experiences into some doubt.

More recently, another writer has been making the rounds and has not only contradicted herself about a formative period in her life but admitted to having been mentally unstable and self-destructive since childhood. Her intelligence and eloquence at present is obvious. But her description of her far-from-New York, non-chassidic community is at wild odds with reality. Whether her personal memories are real or delusional thus remains unclear. Her publisher and the media, of course, don’t seem to care much either way.

Although I can rightly wax suspicious about some of the assertions in some of these ostensibly true stories, I have no right to deem their writers intentional fabulists. Perhaps their once-Orthodox environments, or some other life-experience, so damaged them that they became confused as a result. Or perhaps they suffer from some congenital emotional problem beyond their control.

But what I can do is reflect on the fact that adolescence brings all sorts of psychological and intellectual challenges, including to Orthodox adolescents. And recognize that a particularly powerful challenge is presented to young people these days by the Internet and social media, which provide easy misinformation, precarious camaraderie and false solace; and by publishers anxious to sell books – the more outlandish and prurient, the better.

Of little interest to blogs or editors, tellingly, are the vast numbers of intelligent, sensitive Orthodox youth, including many in the most insular communities, who stand up to the special, myriad challenges of our time as they forge their personal paths through life.

Those young Orthodox Jews are the true, if unpublished, heroes, for ignoring the contemporary, technology-empowered sirens of cynicism. They are heroes for having the courage to pursue resolutions for any doubts or confusion they may harbor, for realizing that there is balm for the wounds they may have suffered, and fulfillment in the religious heritage bequeathed them by their parents, and their parents before them.

Tempest in a Tefillin-Bag?

Of the slew of recent articles celebrating the idea of girls wearing tefillin two were particularly notable. One, because of how revealing it is of its author’s attitude toward halacha; the second, because it holds the seeds of a worthy lesson.

In Haaretz, feminist Elana Sztokman (upcoming book: “The War on Women in Israel”) asserted that “the crude, sexist responses within Orthodoxy to girls wearing tefillin” only “reflect men’s fears and prejudices.” And that her brand of “religious feminism is not about… women who are angry or provocative.”

She dismisses those who have noted that the Shulchan Aruch (technically, the Rama) criticizes women’s wearing of tefillin as just “try[ing] to make their objections rooted in halakha,” and she cites in her favor the halachic authority of the founder of a school described elsewhere as representing the “co-ed, egalitarian ethos of liberal Conservative Judaism.” That authority, Ms. Sztokman announces, has “unravel[led] the halakhic myths… about women and tefillin.”

What’s more, she continues, fealty to the halachic sources about the issue only shows how “some men think about women’s bodies and their roles in society” and “how deeply rooted misogynistic perceptions are in Orthodox life.”

And to think that some people call feminists strident.

The second article of note was by Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, the spiritual leader of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun on the Upper East Side of Manhattan (where he has permitted a woman to wear tallis and tefillin at services). Admirably and responsibly, he cites the halachic sources that oppose the practice, concedes that it isn’t “normative practice in Halachik Judaism” for women to wear tefillin, and even states that he doesn’t “want to encourage women” to do so.

He tries, though, to parse one of them, the Aruch Hashulchan, in order to make a case that the prohibition should no longer apply “in our day, when the expectations for women in general are basically the same as the expectations of men.”

I don’t think that Rabbi Lookstein, although he is greatly respected by many as a communal leader and educator, considers himself a recognized decisor of Jewish law. And so, I imagine that he would not criticize those of us who look to such decisors for rulings, and certainly would not rail against us for being “sexist” or “misogynistic.” His discomfort, moreover, with encouraging women to adopt the practice of wearing tefillin may even reflect a suspicion that, while the immediate motivations of individuals may be entirely sublime, some who are vocally pushing the practice may be more interested in prostrating themselves before an “egalitarian ethos” than in serving G-d.

En passant, though, Rabbi Lookstein raises a point that every observant Orthodox Jew would do well to consider.

The Aruch Hashulchan, he notes, writes that it is clear that only men are commanded to wear tefillin. Thus, men have no choice but to make the effort to achieve the state of physical and mental purity tefillin require – at least for a short while each day, during morning prayers. It is a risk, but the commandment makes it a necessary one. Women, however, who are not commanded to wear tefillin, do not have to undertake the choice; so why should they put themselves in the position of possibly, even inadvertently, disrespecting tefillin?

Seizing on that argument, Rabbi Lookstein asserts that since today “nobody really does it the right way… why are women any different from men in this respect? Just look at all the men who are consulting their… phones, or reading, during parts of the davening, while wearing tefillin…”

The validity of Rabbi Lookstein’s halachic suggestion regarding women wearing tefillin is, of course, highly arguable. That some people don’t properly execute a difficult but assigned personal responsibility cannot be an argument for others to unnecessarily undertake the responsibility and its challenges themselves.

But Rabbi Lookstein’s observation nevertheless holds great worth for all of us who hew to halacha, who disapprove of women laying tefillin and oppose acceptance of the same by Jewish schools.

Because we must wonder why this issue has suddenly been thrust upon us, begetting rants like Ms. Sztokman’s. We can’t just dismiss the controversy as a mere tempest in a tefillin–zekel. It has unleashed anger and hatred against halacha-committed Jews. We are taught by the Torah to examine unfortunate events for some message, some fodder for self-improvement. What might we have done to merit the introduction of yet another tool for divisiveness among Jews?

Rabbi Lookstein may have unintentionally supplied us with the answer.

There are certainly shuls where tefillin are entirely respected, where men don’t joke around or discuss business or politics or check their phones or daydream during services.

But then, sad to say, there are all too many… others too. Might what goes on in them be what is nourishing the new ill will?

Unravelling Tefillin-gate

(This article appeared in Haaretz.)

Unlike some in the traditional Orthodox community, I empathize with the young women in two modern Orthodox high schools in New York who asked for and received permission to don tefillin during their school prayer services. They have, after all, seen their mothers wearing the religious objects and simply wish to emulate their parents’ Jewish religious practice. Carrying on the traditions of parents is the essence of mesorah, the “handed-down” legacy of the Jewish past.

None of us has the right to assume that these girls aren’t motivated by a deeply Jewish desire to worship as they have seen their mothers worship. Even as to the mothers’ motivations, I can’t know whether their intention is pure or homage to the contemporary and un-Jewish idea that “men and women have interchangeable roles.” Most of our acts, wrote the powerful thinker Rabbi Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler, are mixtures of motivations. And so I don’t arrogate to judge either the mothers or their daughters.

The question, though, of whether halacha considers it proper for women to wear tefillin, despite the much smoke and many mirrors conjured in myriad quarters over recent weeks, is pretty clear, at least looked at objectively, without a predetermined “result” in mind. It does not.

The essence of halacha is that discussions and disagreements among different authorities distill over time into codified and universally accepted decisions. The urtext of halacha in the modern era (using the term loosely) is Rabbi Yosef Karo’s Shulchan Aruch, along with its appendage “the Mapa,” in which Rabbi Moshe Isserles added glosses, sometimes but not always to reflect normative Ashkenazic law.

Rabbi Isserles states clearly that women should not wear tefillin. The Vilna Gaon prohibits it categorically. The “bottom line” commentaries on that part of the Shulchan Aruch, the Mishneh Berurah (written by the “Chofetz Chaim”) and the Aruch HaShulchan, both concur. And that is why Jewish women have forgone wearing tefillin until (for some) recent years.

That the daughter of King Saul famously wore tefillin is indeed a fact, but the exception only proves the rule: other women in her time and thereafter (and there were great and righteous ones in every generation) did not wear tefillin. The same applies to the practice of the “Maiden of Ludmir,” an exceptional figure in the Chassidic world. There is no evidence whatsoever to support the assertion that Rashi’s daughters wore tefillin; it is a legend that appears only in modern times. And, despite all the conceptual contortions of late, no Orthodox halachic authority of repute has ever permitted women to wear tefillin. “Retrofitting” halacha, going back to “earlier sources” to change established practices, was the hallmark of the early Conservative movement; it has no place in the Orthodox sphere.

More important, though, there is a Torah prohibition (lo titgodedu) against a part of a Jewish congregation adopting even a permitted Jewish practice if it is not the normative practice of the congregation. And a rabbinic prohibition (mechzi ki’yuhara) against adopting even acceptable practices if doing so will make the practitioners seem to be holding themselves “higher” than others.

That latter idea, it seems to me, speaks particularlyloudly here, even aside from the technical halachic concern. What message does the public tefillin-laying of some young women in the school send to the others? That they are somehow deficient or less holy, or less concerned with connecting with the Divine? What a terrible thing to imagine, what misguided pedagogy.

I once served as the principal of a high school where some students hailed from “modern Orthodox” or non-Orthodox backgrounds. I never interfered in the practices of those students and their families in their homes and synagogues, even when they may have diverged from normative halacha. But when it came to in-school affairs, normative halacha was the standard.

Were I the principal of a school for young women and some of them wished to don tefillin, I would not deride them for their desire, nor judge them in any way. But I would insist on normative halachic standards in school, and ask the girls to don their tefillin at home. I am told that such was indeed the policy of the schools at issue until now. Why it was changed is not clear to me.

What I would wish for my students, and indeed wish now for the young women at the two schools at issue, is that they intensify their commitment to mesorah, and maintain their determination to be closer to G-d. And thereby come to gain sufficient knowledge and objectivity to examine many things, including their tefillin-donning.

And come to wonder why, even if their mothers adopted the practice, their grandmothers, and their grandmothers and their grandmothers – heartfelt, intelligent and deeply religious women – did not.

© Haaretz

(This article is available for purchase for publication only from Haaretz.)

Wealth Management 101

A fantastic recent essay in the New York Times brought to mind a fantastic Talmudic narrative. The latter [in Tamid 32b] describes the would-be world-conqueror Alexander the Great approaching the gates of the Garden of Eden. When denied entry (insufficient righteousness the grounds), he asks for, at least, a souvenir and is given an eyeball (or, perhaps, a skull’s eye-socket).

Seeking to somehow gauge the odd gift, he places it on one pan of a scale, with gold and silver in the other pan. The precious metal pan rises. And it continues to do so, no matter how much gold and silver he adds. Asking the rabbis accompanying him what is happening, they explain that the eye represents the impetus for human desire; it is that which sees and wants, and is never satisfied. He is skeptical but the rabbis then prove their point by placing some dirt, a reminder of the reality of mortality, atop the eye. Its pan then rises high, outweighed by, unconcerned with, oblivious to, all the precious metal.

All of us have likely desired to possess something we don’t. But I have always been confounded by the spectacle of very wealthy people consumed with the relentless pursuit of greater wealth. It just wasn’t anything I could relate to, or understand. And so the opening words of the New York Times piece grabbed me and wouldn’t let me go.

“In my last year on Wall Street,” the author, Sam Polk, writes, “my bonus was $3.6 million – and I was angry because it wasn’t big enough. I was 30 years old, had no children to raise, no debts to pay, no philanthropic goal in mind. I wanted more money for exactly the same reason an alcoholic needs another drink: I was addicted.”

To wealth, that is, and the power he saw it as conferring.

Mr. Polk goes on to recount subsequent years in his life, how he became a “bond and credit default swap trader,” a job description he might as well have offered in Swahili for all it means to me – “one of the more lucrative roles in the business.” And how making a million or two wasn’t enough.

“Ever see what a drug addict is like when he’s used up his junk?” Mr. Polk asks his readers, and tells them: “He’ll do anything – walk 20 miles in the snow, rob a grandma – to get a fix. Wall Street was like that.”

“When the guy next to you makes $10 million,” he explains, “$1 million or $2 million doesn’t look so sweet.” Frankly, I wouldn’t know, but I do trust Mr. Polk. And the Midrash, which informs us that “He who has one hundred wants two hundred” and that “no man dies with half his desires in hand.”

The eye-opening article helped me understand that greed isn’t necessarily a sign of depravity. It can be a type of simple irrationality, what Mr. Polk calls an “addiction.”

Or what the Talmud calls “ta’avos” – irrational lusts – things even those of us unfamiliar with heroin or cocaine can relate to. For smokers or alcoholics, the concept is an easy one to understand. But even if our daily desires are limited to junk food or other things that we know are unhealthy for our bodies or our souls, and that we struggle to control, the idea of a ta’avah is certainly recognizable. If we’re not obsessed with wealth, well, that’s just because, blessedly, we fortunately lack that particular lust. But we might try to be a bit more understanding of those who do suffer such obsessions, no less than we pity an alcoholic.

Eventually, though, Mr. Polk “cashed out,” so to speak. His turning point came when he realized that his immensely more wealthy boss was “afraid of losing money, despite all that he had.”

To his credit, he found a new life, marrying, speaking in jails and juvenile detention centers about the benefits of sobriety, teaching and starting a nonprofit to help poor families struggling with obesity and food addiction. “I am,” he confides, “much happier.”

He seems to have discovered something else the Talmud teaches, that our worth is measured by how we live, not by what we have. And proven himself a “strong” man, as per the sage Ben Zoma’s teaching that “Who is strong? He who subdues his inclination.”

And as having absorbed another of Ben Zoma’s teachings, too: “Who is wealthy? He who is happy with his lot.”

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

Letter to the Editor of the NY Jewish Week

Below is the text of a self-explanatory letter to the editor of the New York Jewish Week; it is published in this week’s issue of that paper.

December 21, 2013

Editor:

Rori Picker Neiss (op-ed, December 15) is “shocked” at my response to your reporter, who asked me for the rationale of esteemed rabbinical authorities’ opposition to pre-nuptial agreements focused on a future divorce. I explained that “there is a concern that introducing and focusing on the possible dissolution of a marriage when it is just beginning is not conducive to the health of the marriage.”

Ms. Picker Neiss contends that such focus is already introduced, in the traditional ketubah. I don’t know what version of the ketubah she is citing but the time-honored, halachically mandated one contains no mention whatsoever of divorce.

The pledge of support that the ketubah references remains in place in a case of divorce, or of the husband’s death. But that is simply a peripheral implication of the ketubah, which simply lists the husband’s obligations to his wife.

And so to compare the ketubah to the “prenup” used by some today is comparing apples to aufrufs.

Ms. Picker Neiss is entitled to embrace the prenuptual approach if she chooses. But I would only ask her to recognize that there are others who, for entirely defensible reasons, choose otherwise.

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Director of Public Affairs

Agudath Israel of America

Musing: What Were They Thinking?

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, whose dispatches are widely reproduced both here in the United States and abroad, reported today on British Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis having become the first sitting British chief rabbi to address the annual Limmud conference, a gathering of multi-denominational and non-denominational Jewish leaders and laymen. By attending and being featured as a speaker, the JTA informs us, he was “defying the opposition of prominent haredi Orthodox rabbis in England.”

Fair enough. Those charedi leaders have a longstanding and principled opposition to Orthodox rabbis participating in “multi-denominational” panels, rosters and such, since doing so perforce promotes the notion that all “rabbis are rabbis,” equals in belief and scholarship, and that all self-defined “Judaisms” are part of the Judaism of our ancestors.

But the JTA report puts it thus:

“The critics had said the conference, which draws thousands of participants from all walks of Jewish life, represented a danger to British Jewry by suggesting it was acceptable for observant Jews to associate with less or non-observant Jews.”

How a Jewish news agency can think for even a moment that charedi Jews – with their innumerable and rabbinically-endorsed outreach organizations and efforts, personal friendships and study-partnerships with “less or non-observant Jews” – consider it unacceptable to associate with such Jews is beyond comprehension.

The “T” in “JTA,” here at least, would seem to stand for “tripe.”

UPDATE:

To its credit, JTA has changed the wording of its piece and notified its clients of the correction. The paragraph quoted above now reads:

The critics had said the conference, which draws thousands of participants from all walks of Jewish life, represented a danger to British Jewry because of its inclusion of non-Orthodox religious perspectives.

It’s not a perfect correction, as that would require a more lengthy explanation of the objection to Orthodox rabbis’ participation in Limmud, along the lines of my posting above. But it is a great improvement. And has moved the “T” much closer to “truthful.”

The Fact of the Matter

Several weeks ago, my wife and I had the pleasure of visiting Detroit (well, Oak Park, a suburb, and a solvent one), where two of our daughters and their husbands and their children live.

Oak Park, and Southfield, which abuts it, are home to a wonderful, vibrant and multifaceted Orthodox Jewish community. The two neighboring cities, within walking distance of each other, boast (figuratively speaking; the residents are a modest bunch) an abundance of shuls and shteiblach, a large and flourishing yeshiva and Bais Yaakov, a yeshiva gedola, a Kollel – and all the requisite kosher shopping and dining amenities to boot. And housing, to put nice icing on a scrumptious cake, is extremely affordable.

One of the cake’s delectable ingredients is a “Partners in Torah” night of study that takes place each Tuesday night at Beth Yehudah, the local yeshiva, where Jews of all stripes learn Torah for an hour with study-partners from the Orthodox community. Hundreds of pairs of men, on one side of a large room, and women on the other, delve into Jewish texts together. It’s an inspiring sight (and sound).

Our recent trip, though, didn’t include a Tuesday, so we missed that weekly event. But we were there over a Motzoei Shabbos, a Saturday night, when that same Beth Yehudah space hosts a “father-son” (and grandfather-grandson) study hour. For 45 minutes I got to study with one of my grandsons (smart as a whip, of course), while my son-in-law studied with another of his sons. Then all the boys – there were hundreds present – moved to one side of the room, where there were tables, and were treated to pizza and a raffle. This takes place, as in dozens of other cities with Orthodox populations, every Saturday night when Shabbos ends fairly early. But so large a turnout in the Detroit suburbs impressed me deeply.

On our return home, though, I was saddened. Not only because I missed our kids and their kids, but also because of an article that had appeared in the interim in the Los Angeles-based Jewish Journal.

It was titled “Open Day Schools To Non-Jewish Students,” and advocated, well, just that. Written by a Reform Rabbi, Jeffrey K. Salkin, it bemoaned the fact that non-Orthodox “Jewish day schools are… going out of business.”

The Conservative movement’s Solomon Schechter schools nationwide, the writer noted, have “lost 25 percent of their students during the last five years,” and “since 2008-2009, four Reform day schools have closed.”

The rabbi’s solution? “Let’s open Jewish day schools to non-Jewish students.” Not only products of intermarriage, he explains, but “full-blown, not-in-the-least-bit-Jewish kids.”

After all, he argues, “Jewish kids have been attending (nominally and not so nominally) Christian day schools… Perhaps it’s time for us to learn how to be hosts as well.”

“We might,” he acknowledges, “lose the automatic, unspoken expectation that our kids will meet and perhaps mate with other Jewish kids.” But it will be worth it, as Jewish schools will achieve solvency and “we get to be a light to the nations – a teaching instrument to the world.”

And then, a bit later, came the report that the Union for Reform Judaism had sold off half of its headquarters in New York, to use $1 million of the proceeds, according to the movement’s president, Reform Rabbi Rick Jacobs, to supplement major foundation grants to reshape the movement’s “youth engagement strategies.”

An admirable goal, yes; youth engagement is vital to Judaism. We are but links in a chain, and our youth are the next link.

But the chain starts at Sinai. And the links will only be as strong as their connection to that original one.

That isn’t just theory, of course, or claim; it’s a fact, blazingly evident before open eyes, here and now in the third millennium of the Common Era, more than three thousand years since the Jewish chain’s first link was forged.

It is a fact evident in the sweet cacophony of children’s voices that rang out from that large packed room I was privileged to sit in for a short time on Motzoei Shabbos, and in all the similar ones across the country.

It is evident in Southfield, Michigan’s weekly Partners in Torah study-partner session, and in countless similar one-on-one telephone partnerships.

It is evident in the explosive growth of Orthodox day schools, high schools, yeshivos and kollelim, and in the many building campaigns to add to their number.

It’s just not yet a fact that’s evident, tragically, to Rabbis Salkin and Jacobs. May they, and their followers, come soon to face it, and to ponder it well.

Too Little Information

At the Sheva Brachos festivities this past summer for the marriage of our youngest daughter, my wife and I heard many wonderful things about our newest son-in-law. Friends and relatives spoke about his impressive Torah scholarship, his modesty, his sterling character. We had already known all that, although it was good to hear all the same. One testimonial, though, particularly impressed me; it was offered by one of the new husband’s brothers-in-law, who, in a short speech, recounted a long-ago lively Shabbos table discussion at his in-laws’ home.

Each member of the family, it seems, had vociferously put forth his or her perspective on some now-forgotten topic. Except, the speaker recounted, for our new son-in-law. When asked by one of the others for his opinion on the matter, the reticent family member’s simple response was: “I don’t have enough information to have one.”

I smiled broadly inside (probably outside too). If only, I mused, more of us were so thoughtful. Instead, our times seem to foster a diametric approach, that all of us must have opinions, with or without the assistance of facts. Call it a Contemporary Commandment: Thou shalt leave no issue uncommented upon.

And so, opine we merrily do, with or without the requisite information, the clay of which cogent opinions are molded – or objectivity, the furnace that forges them.

Whether the topic is gun control, the Affordable Care Act, immigration reform, Afghanistan or the agreement with Iran, we must speak up; full knowledge, let alone comprehension, of all the pertinent details is no requirement. (Mindless animus for the current occupant of the White House is much preferred – but that’s a different essay.)

Opinions have become something like fashion accessories (“Oh, what a nice opinion you have! Where can I get one like it?”), and too often are just purloined from pundits who make us feel righteous – or fearful or angry, the strange preferences of some.

Worse still is opting for “selective information.” Few if any important political or social topics lack two sides. Listening to only one of them because it’s where one has decided beforehand he’d like to land may be enticing, but it’s irresponsible. Shutting oneself in the echo chamber of (take your pick) “conservative” or “liberal” or Democratic or Republican (or Jewish or non-Jewish) commentary is a recipe for intoxication, not enlightenment.

Please don’t misunderstand. We are entitled to have and voice opinions, to take sides. (Some of us do it professionally.) But thoughtful judgment begins with seriously considering all sides of an issue. And yet, while it’s not exactly hard these days to find very different perspectives on any topic, too many of us purposefully avoid the marketplace of ideas (or limit ourselves to one stall). “Oh, I don’t read that,” we glibly say, or “I never pay attention to him” – simply because the “that” and the “him” represent points of view at odds with the speaker’s gut feelings. What somehow gets lost is the recognition that there’s great gain in confronting a different point of view – and none at all in just having one’s uninformed feelings seconded.

A little experiment: Write down the names of the media or pundits you make a point of reading. Now, examine your list to see if they are homogeneous or represent a broad variety of attitudes or perspectives. If the former’s the case, you’re cheating yourself.

Needless to say, there are ideas from which we observant Jews rightly insulate ourselves. But political and social issues don’t usually entail heresy or licentiousness. What they do entail, and require, is complete information, true objectivity and long, hard thought.

Consider, for example, the death penalty. On the one hand, why should taxpayers be burdened with housing and feeding bad people? Executions, moreover, deter other would-be criminals, and can provide victims’ families a measure of solace.

And yet, there’s another hand. Killing a human being is a grave deed, not to be undertaken lightly. And people, at least some of them, can change. And mistaken convictions have sent innocent people to their deaths.

It’s easy to just dismiss the first set of points as callous, or the second as weak-willed. What’s hard is weighing the two sides against each other. But that’s what’s necessary, in the end, to reach an informed, intelligent opinion.

And if the weighing is inconclusive – which happens more than seldom – and leaves an informed, intelligent person ambivalent, well, then, maybe he should just acknowledge the fact.

What? And remain opinionless? Heavens!

Sometimes, though, that’s necessary. And, as our son-in-law understood – and all of us should – there’s no shame in that.

Deathless

Odd that the Torah-portion about the death of Yaakov Avinu is called “Vayechi.” After all, the word means “And he lived.” And, differently voweled, the word can mean “And he will live.” And especially odd, because Yaakov didn’t die.

At least that’s what Rabbi Yochanan (Taanis, 5b) asserts, although his listeners asked sarcastically, “Was it then for naught that the eulogizers eulogized him, the embalmers embalmed him and the gravediggers buried him?”

Unperturbed, Rabbi Yochanan responded with the prophet Yirmiyahu’s assurance, “And you, fear not, my servant Yaakov, says Hashem, and tremble not, Yisrael. For behold I am your savior from afar and [that of] your descendants from their land of captivity.” That verse, explained Rabbi Yochanan, juxtaposes Yaakov with his descendants. And so, the sage concluded, “just as those descendants are alive, so, too, must he be.”

As abstruse Talmudic passages go, this one would seem a good example. Rabbi Yochanan’s proof is as unconvincing as his contention was bewildering. And yet, the traditional word for dying (vayomos) is strangely absent from the account of Yaakov’s… whatever. Instead, an unusual and somewhat vague word (vayigva) is employed. And there are Midrashic narratives, too, that imply Yaakov’s life after life.

What is more, the concept that Jewish tradition associates with the third of our forefathers is emes, or “truth.” The Rambam (Hilchos Yesodei HaTorah 1:3-4), albeit in a different context, explains emes as meaning, essentially, “permanence”. Another indication that Yaakov, in some way, has transcended demise.

And, even with his embalming and burial, he has. For while his parents and their parents – Yitzchak and Rivka, and Avrohom and Sarah – bore children who proved unworthy of being progenitors of the Jewish people, only Yaakov and his wives merited seeing all of their offspring become forbears of the nation.

And so, in a very real way, Yaakov didn’t die; he metamorphosed into Yisrael, into the Jewish people. Which, when one thinks about it, may be precisely what Rabbi Yochanan was saying. His proof of Yaakov’s eternalness, after all, lies in a comparison between the man and his progeny. Perhaps it is more than a comparison. Yaakov becomes the Jewish people; he is Klal Yisrael, and that is why he is deathless.

That Yaakov would sire the first exclusively Jewish family was heralded in his famous dream, of which we read several weeks ago. There too, as in Yirmiyahu, Yaakov is juxtaposed with his descendants. “To you shall I give [the Holy Land], and to your children.” And: “All the families of the earth will be blessed through you, and through your children.”

Sometimes a thought can only be thought, or an observation observed, after a certain point in history. A possible example has to do with the realization of the import of Yaakov becoming Yisrael – and the dream he dreamt after he left Be’er Sheva and set out on his journey to Charan.

Because the dream-image that accompanied that Divine message about his future was a connection between heaven and earth in the form of a sulam, or “ladder.”

“Sulam” occurs only this once in the Torah, and its etymology is unclear. But an Arabic cognate of the word refers to steps ascending a mountain. The easiest way to ascend a mountain is a spiral path. That fact, and the possibly related Aramaic word “mesalsel” – to twist into curls – might lead one to imagine Yaakov’s “ladder” as something more akin to a spiral staircase.

It is a poignant image.

For, beginning with Yaakov, Jewishness is finally bestowed by genealogy.

And a spiral ladder is what one might more technically call a double helix, a fitting vision to presage the destiny of the man who dreamed it.